Letters from Palestine (18 page)

FREE, FREE PALESTINE!

Manar

Almost all Palestinians are refugees and
descendants of refugees. About three quarters of a million people
(roughly 75 percent of the entire Arab population living in
Palestine) were forcibly expelled from their towns and villages in
1948 when Israel took control of the country. After the Six-Day War
in 1967, when Israel conquered and annexed the West Bank, hundreds
of thousands of additional refugees were created. As a result of
these expulsions, the Palestinians as a people are the longest
enduring refugee population in the world. Being a Palestinian,
therefore, is almost tantamount to being a refugee, and by
definition, a refugee has been driven from his or her home.

One of the first things you learn, however,
when you go to Palestine or talk to Palestinians who live elsewhere
is how vivid their memories are of their native villages, how much
love they have for their land, and how desperately they continue to
yearn to return to just where they or their ancestors lived so many
decades ago. Time passes, so much time in exile, but the longing
for their original place of residence continues to burn brightly
along with the never-ending hope that one day their exile will come
to an end. To return home is the deepest wish of every Palestinian,
along with the concomitant dream that one day, too, they will again
be able to live freely in their own country.

A number of the people who submitted stories
to us wrote about their native villages, and I wish we had space to
print them all. Instead, the next selection, written by a man named
Ziad Abbas, will have to serve to illustrate many of these
ineradicable features of the psyche of the Palestinian people.
Here, then, is Ziad’s story.

_PHOTO

Ziad Abbas, forty-five, is a Palestinian
refugee born and raised in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the West
Bank, although the village of Zakariah, from which his family was
uprooted in 1948, is his true home. Ziad, whose name means
“something additional or extra,” is the youngest of five children.
Like many other Palestinian refugee families, his is now dispersed
and living in various countries in the Middle East, making it
impossible for them to reunite.

Ziad is the cofounder of the Ibdaa Cultural
Center (www.ibdaa194.org) in Dheisheh where he has served as
executive director since 1994. Ibdaa’s mission is to provide a safe
environment for the camp’s children, youth, and women to develop a
range of skills, creatively express themselves, and build
leadership through cultural, educational, and social activities
that are not readily available in either the camp or occupied
Palestine.

Ziad is also a journalist who has worked
with Palestinian and international media and has participated in
the production of several documentary films. His articles have been
published on electronic intifada and his extensive speaking
engagements include speeches at the United States Social Forum and
the World Social Forum.

He recently completed his master of arts in
social justice in intercultural relations from the School for
International Training Graduate Institute (World Learning) at the
University of Vermont. Currently on leave from the Ibdaa Cultural
Center, Ziad is working with the Middle East Children’s Alliance
(MECA, www.mecaforpeace.org), a nonprofit organization based in
Berkeley, California.

* * *

Ziad Abbas was my first Palestinian. I mean,
the first one I had ever met.

How it happened was like this.

After I had heard Dorothy Naor speak in
March 2008, at a Berkeley meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace, I
approached one of its members and said I was interested in making
contact with Palestinians in the area. Did she know of any?

“You need to meet Ziad,” she told me.

“Who is Ziad?” I asked.

“He works at the Middle East Children’s
Alliance, right here in Berkeley. He’s your man.”

So I called the organization, abbreviated
and known internationally as MECA, and asked if I could speak with
this Ziad. He was hard to reach—always busy, always somewhere else,
it seemed—but finally I was able to make phone contact with him. I
explained my interest to meet him, as briefly as I could, and he
said that, sure, we could meet sometime. I suggested lunch. He said
he’d let me know.

I waited. Waiting for Ziad—how little did I
know then that it would always be a waiting game with Ziad. But
then, I would also learn that it was always worth the wait.

In truth, Ziad was a very busy guy. Finally,
we were able to get together for a lunch in Berkeley near the
offices of MECA, where he was working for several months on some
kind of an internship.

Ziad turned out to be burly man, with white
hair, who seemed to be his forties. After I had said just a little
about myself and my reasons for wanting to meet him, I asked him if
he could tell me something about his life and work.

The first thing he told was that he was from
the Dheisheh refugee camp, but that wasn’t his real home. His real
home was his original village, which he then described to me. Ziad,
therefore, gave me my first lesson about Palestinians—the crucial
significance of the villages where their family was from and the
intense longing, indeed the steely determination, to return
there.

Ziad told me many other things about his
life: how he had, despite not wishing to do so, become an activist;
how he had been imprisoned and tortured many times in Israeli
prisons (he spared me the details; he only alluded to these
events); his attempts to pursue his education, which had never been
easy; his work as a journalist; his cofounding of Ibdaa, an
important cultural center for youth in the Dheisheh refugee camp;
and his continuing work with Palestinian children, especially with
a dance troupe that had toured America and other countries. And so
many other things over that long lunch did Ziad tell me.

He was a very impressive guy—tough, full of
life, a fighter for justice, a man of many accomplishments, and
warm of heart. I found myself full of admiration for him. Even
then, I was aware, and would be only more so later on, how lucky it
was for me that Ziad was my first Palestinian. For just that
initial talk with him did a lot to solidify my determination to
become involved with their cause and to make it my own.

In the year since that first meeting, I have
been fortunate enough to have had several more personal talks with
Ziad, both at his office and over dinner (once he even came to have
dinner with Anna and me at Anna’s home, which was a special
pleasure for us). I have heard him speak at several Palestinian
functions, seen a film that he helped to make about the Ibdaa Dance
Troupe (one of several films he’s been involved with), spotted and
chatted with him at various demonstrations we’ve attended or at
talks in the area. In many ways, Ziad is still my first
Palestinian.

