At the job, little glimpses of reality quickly began to show. I often overheard my Jewish colleagues talking about their military service. Most of them were called away for a few weeks from time to time to do reserve army duty. There were heated political discussions about the recent Oslo accords and the relationship with the Palestinians. Throughout all this, I was silent and extremely uncomfortable. I was born in Lebanon, and, in 1983, when I was ten years old, I lost my mother to a bombing of the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center in Beirut, in the fallout of the Israeli invasion the year before. In 1995, I came to Israel as a result of the Oslo accords. I couldn’t help wondering, as I gazed around the room at my colleagues, how many of them had served in Lebanon during the invasion that I’d lived through there. But I pushed these thoughts away. I was back here now, I needed a job and had to start my life.
As though to soften some of my alienation, a friendship blossomed with an older British colleague, with whom I found much to connect and laugh about. She was Jewish and had immigrated to Israel as a teenager and married a local Israeli. One day, I invited her and her husband to my home in Fassouta. She gladly accepted and they came, but the visit turned out to be tense and uncomfortable, for a reason I couldn’t immediately grasp. The conversation was strained, each topic I brought up received a lukewarm response, and they ate and left as quickly as possible. I cleared the plates away afterwards, feeling puzzled and deflated. At work the next day, she apologized to me, telling me that her husband had served in a high rank in the Israeli army and was uncomfortable visiting an Arab home.
I was stunned by her forthrightness, but appreciated the truth. With the exception of a few cities, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis live deeply segregated lives in Israel. This creates a real problem for some Palestinians, whose towns and villages are prevented from natural expansion by the Israeli government, as most of their lands were seized in 1948 and the remainder were classified as “state land.” The government imposes strict zoning conditions and does not easily permit the expansion of building zones within the municipal boundaries of Arab towns and villages. Thousands of Arab homes are under the threat of demolition by the state for being located outside the permitted zones. Fassouta, my village, for example, has 11,000 dunums (1 dunum equals 1,000 square meters) within the jurisdiction of its local council, yet only 650 dunums have been approved by the government for new building expansion since 1988. The result is overcrowding and having to leave and find homes elsewhere. But many Jewish communities forbid Palestinians from living or even working in them, and some Palestinians have had to resort to lawsuits to secure the right to buy an apartment if they happen to have Jewish neighbors. We are treated as pariahs, unwanted and unwelcome. In a recent example, a Jewish member of parliament advocated the separation of Arab and Jewish women in maternity wards of hospitals, and several medical institutions are reported to have taken heed.
One day, a man I will call Moshe, one of my colleagues at work, stood in the doorway of my small office, beaming, coffee cup in hand. He had been friendly to me from day one. We exchanged small talk about work. He leaned against the door, studying me quizzically as he sipped his coffee. Then he said, rather thoughtfully: “You’re not like other Arabs, eh? You’ve made something of yourself.”
I paused. I wondered if he thought he was paying me a compliment, in singling me out from my “crude, backward” race. How was I supposed to reply?
“I tell you, you Christians,” he continued, sticking his head in a little closer and lowering his voice, as though sharing a highly valued secret, “you’re different. We have no problems with you!”
I blinked. So I was getting two compliments, it seemed, and Moshe was taking it upon himself to give me the stamp of approval on two accounts, including not being Muslim. I stared, thinking of the number of ways in which these remarks were wrong, and how they would be received in any other country, and utterly failing to experience the gratitude that they were meant to produce.
At the end of the workday, I arranged to meet my cousin for a trip to a mall in Haifa. We chattered in her little car, Arabic music playing, exchanging village gossip and news of the upcoming wedding season. For a while, I was transported out of the reality of the country to a world where I lived in my own homeland, Palestine, unencumbered by racism and discrimination.
But the reality shattered, as it always does, the minute we drove into the mall’s parking lot. Hebrew signs were everywhere. Inside the mall, there wasn’t a single sign in Arabic, though it served mostly Palestinian shoppers from the surrounding Galilean villages, and though Arabic is the second official language of the state. We walked into a shop and felt that familiar nervousness in speaking our language.
But I wasn’t about to talk to my cousin in Hebrew. As we perused the clothing, we chatted in Arabic, though our voices subconsciously dropped. Seeing an assistant, I pointed to a dress, asking her for the right size to try. “Those are the last pieces!” the sour-faced woman snapped and walked off.
I turned away uncomfortably, but, this being Israel, we weren’t surprised by the rude response. People’s rudeness is a known characteristic of the country, and, for some reason, it evokes a national reaction of humor among Israelis rather than disbelief. But there’s the chutzpah of Israelis’ dealing with each other and the rest of the world, and there’s a “flavored” chutzpah, loaded with a tacit sense of dislike and contempt, for dealing with Palestinians. Thus, when a more cheery-looking assistant bounded up to us to help, we were grateful.
Grateful, you see, for being treated like human beings, “despite” being Palestinian.
