A visit to my country, Palestine

My heart pounded as I felt the plane approach the Palestinian coast. Throughout the entire two-hour plane ride, I experienced mixed emotions that are difficult to put into words, and therefore, when the moment finally came and I got my first look, my eyes wept silently.

During that unique journey that I had never dreamt of, I could not control my emotions that ranged between feelings of injustice and joy, between feelings of sadness for an imagined life lost or a life that escaped us at a specific time in history and the feelings of nostalgia for hope or justice that we must continue to feel until it is achieved somehow, some time, for some generation.

Therefore, I found myself in a kind of shock in a variety of ways, added to the fact that it was not related to me being a refugee, as I was given the label against my will due to the lack of meaning and structure of citizenship in this part of the world. I did not seek refuge from one country to another, as I was born in Aleppo, in an Arab country ruled for 50 years by a regime whose most important claim was that it was “nationalistic” or Arab and that the Palestinian cause is its top priority and main cause.

Of course, experience showed us that this was all just manipulating claims used for extortion and influence. I was also in shock as I was coming to my country, not from the first country of refuge that my parents and I sought refuge in from Palestine in 1948, but from another country I was forced to live in after the Syrian war and the mass Syrian refugee crisis, whose catastrophe exceeded what happened to the Palestinians during their Nakba.

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On top of all of this, I did not come to the country of my parents and grandparents as a Palestinian, as this label wouldn’t allow me to enter my country, but because I carry a foreign passport. This is one of the ironies of my situation, which I have no part in.

Therefore, I am coming to my country, with all of these perceptions and all of this longing and nostalgia because I acquired another nationality in the form of a passport. The person who will decide whether or not I enter, and perhaps even their ancestors, has no link to my country other than ideological fabrications and claims based on religious myths.

This is the first thing I thought about in the airport, when an employee flipped through the pages of my passport, looking me in the eye, thinking they may reveal something I am hiding, to see what I have seen of the country’s topography, or to read something in them that she could never understand.

Before this, I was looking at the passengers on the plane I was aboard. They were a mixture of nationalities, including Russians, Ethiopians, Polish, Moroccans and Europeans. They are all allowed to enter my country or the country of my parents and grandparents before me, although none of them or their ancestors have any link to this country except for their link to the state, a successful colonial project.

Here, perhaps, I should acknowledge that these feelings included a sense of weakness, but not helplessness; a sense of oppression but not inferiority; a sense of recognition, but not surrender. This spiritual connection to Palestine, its cities and villages, its valleys and mountains, its people, history and intellectuals, is something all Palestinian refugees know, despite never seeing an inch of the country in their lives.

Throughout the journey, I looked forward to the first moment of entry. My life story played before my eyes. I saw the Palestinian tragedy, as I knew it, in the refugee camps, the denial of identity, standing in front of the UNRWA offices, the hardships at the Arab borders, the emergence of guerilla fighting, the wars with Israel and the defeats that ensued. In short, everything in my life, all of my feelings and perceptions, revolved around the fact that I was Palestinian and the suffering Israel has caused me both on a general and personal level.

On this trip, I also looked back on the poems of Tawfiq Ziad, Izz Al-din Al-Manasra, Samih Al-Qasim, Ahmad Dahbour, Abu Arab, and Mahmoud Darwish, the pictures of Abu Ammar, Abu Jihad, Majed Abu Sharar, Abu Omar (Hanna Mikhael), George Habash, and on anyone who influenced my political career, my personal identity or my emotions.

What’s important is that this is what happened to me, and more importantly, this is not just an isolated incident. This is the meaning of the Palestinian identity being built or crystallised following two main events; first the Nakba, and second, the start of the Palestinian armed struggle and the establishment of the PLO.

Perhaps what we must realise is that this is exactly the dilemma of this identity, and there is no way to distinguish or divide them, as some believe. Sound identities are not founded on pillage, like the Nakba, which broke the Palestinian political, geographic, and social unity.

Moreover, the continuation of the Nakba and its reproduction with the emergence of new generations over the past seven decades has led to the emergence of new narratives that gradually marginalise or push aside the main narrative or reduces it in the name of new needs or priorities. This is accompanied by the preludes of the disintegration or fragmentation of the concept of the Palestinian people’s unity, especially with the absence or marginalisation of its symbolic entity, the PLO.