Ziad travels a lot in connection with his
work and recently spent some time in Vermont, pursuing a graduate
degree in international relations, which he’s since obtained. I had
told him some time ago, however, that I definitely wanted him to
contribute to my book, and he had agreed. But, of course, he never
had time to write the piece he had in mind. I kept after him like a
shadow. I pestered him endlessly, and he promised faithfully.
“Soon,” he’d say. “Just a few more days,” he’d assure me. Later he
would call me to tell me, “It’s almost done.” But somehow, it never
came.

I was caught between wanting to give him
time to write and becoming the world’s greatest nag. I usually
vowed to do the former while inevitably turning into the latter.
But, still, I was convinced that eventually Ziad would come through
for me because, at bottom, I knew he was determined to write this
story and that because he was true-blue, he would.

Now, whenever I see Ziad, or even think
about him, I have the warmest feelings for him. And when we meet
nowadays, he always gives me a bear hug in greeting.

So here is his story, and here is Ziad, my
first Palestinian. I am not ashamed to say that Ziad is my
hero.

* * *

The morning when I went to pick up my uncle
from his home, I found him waiting outside the house. As I
approached him, I realized that this was a different person than
the man I usually visited, a man with a slow walk, short answers,
little expression, and no laugh lines around his eyes. Today
something new was happening. I could see that he was very excited
in a way in which I had never seen him before. I was on time, but
when I greeted him, he looked at me and made a wry face, saying,
“Where have you been?” as if he was blaming me for being late. I
smiled, realizing that he wanted to get to our destination as soon
as possible so that he would be sure to have enough time there.
Although he was clearly excited, there was also an edge to his
mood, and I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was
nervous.

It was the first time for me to visit my
mother and father’s original village, the village that they had
been uprooted from in 1948. It was the first time that I would have
a chance to find a connection between my life here and my roots,
the history of my family, and the land we came from. I wanted to
find a personal connection to all of the stories I had heard over
the course of my life, stories of life before the catastrophe,
stories of how the mountains look, the buildings, the farms, and
the trees.

We had barely spoken when my uncle went to
my car and climbed inside. As he closed the door, my cousin
approached him and asked if she could go with us. She said, “I want
to go too, to learn about the village, to see the area.”

There was a minute of quiet while she waited
for an answer. I was surprised when my uncle replied firmly, “No,
next time you will come.” I was confused by this because I knew we
could make room in the car for one more, but I thought he must be
concerned for her safety.

I looked at her and apologized, saying, “I
am so sorry,” as I climbed into the driver’s seat. I started the
car, and she just stood watching. We left her standing there as we
drove across the camp, winding slowly through the narrow alleyways
full of children on our way to the main street.

We arrived at the main road and parked. I
told my uncle to just relax, that my friends were coming soon to
pick us up. He had never met them, so I explained that the woman
was Jewish, from the United States, but that she had been living
for a while in the camp and working with us in the organization.
The man who would be coming, I explained, was a friend of mine, a
Druze from the Golan Heights.

My uncle looked at me impatiently, as if to
say he didn’t care. He asked, “Are you sure they are going to be
able to help us pass the checkpoint?”

I reassured him, “Yes,” although I was not
sure of how sure I really was.

At this moment, my friends arrived, driving
a fancy car with Israeli plates. We changed cars; I parked my car,
and we joined them in theirs. My car had Palestinian plates and
would not be allowed to even get close to the checkpoint, as
Palestinian cars are not permitted to enter Israel. After
introducing my friends to my uncle, we started driving toward a
checkpoint south of Bethlehem.

Most of the people who pass this checkpoint
are settlers, living inside the West Bank in Jewish-only
settlements built on land confiscated from Palestinians. Although
for my uncle’s sake, I acted sure, in fact, I was scared. I did not
know what would happen at the Israeli military checkpoint if the
military realized that we were trying to smuggle through. No one
ever knew what would happen to a Palestinian at a checkpoint; both
my uncle and I had seen a lot of violence in these places.

I tried to check with my uncle about how he
was feeling, saying questioningly, “Uncle, I hope we will pass the
checkpoint.”

He opened his hands wide, raising them over
his head, and looking toward the sky exclaimed, “I hope God will
protect us and help us to pass.”

Our Jewish friend, who understood some
Arabic, looked back at us from the front seat through the mirror.
She reassured me with complete confidence, saying, “Don’t worry,
Ziad. We will pass. I am Jewish, and blonde. They would never
imagine I am transporting Palestinians who don’t have a permit.”
She looked to the other friend from Golan and said, “He looks like
any Jewish Israeli, so don’t worry.”

I looked at my uncle whose head was covered
with a black and white traditional Palestinian head scarf known as
a keffiyeh, and I realized then that even though we were in
Palestine, a place full of people like us, he and I were the ones
who were “different.” I wished I could change my identity, to not
have darker skin, so that we could avoid the harassment that I was
sure was coming. I wanted to be able to pass without anyone looking
suspiciously at my color, stopping me, checking my ID,
interrogating me, or maybe even torturing me.

As I looked at my uncle without speaking, he
quickly pulled the keffiyeh from his head and drew a knitted cap
out of his bag and pulled it on instead. I realized as he was doing
this that my uncle understood the situation. He was trying to hide
his Arab-Palestinian identity. While I was wishing that just for a
moment I could change to be blond so that I could pass through
easily, my uncle was transforming his identity in a practical way.
He stuffed his keffiyeh into his bag. We looked at each other in
the car, both realizing what was in front of us and what we needed
to do.

All of us saw what he was doing, but no one
said anything. The driver looked back and smiled, but with the kind
of smile that reflects sadness more than happiness. As we moved
closer to the checkpoint, my heart started beating rapidly, and my
feeling of fear increased. I saw my colleague was merging between
the other Israeli cars that were coming out of the settlement to
the main road and that the car started slowing down toward the gate
full of soldiers.