Letters from Palestine (9 page)

A special units policeman came up to me and
looked into my eyes, “Put down that flag or I will tear it in your
face,” while Israeli flags were fluttering in front of me to remind
me of my slow death.

I wake up from my daydreaming to get off at
the train station near my work. I walk while Fayrouz never stops
singing. I stand quietly before a lonely olive tree in the middle
of Tel Aviv with a thousand questions in my eye: “What are you
doing here? Why didn’t you leave with the departed?” The tree is
what remains of the evacuated village of Summayl. So, Tel Aviv was
not sand dunes, as they told me. It was the villages of Summayl,
Jamasin, Ejlil, Manshiyyeh, Sheikh Mouannes, Abu Kbir and the smell
of war that emanates from its soil.

This place has a smell and a story, and this
story is my story and the story of every Palestinian in Israel who
opens his window in the morning. In his nose, there will be the
mixed smell of the sea and the earth and the smell of smoke and
fire still burning after sixty years.

I reach my office exhausted from digging up
history. I recollect my energies and start again to dig up history.
I work as coordinator for a project on Palestinian oral history,
collecting what remains of the stories of people. I collect
leftovers of the story to discover the truth. There are three
hundred thousand displaced Palestinians in Israel, most of them
living a few kilometers from their villages, which became Jewish
settlements. They are the Present Absentees, according to Israeli
law, on the basis of which their lands were confiscated, and they
were prevented from returning.

How this law irritates me. How could you be
present and absent in the same place and time? How can you negate
the existence of a person by a law, and in a few lines? Why do you
mess up history and dump whomever you want on the rubbish heap of
history?

Apologies to the State of Israel because we
did not die. Apologies because we eat what we sow and drink rain
water. Apologies because we think and write, and because we stayed
on our land in spite of our continuing catastrophe and in spite of
the continuing destruction of our homes and the expropriation of
our land and your racist laws. Apologies to the State of Israel
because we are a people who love life.

West Bank Stories

In these two letters, Sheeren Naser, who was
introduced in the first section of this book, takes us with her on
her first trip into the West Bank to the town of Birzeit, where her
family had its historic roots, and then recounts a subsequent visit
there years later when she was a young woman. In describing her
initial journey into the West Bank, Shereen’s story well represents
a kind of bridge that American-born Palestinians must cross when
they leave the security of their native country and experience the
culture-shock of encountering their ancestral land for the first
time.

Letters from Shereen

The first trip

I was eleven the first time I traveled to
Palestine in 1997. Until that first day, Palestine had been just a
word hushed around the dinner table. I always knew I was Arab, but
both of my parents spent much of their youth in Kuwait because the
occupation awarded their families no opportunity at a decent life;
so, for a long time I thought I was Kuwaiti. I would hear stories
about Kuwait and heat so strong it would melt car tires. But our
hometown, Birzeit, would sneak into every story, whispered like
something sacred and holy. The story of the melting tires was
always followed up by a quick comparison to the cool air of
Birzeit, a Hawaii to our stifling Chicago or New York.

So it doesn’t take much explaining to see
why in my young mind, Birzeit was a field of flowers and waterfalls
that you frolicked in. When my sister and I would turn out the
lights for the night, she always begged me to tell her a story, and
so that’s when I told her of that mystical land that weaved its way
in and out of the stories I would hear. I would tell her of a
Birzeit that was like the Emerald City in the
Wizard of Oz
,
only better. Suffice to say, when we finally made it there, it
wasn’t quite as I’d pictured it, but I can say it changed our lives
for all eternity because we would never again find anything so
beautiful.

From the day we found out we were going to
the Middle East until we left, we talked about nothing else in my
household. The trip was top priority at every shopping trip (Middle
East weather called for some new clothing), every visit we made to
someone else’s home, and every family conversation.

