RIHAM BARGHOUTI
I am obsessed with Palestine. I don’t just mean that I love the olive groves, people, land, and the smell of jasmine and cardamom coffee in the morning. I am obsessed with the geography of Palestine. Growing up in New York, I was told over and over again that I didn’t exist, my people didn’t exist, Palestine didn’t exist. So I searched for Palestine on every map and globe I could find. I knew it was there. I had visited it so many times. One day I happened upon the old globe in the library of Brooklyn Technical High School. I looked at it carefully, sure I was not going to see what I was searching for. However, to my joy and satisfaction, there it was, a small strip of land between Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, labeled Palestine.
The success of the Zionist project is dependent on maintaining the myth that “Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land.” Any transgression of this mantra would incur severe consequences. I learned this early on.
On July 31, 2006, Israel launched a brutal airstrike on the defenseless Lebanese town of Qana. Twenty-eight civilians were killed, including sixteen children. Israel immediately began a media spin in an attempt to erase the horrendous images from our minds: pictures of children being taken out of the rubble, the site of death and destruction that brought back all of our memories because Qana was violated before. Many of us woke up Sunday morning to the news—news that made our stomachs ache, almost like an ulcer, bringing a feeling of despair. Oh god, not again, please not again. But nothing could erase those images, and we were reminded once again of the massacres perpetrated by Israel against Arabs. As I watched the news, I thought about Deir Yassin in 1948, Qana in 1996, Jenin in 2002. Most of all I was assaulted by the memories of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
I was ten years old, living in New York, when the massacre of Sabra and Shatila happened. This period was fraught with the worst recurring nightmare of my life. In my sleep I would come to my home and open the door to find my family slaughtered by a fierce lion. As hard as I would try, I could never save them: my father, my mother, and my sisters, all savagely killed and I totally useless, left alive and alone. For a while, I began sleeping in my parents’ bed so that the minute the nightmare began, I could open my eyes and feel the very real comfort of my parents’ breath assuring me that they were, in fact, alive and untouched by the savage lion.
Riham and her cousin Nai at the entrance to their ancestral home in Deir Ghassaneh, Palestine, August 12, 2018.
Photo courtesy of the author
Several years after I stopped having this nightmare, I overheard my father explaining to some Palestinian friends that they should be careful about what images from the intifada their children watched on the news. He explained that when I was ten years old, I had had this horrible recurring nightmare of my family being slaughtered, due to the images I saw of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. I then understood where my nightmares had come from. Though I was living in New York and not threatened in any real way, subconsciously my mind made the connection: In Lebanon there were Palestinians who were being massacred. I too am Palestinian. My family is Palestinian. If it could happen to them, it could happen to us.
For most Palestinians in the diaspora, the only way home is through “the Bridge.” This is not the Verrazano or the Golden Gate; it’s more like a few wooden planks atop a puddle that connect the west and east banks of the Jordan River. It was, and still is, an arduous trip. Your luggage is dumped and patted down, and your body is strip-searched and patted down. This is true for old or young; man or woman. Do you see how democratic Israel is?
On one trip to Palestine, as a soldier checked our luggage—meaning dumped all our belongings into dirty plastic crates, physically handling even the most personal of items, underwear included—he alighted on a small jewelry case. He opened it and, lo and behold, found a major transgression, something very dangerous and sinister, more threatening than weapons of mass destruction. He found a gold charm depicting the map of historic Palestine.
The Israeli soldier who found the map realized right away what a crime we had committed. He gave the necklace with the gold charm to my mother and said, “Get rid of it.” But my mother couldn’t force herself to throw away such a precious item. She told my sister to wear the necklace backwards so that it would be hidden by her hair. But it was quickly discovered by a female Israeli soldier when we were taken to be physically searched. She called her superior right away. In the weeks to come we would get to know Captain Yakov very well. On his command we were herded into a room by a number of soldiers brandishing their M-16s. Soon enough my mother was arguing with them, my sister was screaming. Captain Yakov swore to my mother that so long as he was in charge we would never be allowed to enter.
It took four trips; two sets of permits, one of which had to be smuggled out of Palestine by Amti Zaghloula, my sixty-year-old aunt; an Israeli lawyer, Felice Langer; an article in the local newspaper; and my mother’s tenacity to finally get us across the bridge that year.
Why was the map such a major transgression? Why was the response to it so uncompromising? Why were we made to suffer? Well, it’s simple. It wasn’t just a gold map; it was all that the map represented. My mother, an ordinary Palestinian who had been dispossessed and had lived in exile for over fifteen years, had stubbornly held on to her connection to her homeland. She had also successfully passed on her passion for a return home to her children. And if that was the case—if Palestinians, generation after generation, were going to remember their past and demand recognition of their identity—how could Israel go about its business of denying the existence of Palestine? How could it create a Jewish state for only Jewish people in the land of Palestinians? How would Israel forget its legacy of colonialism and expulsion if those it had colonized continued to resist and those it had expelled continued to return?
Now, I think of all the children who do not have time and distance to protect them, who live in an endless barrage of violence and fear. I think of how so many do not have a safe place to sleep to escape the nightmares, because the violence is not only in their imagination. It is real; it is continuous. Most Palestinians don’t have the luxury of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder because our collective trauma began before 1948 and continues today. The years are on a loop inside my head: 1936, 1947, 1948, 1953, 1956, 1967, 1982, 1987, 1994, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014 …. There is no past. This is our past, it is our present, and I fear how far it will continue into our future.