After I first arrived at John F. Kennedy Worldwide Airport on July 24, 1994, I used to be each scared and torn by guilt. My fears weren’t merely these of any new immigrant attempting to begin a brand new life in another place. As a Palestinian, the USA, as a political entity, has all the time been a hostile place for me.
My guilt, alternatively, was associated to the truth that I had left my household behind, residing below perpetual siege. Since then, a few of them have died, together with my father, who was denied entry to correct medical care—like numerous different Gazans nonetheless residing below Israeli occupation. Within the ongoing battle on the Gaza Strip, I’ve misplaced actually tons of of members of my instant and prolonged household, pals, neighbors, and acquaintances. My guilt, again then, was totally justified. It nonetheless is.
That July morning, after I handed my laissez-passer to the U.S. immigration officer at JFK, he regarded perplexed. He adjusted his polarized sun shades repeatedly as he flipped by means of the unusual doc. “What does it imply that your nationality is ‘undefined’?” he requested. I understood the query, however might neither discover the phrases—nor the braveness—to reply. I noticed my face mirrored in his shiny lenses and felt embarrassed. I didn’t appear to be the courageous Gazan taking over the world, as my father and neighbors again house anticipated me to be.
“At all times keep in mind, you might be from Gaza,” my father had advised me, as he stood within the predawn morning with my youthful brothers and a small cluster of neighbors and pals who insisted on bidding me farewell earlier than the taxi taking me to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport arrived. My mom had died a few years earlier, throughout the first intifada (rebellion), however her form eyes nonetheless stared at me gently, one final time, from a framed picture in the lounge.
The look on my face as I confronted my first American impediment was hardly one in every of bravery. I can’t be despatched again, I assumed to myself, amid a rush of different ideas I couldn’t articulate in that second. I wished to inform the officer that I’m “undefined” as a result of Israel refuses to acknowledge my nationality, my roots, my historical past, and my current, not to mention my humanity. I wished to inform him that is the one time period they might discover to keep away from merely acknowledging my identification as a Palestinian; that Israel’s dehumanization of me and my individuals doesn’t start or finish with language; and that I’m a refugee from a spot known as Gaza, whose individuals have been pressured into an inner exile inside Palestine itself, and that these Gazans, like me, are, in reality, thought-about fortunate for having a doc with a reputation and a face.
Different officers joined the person within the mirrored glasses, some investigating the bizarre paper, whereas others examined me—a wierd, spectacled creature with blue denims and navy blue T-shirt with an alligator brand. After a lot deliberation, they determined that I might proceed with my journey to Seattle. They didn’t handle to efficiently decipher my nationality, however in the end deferred to the legitimate visa I carried from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Thirty years later, I’ve accomplished a lot with my life. I’ve studied, raised a household, and, at the least in my very own estimation, contributed to U.S. society by means of my books, papers, articles, media engagements, and extra. My youngsters—who now appear poised to attain greater than I ever have—are enterprise their very own journeys to seek out methods to “make a distinction,” a calling repeated many occasions in my family.
But I nonetheless really feel “undefined,” not solely by Israeli requirements, but additionally by the requirements of the nation that ought to have—at the least in principle—change into my very own.
Denial
The story of the passport is, after all, a political one. We, Palestinians, clearly do exist. I’m not Russian, Moroccan, Brazilian, or a member of the Māori individuals—though I really feel a selected affinity with the latter group given our shared wrestle in opposition to settler colonialism and cultural erasure. However I don’t exist as a distinction to anybody else, together with Israelis. Palestinians are as previous as—and even older than—recorded time.
“Palestine was the title used mostly, persistently and constantly for over 1,200 years,” Palestinian writer, historian, and tutorial Nur Masalha wrote in his seminal 2018 guide, Palestine: A 4 Thousand 12 months Historical past.
But in 1969, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir—an iconic Israeli chief within the eyes of many People—insisted “There have been no such factor as Palestinians,” in an interview in The Sunday Instances of London. “It was not as if there was a Palestinian individuals in Palestine contemplating itself as a Palestinian individuals and we got here and threw them out and took their nation away from them,” Meir continued. “They didn’t exist.”
