Letters from Palestine (34 page)

The students, too, are prisoners along with
everyone else. Of college students seeking to continue their
education abroad, only some manage to escape; a great many of such
Gazan students are in the end forced to forego their dreams.
According to Gisha, an Israeli organization concerned with
monitoring the movement restrictions on Palestinians, as of October
21, 2009, there were still 838 students waiting to leave Gaza to
study abroad, with the school year already having begun, and many
more who had already given up trying.

In their report on this situation, Gisha
states:

Overseas travel is no simple matter for
Palestinian students because passage through Israel is extremely
limited in accordance with a long list of criteria determined by
Israel, which include the possession of a “recognized” academic
scholarship and enrollment to study in a country which has a
diplomatic presence in Israel. In addition, since June 2008 Israel
has made the exit of students from Gaza to study abroad conditional
on a physical diplomatic escort. The students also have difficulty
leaving through Egypt via Rafah crossing due to the fact that it is
closed most of the time. The rare openings of Rafah Crossing permit
travel for only about 12 percent of people wishing to pass.

In this section, we present the dramatic
stories of three who did manage, through luck, their own
perseverance, and outside help, to escape. Their stories will both
illustrate the lengths to which they had to go in order to travel
abroad for their studies and will, I hope, help to bring attention
to all those still waiting to be able to follow in the footsteps of
the students you will be meeting next.

_PHOTO

My name is Ahmed Alkhatib, an
eighteen-year-old Palestinian from Gaza City. I came to the U.S. in
2005 as an exchange student to learn about this country and its
culture and to educate Americans about the Palestinian culture and
community. This State Department initiative was a year-long high
school experience, which placed Middle Eastern students in American
host families to get a real taste of the American lifestyle.

When the program ended, I left the U.S. to
return home and unsuccessfully attempted to go back to Gaza through
the Egyptian border. I had barely spent two weeks with some family
members in Egypt before violence in Lebanon and the already
troubled Gaza Strip erupted simultaneously into full-scale
conflicts.

In the summer of 2006, I was stuck in Egypt
for three months and was never able to return home because Gaza’s
border with Egypt was closed. The border is still closed to this
day. I decided to return to the U.S. to complete my high school
education. I moved back into the home of my former host mother in
Pacifica, a San Francisco suburb, on September 2, 2006.

In January 2007, my seventeen-year-old
cousin was killed in the internal fighting between Palestinian
factions. I decided to start the application process for political
asylum status with the Department of Homeland Security. My asylum
request was approved, after nearly a two-year-long process, in
October of 2008. I am currently enrolled in a community college to
acquire my AA degree and plan to transfer to San Francisco State
University.

_PHOTO

In the summer of 2006, I was unable to
return home to Gaza due to the border closure and the complete
isolation of the Gaza Strip from the outside world. Political
pressure resulted in Egypt’s refusal to open the borders to regular
passage back and forth. Families, patients, students, and other
travelers have been unable to cross in either direction, causing
great suffering to the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip.

Ahmed Alkhatib is another student who was
first brought to my attention by Anna Baltzer in early October
2008, when I wrote him to inquire whether he would be interested in
contributing to the book. He was and responded enthusiastically to
the offer. Once I heard back from him, I was delighted to learn
that Ahmed attended a nearby college—in this case, in San
Francisco—so that it might be possible for Anna and me to meet him
in person.

Ahmed was more than amenable, but since he
was busy with his school and his frequent activist endeavors, and
Anna and I were already in the midst of preparations for our
journey to Palestine, we decided to postpone our get together until
after Anna and I returned from Palestine.

But nature and Israel had other things in
mind that caused us to have to defer this meeting much longer than
either of us expected. To begin with, within a few days after my
return home, I had come down with what started as a heavy cold,
then morphed into bronchitis, and finally into an adult form of
whooping cough, as a result of which I was sidelined for nearly six
weeks. After that, it was the end-of-semester crunch time for
Ahmed, the December holidays for me, and shortly after that, the
massacre of Gaza, where Ahmed’s parents still live, began.

Nevertheless, during this time, I kept
seeing Ahmed—if not in person—because it seemed that whenever there
was a local demonstration, he was the one Palestinian who was
inevitably interviewed on television. Since Ahmed is both very
articulate and passionate, he proved to be a very effective
advocate for the Palestinian perspective, so I was already very
impressed with him. We were still trying to arrange to get together
when Anna and I bumped into him, almost literally, at a San
Francisco demonstration. That was actually our first meeting after
many email exchanges.

We did, finally, get together for dinner
shortly afterward at the home where Ahmed lives with his American
sponsor and where Ahmed had gone to the trouble of preparing an
authentic traditional Palestinian meal for Anna and me. That was
the first of what has now become a number of our meals together,
and they have always been very stimulating and lively affairs, for
Ahmed is a trove of knowledge about Palestinian affairs and, as you
will infer, a dedicated and highly respected activist. He is also a
great guy to hang with, and it has been a pleasure for us to get to
know him—another bonus of working on this book. Now it is your
turn.

Background

My father, Fouad, was born in 1953 and was
the oldest child with five younger brothers and sisters. He grew up
in an impoverished refugee camp where his family was very tough on
him. He endured great hardship and challenging conditions in Rafah.
His own parents had been driven out of their town, in Ramla County,
during the 1948 Nakba. Once his family settled in Rafah, their home
was demolished twice by the Israeli military during the 1956 and
1967 wars. My father had always taken responsibility for his
siblings and started working when he was young to fulfill certain
commitments to his family.

