Letters from Palestine (5 page)

“Where’s that?” he asks inquisitively,
taking a sip of beer.

My stomach relaxes. Good question. Where is
that? When I speak about Palestine in a nonpolitical setting, with
friends, family, Palestine is all the land—Israel, the West Bank,
and Gaza. When it’s political, we must differentiate. But in my
heart it’s all Palestine, always. Now how to explain to
sandy-haired Nick . . .

“Well, you know Israel?” He nods. “Well,
before it was created, the land was called Palestine. It was a
British colony. That’s where my family’s from.”

“Oh, so you’re from Israel?”

No. My stomach starts to tighten again. I
can’t tell if he’s being belligerent or is just ignorant. It’s
Saturday night, I just want to dance with my girls and talk to a
cute guy, not argue, and not give lessons on British colonial
history.

“No, I’m from Palestine. Now it’s just the
West Bank and Gaza.” This elicits a nod of recognition from Nick. I
have reached him. “But the cities that my family are from are in
Israel now.” I have confused him.

“So . . . Israel used to be Palestine?” he
ventures, treading in new, revisionist territory.

“Basically, yeah,” I summarize.

“Huh, I always wondered who Palestinians are
and where they came from!”

At this I laugh out loud, making him laugh
too. Good, no belligerence, just lack of information. This I can
handle.

Always there is a story to tell when you say
you are Palestinian. There is intrigue. Always there is a question
of “But where is Palestine?” or an assertion that somehow you do
not exist because a nation-state called Palestine does not exist.
You become a question mark in the eyes of your beholder. Something
heard about. Something read about. Perhaps something
experienced—but not dressed like this, not drinking a beer.
Something familiar. Something foreign. Something to understand. And
it eats at me, because it is something I too yearn to
understand.

I heart Palestine

I wind through the labyrinth of Virgin
Records’ aisles—Rock, Indie, Rap, Soul & R’n’B, Middle
East—picking up CDs as I go: The new Ben Harper CD because I’m
going to his concert this evening and will want it afterwards. Bob
Dylan,
Blood on the Tracks
, because it’s $5 and my copy has
been scratched since 2001. Marcel Khalife,
Arabic Coffee
Pot
, because I should know him better. Munir Bashir,
Stockholm Recordings
, because his oud brings me peace of
heart.

That should be about $45, I lie to myself.
Enough. I stand in line to pay and am eventually called over to the
farthest register. I hand the young man at the register my pile of
CDs, aware that everyone else paying has restrained themselves to
one CD and I am buying four. He begins scanning the barcodes. He’s
in his early to mid-twenties, tall, and black.

“What does your shirt say?” he asks, nodding
towards me. I glance down for a second to remember what I am
wearing. It’s a bright yellow T-shirt I bought in Ramallah this
past summer, with a green olive tree in the center encircled by red
Arabic script.

“It says ‘I love you, oh, Palestine’!” I
exclaim, a little more enthusiastically than was perhaps
necessary.

He smiles.

“Kinda like ‘I heart New York’, huh?” he
replies.

Yeah, something like that.” I smile
back.

“You ever been there? What’s it like?” he
asks.

What’s it like . . . This time it was way
worse than last time, I think to myself.

* * *

The first time I went to Palestine was when I
was seventeen, in 1999. It was an incredibly emotional experience.
I am still not sure if it was so overwhelming because it was the
first time I went, and I was unprepared for the levels of racism I
experienced and the reality of life under occupation, or if
seventeen is a more sensitive age, and so I felt everything
deeper.

I had gone to Palestine with my father and a
team of doctors from Physicians for Peace, an organization which
sends teams of doctors from the U.S. to various developing
countries to help strengthen their medical care. We were based in
Bethlehem and drove around the West Bank quite a bit—something that
was possible in 1999 but not really on my second trip in 2007. What
struck me the most being there was the separation—and how it made
you feel that you were Palestinian, in a suspicious, dirty way.
There was a checkpoint that we had to cross each time we wanted to
leave Bethlehem, and manning it was an Israeli soldier with red
hair. He was about eighteen or nineteen years old. Every time we
passed through the checkpoint, this feeling hit me that this
soldier controlled us. He was essentially my age. He looked like
one of my friends from school. He could be the cousin of one of my
friends from school, but he had this power over me, my father, and
the other passengers because of his nationality and because he was
holding a gun. It was the first time in my life I felt inferior to
someone else. Not because I believed I was—but because of how
strongly the power dynamics split us.