That notorious interview coincided with the second anniversary of the 1967 battle. In Israel and the West, it’s generally known as the Six-Day Conflict; for us Palestinians it’s the Naksa (“the setback”). The latter time period should be distinguished from the Nakba (“the disaster”), which was coined shortly after Zionist militias—which might later coalesce into the Israeli Protection Forces—gutted out a complete nation from its historic homeland to construct a state on its ruins. Amid many massacres, greater than 500 Palestinian villages had been destroyed by these militias between December 1947 and July 1948. That is how most Palestinians grew to become refugees, as practically 80% of our individuals had been pressured out.
We by no means discovered security elsewhere. Those that had been internally displaced within the West Financial institution and Gaza by the Nakba had been then caged in by Israeli army occupation in June 1967. Many Palestinians and Arabs had hoped that the 1967 battle—which concerned Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in opposition to the U.S.-backed Israel—would reunite refugees with their long-destroyed villages. As a substitute, the Naksa resulted in practically 400,000 extra Palestinian refugees, added to the unique 750,000 refugees from the Nakba.
Since then, Palestinians have been caught in a seemingly infinite circle of dispossession that, with time, prolonged past the boundaries of each historic and occupied Palestine. When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990, Palestinians, already refugees from earlier conflicts, had been principally pushed overseas. A whole bunch of 1000’s of Palestinians had been exiled from a spot that they helped construct. Following the invention of oil someday within the Nineteen Sixties, Kuwait wanted Palestinians as a lot as Palestinians wanted Kuwait. Nonetheless, Kuwaitis seen Yasser Arafat’s political stance—additionally adopted by his Palestine Liberation Group (PLO)—as supportive of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. As Iraq was pressured out of Kuwait, so too had been the Palestinians.
Palestinians, lots of whom had been Kuwaiti authorities staff and lecturers at academic establishments, had been collectively fired from their jobs and requested to depart the nation. This unhappy state of affairs was repeated in Iraq, nearly instantly following the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Then, too, Palestinians went on the run, 1000’s of them trapped in desert refugee camps on Iraq’s borders with Jordan and Syria. Whereas some discovered refuge in Jordan, others ended up in South America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and the U.S.
The so-called Arab Spring—which did not convey freedom, democracy, or justice to Arab nations—as soon as once more made Palestinians run for his or her lives. Some had been fleeing war-torn Libya following one other disastrous U.S.-NATO intervention, whereas others fled from Lebanon, overburdened with financial hardship, international meddling, and the Syrian refugee disaster. However the largest variety of new Palestinian refugees originated from Syria itself.
But in Gaza, the place we lived below Israeli occupation, surrounded by army bases and opulent Israeli Jewish settlements—all constructed illegally on our land—we perceived Palestinian refugees in Iraq and Syria as probably the most privileged of all refugee communities. Palestinians residing in Iraq had been comparatively economically affluent, and people in Syria had entry to high quality training, which we lacked within the Gaza refugee camps. Entry to well being care amenities and different fundamental providers had been issues that each teams had discovered to take with no consideration. In Gaza, we didn’t. However all of us, no matter location, had been cursed with weird journey paperwork that served little objective and generated confused appears from inquisitive immigration officers at varied borders, whose typical verdict was “Entry denied.”
Palestinian refugees had—in reality, many nonetheless do—journey paperwork issued by Egypt and generally known as wathiqa, which severely restricted the motion of their holders, primarily requiring a visa to go anyplace, together with Arab nations. Although, in 1995, the Palestinian Authority issued new journey paperwork to Palestinians within the occupied territories; Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Egypt, and the remainder of the Center East continued to make use of the restrictive previous wathiqa. International locations that enable Palestinians to go to or work differ from yr to yr, and from one political context to a different, although these from Gaza (in addition to Lebanon) stay probably the most rejected of all Palestinians. These of us who lived below Israeli occupation had a further and equally ineffective doc, the laissez-passer (French for “allow them to go”), which was issued by Israel to tell apart between occupied Palestinians and Israeli residents, who had full journey rights. The Israeli doc, nevertheless, by no means lived as much as its title—it served to limit our motion, somewhat than facilitate it.
