When we were little, our grandmother used to get angry at the telenovelas, at the musalsalaat in Arabic, at the soap operas, as they call them in English. She'd get upset whenever the good character died a tragic death and evil lived past the final episode, which happened a lot. “Hierba mala nunca muere,” she’d announce to everyone in the room. Bad weeds never die. She would sometimes add, Dios tarda pero nunca olvida, God takes a while but never forgets.
Israel’s Ariel Sharon is a hierba mala que nunca muere. An asshole that never dies. My mother, a sweet lady who cusses really nice would have nightly called him un maldito desgraciado, a fucking disgrace, all before the first commercial break.
In 1982, Ariel Sharon, Israel’s war minister at the time, helped orchestrate the slaughter of thousands of defenseless Palestinian refugees living since the Nakba in Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camps up in Beirut. It was a collaboration between the fascists of Israel and the fascists of Lebanon.
The Sabra and Shatila Massacre revealed to many that Israel is the aggressor, not the victim, tarnishing its reputation. The backlash led Israel to conduct something to resemble an internal investigation, finding Ariel Sharon responsible, dismissing him as Defense Minister, demanding he never hold public office, then voting him in years later as Prime Minister.
The first time I had the honor of touching Palestine’s soil and encountering her people was four and a half years prior. As our bus was crossing the Sinai Peninsula from Cairo toward the border at Taba, we were all learning Ariel Sharon had just suffered a stroke. That day was January 4, 2006.
It is now the year 2010 and Ariel Sharon is still alive, in a coma being kept alive, in a permanent vegetative state. Hierba mala nunca muere, I hear my grandmother say.