It was a very surreal experience being in
Palestine for the first time. I grew up with Palestine all around
me—in the papers, on the news, in old black-and-white family
photos, in books with titles like
Before Their Diaspora
—but
now, I was actually here.

Many of my Jewish friends from school had
made trips to the same piece of land to visit their family and
regaled us with the beauty of the land and the crazy fun they had
on their trips. Mine was different. They shopped; I was searched.
They went to the beach; I went through checkpoints. They spent
nights watching the stars on kibbutzes; I watched Palestinians
without permits risk their lives to sneak in and out of Jerusalem
for work to raise money for their families.

The history and stories I’d heard were all
around me, and nowhere around me. The black-and-white photos of
what Palestine was—rolling hills with shepherds, Arab homes with
blossoming gardens of lemon trees and orange trees—melted away into
a deeply divided reality of borders, crossings, and “sides.” The
past felt more distant than ever, and the present was quite heavy.
Growing up with stories about Palestine, political discussions, and
images of the Intifada, then Oslo, was one removed understanding of
Palestine. But now I was here, and I wanted more than ever to
cultivate and strengthen my relationship with Palestine.

Over the years, the guilt of living a
privileged life far from Palestine had washed away into a personal
drive to use the privilege I’d been born into to help Palestine in
any way I could. And now I was there. And it was suffocating, and
scary. Being light-skinned and socialized as a white person in the
States, I hadn’t yet really experienced in-your-face racism. Here,
I was treated with suspicion, condescension, and disrespect because
I was Palestinian. We were the ones who had to go through
checkpoints every time we wanted to go somewhere. Our cars were
pulled over and emptied of all the men ages ten and over who were
searched at random because it was a car full of Palestinians. I was
kicked and spat on by a group of Israeli children when they
realized I was Arab, while the Israeli guard nearby stood and
watched. We were pulled to the side at the airport and asked
questions because our family name is Arabic. Divisions run deep in
Israel and Palestine, and I fell into the blatantly oppressed group
for the first time in my life, and it felt awful.

In the States, only once did I experience
that feeling to which I was introduced in Palestine—the feeling of
inferiority. It was during my senior year of high school, on a
spring afternoon. I was walking up the steps of my boyfriend’s
house with him, and his grandmother was coming out of his house. My
boyfriend was Jewish and non-Zionist, and we were crazy about each
other. As we met at the steps, he introduced us.

“Grandma, this is my girlfriend.” She
reached out her hand to shake mine. “Shireen.”

She withdrew her hand.

“Where are you from?” she inquired, staring
at me.

“Um, I’m Palestinian,” I answered, feeling
somehow like I was in trouble for being the wrong ethnicity for her
grandson.

“Palestine is not a country,” she
retorted.

Shame and a deep sense of inferiority swept
over me. Inferiority is a very powerful emotion, and it is not
always elicited when you experience racism. It takes a subtle
imparting of condescension, racism, and arrogance from your
interlocutor. I am a very, very proud person—but once in a while
someone can succeed in making you feel less than them . . .
inferior . . . and it is a very troubling emotion. And what is
maybe the worst part of it is knowing that as hard as you are, as
proud as you are, someone can still crack through you and break
you, just a little. As a Palestinian, this unwelcome feeling
resonated in Palestine through all my interactions with
Israelis.

* * *

I paused, reflecting on how to answer his
question of “What’s it like.”

“Well, if you’re Palestinian, like me, it’s
kinda rough. You can’t drive on the same roads as the Israelis. You
get detained in the airport for no reason. You have to go through
checkpoints every time you want to go somewhere. It’s rough. The
Israelis are really good at making you feel inferior to them all
the time, like somehow you’re less than them. You know what I’m
saying?”