These paperwork had been meant for use solely outdoors the borders of occupied Palestine, or Palestinian refugee camps scattered everywhere in the Center Japanese Diaspora. In Palestine itself, the system is much extra advanced and dehumanizing.
Kafkaesque Actuality
On Sept. 13, 1993, the unwise PLO management signed the Oslo Accords. The settlement granted the PLO—not the Palestinian individuals—recognition by Israel. In change, the Palestinian group, which had ceased to meaningfully signify Palestinians, acknowledged Israel’s proper to exist. The latter transfer could seem innocuous, nevertheless it was not. Apart from the philosophical authorized argument that states are political creations and haven’t any inherent ethical proper to exist, Israel’s existence is happening on the expense of the erasure of the Palestinian individuals—our political rights, our tradition, our language, and extra.
That settlement primarily licensed that Israel had the best to exist on prime of the very Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed throughout the Nakba. It forfeited, with the stroke of a Norwegian pen and a U.S. stamp of approval, the rights of the Palestinian refugees to their unique homeland. Palestinian proponents of the settlement on the time argued that elementary points similar to refugees, water, borders, and the standing of Jerusalem had been all to be resolved by the tip of 1999. So far, no such discussions have occurred.
As a substitute, the West Financial institution was consequently divided into three distinct territorial zones, every to be ruled by completely different army ordinances. Israel by no means really revered the zoning system it crafted to corral Palestinians behind ever-growing settlements, apartheid partitions, fences, and bypass roads. Israel invades any area, in any zone, at any time, at will; it carries out arrests, assassinations, house demolitions, and the uprooting of bushes, principally historical olive groves. However for Palestinians, the zones nonetheless matter, as every zone contains further checkpoints, reducing off communities and households from each other, separating farmers from their land, college students and lecturers from their faculties, and so forth.
Life in Gaza, at the least previous to the continued war-turned-genocide and famine beginning on Oct. 7, 2023, represented a unique type of wrestle. It was, within the phrases of present British international secretary David Cameron, who visited Gaza in 2010 in his capability as prime minister, an “open-air jail.” Gaza is consistently surveilled by Israeli guards, who hold an armed, watchful eye from land, air, and sea.
This actuality was not the one context behind the Oct. 7 assaults, however is actually a predominant motivator behind the Palestinian resistance within the Gaza Strip. It turned out that people have a sure tolerance degree to oppression and an innate need to be free.
No Proper to Human Rights
Little has modified in Israel’s rhetoric round Palestinian existence within the 55 years since Golda Meir insisted there was no such factor as Palestine. On March 19, 2023, Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stated as a lot in a speech: “There isn’t any such factor as a Palestinian individuals.” A day later, then U.S. nationwide safety spokesperson John Kirby replied that “we [in the U.S.] totally object to this type of language,” saying it does little to “de-escalate the tensions” within the area. Like most U.S. officers, Kirby didn’t acknowledge Washington’s position in serving as the primary line of protection in opposition to criticism or worldwide sanctions in opposition to Israel, earlier than or throughout the genocide. This diplomatic deal with language continues to obfuscate the brutal actuality of an ongoing genocide—painstakingly recorded by South Africa’s authorized group earlier than the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice at The Hague on Jan. 11, 2024.
However, in reality, we Palestinians additionally don’t exist so far as U.S. international coverage within the Center East is worried. When the Trump administration started implementing its “Deal of the Century,” geared toward serving to Israel “normalize” its relations with Arab nations with out resolving the query of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it did so with no regard to Palestinians and their rights, that are enshrined in worldwide regulation. After Palestinian management boycotted Jared Kushner’s 2019 financial management convention in Bahrain, the son-in-law and senior adviser of former President Donald Trump known as them “hysterical and erratic.” Trumpism remained dedicated to the identical dehumanizing thought. Israel has to “end the issue” in Gaza, Trump himself stated on March 5, 2024, amid Israel’s genocidal battle on the Strip.
