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April 11 - April 23, 2024
As a small child when I walked about with my mother, I always clutched her hand and let her guide me. It was smooth and easy, like gliding on ice. Looking up at her from my tiny stature was like beholding a superhero by my side; Mama was larger than life.
After living for over forty years in Switzerland, she held a Swiss passport, which conveniently read, “Place of origin: Geneva,” rather than “Place of birth: Jerusalem.” Maybe that’s why the Swiss passport is the most valued in the world—because you can easily erase all traces of your former identity and don the name of the country in which you have become naturalized.
I didnt know this was a thing.
As forests of pine trees streamed by our window, my mother pensively reflected that she didn’t recognize anything. “I am happy it has changed so much,” she said. “If it looks so different, then I don’t have to miss it as much. I am somewhere else, not in Falastin.”
It’s not a conflict about ancient hatred, or religion, as it is a modern struggle over land and who gets to live on that land.
“Refugees are like seeds that scatter in the wind, and land in different soils that become their reluctant homes.”
Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law that passed in 1950 was the main legal instrument used by Israel to take possession of the land belonging to Palestinians who were expelled or fled the country due to war.
My mother and her contemporaries were the last vestiges of a lost civilization, with narratives that would never again be told in the first person after they died. Only the photos would remain as silent monuments of an untold story.
It was only years later that I came to understand that identity is where your heart lies. It is not the product of official documents, or genealogy.
They have to apply for permits and wait in long lines at checkpoints to cross from one city to the other within the West Bank.
Such a tragic way to live in your homeland.
The most shocking reality was standing in the shade of the concrete twenty-five-foot-tall Israeli Wall that seemed to be continuously sprouting amidst ancient olive trees: destroying landscapes, creating ghettoes and barriers that separate Palestinians from their land, and Palestinians from other Palestinians.
Fine example of apartheid by means of a physical barrier.
Jerusalem was known to be one of the most tolerant places in the world, where different cultures and religions lived side by side, and respected one another, living in balance and harmony.
She waved me back onto the bus, blindly honoring the US passport. How could it be easier for a US passport holder to travel around this land, than someone whose whole family has lived here for generations?
The things we take for granted in America are things Palestinians have to fight for every day of their lives. Yet they continue to battle the injustices inflicted upon them in non-violent ways, by getting up every morning to tend to their office jobs, their sheep, their olive trees, their students, their patients.
“I have finally figured out why so many people here have become more religious.” She was eager to hear my reasoning. “Because no one can control the degree of devotion they have to their faith. No one can stop them from believing, or from practicing their faith. It is the most intimate relationship there is. No checkpoint, and no Wall, can come in the way of your relationship with God. It is personal; it is private; it is intimate. And Israel certainly cannot control it.”
An older Polish Israeli woman, whom I had met a week prior while trying unsuccessfully to find my mother’s home recognized me and accosted me with an indignant, “What are you doing here again? Go away! Go away!” The disdain in her voice left an indelible mark on me. It was hard not to interpret her comments as a second expulsion.
“Bring me a handful of soil, my Falastin soil,”
Israel is not the only country to welcome emigrants from all over the world, but it is the only one to confer nationality automatically on a single category of people: Jews.
I looked out the window at the yellow Israeli license-plate cars rushing off to work in the morning commute. Did they know that their roads are laced with blood and tears? Did they know that every inch of Palestinian land has a story to tell, a story that is conveniently muted, or erased?
I’ve never been nationalistic, except that when your people have been denied their legitimate rights to nationality for over seventy years, you yearn for it.
What are class meetings? It’s a weekly time set aside to come together as a class to talk and listen to one another, to share our grievances, and learn how to reconcile our differences. It’s an opportunity to learn how to live with others using respect and kindness as our guiding lights. The children are first invited to try to resolve their conflicts on their own, and if that doesn’t work they can write up their complaints in a notebook that serves as our agenda for the following meeting.
What a sweet way to teach children to be compassionate and understanding.
I also couldn’t overlook the fact that most of the junk food was manufactured in Israel and sold to Palestinians.
Wow...
“Look to your left and right. Look at your neighbors and if you’re sitting next to a friend who might distract you, or whom you might distract, change places. Do you know why?”
Just a cute memory of my days in elementary school, where we were told the same during library joint reading sessions.
Children in war zones play out the violence they see around them; they’re impulsive and cannot access critical thinking skills because they’re in the “fight or flight” mode, too busy fending off their fears and anxieties.
This fifth-grader needed to talk about her fears, because unspoken fears have a way of paralyzing people. My advice to her father was to share with his daughter some of his own fears so that she could begin to understand that we all live with fears, real or imaginary, but that we also learn how to master them in order to make way for life and fulfillment.
Research suggests that people do not change in isolation, that in fact they need their community to believe in them in order to change.
(So, take my hand and lead me To my happy end and forever, I cannot walk alone, not a step. Where you will go and stand, take me with you.)
were Israelis duped into believing that every monument, every building was for them or about them? Was the Arab presence, its population, art form, and monuments, to be wiped out to make way for a new version of Israeli history?
On the boardwalk a poster, hung from a lamppost, listed the chronological history of the town. Not once did it mention that Jaffa has been an Arab city. Erasure is a form of oppression.
On July 10, 1948, in a systematic campaign to depopulate the villages of Palestine to achieve the Zionist dream, Israeli armed forces drove out the villagers of Qula. In September of the same year the Israeli forces bulldozed the village, leaving it in ruins, and planted a forest of European pines to conceal its existence.
