Let me tell you how things looked when this was truly a nature park. Before you came and spoiled it all. You could not see any new buildings, you did not hear any traffic. All you saw were deer leaping up the terraced hills, wild rabbits, foxes, jackals and carpets of flowers. Then it was a park. Preserved in more or less the same state it had been in for hundreds of years.

To which the settler retorts:

‘Nothing can remain untouched for hundreds of years. Progress is inevitable.’ (…)
‘You dug our hills for nothing.’
‘Building roads is progress, not destruction.’

How common it is, in our capitalist heartlands, to come across people with that settler mentality, those who believe in the inevitability of what they call progress, in the necessity of roads, in all the goods of the land being theirs as a matter of course: the entitled ones, the owners.

Anyone who does not feel the pangs of the wounded biosphere moves like a colonist within it. Naturally, such obliviousness and self-absorption correlate very closely with economic affluence. In the sacrifice zones of the capitalist world-economy, people carry the wounds in their bodies; in the most luxurious shopping malls, one needs a political-ecological education to see the deep stabs being inflicted, and chances are that one is quite alone in doing so. Only by tending closely to the wounds in the biosphere can one cultivate properly Palestinian sensibilities: before you came and spoiled it all. What will today’s settlers leave for posterity?