The Pixelated Cow
I was born in 1981 and I grew up in a refugee camp in Syria.
In 1991, in general I was very obsessed with comic books, and I came a comic book telling the story of civil desobedience in Beit Sahoul, my home town I knew nothing of, and it was one of the few times I came accross my heritage. It talked about civil desobedience, people that thrown their id cards and refused to pay taxes and try to be self-sufficient.
When I went back to Beit Sahoul in 1996, I did more research about that era of time during the 1st Intifada, and I came accross this fascinating story.
During the 1st Intifada in 1987, a bunch of activists decided to start a dairy farm, to produce their own milk, because the only of milk available in Palestine at that time was israeli milk called Tnuva, and they said fuck it we can do our own milk even though we don’t know nothing about farms, teachers, doctors, they never saw a cow. So collected money from eachother and they went to a kibboutz and they bought eighteen cows and went back to Beit Sahoul and said ok let’s try to get the milk out of the cow. After a few months they were able to produce a good quality of milk, yogurt, cheese. The whole town started to buy the milk they produced and they started to call it Intifada milk. However the farm turned out to be a very nice place also as a social hub. People would go there, have picknicks, stay the whole day, next to the cows, milk the cows, chat, talk about politics, news. However the israelian army didn’t like the whole concept of palestinians being self-sufficient. They arrested all the activists and they took photos of the cows and they told the activists that you have twenty-four hours to shut down this farm or we will come with bulldozers to knock it down over the cows. The activists tried to discuss with the military commander, explaining that we are producing milk not bombs and no you have 24 hours, those cows are a national threat to the security of Israel. So the activists stayed the whole night discussing what to do with the cows, and then they took the cows and ran away.
The next morning, the commander came to the farm and it was empty, so he was happy he felt fine, I screwed them, then he realized that he doesn’t what actually happened to the cows, so he went back to the activists and asked what happened to the cows, and they refused to tell him, so he sent troops with helicopters searching the area of Beit Sahoul looking for the cows. For the next 4 years, the activists could manage to keep the cow under, moving them from place to place, hiding the cows inside their houses, in caves, in the mountains, and whenever the army caught one of the cows they would slaughter the cow, arrest the guy hiding the cow, and it was very serious crime against the state to hide the cow. For four years, the collection was still going, and milk was distributed as if you are selling drugs and it was enough to be caught with a bottle of milk to go to prison.
In 1991, only a few cows could survive because of the moving from a place to another, some died, some were caught, so only four cows were left and one of them was pregnant with a twin. And the activist said fine well we have four, with the calves we’ll have six, 50% more, we will make it, everything will be fine.
One day, they called the guy that was hiding the four cows in a cave next to his house, and they called the guy to say the pregnant cow is giving birth, so come to help. So he helped with what he knows, but it didn’t work, so they called the vet, the vet came and gave her shot and told them she’s having problem, she might die, so they kept giving the cow hot water massages to the cow and it didn’t work. Early morning, the two old couples went to sleep, the vet left and that activist stayed awake doing hot massages and the cow started to give birth. The first calf was born, and he was born dead, the second calf was born and the mother died.
At the same time they were announcing on the news that the Madrid agreement was signed between palestinians and israelis. And the activist felt betrayed that the same leadership who ask them to go self-sufficient and prepare for civil-desobedience now sold us out in a peace agreement we’ve been living under a roof with cows during the last four years not for this, so they lost hope, could not take it anymore, left the project. The people still in the project decided to sell the cows to a palestinian butcher. So after four years, we palestinians slaughtered our own cows with our own hands.
Now this is my cow, made out of 68000 cubes and I called it the Pixelated Intifada or the Trojan cow. Basically I found that the Intifada experience didn’t get what it deserved and was cut off somewhere in the middle before it completed loading if you want to talk nowadays language. A pixelated cow, a blurry image against what’s happening today. At that time we were thinking of self-sufficiency, producing our own milk, now we are invaded by Coca-cola, KFC and all the capitalist colonisation culture. That cow and the whole Intifada experience was cut in the middle, left alone, pixelated, while everything is very clear nowadays, KFC, and Coca-Cola, and everything else.