I tried on the dress. “Wow!” the assistant exclaimed as I came out of the fitting room. Okay, so I understood she was flattering me because she wanted to sell, but I smiled, nonetheless. Then she added: “You’re so beautiful; one would never think you were an Arab!”
I returned the dress and walked out, my cousin and I shrugging our shoulders. It is not possible to live for even one day in Israel and forget that we are us and they are them—and we may never be accepted as being equal to them. In fact, in most of my interactions with Israelis, I feel a vibe of barely concealed hostility, cautious suspicion, or, in the best case, like Moshe, an attitude of benevolent tolerance of us, the indigenous natives, toward whom they are being generous in allowing us to stay on our land.
As my cousin and I lined up for burgers, I glanced curiously at the Jewish Israeli family near us, crowding at the shawarma stall. I wondered how it was that Palestinians didn’t seem to exist in this country, but Palestinian food was so sought after. The shawarma had a kosher label, too. We’re bending over backward trying to integrate, but I think the state would be happy if we operated our falafel and shawarma stalls and just faded into the background after that.
Because, for Israel to face the weight of its actions against us, right from its foundation and through till this moment, is a tall order, one that no segment of Israeli society is ready to face.
Fast forward a few years, and I returned to the United Kingdom to do my MBA. But the sinking feeling hit me as soon as I graduated and landed back in Tel Aviv. At home in Fassouta, I was back to the old drawing board: looking for a job. The old monster resurfaced. I still had an Arab name and still had no army number to supply; as Palestinians, we’re exempt from military service in the Israeli army. Months later, I still had no job. Finally, in desperation, and with mounting debts to pay off, I took a job that I didn’t want. We don’t have the luxury of self-actualization in this country, I bitterly realized—it’s survival we have to worry about.
The job was in Karmiel, which is, again, a Jewish town in the Galilee built on land confiscated from three Arab villages: Deir al-Asad, Bi’na, and Nahf. I blocked this out daily as I went to work; I desperately needed the job, and I also needed the strength to cope with the mental and emotional trauma of being back in the country, which was, by now, getting steadily worse. The second intifada was raging in the West Bank and Gaza,
and, every night, I went home to watch the horrors unfold on the news. I had nightmares of bloodied corpses and wails of victims’ families. During the day, I could barely focus on anything. That period was one of indescribable stress and agony to me and to other Palestinians, as we watched our people in the West Bank and Gaza being attacked again on such a scale, all of us helpless to do anything to stop it.
At work, I’d hear my Jewish colleagues talk about “battering them,” and gleefully discussing Israel’s victories against its enemies. I couldn’t respond with a single word; again, I had to keep my job, and things were so tense in the country that the atmosphere was like a taut wire about to snap. A few days later, another colleague, in her late twenties and of the same age as me, announced loudly at the lunch table that her government was making a mistake in not “going in there [to the West Bank] and obliterating everything—people, trees, cats, dogs, everything—and solving the problem once and for all.”
The alienation is, of course, present on a communal level, not just a personal one; shortly after, there was another Israeli Independence Day to live through. Each year, on this day, many Palestinians are overtaken by such depression and despair that we elect to simply stay home. The day of celebration for Israelis marks the memory of our nakba, the loss of Palestine and the dispossession of our people. While Jewish Israelis are out flag-waving, having parties and barbeques on what was Palestinian land, we are commemorating our destroyed villages, remembering our dead and those who cannot come home. Each year is a painful reminder that another year has gone by in this tragic predicament. The entire country is plastered in Israeli flags for weeks before and weeks after, at a dose even higher than usual; Israel seems to have an obsession with hanging its flag everywhere, as though to make a point, perhaps to feed its own, insecure national psyche.
I often wonder at our sheer will to survive, as a people, in a system so ruthless in trying to negate our existence. For decades, it was illegal to raise a Palestinian flag in Israel. To this day, Palestinian citizens of Israel are not even referred to as Palestinians by the Israeli establishment, but by a great oxymoron of a term, “Israeli Arabs,” carefully concocted to imply that Israel was always there and we were always a minority group within it, and equally, to firmly keep erasing our Palestinian identity and make us nameless “Arabs,” a race that includes citizens of twenty-two countries. Worse, after several decades of this harsh indoctrination, even we have sometimes stopped referring to ourselves as Palestinian—not surprisingly, given that the word was tantamount to asking for a prison sentence. Several more names have been created to describe us, some kindly by our Arab brethren, among them “1948 Arabs,” which curiously ties an entire people to a single date; “Arabs Inside the Green Line” (of armistice in 1949 between Israel and its neighboring Arab countries; can you imagine using this definition to introduce yourself to someone?); and my favorite, “Arabs of Inside,” which would evoke a naturally puzzled response of “Inside what?” by anyone outside this mess. “Inside Israel, of course,” we would answer, as though this should be obvious. The reason for all these names is as pitiful as it is useless; it lies in the refusal of some Arabs to recognize Israel and, thus, to call it by its name—another case of sticking one’s head in the sand.
