ABIR SALEH
I am a Palestinian American mother. My parents are both from the West Bank. My father went to college in Beirut, and when his father asked him to return to Palestine, he went back, was arrested, then released, but was never able to finish his degree. My parents were married in Palestine. After my brother was born, they came to America looking for better financial opportunities and a better life.
My father has deep ties to Palestine. Several years ago, after living in New York City for many years, he returned to the West Bank, thinking that he could stay for long periods of time and go back and forth. However, according to the Israelis, he is living there illegally! He was told that if he leaves the West Bank again he will not be able to return, and so he is there while we are here.
He has never seen two of his grandchildren. My sister-in-law tried to visit, to show him his grandchildren, but was not allowed in through the Allenby Gate in Jordan. Distraught and scared, she had to return very late at night to a desolate area in Amman. The other day I called my father, and he cried on the phone, he missed us all so much. This was shocking to me, as he is a serious and reserved man and not someone who cries easily. Once, he tried to travel and showed his original Palestinian passport from the 1940s, but the Israelis just laughed. He got so upset that he is from a place that does not recognize he was there before Israel was created.
I was raised in Brooklyn, New York. When we were children, we had a Jewish neighbor named Selma. Because she married an Italian, non-Jewish man, her family disowned her. Our two families became very close. Sel was very kind to us, and she and her husband sort of adopted us as their own children since they had none. It’s a Brooklyn story for sure: Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim in the same place.
Selma was like our grandmother, and we treated her that way. After her husband died, she reunited with her family who were very Zionist. After that, there was a wedge between us. She was told that Palestinians were all terrorists, and it got to the point where we could not talk about the issue of Israel/Palestine at all. Yet she continued to be in our lives and helped me with my children. While terminally ill, she used to sneak us into her house, worried that if any nosy neighbor would ask, she would pass us off as Syrian Jews. As I wear a hijab, this was rather difficult. But she snuck other family members in as Puerto Rican, or any of the hundreds of possibilities that exist in New York City. Her family did not know about us or care about anyone she was close to who weren’t Jewish. Being Palestinian, we were her dirty little secret; when Selma died they didn’t even tell us. This broke our hearts. My grandmother died and I didn’t know.
As a Palestinian in the West Bank, you must have a visa to travel in your own country. I have cousins living in the West Bank who are always getting arrested. Most of the time they don’t know what the charges are. This means that every time they need to go from one place to another, they are often detained. This happens to Palestinians all the time. My cousin described one such incident when she was trying to travel to Jerusalem and, while crossing the checkpoints, was detained for several hours in a tiny enclosure like a box in the sun. This is customary. You sit in that box in the blazing sun for hours while the IDF officers smoke, relax, play cards, and you are completely helpless to do anything. It doesn’t matter whether you are going to work or to the hospital, you sit in that box simply for the crime of being Palestinian.
In Palestine, much of your life is determined by what kind of passport you have. Because we had American passports, and not Palestinian residency cards, we were allowed to stay in our car at the checkpoints and drive across. If you don’t have an American passport, you have to get out and are treated as less than human. The IDF officers interrogate you. Not only do they have guns; their fingers are on the trigger pointing directly at you while they ask you questions. You feel like a criminal.
Once on a visit there, we were going through a checkpoint on a bus. We were supposed to stay on the bus because we had American passports, but there were some people on the bus who didn’t have the right papers, so they made us all get off. I had my teenage son with me, and I was a nervous wreck, knowing they treat young Palestinian men as worse than animals. I had terrified visions of when the IDF brutally beat Tariq Khdeir, a 15-year-old American visiting his family in Palestine in 2015. So we decided to hitchhike and got into a car with an American from California.
Before I knew what was happening, a strange woman jumped into the car instead of my son while the car was still rolling, with the driver yelling at us to hurry. The fierce mother instinct came out of me at that moment, and I physically pushed the stranger out of the car so my son could get in, just in time to be where the soldiers took your papers. I felt terrible about this, but I had to protect my son. I didn’t think I could do such a thing.
In the short time of my visit, my normal, patient, caring self was tested to the max. I felt the shift in attitude and in my anger level as the days grew longer. I can empathize with those Palestinians who are born into these constrictions and struggle on a daily basis just to live.