Letters from Palestine Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a reaction.
    “Where’s that?” he asks inquisitively,
taking a sip of beer.
    My stomach relaxes. Good question. Where is
that? When I speak about Palestine in a nonpolitical setting, with
friends, family, Palestine is all the land—Israel, the West Bank,
and Gaza. When it’s political, we must differentiate. But in my
heart it’s all Palestine, always. Now how to explain to
sandy-haired Nick . . .
    “Well, you know Israel?” He nods. “Well,
before it was created, the land was called Palestine. It was a
British colony. That’s where my family’s from.”
    “Oh, so you’re from Israel?”
    No. My stomach starts to tighten again. I
can’t tell if he’s being belligerent or is just ignorant. It’s
Saturday night, I just want to dance with my girls and talk to a
cute guy, not argue, and not give lessons on British colonial
history.
    “No, I’m from Palestine. Now it’s just the
West Bank and Gaza.” This elicits a nod of recognition from Nick. I
have reached him. “But the cities that my family are from are in
Israel now.” I have confused him.
    “So . . . Israel used to be Palestine?” he
ventures, treading in new, revisionist territory.
    “Basically, yeah,” I summarize.
    “Huh, I always wondered who Palestinians are
and where they came from!”
    At this I laugh out loud, making him laugh
too. Good, no belligerence, just lack of information. This I can
handle.
    Always there is a story to tell when you say
you are Palestinian. There is intrigue. Always there is a question
of “But where is Palestine?” or an assertion that somehow you do
not exist because a nation-state called Palestine does not exist.
You become a question mark in the eyes of your beholder. Something
heard about. Something read about. Perhaps something
experienced—but not dressed like this, not drinking a beer.
Something familiar. Something foreign. Something to understand. And
it eats at me, because it is something I too yearn to
understand.
     
    I heart Palestine
     
    I wind through the labyrinth of Virgin
Records’ aisles—Rock, Indie, Rap, Soul & R’n’B, Middle
East—picking up CDs as I go: The new Ben Harper CD because I’m
going to his concert this evening and will want it afterwards. Bob
Dylan, Blood on the Tracks , because it’s $5 and my copy has
been scratched since 2001. Marcel Khalife, Arabic Coffee
Pot , because I should know him better. Munir Bashir, Stockholm Recordings , because his oud brings me peace of
heart.
    That should be about $45, I lie to myself.
Enough. I stand in line to pay and am eventually called over to the
farthest register. I hand the young man at the register my pile of
CDs, aware that everyone else paying has restrained themselves to
one CD and I am buying four. He begins scanning the barcodes. He’s
in his early to mid-twenties, tall, and black.
    “What does your shirt say?” he asks, nodding
towards me. I glance down for a second to remember what I am
wearing. It’s a bright yellow T-shirt I bought in Ramallah this
past summer, with a green olive tree in the center encircled by red
Arabic script.
    “It says ‘I love you, oh, Palestine’!” I
exclaim, a little more enthusiastically than was perhaps
necessary.
    He smiles.
    “Kinda like ‘I heart New York’, huh?” he
replies.
    Yeah, something like that.” I smile
back.
    “You ever been there? What’s it like?” he
asks.
    What’s it like . . . This time it was way
worse than last time, I think to myself.
     
    * * *
     
    The first time I went to Palestine was when I
was seventeen, in 1999. It was an incredibly emotional experience.
I am still not sure if it was so overwhelming because it was the
first time I went, and I was unprepared for the levels of racism I
experienced and the reality of life under occupation, or if
seventeen is a more sensitive age, and so I felt everything
deeper.
    I had gone to Palestine with my father and a
team of doctors from Physicians for Peace, an organization which
sends teams of doctors