(Hanan Ashrawi’s daughter telling her story)

I am Palestinian - born and raised - and my Palestinian roots go back centuries. No one can change that even if they tell me that Jerusalem , my birth place, is not Palestine , even if they tell me that Palestine doesn't exist, even if they take away all my papers and deny me entry to my own home, even if they humiliate me and take away my rights. I AM PALESTINIAN.

Name: Zeina Emile Sam'an Ashrawi; Date of Birth: July 30, 1981; Ethnicity: Arab. This is what was written on my Jerusalem ID card. An ID card to a Palestinian is much more than just a piece of paper; it is my only legal documented relationship to Palestine . Born in Jerusalem , I was given a Jerusalem ID card (the blue ID), an Israeli Travel Document and a Jordanian Passport stamped Palestinian (I have no legal rights in Jordan ). I do not have an Israeli Passport, a Palestinian Passport or an American Passport.

Here is my story:

I came to the United States as a 17 year old to finish high school in Pennsylvania and went on to college and graduate school and subsequently got married and we are currently living in Northern Virginia. I have gone home every year at least once to see my parents, my family and my friends and to renew my Travel Document as I was only able to extend its validity once a year from Washington DC . My father and I would stand in line at the Israeli Ministry of Interior in Jerusalem , along with many other Palestinians, from 4:30 in the morning to try our luck at making it through the revolving metal doors of the Ministry before noon – when the Ministry closed its doors - to try and renew the Travel Document. We did that year after year. As a people living under an occupation, being faced with constant humiliation by an occupier was the norm but we did what we had to do to insure our identity was not stolen from us.

In August of 2007 I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC to try and extend my travel document and get the usual "Returning Resident" VISA that the Israelis issue to Palestinians holding an Israeli Travel Document. After watching a few Americans and others being told that their visas would be ready in a couple of weeks my turn came. I walked up to the bulletproof glass window shielding the lady working behind it and under a massive picture of the Dome of the Rock and the Walls of Jerusalem that hangs on the wall in the Israeli consulate, I handed her my papers through a little slot at the bottom of the window.

"Shalom" she said with a smile. "Hi" I responded, apprehensive and scared. As soon as she saw my Travel Document her demeanor immediately changed. The smile was no longer there and there was very little small talk between us, as usual. After sifting through the paperwork I gave her she said: "where is your American Passport?" I explained to her that I did not have one and that my only Travel Document is the one she has in her hands. She was quiet for a few seconds and then said: "you don't have an American Passport?" suspicious that I was hiding information from her. "No!" I said. She was quiet for a little longer and then said: "Well, I am not sure we'll be able to extend your Travel Document." I felt the blood rushing to my head as this is my only means to get home! I asked her what she meant by that and she went on to tell me that since I had been living in the US and because I had a Green Card they would not extend my Travel Document.

After taking a deep breath to try and control my temper I explained to her that a Green Card is not a Passport and I cannot use it to travel outside the US. My voice was shaky and I was getting more and more upset (and a mini shouting match ensued) so I asked her to explain to me what I needed to do. She told me to leave my paperwork and we would see what happens.

A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from the lady telling me that she was able to extended my Travel Document but I would no longer be getting the "Returning Resident" VISA. Instead, I was given a 3 month tourist VISA. Initially I was happy to hear that the Travel Document was extended but then I realized that she said "tourist VISA". Why am I getting a tourist VISA to go home? Not wanting to argue with her about the 3 month VISA at the time so as not to jeopardize the extension of my Travel Document, I simply put that bit of information on the back burner and went on to explain to her that I wasn't going home in the next 3 months. She instructed me to come back and apply for another VISA when I did intend on going. She didn't add much and just told me that it was ready for pick-up. So I went to the Embassy and got my Travel Document and the tourist VISA that was stamped in it.

My husband, my son and I were planning on going home to Palestine this summer. So a month before we were set to leave (July 8, 2008) I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, papers in hand, to ask 2 for a VISA to go home. I, again, stood in line and watched others get VISAs to go to my home. When my turn came I walked up to the window; "Shalom" she said with a smile on her face, "Hi" I replied. I slipped the paperwork in the little slot under the bulletproof glass and waited for the usual reaction. I told her that I needed a returning resident VISA to go home. She took the paperwork and I gave her a check for the amount she requested and left the Embassy without incident.

A few days ago I got a phone call from Dina at the Israeli Embassy telling me that she needed the expiration date of my Jordanian Passport and my Green Card. I had given them all the paperwork they needed time and time again and I thought it was a good way on their part to waste time so that I didn't get my VISA in time. Regardless, I called over and over again only to get their voice mail. I left a message with the information they needed but kept called every 10 minutes hoping to speak to someone to make sure that they received the information in an effort to expedite the tedious process. I finally got a hold of someone. I told her that I wanted to make sure they received the information I left on their voice mail and that I wanted to make sure that my paperwork was in order. She said, after consulting with someone in the background (I assume it was Dina), that I needed to fax copies of both my Jordanian Passport and my Green Card and that giving them the information over the phone wasn't acceptable. So I immediately made copies and faxed them to Dina. A few hours later my cell phone rang. "Zeina?" she said. "Yes" I replied, knowing exactly who it was and immediately asked her if she received the fax I sent. She said: "ehhh, I was not looking at your file when you called earlier but your Visa was denied and your ID and Travel Document are no longer valid." "Excuse me?" I said in disbelief. "Sorry, I cannot give you a visa and your ID and Travel Document are no longer valid. This decision came from Israel not from me."

