Books

The HLF case is featured in Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice. It is published by McSweeney’s Voice of Witness, a series that uses oral histories to document social injusticeBuy the book here.

Excerpt from Patriot Acts:

“For me, to be a Palestinian means to be one of over ten million refugees worldwide who were expelled from their homeland. To be a Palestinian means to often be looked upon with suspicion. It means to wake up in the morning to find the occupying forces building a wall to separate your home from your farm in the West Bank. It means waiting hours at checkpoints manned by Israeli teenaged soldiers as you attempt to reach your college in Nablus. It means fearing your wife will give birth in a taxi at a checkpoint on the road to a hospital in Ramallah. It means not getting a permit to build a house, while new immigrants from Russia are building homes on land confiscated or stolen. It means having your home demolished along with an entire neighborhood, under the guise of securing illegally-built settlements. It means not having enough water to drink. It means to be detained along with thousands of other Palestinians for years and years without being charged. For me, it means being imprisoned for sixty-five years in the U.S. for feeding Palestinian orphans.”

— Ghassan Elashi, one of the Holy Land Five

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