“The precise to have rights, or the best of each particular person to belong to humanity, ought to be assured by humanity itself. It’s not at all sure whether or not that is attainable,” Hannah Arendt, a German American historian and thinker, argued in 1949. She was responding to the adoption of the Common Declaration of Human Rights in 1948—by the way, but additionally tellingly, the very yr my individuals’s existence was being systematically destroyed in one of many best violations of the collective human rights of a single group in trendy historical past.
Certainly, with out political context and authorized recognition, human rights on their very own are of little worth, a mere recurring topic of repeated press releases by the likes of Amnesty Worldwide and Human Rights Watch (HRW). By the way, each organizations, together with Israel’s personal rights group, B’Tselem, have acknowledged Israel as a totally fledged apartheid state. In response to a 2021 report by HRW, President Joe Biden’s state division protested, “It isn’t the view of this administration that Israel’s actions represent apartheid.” This perspective is typical. For successive U.S. administrations, Israel’s actions don’t matter. All that issues is the language, and provided that it deviates from the U.S.-championed political discourse. This stays unchanged even when nicely over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in Gaza in a matter of months.
If the Palestinian wrestle might be summed up in a single phrase it will be a wrestle in opposition to erasure. When Israel handed its so-called Nation State Legislation, it geared toward recognizing that “the Jewish individuals have an unique and inalienable proper to all components of the Land of Israel.” This exclusivity instantly and irreversibly denies the rights of the native Palestinians to their very own land, and thus the Proper of Return to thousands and thousands of Palestinian refugees expelled throughout the Nakba and the Naksa.
United Nations Common Meeting Decision 194 insists that “refugees wishing to return to their houses and reside at peace with their neighbours ought to be permitted to take action on the earliest practicable date.” That was 76 years in the past. The refugees, my household included, are nonetheless ready for the “earliest practicable date” to actualize. For Israel, the mere demand is tantamount to calling for the eradication of Israel altogether.
The dehumanization of Palestinians has been happening for a few years and is a purposeful aspect of the settler-colonial construction. In 1983, former Israeli military Chief of Employees Gen. Rafael Eitan described Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” In October 2023, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, stated they’re “bloodthirsty animals,” echoing the phrases of Israeli protection minister Yoav Gallant who, three days earlier, had known as Palestinians “human animals.” With time, nevertheless, this dehumanizing language serves different capabilities except for racial discrimination. The genocidal language grew to become a precursor for genocide.
Even earlier than the most recent battle on Gaza resulted within the horrifying massacres of tens of 1000’s of principally girls and youngsters, and the following human-made deadly famine, the language of genocide has lengthy been legible writing on the wall. Israeli heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu stated in November 2023 that one in every of Israel’s choices within the battle in opposition to Gaza might be to drop a nuclear bomb, whereas Israel’s minister for the development of ladies, Might Golan, stated in March 2024 that she is “personally happy with the ruins of Gaza.” Euro-Med Monitor, a human rights group, even recorded proof that Israeli forces “introduced Israeli civilians to observe” Palestinians being tortured.
The Israelis, for as soon as, are not expending a lot power or time keeping off accusations of genocide, which was precisely described by anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé as “the first-ever televised genocide in trendy occasions.” Certainly, the masks have lastly fallen, and the world is ready to see the true face of Israeli settler colonialism in its ugliest manifestations.
Patrick Wolfe’s phrases proceed to ring true. The late Australian scholar and historian argued that “settler colonizers come to remain: invasion is a construction not an occasion.” Genocide is an inevitable half of this domineering construction, as Wolfe explains that settler colonialism “…perpetuates the erasure and destruction of native individuals as a precondition for settler colonialism and expropriation of lands and assets.”