Battered by the force of all this, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are still trying to come to terms with their own identity, shattered to oblivion by a foreign power. In recent years, we’ve begun to cautiously say we’re Palestinian again, as the wheel continues to grind on successive decades of Israeli oppression and our patience wears thinner and thinner.
Israel’s attempts to sweep us under the carpet, of course, and its severe discomfort at acknowledging our identity, both stem from its refusal to acknowledge the wrongs it has done and continues to do against us, or to realize the impossibility of its project of being a “Jewish state.” The Palestinians live in this country, and they lived here long before the Zionist project decided to expropriate it and create Israel in its place. Today, the Palestinians living inside Israel are citizens of it, but Israel is not a state for all its citizens—it is, by its own proclamation, a state for Jews. Though the word only isn’t at the end of that definition, Israel’s practices very much imply that it is a state for Jews only. Its biggest fear seems to be in relinquishing its racist dogma and becoming a binational state, or a state for all its citizens.
When, faced with the discomfort at my presence that I encountered daily at work, on the bus, in the mall, and in government offices, I reflected on Israel’s self-definition of being Jewish and democratic, touted so shamelessly by a supposedly modern country with a parliament, a president, a prime minister, and a claim to democracy, my first, instinctive question was, What if you’re not Jewish?
The answer, from the state’s actions toward me each day that I lived there, seemed to be, Well, then you should leave.
Eventually, I did. I packed my bags and moved to Ramallah, in the West Bank, part of the occupied Palestinian territory, in a desperate attempt to stay in my homeland but distance myself from the oppression of living in Israel. Together with other Palestinians who moved here, we yearned to feel some reclamation of our identity and live in our own self-governance, seeking any scraps of dignity and relief that we could forage in this country.
We came out of the frying pan and into the fire.
For me, it took a while for this to register. My initial reactions on visiting Ramallah were euphoric, completely detached from the reality that I had yet to discover. My heart fluttered with the Palestinian flag that I saw on rooftops and in front of official buildings. I gazed at government ministries with a sense of pride; here were hints of Palestinian sovereignty, here was a fragment of Palestine, all was not lost! There were no Hebrew signs where I lived. People spoke Arabic and were friendly and welcoming. It was almost like coming to a different country.
It was. But it was no tourist destination.
My daily diary here is another side of the same coin, that of Israeli military control and dispossession of Palestinians. Here, it’s much more blatant, in our face. It’s in the humiliation and endless waiting time at the checkpoints, in the bitter, daily environment of violent clashes, in the sprawling, illegal Jewish settlements gobbling up our land, in the frustration of movement restrictions, in the constant feeling of insecurity. It’s in watching my people every day, choked by a foreign occupier, being unable to grow our economy and living a warped existence of barely making ends meet, at the mercy of international aid. It’s in generations that find rising unemployment and costs of living, no hope for a better future, and no peace on the horizon.
In fact, the Palestinians are doing Israel a historic and colossal favor in calling this an occupation. The definition of a military occupation as a temporary state of affairs has long stopped to apply here. After half a century, more than a hundred illegal Jewish settlements, and over half a million Jewish settlers illegally squatting in the West Bank, what is happening far exceeds an occupation; it’s a structured, systematic dispossession of Palestinians just like that of 1948, only at a slower, yet equally ruthless pace. As more Palestinian land is lost and Palestinians are pushed into tighter and tighter ghettos, choked by a horrendous separation wall snaking through their lands and cutting them off from their families, fields, schools, and work, as they are forbidden from using many roads, and as they continue to be the target of random killings and sometimes mass arrests, Israel has already created facts on the ground that make the realization of a truly independent and viable Palestinian state impossible.
I have always found it curious, however, how both Palestinians and the international community have come to view this military occupation as an isolated problem, removed from the historical context of the nakba: the founding of Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine, the dispossession of around 85 percent of the Arab, Palestinian population of this part of the land, and the ethnic cleansing and destruction of more than four hundred Palestinian villages. Th
e occupation did not fall out of the sky on these territories, the West Bank and Gaza. The occupation is only an extension of Israel’s founding principles, its violent beginnings, its dogma of being a national home for the Jews, and its historical attack on the Palestinians with the aim of driving them out of their homeland to fulfill its aims.
To really look at ending the occupation, the issue at hand is much larger; it’s in Israel’s self-definition, its expansionist goals, its attitude toward non-Jews, and its actions over the last sixty-eight years that attest to all this. Inside Israel is a system in which Palestinians are afraid to speak Arabic in public, in which, in recent years, like our brethren in the West Bank who are frequently shot and killed at checkpoints, we may be killed in the street at the mere suspicion of a soldier or policeman, in which we have to grovel for work and be grateful for any crumbs thrown our way, and in which we have to carve out a dignified existence against a monster of a state that openly calls for our expulsion or “demographic transfer.” On either side of the separation wall, one can only wonder at the sadistic ingenuity with which Israel has woven an airtight system around us to suffocate every aspect of our lives—while it relentlessly pursues its goals of more Jewish settlement and more and more grabbing of Palestinian land and resources for Israeli-Jewish-only benefit.