The mechanisms of shaming and dehumanizing Palestinians through media and American academia has negatively affected every single person of Palestinian origin in the US and continues to silence the vast majority of this small community. I only discovered I was Palestinian, and therefore not human, when I was forcefully denied access into the Occupied Territories and humiliated in 1991 by Israelis at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Impressions stay with children for a long time. I was strip searched and cavity searched, sniffed at and barked at by security dogs, my stuffed animals were taken and torn apart, our luggage ripped through the middle by machetes (1st time Id ever seen one), and placed in a cell and sent out of the country 12 hours later. That memory remained with me for a long time and I was ashamed to admit my mothers family was Palestinian because I could not relate my summer experiences to friends summer experiences in Nantucket or Marthas Vineyard. I was silent on the issue even when I would find my mother distraught and lamenting to her sister in Spain on the telephone about the latest abuses her family experienced in Palestine by Israelis. I was silent again when my cousins ambulance could not get through checkpoints in time (an American citizen mind you). Until I was 18 I always used the phrase American of Arab origin when explaining my unusual name. I continued to witness the dehuminization of Palestinians by American media and the (farfetched) linking of Palestinians to terrorism and refused to join my mother in her journeys back home. Ironically, my great awakening would be September 11, 2001. I was headed to my Arab-Israeli Conflict course taught by an Israeli because I was interested in learning more from an academic standpoint. Upon arriving, there was mass panic and we were told to go back home, that class had been cancelled and that there had been a horrendous attack by Muslims in New York City. For the remainder of the coming weeks I would witness classmates and colleagues from the 5 college consortium in Massachusetts being physically attacked and verbally abused, womens headscarves being ripped off, and being called a terrorist and fundamentalist by those same people I had casually debated feminism and Russian literature in class. Instead of mourning our familys loss in the attack, losing contact with my brother Tariq Yousef for days as he navigated the hospitals in NYC during his residency in support of the victims, etc, I was forced to address the cultural labels I was forced to be ashamed of and silenced me for years. I dropped my pre-med requirements and jumped on the political science bandwagon and became socially active around issues of Palestine at Smith College. I engaged in a school board standoff with another woman who kept an Israeli flag posted at her window facing an entry I had to go through every single day to get home (I placed my freshly purchased Palestinian flag in the adjoining window and was asked to take it down, although the other student was not). I joined the Mission of Palestine to the United Nations after failed attempts in corporate America on Wall Street because my heart was in the wrong place, all to the chagrin of my parents who kept insisting they were refugees who suffered enough and did not flee to this country for higher education and a better life only for their daughter to throw opportunity out the window and place herself at risk for caring about Palestine. I entered a Masters program at Columbia with the intent of learning more about public finance and energy so I could work for an American NGO that strove to ensure better access to energy sources for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza that were not monopolized and controlled by Israel (as written in my admissions statements). As would be the case, my student loan debt to Columbia would dictate that I head to DC, where I would learn more accurately what it meant to be an American of Palestinian (and Lebanese) origin. In every decision to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support to Israel my heart became more embittered and I more jaded. To bear witness and support those policy makers who were complicit in subjugating Palestinians through policy decisions with real life consequences that furthered atrocities, to bear witness to the AIPAC conventions and political mongering to assert support for the existence of the only Apartheid State on earth in order to ensure campaign funding for respective Congressional races three blocks from my apartment, to be silenced by senior management on the issue of Palestine so as not to ruffle feathers or place my security clearances at risk, to bear witness to Jewish colleagues assertions or righteous-hood and divine right and to continue to remain silent so as not to jeopardize my career, to the stream of heavily biased media reporting and public shaming of those people who support human rights of Palestinians, to witness the 2009 attack by Israelis and the current massacre of those same people 5 years later, to find remarks of terrorist on my car, etc, left me feeling more dehumanized by Americans than the Israeli who asked me to sit on his lap as a child and state I was jewish in order to go back to my mother in the cell we were placed. We, as Americans, must find ways to change this discourse and encourage Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans to continue to participate in an American dialogue and exercise their freedoms without fear. We as Americans must also find ways to demand and exercise an end to blind financial and rhetorical support to governments that deny human rights and perpetuate genocide (not just Israel). My battle to be an individual in America void of any negative connection to Palestine was lost a long time ago. I pray that my children will not be embarrassed that they are ethnically a quarter Palestinian (one quarter Afghan, one quarter Indian, one quarter Lebanese) down the road and made to feel ashamed to speak up in the name of morality and human rights.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 18:07:40 +0000
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