Though this understanding is turning into clearer to many in Western tutorial establishments, because of the relentless efforts of Black, Indigenous, Palestinian, anti-Zionist Jewish, and different intellectuals, it’s hardly a topic of debate within the International South. In my visits to South Africa, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and my quite a few interactions with Southern intellectuals, the intersectionality between the Palestinian trigger and different Native struggles is neither an educational principle nor a debate. It’s the solely attainable salvation to many countries that proceed to wrestle below the oppressive weight of marginalization and racism, inside nationwide frameworks, or colonialism and neocolonialism inside an unfair, Western-inclined world system.
We Do Exist
In contrast to my early years as a scholar within the U.S. and a younger tutorial in Western establishments, I’m now much more invested in constructing connections with individuals who perceive, and even share, my positionality: dispossessed, marginalized, and even outright oppressed.
This course of, nevertheless, began with my family, with my daughters and my son. Elevating Palestinian youngsters within the U.S. was all the time tough, particularly for individuals who reside in small, remoted communities. The Sept. 11 terrorist assaults, nevertheless, made it much more tough. Fearing for my youngsters’ security, I merely stopped talking our native Arabic to them in public. Racism and violence in opposition to Arab People reached unprecedented ranges. Finally, we left the U.S., spending years in Malaysia, the place my son was born. It was a wanted respite. My best fears had been that my youngsters would develop up hating themselves, abandoning their identities merely to “slot in,” or worse, seeing themselves as perpetual victims.
My hope grows stronger as I witness my individuals’s steadfastness within the face of genocide. I do know that we are going to not be wished away by some Israeli politician empowered with U.S.-provided weapons and emboldened by the world’s assist or silence.
So their bedtime tales consisted of tales about two courageous Palestinian women, and ultimately a boy, who traveled to Palestine to assist liberate the individuals. With every quest, they discovered a few new metropolis or refugee camp. They discovered about locations, historic figures, and meals. And every time, they flew over the ocean to interrupt jail partitions, take away fences and checkpoints, all the time donning their valuable kuffiyas, Palestinian conventional scarves. These tales, which we known as “The Palestinian Warrior Women Specific,” helped them see themselves as fighters for a simply trigger, a legacy that continues to reside with them a few years later; one in every of them is a political activist with a Ph.D. in Palestine Research, and the opposite is a well being employee and future physician, advocating for equal entry to well being care amongst marginalized communities in Washington state.
It took years for this to occur, a course of that’s shared by many Palestinian American households throughout the nation, every growing their very own instruments to remain near house. Wherever we’re on the earth, Palestine is now a part of our existence. Our meals, garments, spirituality, values, and every day conversations are all deeply rooted in our tradition. With time, we grew delicate to any injustice happening anyplace, placing Palestinian American activists, writers, attorneys, and the like typically on the forefront of any simply wrestle within the U.S.
My hope grows stronger as I witness my individuals’s steadfastness within the face of genocide. I do know that we are going to not be wished away by some Israeli politician empowered with U.S.-provided weapons and emboldened by the world’s assist or silence.
I’ve a passport now, a U.S. one, although such citizenship resolved little or no of my quandary. Sure, papers had granted me, at the least in precept, entry and the best to have rights, however they didn’t, nor ought to they, grant me an identification. My identification isn’t a chunk of paper with coloured stamps, however is outlined by means of my wrestle as a member of a collective that’s preventing and dying to protect our sense of peoplehood, in opposition to a backdrop of untold, rooted, and persevering with injustices.
Furthermore, I not possess the laissez-passer of previous. It was changed by an alternate Palestinian Authority passport, which is, sadly, equally ineffective. Nonetheless, the brand new piece of paper, at the least, declares that my nationality is “Palestinian” (though nonetheless a refugee).
It took me years to fulfill all of the bureaucratic procedures, sophisticated by the gap and the Israeli occupation administration, to acquire related papers for my youngsters, who’re additionally now proud “Palestinian refugees” from the Gaza Strip. It was necessary for me—and now, for them as nicely—that the bond between us and the homeland isn’t severed.
A bit of paper might grant you entry, however identification is one thing you should look for your self. And within the case of my individuals, it’s one thing we’ve got to combat, and infrequently die, for.