That is just wild how clear the erasure is. They're not private about it.
The al-Buraq, or Wailing Wall, Uprising refers to a series of demonstrations and riots in late August 1929 when a yearlong dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem escalated into violence. The violence started in Jerusalem, spread to Hebron, and then to the rest of the country. Hundreds of Jews and Arabs were massacred and many were injured.
The beginnings.
“The central issue” my grandfather referred to was that Palestinians were fighting against British colonialism, and they perceived European Jewish nationalism as part and parcel of that colonialism.
As for the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba, we Palestinians commemorate the catastrophe, the loss of our homeland, while Israelis celebrate on that same day their independence from the British Mandate government and the creation of their homeland. So paradoxical!
Breathe in the warmth of our gathering; breathe in the friendship in this room. Breathe in the food that nourished us. Every breath you take reminds you that you’re alive. You are light that will shine even in the darkest corners.”
However, following the war of 1948, Palestinian owners of these houses lost their properties because of the “Absentee Property Law” established by the state of Israel. This law applied to all Palestinians, or residents in Palestine, who left their usual place of residence in Palestine for any place inside or outside the country after November 29, 1947, the date of the adoption of the UN Partition Plan (which divided Palestine into a Palestinian state and an Israeli state). The law stated that Israel would confiscate Palestinian homes, land, and bank accounts if their owners left them for a
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So many of these things are actually built into the law that I didnt know about.
Israeli families now live in these Palestinian homes. I wonder how they have come to terms with the tragedies imprinted in the stone walls and ceramic tiles. At night what do they dream of? Can they make out the silent shadows on the walls, shadows of Palestinian families packing their suitcases in a hurry, children snatched from their beds, mothers weeping in silence?
I wondered how the present Israeli owners go past the initialed gates each day only to be reminded that their house belongs to someone else.
We like to believe we are higher beings, moral humans, who know what is right and what is wrong, yet we are no better than certain animals. Did you know that some types of sparrows forcibly eject martins from their nests and then occupy them?
Yet, the world sat silently while Israel took Palestine, gently and covertly, starting in 1897 when Zionism was declared in Basel by Herzl, and more forcefully from 1948 to the present. Zionists did not come to Palestine to become part of the fabric of the land. They came with one goal in mind, and one goal only—to create a Jewish state for Jews with the help of the British and other colonial powers. But how can you create a Jewish state when most of the population is non-Jewish? You encourage massive immigration of Jews into the country; you take land, homes, and jobs; you place restrictions
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Zionism, as an ideology, is a product of its time, the time Americans were finalizing the genocide of the indigenous population in America and when European powers colonized, exploited, and oppressed native people all over the world.
Israel’s first president, Ben-Gurion, is said to have written to his son in 1937, “We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”
How more clear can they be? Israeli leaders have been straightforward about their wishes from the start and yet people still deny it.
A sticker on the back door of the ambulance had a rifle crossed out and the words “Don’t shoot” printed below it. A reminder of the Occupation.
Every time a Palestinian elder dies a little bit of Palestinian history dies as well.
For all those years, since 1948, the Palestinians have been holding on to their house keys as proof of their ownership, of their right of return, of the massive home robbery inflicted upon them. And yet how ironic that even though I have the legitimate symbolic keys to Jerusalem it was Ariela, my Israeli friend, who opened the doors for me.
This bus took a bypass road, one of the many roads in the West Bank that Israel has built especially for the settlers illegally residing on Palestinian ground. I always had a knot in my stomach riding on these roads. How is it that the native population of Palestine lost the freedom to walk and drive on its own land? Is there any place else in the world where roads are segregated?
The apartheid is so clear!!!
He commuted daily from Bethlehem to Jerusalem with a work permit issued by the Patriarchate. However, he wasn’t allowed on the quick bypass roads because of his West Bank ID. Therefore, he had to catch a shuttle van that skirted around Jerusalem and dropped him off at Abu Dis from where he took another car to Jerusalem—a circuitous trip for a Jerusalem native. Nadia had it even worse. She had worked for years at the East Jerusalem YWCA and sat on the boards of several NGOs in Jerusalem. However, the Israeli government denied her a permit to enter Jerusalem so she couldn’t go back to her work
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Like this is made to make their lives miserable and difficult in every which way.
It was hard to fathom in that moment that I was in the ancient city where Christ was born and simultaneously in a modern Palestinian city under Israeli Occupation.
Even though my days and nights were filled with delights such as these, there was still a big hole in my heart. I longed for my Mama. I wanted to come home and tell her all about my day, but since she was not home waiting for me, I often spoke to her in my head, pretending she was right by my side. When I took the bus up to the Old City, I would look out the window toward the cemetery at the top of the hill and say, “Hello, Mama,” as though that was her new home and I was driving by for a visit.
Hundreds of commodities needed for maintaining daily life are not allowed into Gaza by orders of the government of Israel—building and plumbing supplies, water filters—the latter vital for purifying the water drawn from Gazan wells, which are heavily polluted by brine, oil, sewage, and more.
More evidence.
What would happen to the loads of humanitarian supplies waiting in the trucks? I wondered. Someone said they would remain in a settlement nearby until the Israeli authorities allowed them to be delivered into Gaza. We were angry and worried the supplies would never reach their intended destination.
Same thing that is happening right now...
There were bombings and shootings every night. The British could not protect us from the Zionist forces, and because we were not allowed by the British to bear arms, and the British were too busy pulling out of Palestine, we were defenseless and vulnerable. Bread was scarce, so were benzine and paraffin.
