I am a Palestinian American, my dad is older than the state of Israel

The trauma experienced to go see my family, friends is painful

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Transcribed from the clipping

“To be Palestinian is to be perpetually gaslit… This situation isn’t complicated. In fact, it’s only 73 years old. My dad is older than the state of Israel. He was in his first year of life during the British Mandate, when the British government supported ‘a national home’ for Jewish people, leading to the creation of Israel.

My people call the 1948 war that uprooted Palestinians from their home ‘al Nakba.’

The rest of the world doesn’t have a name for it because it’s rarely even acknowledged… I’m a proud Palestinian — and an American — and I’ve worked in politics and advocacy for over two decades… I grew up in Texas, and I have a lighter complexion than the rest of my family.

Which means that for my entire life, I’ve been Arab-undetected. That means people feel comfortable saying things in front of me they wouldn’t to the rest of my family: they’ve called me, my family, my people terrorists. They’ve quoted the Bible at me as justification for the persecution of Palestinian people.

They’ve disparaged ‘those people’ and assumed I would agree. I often let them dig the hole just deep enough before I reveal that I am Palestinian and that the majority of my family is actually Catholic.

Because, yes, there are Palestinian Christians — Jesus Christ was Palestinian… The problem, in part, lies in the inability or refusal to separate true antisemitism from the legitimate critiques of the oppressive Israeli regimes that have reigned over Palestinians, carrying out human rights abuses that would not be justified in almost any other circumstance… Even Jewish people who dare to speak out against this oppression are being attacked and labeled antisemitic… The bottom line is standing up for Palestinians isn’t the same as antisemitism.

Arabs are Semites too, and ethnic persecution is ethnic persecution. I may not live in Palestine, but the trauma I have to go through in order to go see my family and friends is painful and enraging. I have dual citizenship because of my parent’s forced Israeli citizenship. But I was born in the United States.

When I fly to Tel Aviv, my U.S. passport is literally useless. I have been detained for hours on end. My family doesn’t know when to pick me up because my release is based on the whim of that particular day’s security agents. I have been strip searched. My bags and electronics have been ripped apart and scanned and then scanned again and again.

The security agents shuffle me from office to office and ask me absurd questions like when was my grandfather born? What was my great grandmother’s maiden name? Why don’t I speak Hebrew? This entire process is meant to anger and intimidate and remind me that I’m not equal.

If my American citizenship can’t protect me, imagine how vulnerable every Palestinian living from the West Bank to Gaza feels.”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian American given the whole column to write in her own voice, with a photograph of the village her family came from. Kafr Bir’im was depopulated in 1948. The archive holds this village three times: 1972, 1973 and 2021.

Cite this clipping

"I am a Palestinian American, my dad is older than the state of Israel," Courier-Journal, 22 June 2021, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2021-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2021-005