In May, my sister and I skipped out of
school early, our bags packed, and traveled first with our mother
from the States to Jordan. The plan was to start there. My mother
would then get her visa, since she still had a Jordanian passport,
and then we would meet my father who would fly straight from the
States to Birzeit.

Unfortunately, my mother was not granted her
visa into the West Bank. I remember very clearly that summer how
hard she tried. She went to the embassy numerous times, sometimes
coming back tired, other times angry, threatening to write a news
story on how badly they treated people at the embassy that she
would subsequently publish in the U.S. Unfortunately, no amount of
pleases or profanity got her a visa, so instead my father traveled
into Jordan, picked me and my sister up, and took us back to
Birzeit, while my mother made other travel arrangements.

The West Bank borders Jordan to the west,
and Jerusalem is about fifty miles from Amman, Jordan, where my
family was staying. In order to make the trip, though, you have to
pass through what we call “the bridge,” or a checkpoint on the
border. With or without a visa or a passport “accepted” by Israel,
such as an American passport, the trip can be difficult, and entry,
especially for Palestinian Americans, can be denied for pretty much
any reason. We had heard countless stories of people having to go
back several times before they got through, and it’s even worse now
than it was when we went in 1997.

Needless to say, my father was a bit nervous
about the trip. He had not been to the West Bank in a very long
time, and even if we got through without a hitch, he was not sure
he could make it from the bridge in Jordan back to his aunt’s home
in Birzeit. He enlisted the help of some of our West Bank relatives
visiting in Jordan who were planning on reentering the West Bank.
Since they had Palestinian passports, and we had American
passports, we would be separated at the checkpoint, but the plan
was that we would meet them on the other side and then they would
escort us to our aunt’s house.

We left very early in the morning, loading
our bags into our uncle’s blue car, and made our way to the border.
The checkpoint looked a lot like an airport to my young mind. There
are big buildings you go through, you check through customs, then
you board a bus that takes you across the border. In the building,
they separate the travelers out by passport. One group consisted of
those with Palestinian passports, and the other group, everyone
else.

As an eleven-year-old I could maybe conceive
of this. It’s like at an American airport, when you enter your own
country after being abroad; you might be separated from those who
carry other passports and typically you get through quicker. My
thought was that as foreigners here in the West Bank we would have
to go through some sort of search process that my uncles would not
have to go through since they were entering their own country. But
then we finished going through customs and my uncles were still
trying to get through. We were boarded onto an air-conditioned bus
with little shades on the windows and a Robin Williams movie
playing on a small TV overhead, and my uncles were still trying to
get through.

Our bus started moving, and my uncles were
still trying to get through. Even more shocking to my eyes was a
bus that ran alongside ours full of people who looked just like
me—Palestinians, my dad explained, with Palestinian passports. They
were all standing up, stuffed like sardines into a tan bus, the
paint chipping off the sides, the windows open to let in a little
air since there was no air conditioning, and I was pretty sure
there was no Robin Williams movie either.

Our bus soon reached the other side of the
bridge. We exited and waited at the station for our uncles so that
they could guide us back to my aunt’s house where we would be
staying. We waited for over five hours, and still no sign of them.
My father bought us bottles of Tang orange juice, sweet and tangy
as promised. The sun beat down on our backs as we sat on the
concrete sidewalk, just waiting. My sister and I played hand games
and guessing games, then we started bickering as the heat became
unbearable.

My father decided we couldn’t wait any
longer. We hopped into a shuttle that took us to Jerusalem, then
from Jerusalem we had to get a ride onto another shuttle, which had
clearance to go to Ramallah, and then another shuttle that would
take us to Birzeit, and finally, home.

