After sixty years of being rejected, of being the unknown and a stranger in his own land, I find it ludicrous that voices of blame point toward me. Apparently it was my fault all along. My country is not South Africa during the 1980s. The party I spoke of is Israel’s Independence Day celebration, marking its 60th anniversary on the 15th of May this year. The unknown is an Arab/Israeli, a Palestinian.
Having culturally shared most definitions of being a Palestinian, let me share with you little of what it meant to be an unknown for the past 60 years, and why I will not attend the party to which I am NOT invited.
Partly Because…
I am a Palestinian refugee. My grandparents were forced out of their home in 1948 after a night of heavy shelling by Jewish fighters; they left behind significant properties and wealth, which they could not claim since the 1948 War of Independence (Better known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe). My grandparents told me that they left during a week of heavy shelling over Beit Jibrin, their estate center, just after loosing their home in the nearby sea town of Jaffa. They knew what the outcome of the war would mean and they feared for their lives. Hearing of massacres all over Palestine, these realities were so frightening that they decided to leave everything behind to save the lives of their family.
My grandfather died a few years ago after battling Alzheimer’s disease. During that time the only words he could utter were “Siham,” the name of my grandmother, “SouSou,” one of his grand-daughters who helped care for him while he was sick and “Essoura,” his favorite place during the time of his youth. Essoura was a hill which he owned that over looked much of Palestine. He died a poor man in Diaspora, a fate experienced by thousands of other Palestinians. The hill, Essoura, is now personally owned by former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who turned it into a milk farm.
As an Israeli citizen, one would assume that it would be easy to reacquire my grandfather’s properties. This is not the case under Israeli “absentees’ law” which lists my grandfather’s properties as owned by Arabs who no longer exist.
My grandmother, still living, can speak about Jaffa with love, passion and nostalgic longing, oblivious to the fact that her once-fabulous town has been walled off and turned into a racially segregated Arab ghetto. Once a beautiful young woman, she studied at the German Colony School in Jaffa and had hopes to continue her higher education at a University. She sits quietly at night watching her favorite TV show while staring into walls of emptiness.
Partly Because…
I am a West Banker; I shared the West-Bankers experience since my childhood, growing up in the battle-fields of many towns in the West-Bank during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when children were the primary target of IDF soldiers.
The menacing clamor of bullets, graffiti-covered towns, and the reek of burned car tires everywhere have marked the memories of my childhood.
Our part of the world is nameless. It is a taboo to call it Palestine yet it is known for it is geographical location: much like calling Texas “Land-by-the-Gulf-of-Mexico” or “Southern West-Coast” instead of California. The West Bank serves primarily as a market for Israeli goods; goods that are heavily guarded so no other competitor can enter the market. It is a new form of colonization, where the colonized buys only the colonizer’s goods. This is a pure form of economic gain with a guarantee of success for the colonizer’s goods.
Partly Because…
I am a Jerusalemite Arab; I lived in ever-shrinking cantons and neighborhoods, excluded from receiving ample funds for services from the government of Israel (which declared my city its capitol) and to which I pay taxes. As an Arab, I cannot speak my mother language except in my ever-shrinking neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, once an upper-class Palestinian neighborhood housing many of the nicer mansions, Victorian-style homes, and tree-lined streets.
Sheikh Jarrah was turned into a slum, where the ever growing Arab population has been forced to stay in the same boundaries of their old neighborhood. They are denied any permits to build, renovate or expand their aging homes. Demolishing of homes built without the impossible-to-get permits marked that period of time in my life.
Partly Because…
I am an Arab-Israeli; most prefer to call us Arab-48, just like that: a nation with a number. We are the descendants of few who stayed in Palestine when it came to be called Israel, where we were held under military rule for eighteen years. The military rule disappeared but a more brutal one came to replace it. We now live under police rule.
Last year a group of Arab-Israeli youths in the village of Buqei’a in the north of Israel vandalized and burned a wireless pole owned by a wireless company just outside their village, believing it posed a serious threat to the health of the villagers. An army of over 200 Israeli policemen declared the village a war zone, attacking and shooting any individual who moved, and arresting tens of young men. The news of such segregate apartheid-like and state-driven cruelty never made it into the mainstream media, and it was soon forgotten. One might think vandalizing anything is a crime, really it is not in a country like Israel, and definitely not when you intentionally vandalize the Arabic text on any road sign. The definition of vandalizing might be a tricky one.
I am an Arab-Israeli.
After 7-years of living in the US, I decided to make my first trip back to Palestine/ Israel. In Paris, I was held by Israeli Airport Security for Five hours, interrogated, questioned, and searched to my underwear. I was asked about every day I spent outside of Israel, what I did, who I met, and a proof to all the information I submitted including a proof that I am who I claim to be. The final blow came when I was asked how long I was going to stay in Israel.
I am an Arab Israeli. I carry the Israeli passport. I do not speak Hebrew because I lived in my Jerusalem Arab neighborhood and in the West-Bank my whole life, but I believed until that moment that I had the right to stay in my own land for as long as I wish and at least enjoy the same basic rights granted to new Israeli “immigrants.” Well I thought wrong. I was finally allowed on the plane alongside heavy security carrying nothing but my wallet and passport (my bags to follow a week later). The same interrogation repeated itself in the Tel Aviv Airport.
Israel is the modern name of the country that sits on the land of my ancestors.
My ancestors lived there since the beginning of time. Things changed, but I stayed because it was my fate to witness different sides of the story. Each side was worse than the other.
On my way out of Israel, I decided to look for a home to buy with my family in a charming Jerusalem neighborhood that I always admired. You know… a place which I can go back to often. I called an agent who apologized sincerely about serving me as a non-Jew. Apparently, a non-Jew cannot own in Jewish neighborhoods under law. Any property bought out or confiscated from Arabs and now owned by Jews can only be sold back to Jews. No wonder the Arab neighborhoods have been continuously shrinking. I have felt what it means to be a citizen of a genuinely racist country.
I hereby refuse to attend your party, not as a bad citizen, but simply because… Apparently…I do not exist. I cannot fit anywhere where I pose a threat to the Jewish majority.
There is no flag I can salute while every symbol on the blue-and-white drape refers to the aspirations and hopes of a Jewish majority that I cannot be part of, not because I do not want to, but because frankly it is out of my control.
There is no national anthem to stand up to while every word sings to the Jewish majority and not me.
There is no place for me unless I decide to be a stranger, an outsider, a reject, an alien, an outcast, a second-class citizen in an apartheid state. I can be all of those and accept to live in a designated area in Israel if that is what it takes. I am willing to call myself an immigrant in my own land when I cannot be a member of the club; but I ask to be treated with little dignity as an equal human being and a full-citizen.
I will turn down your invitation that will never be sent, not as a bad citizen, but because I shared the horrors of being a Palestinian refugee under your rule; the horrors of being a resident of your occupied primary market outside of Israel where people are treated no better than farm animals; because I witnessed what it meant to be a Jerusalemite Arab, with no right to vote, when Jerusalem is your supposed capitol; and finally because as an Arab-Israeli, your own citizen, I was denied the sheer right of reclaiming properties left waiting during the 1948 war. So go, celebrate your anniversary away from my doors.
Oh, about the house in Jerusalem: Good news! I cannot buy that one, which is better apparently because I would have to “put up with the neighbors”, whatever that means. Good news… I guess.
Picture: My great grand-parents (Palestinian Arabs, Yaffa, Palestine/ 1922- Modern Day Tel Aviv, Israel/ Found 2007, Ramallah -West Bank)
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