Read: The destruction of Palestine

As for the second event, although it contributed to the revival of the Palestinian spirit and the mobilisation of the Palestinian people, it ended in tragic consequences after the Palestinians paid a high price and sacrificed for it without achieving important or sustainable achievements. Everything that was achieved was ruined due to the fact that moodiness and experimentation was prevalent in the national work. Given this, our national movement was transformed into merely an authority for part of our people on only part of our land with part of our rights, all of which was under the cover by those claiming righteousness or legitimacy given their launching of the armed struggle.

In another scene, the meeting was impressive, as I met with a precious group of the steadfast Palestinians who are forgotten, or abandoned in the name of nationalism, and perhaps this reflected positively on them if one compared their situation with that of the Palestinian communities abroad. I was able to meet academics and intellectuals, such as As’ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana, Muhannad Mustafa, Antoine Shalhat, Marzouq El-Halabi, Bashir Bashir, Mukhles Burghal, and Ahmad Al-Saffouri.

I was also able to meet political figures, such as Mohammad Barakeh, Ahmad Al-Tibi, Ayman Odeh, Matanis Shehadeh and Asma Zahalka. I also met beloved Syrians from Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights such as Ayman Abu Jabal, Weam Amasha, Fawzi Abu Saleh, and Tawfiq Abu Jabal, Jews who devoted their lives to the defence of the rights of the Palestinians, such as Yosef Ben Efrat and Yoav Haifawi. I also participated in forums and in the “Arab Human Capacities” conference in Taybeh, as well as the International Conference on Jerusalem.

Everything about this state, since its earliest days, proves that it is a project state: a colonial, racist, and religious project founded on conquering, oppressing, displacing and marginalising the indigenous people in every sense of the word. This is not ideological, political, or propaganda talk. These are facts that can be seen by any person, regardless of their observation of the country, which was founded like any investment project that adopts successful administrative standards and is based on organisation, resource development, technology and democracy.

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This is what I noticed, for example, from the visit to my native city of Lod. The city’s landmarks have been completely changed, with only the Omari Mosque, the Dahmash Mosque and the Church of St. George left, along with the remains of the Al-Far family’s olive grove, Khan El-Hilu, the old municipal building, and a few old houses. In other words, the features and landmarks of Lod were changed after the majority of its people were displaced. Even George Habash’s house was completely erased and razed to the ground. This is the situation in most Palestinian cities, although the situation in Haifa, Jaffa and Acre is slightly better.

Secondly, we see a clear difference or distinction between the services offered to the Arab neighbourhoods and the Jewish neighbourhoods. This distinction even includes the names of places, as they have been Judaised by giving them Hebrew names, in the context of Israel’s efforts to establish a historical narrative.

Thirdly, one feels this in the spatial sense, as the Jewish neighbourhoods are spacious and open, while Israel is narrowing the areas of Arab neighbourhoods, which includes all Arab cities or neighbourhoods. This also happened in the cities of the Golan Heights, in the cities of Majdal Shams, Baqa’tah and Jubata ez-Zeit.

The discrimination is evident in the story of the Palestinian fishermen in Jaffa, as their old port was occupied by some Israeli families in their boats, which are merely recreational boats. The boat owners decided to make the fishermen’s port on the coast of beautiful Jaffa a port for their boats. They were supported by the municipality, which complies with their needs at the expense of the Palestinians.

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Fourthly, this also includes seizure of land and allocating high areas exclusively to Jewish neighbourhoods, towns and villages. They confiscate high areas, along with private Palestinian land, for various purposes, apart from the construction of the Separation Wall, which separates the West Banka and Israel.

Fifth, discrimination is blatantly clear in Jerusalem where religious and nationalist Jews from the extremist right wing insist on fighting the Palestinians inside the walls to harass them and chase them away. They show no respect for the feelings of the Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the holy city during the ceremonial displays they hold as Jews and occupiers, including the presence of military displays that makes one feel the oppression and occupation clearly.

This visit is not yet over – I am still visiting the West Bank – but I was truly amazed by the reverential nature of Jerusalem and its glory and beauty, by the amazing mountains of Galilee ad its cities, the beauty of the coasts of Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre. I was also amazed by the Golan Heights and its cities, and I was astonished at how it fell in the 1967 war. I was taken by the kindness of the Palestinian and Syrians I met.

I am a Palestinian Syrian, or a Syrian Palestinian.

Translated from Al-Hayat, 24 May 20017

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.