The strange thing about blood is that it never looks real.

One time I arrived at the second avenue stop on the F train in New York City just after someone got knifed. The stabber and stabbee had been removed from the scene already, both still breathing. But a thick neon red puddle of blood remained.

The color and texture of the blood were so vivid. It looked like an overdone prop from a Hollywood set.

A few years earlier, when I was working as a union organizer, I rode the elevator up to the fourth floor of the San Francisco General Hospital in search of healthcare workers to invite to a union meeting. The elevator doors opened to a frantic scene of a man covered in blood lying unconscious on a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses.

I stepped back into the elevator, walked outside, got in my car and drove back to the office.

It was a hospital after all, I shouldn’t have been so shocked. But I’m not good with blood. My stomach is too weak.

Yesterday, I saw a man shot in the head by a rubber bullet in Bil’in.

His friends ran with him in their arms, drenched in his blood. Their shirts and hands were stained surreal red. The man’s face was covered in blood.

I turned and buried my head in Tatsiana’s shoulder.

This isn’t supposed to be real. People don’t actually get shot in the head for trying to protect their land from illegal walls.

But they do. And I was there to witness it yesterday.

People ask why we go, over an over again, to play out this futile game with the IDF soldiers.

If the internationals and Israelis weren’t there, those bullets could have been real. More real that the rubber coated depleted uranium shot yesterday. Not because we are great protectors of the Palestinian people, but because in the eyes of the West, our lives are just worth more.

If they were shooting live ammunition there would have been no need to rush the man, who’s name is Ibrahim, away from the scene leaking unreal redness everywhere. Instead of just a chunk of his skull cracked and missing, he would have been dead.

He could have died anyway. The Red Crescent ambulance took him to the nearest hospital. He survived.

It is all too real.

(photo courtesy of Palestine Monitor)