He laughed, “Girl, I’m black! The NYPD makes
me feel like that every day of my life.”

I smiled that he’d seen the similarity in
experiences.

“Word. So you know what it’s like,” I said
as I signed my receipt.

Sand nigger

“This is totally embarrassing—I can use
chopsticks, but not the right way! Just well enough to get the food
off the table and into my mouth,” I laugh, as the rice falls from
my slip-sliding chopsticks. Neel laughs quietly, taking in my
clumsy attempt to pick up tofu.

“Man, I haven’t seen you in a minute,” he
says, smiling still. “Maybe like two, three years ago?”

I look at Neel across the table and flip
through my catalog of memories of him from high school—soccer
games, dances, school assemblies. He was always cute in high
school, a bit on the skinny side, but now he’d filled out—grown
into his body handsomely. He’s wearing a suit from his full day of
meetings while in town.

“Yeah, three years ago, in June—just before
you moved,” I reply, “We were going to go to the Guggenheim, but I
was late, so we went to the Rubin Museum—with the beautiful
Himalayan Art.”

* * *

My mind races back to that day, June 5, 2005.
Neel and I had run into each other in May, after not seeing each
other since high school graduation, and had been hanging out a
bit—feeling each other out. We’d made plans to go to the Guggenheim
Museum and grab a bite afterwards—a typical early-twenties, New
York date. Before meeting Neel for our cultural excursion, I was
going to a protest. Every year, New York hosts a “Salute to Israel”
Parade, which shuts down 5th Avenue from the 50s to the 70s for the
marchers to demonstrate their love and dedication to the state of
Israel. And every year there is a meager, but vocal, showing of
counter protestors who go to remind the saluters that Israel
oppresses the Palestinians, and not everyone salutes that country.
How could they get away with holding a parade that rivals the St.
Patrick’s Day Parade in magnitude and raucous celebration without
being reminded of the Palestinians? I was going to remind them of
the Palestinians.

It was a mercilessly hot June day—made even
hotter by the crowds. Manaal—a Pakistani friend from college—had
agreed to attend with me. I was a little nervous about going to
this protest. Everyone I’d spoken with about it—all Arabs,
admittedly—said it was a very, very intense experience, and a
little scary. An Egyptian coworker at the time went ballistic when
I told him I was going, and naively asked if he wanted to join
me.

“Are you crazy? Ya bint! The people that go
to that parade are crazy! They are out of their minds! They will
actually kill you!” he exclaimed. Boutrous was prone to
exaggeration, so I took his cautionary words with a pile of
proverbial salt. And anyway, I was twenty-three, strong-headed, and
going to prove my point of standing up for my people when others
had the audacity to celebrate their oppressors.

Manaal and I arrived ready to represent
Palestine. She borrowed a T-shirt with the Palestinian flag on it
that said “Palestine” in English and Arabic beneath, and I wore my
favorite T-shirt which read “Proud to be a Palestinian” on the
front and “End the Occupation” on the back. We wove through the
crowds and seas of blue-and-white flags to the piteously small
congregation of contenders for Palestine. We sweated in the sun,
chanting promises of return and liberation until I had to leave to
get ready for my third date with Neel. Quickly, Manaal and I
switched from angry screams of “Warsaw Ghetto, Palestine, Iraq—an
occupied people has the right to fight back!” to excited squeals of
“I brought two shirts for today—you have to help me decide which
one I look cuter in!”

We walked up half a block to cross to the
east side of the street, where our subway line was. As we made our
way to the subway, we suddenly found ourselves caught up in a crowd
of very angry, very violent parade spectators who did not want us
walking on their side of the sidewalk.

“I smell Arabs!”

“Terrorists!”

“Dogs!”

“Manaal, come on let’s go,” I said, grabbing
her hand to make sure we didn’t get separated in the crowd. Someone
threw a glass bottle at me and hit me in the back.

“Sand niggers,” one man hissed as I passed
him. The words smacked me across the face. At this, I stopped.