Mousa Taher, 23, has just returned from the Kia Ora Gaza mission, which distributed $7 million of medical supplies to the Gaza Strip. It changed his life.
“The children walking over the bricks of their destroyed homes, their mother putting up a tent, their father in jail...in tears and confusion looking at the tanks coming down the street, the men holding metre-long machine guns...they stare...need I say more...just imagine how it would feel to be a Palestinian....”
Mousa Taher’s Facebook says it all.
The 23-year-old Wellington-born man arrived home on Sunday – the day before his first daughter turned one - after being part of a 400 volunteer convoy of people from 30 countries that travelled through the Gaza Strip to deliver $7 million of medical supplies to the Palestinians.
Sanctions were placed on the country by Israel in 2007, cutting electricity and limiting fuel, after Palestine Freedom Fighters bombed their Jewish neighbours.
The Gaza convoy including six New Zealanders hoped that the visit would go some way towards lobbying for political change. Specifically, Taher wants to get building materials into the country so the Palestinians can rebuild after Gaza was bombed by Israel in 2008.
Taher, who left on September 12, says the visit to the country changed his life because of the perseverance of Palestinians who, despite their whole lives being turned upside down, refuse to lose hope.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a manmade disaster. And the thing is this doesn’t have to happen. There are people that want to rebuild but they’re not being allowed by a tyrannical and oppressive regime.
“The thing that struck me was the spirit of those people. They’re poor. They’re oppressed. They’re being murdered, butchered, killed, and yet they’re the most generous, kind, courteous and honorable people that I’ve met.
“How can someone go through that yet be so helpful and be so generous? It was a lesson.”
Despite “ the Israeli government’s resistance to criticism from any person, government or the world’s humanitarian agency United Nations,” he believes that he and people who work for his cause can make a difference by slowly changing cultures.
“I think [Israel is] impervious to what others say...but just because they don’t care, it doesn’t mean that the others don’t care. If [we] put pressure, proper pressure [on them] then they’ll have to [change].”
Taher, as a fifth form Tawa College pupil, was inspired to work for change in the Middle East by his teacher who taught a unit on Palestine and Israel, and was further carried along by his conversion to Islam in 2006.
“I realised the injustice and the enormity of what was happening over there.”
He left behind his one daughter Ruqayyah and wife Corinne Poole in Auckland, and while it was hard being away from his family for six weeks is already planning his next visit to Gaza When? “Soon, soon, God willing, soon.”