The same circumstances apply for my mother,
Seham, who was born in 1958. Her father was imprisoned by the
Israeli military during the 1967 War. She was a fourth grader when
he died, a few days after he was released. Her mother raised her
three boys and three girls on her own in constant fear of
displacement. Both of my grandfathers died before I got to know
them well. My grandmothers, however, are alive and continue to
provide evidence of sixty years of suffering.

My father left the Gaza Strip after high
school to enroll in Cairo’s medical school. My mother left home as
well and studied mathematics. When they graduated, both returned to
Rafah and worked for the United Nations in their respective fields.
Through my mother’s oldest brother, my father got to know my
mother, and they eventually got married. Once they did so, my
father contracted with the Saudi government and moved to Saudi
Arabia to work as a medical doctor in the education department in
1981. There, my father would be employed for twenty years, doing
extensive work with the schools’ clinical systems. My four siblings
and I were born in Mohayel, southern Saudi Arabia, where we lived
until I was about ten years old.

In 2000, my mother, two brothers, two
sisters and I moved to Gaza City, while my father returned the
following year. The reason we came back was that policies were
changing in Saudi Arabia. The government was trying to get rid of
foreign workers. My father anticipated being fired and decided to
just leave before it officially happened. My mother went back to
teaching math to middle- and high school–aged children in Gaza
City, where she continues to teach now. My father found work with
different clinics in Gaza City, and now he works for a United
Nations clinic in the Jabalia refugee camp.

The Intifada and I

On Saturday, September 29 of 2000, I was a
sixth grader and on my way to school when I ran into a chaotic
scene, which was relatively new for me. Burning tires,
loudspeakers, mass protests, students on strike, and widespread
tension formed the new wave of violence and unrest in Gaza and all
of the Palestinian Territories. I was stunned by such tension, but
was aware that it wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last.
What I did not anticipate was that I was not going to witness the
end of the Intifada before I left Gaza in 2005.

In December of 2001, I was in the seventh
grade and was coming home with friends around noon. I started
walking faster than my friends because I was impatient and wanted
to get home. Just a few minutes later, there was an F-16 bomber
that bombed a security building in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood
of Gaza City. My friends happened to be passing right by the
building when it was hit, and I missed being hit with bombs by
seconds. One of them, my friend Rajab, got hurt badly and had a
head injury where part of his scalp came off his head. Ali and
Mohammed were also hurt, but less seriously than Rajab.

The building was hit twice in less than a
half hour. I knew that something must have happened to my friends,
and I irrationally ran back to the site of the bombing. Smoke and
dust prevented me from locating them, and I stood by the site until
the second bombing took place. I saw a guy from a nearby high
school whose entire lower body exploded. It upsets me to describe
it, but I saw that the lower part of his body was just totally
shredded and his upper body totally intact.

A new path

I found it difficult to coexist with the
challenges of living in Gaza. I wanted to have a safe environment
where I could focus on my life and be able to succeed at school. I
wanted to keep my grades high because I always felt that something
good was going to happen to help me get out of Gaza. I wanted to
believe that I was going to get a scholarship or a grant, something
to give me hope. I decided to start learning English; I had a
strong feeling that English was going to be my key to success.

AMIDEAST is a private, nonprofit
organization promoting cooperation between the U.S. and the Middle
East through education, information, and development programs. I
was awarded a U.S. State Department scholarship to study English at
the Gaza AMIDEAST headquarters with about 150–200 students.
AMIDEAST also recruits and selects students in the Middle East for
another U.S. State Department cultural exchange program called
YES.

YES, Youth Exchange and Study, is a high
school exchange program funded by the U.S. Bureau of Educational
and Cultural Affairs. After an extensive process, I received a spot
in the scholastic program.

While I was preparing to come to the U.S., I
was faced with two battles. One was the application process itself
and the other was trying to convince my family and community that
it was a good thing. Despite intense opposition from family and
community members, I did not listen to or care about any
disparaging thing people said. I would have never given up such a
ticket, which would enable me to leave Gaza.

The United States and I

I arrived in the U.S. on July 2, 2005. Due to
a late visa, I had to travel all the way from Palestine to San
Diego, California, on my own, at age fifteen. I had extreme
difficulties at airports with passport and security issues. I was
realizing more and more how difficult being a Palestinian was, even
outside of the geographical borders of the conflict. I stayed with
many host families around the country and settled in California.
Finally, I ended up in one of the most promising and open
communities in the nation, the San Francisco Bay Area.

My experience was rich with pleasant and
difficult moments. Adapting to the new lifestyle and cultural
practices was not an easy task. I ran into anti-Arab sentiment,
which was upsetting and, unfortunately, frequent. Overall, I
developed very meaningful connections with many individuals and
families. I was blessed to live with a compassionate host mother
who provided much for me and helped me face different
challenges.

As the year went by, it was time for me to
go home, and I said goodbye to everybody. I left the U.S. on June
18 of 2006 and flew to Egypt. I was planning to spend two weeks in
Egypt with my family before going to Gaza. However, I was unable to
enter Gaza through the Egyptian border because it had been closed
since the abduction of an Israeli soldier in summer of 2006. I
spent months in Egypt, hoping to be able to return, but all my
attempts failed.

I decided to investigate the possibility of
returning to the U.S. My former host mother offered to take me in
her home again to finish my high school education. I worked hard
for three weeks to get accepted in a sponsoring school, secure a
student visa, and collect the air fare. I left Egypt on September
1, 2006, to arrive a day later back in Pacifica, California.