As we traveled in the first shuttle, my
senses were completely overwhelmed by the sounds, the smells, the
colors, and the chaos. Women walked in the streets trailed by four
or five children wearing bright-colored clothing with misspelled
English words. Men haggled over the price of a box a cigarettes
with street vendors. A man yelled at a young boy as he ran down the
road. The people riding in the taxi with us struck up a
conversation with my father, and my sister and I sat in the
backseat holding hands, our foreheads pressed against the windows,
our minds sending little prayers to God that we’d make it alive.
The way our chauffeur was driving, I wasn’t sure we would get
anywhere in one piece: I was always taught those red octagons meant
stop. My senses were being hounded on all sides, not sure where to
direct attention, and instead jumping from one thing to the next
without any purpose or direction, trying to get as much information
as possible out of every unfamiliar sight, sound, and smell.

_PHOTO

The Village of Birzeit

I don’t even really remember my first West
Bank checkpoint and only briefly remember my first foray through
Jerusalem as we tried to catch a cab to Ramallah and then to our
hometown of Birzeit.

I do remember, though, that as we made our
way to Birzeit, things became quieter, more subdued. City buildings
turned into olive groves, and street vendors turned into farmers
making their way home. Three hours later, we finally reached
Birzeit. Our entire trip took over twelve hours—subtract five for
the waiting, and it took about seven hours. Just as a comparison, I
can drive the 532 miles from New Orleans, Louisiana, where I attend
graduate school, to my parents’ house in Austin, Texas, in eight
hours. We found out later that it took my uncles over fourteen
hours to travel less than fifty miles.

Needless to say, we were exhausted when our
third taxi finally stopped in Birzeit . I looked around for the
field of flowers, the little fairies flitting from tree to tree,
and the green emerald castle. Instead, I was greeted by the
decapitated head of a cow hanging by a hook through its nose,
swinging in front of a doorway we were to climb through to our
apartment. My meat usually came wrapped in clear plastic wrap with
that sanitary yellow Styrofoam plate underneath; it didn’t hang
from a hook. But as I peered inside the butcher’s shop, I noticed
something that didn’t happen much when you bought your prepackaged
meat (and I’m not talking about any kind of deadly disease). The
lady inside buying her meat put her purchase down on the counter
and started laughing as she took a cigarette from the butcher and
sat down with him for a cup of tea.

Then once we made it past the cow head and
into the apartment building where we would be staying, I noticed
the stairs. No elevator. Only five flights of stairs. I had heard
the aunt we were staying with was old. No way she had to climb
these stairs to get home every day! I mentioned this little fact to
my dad. Maybe we were in the wrong place? He laughed and told me he
never really understood it either.

I thought this was supposed to be some kind
of paradise. Instead, I’m greeted by five flights of stairs and cow
heads. But what happened next made me realize that paradise wasn’t
just about the field of flowers. In the next few days, I would be
overwhelmed by warmth and kindness and closeness, maybe even
sometimes too much for comfort. Our journey did end with an emerald
city of sorts. We were fed, stuffed actually, with delicious foods,
buffed and laced and given every sort of hospitality imaginable.
People my dad hadn’t seen in years and whom we’d never met treated
us like we’d lived there all our lives. Some homes didn’t have
running water, the city mostly smelled terrible and trash cans had
more trash around them than in them, but I couldn’t think of
paradise any other way.

Lessons learned

My parents made every effort to instill my
siblings and me with their culture. I appreciate their patience
with us as we learned to speak Arabic and tried to compromise
between being American and at the same time Arab. But because they
were my main source of information on my culture, all of my
“Arabness” had always been strongly attached to what they chose to
show me. For example, since I was a little girl, my dad had always
tried to quell my anger at not being allowed to go out with friends
or wear spaghetti strap shirts by using “our versus their” culture
techniques. This technique is described best as the “I trust you,
but I don’t trust them” technique, the “them” being my American
friends. “When you’re eighteen, you’ll understand. We’ll send you
to Birzeit by yourself, and you’ll see for yourself,” he would
close, reasoning that I didn’t understand where he was coming from
because he had been modifying our real culture and being easier on
me. Just wait till I was left alone in the society that had
indirectly bred me, without my parents as a buffer.