Interview with Tala by ND ’22 and TH ’22.
Tala lives in Ramallah, Palestine. She is a 2017 graduate of Al-Quds Bard College Palestine/Abu-Dis with a degree in media studies. Tala spent a semester studying in New York. She is currently working as a film editor and photographer. Her work in short film documents underrepresented Palestinian communities, including Bedouins and refugees. She hopes her work will bring attention to human rights abuses in Palestine. Tala is also an avid traveller.
Transcript:
So, in 2011, I got accepted in a leadership camp in New York. They took one female and one male from each country. When I got there, they assign you to tents. So, when I went to my tent, I noticed that they put me and an Israeli girl and another girl from the U.S. together. So, being a fourteen-year-old talking about the conflict here was really stressful, especially that she didn’t want me to talk about certain things. For example, the separation wall which is really like one of the biggest problems here. So, at the end I agreed, as long as she doesn’t talk about the political parties here. So, I said my part, she said her part, but she really never wanted to listen to me anyways. When the evening program started she started talking about these political parties. So I started talking about the separation wall. There was this story that she was talking about, where they were really young and they had, like, to train for attacks — it was just like a training. And they had to go under their desks and wear these masks. And then she started crying so everyone started crying with her. So, on my part it was frustrating because it never really happened to her. It was just like a training. And I started telling her like, what if that really truly happened to you, what would you do?
Once, when I was in sixth grade, I was in my room, actually, sleeping. And at 4 AM, all I heard was like the sound of bombs or something. So, we opened the window and we saw the Israeli tanks in front of us. And they were telling our neighbor to come down.
But he never listened to them and he stayed at home. So, then they broke down –they broke down the door. They went up, they got him, and then they went outside. They made him strip everything off. They started screaming at him and they hit him. And after all of that they started cutting down all the olive trees of the houses. And then they took him, and they just left. A few days after, we heard the same thing on speakers right in front of our house. Like, we heard people talking on the speaker. So, my Dad went out and we all saw the Israeli soldiers in front of us. And they were ordering everyone from the houses to go outside. So, we went out. It was six in the morning and freezing. They made all the men sit on their knees, and all the women on the other side. And a lot of them had like really small babies.
And after that, apparently, they asked who this name was, and they said another neighbor’s name. And then they took him, and they put him inside their Israeli jeep, and then they left. And he was beaten a lot. He went to prison, of course, for about a year or so. He had a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And then after they took him, everyone went back home because we can’t really do anything. And we went to his house with his wife and everything was broken and, all the clothes were on the floor. The beds were flipped. And after a year and a half or two, he got out. And apparently they only took him because he’s part of a political party. It doesn’t mean he’s doing anything wrong. That’s just like their mentality, I guess. So, it was really an experience that I would never forget.
https://soundcloud.com/nancy-kalow/interview-with-tala-zeitawi