I cannot describe the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach. "Why?" I asked and Dina went on to tell me that it was because I had a Green Card. I tried to reason with Dina and to explain to her that they could not do that as this is my only means of travel home and that I wanted to see my parents, but to no avail. Dina held her ground and told me that I wouldn't be given the VISA and then said: "Let the Americans give you a Travel Document".

I have always been a strong person and not one to show weakness but at that moment I lost all control and started crying while Dina was on the other end of the line holding my only legal documents linking me to my home. I began to plead with her to try and get the VISA and not revoke my documents; "put yourself in my shoes, what would you do? You want to go see your family and someone is telling you that you can't! What would you do? Forget that you're Israeli and that I'm Palestinian and think about this for a minute!" "Sorry" she said," I know but I can't do anything, the decision came from Israel ". I tried to explain to her over and over again that I could not travel without my Travel Document and that they could not do that - knowing that they could, and they had!

This has been happening to many Palestinians who have a Jerusalem ID card. The Israeli government has been practicing and perfecting the art of ethnic cleansing since 1948 right under the nose of the world and no one has the power or the guts to do anything about it. Where else in the world does one have to beg to go to one's own home? Where else in the world does one have to give up their identity for the sole reason of living somewhere else for a period of time? Imagine if an American living in Spain for a few years wanted to go home only to be told by the American government that their American Passport was revoked and that they wouldn't be able to come back!

If I were a Jew living anywhere around the world and had no ties to the area and had never set foot there, I would have the right to go any time I wanted and get an Israeli Passport. In fact, the Israelis encourage that. I however, am not Jewish but I was born and raised there, my parents, family and friends still live there and I cannot go back! I am neither a criminal nor a threat to one of the most powerful countries in the world, yet I am alienated and expelled from my own home.

As it stands right now, I will be unable to go home - I am one of many.

So today is the third day of Eid Al Fitr that all Muslims worldwide celebrate right after the culmination of the month of Ramadan. Not sure if it’s only me, but Ramadan seems to have lost its glory. Years ago when I was a child, people’s attitudes towards both Ramadan and Eid (festival) were way different than now. Maybe I have grown up to the extent that I see in them nothing but the mere fact that few arrogant relatives come for a visit for a couple of minutes, and everyone just sucks them up.

It has been a gloomy day in deed. Being self-centered often times, I thought that my own family never enjoyed the Ramadan that other people celebrate. But the night prior to the Eid, I went for a drive to Ramallah with my uncle and three sisters, we toured around Al Manara and the mall a bit, and felt the legendary atmosphere. People were happy. That hit me; I am not accustomed to seeing them vividly preoccupied with the preparation for the big “day.”

So I came back home and wrote to all my contacts wishing them a Happy Eid and expressed my astonishment and satisfaction to see promising smiles in the crowded streets of Ramallah. But the sad part was that I knew it was merely fleeting moments and that those smiles would be wiped off soon. Not only have my fears become true, but I was blind. Yes, blind. Or may be I just chose not to see it. May be I wanted to believe that we are actually happy.

Would I miss Ramadan? NO. Not really. It has been made hell this year.

While Ramadan is believed to be the holy month during which people get closer to Allah by fasting from food and drink all day long and focus on their faith instead, I am not pretty sure this was the case with us Palestinians. It was only a drug. Ramadan numbed our pain. We could handle both the Israeli and Palestinian political, economic, and security pressure knowing that the day of salvation was approaching; the Eid. But after the three days elapsed, then what?

Now thousands of Palestinians are waiting for the next phase. It has been seven months now. Seven months, and thousands of the PA employees have not received their salaries. And two months elapsed with millions of students deprived form their right of education. I have three sisters and two brothers who do nothing but stay at home. They have not attended school from the very beginning of this term. It is both sad and frustrating that they have to “do the time” and pay a high price.

Reading the news headlines on the first days of Eid is not healthy at all. It lessens the effect of the drug, and one starts to get sober. Sounds funny in deed, but that was the case.

Few minutes ago, I surfed some of the blogs and came across few Iraqi bloggers writing on both Ramadan and Eid. If the titles did not mention “in Iraq,” I swear I could never tell the difference between Iraq and Palestine. The hunger, misery, constant killing, and lack of security are all Palestinian symptoms.

I am speechless now; I can hardly verbalize the so many conflicting thoughts. Heaven knows how things would be like next Ramadan, but I would not speculate it already. It is not time to worry about it now, other issues are on stake; food, money, and education. Until then, there are a lot of things to sort out.

Yesterday, I realized that I believe in love at first sight. Not the romantic kind, rather the sense of connecting with another human being without ever having to say a word. Indeed, the person I was so enthralled with last night was a five-month-old girl, who smiled at me and then hid her face in shyness. Those few moments of interacting with this baby lifted my spirits, but it also made me reflect in sadness about the fact that many children in this current conflict are robbed of their joy and their childhood.

I often contemplate how mature Palestinian children seem. Sure, they play the childhood games that we all played in our day, but there is wisdom in their words that is eerily sobering. Their age defines them as children, but if you have a conversation with a Palestinian child, you will realize how much awareness she has of the world around her, of suffering in the next village, in Gaza, in Lebanon. She is a child that has empathy and understands that life, by nature, is wrought with all sorts of difficulties.

A Palestinian child knows better; life is not as it is depicted in cartoons, where those who die are miraculously resurrected not once, but several times, where injuries are healed instantaneously, where death is a joke and life is a series of slapstick moments. A Palestinian child escapes into imagination, but she is never far removed from the reality of children and adults alike being indiscriminately shot outside her window, in her classroom, at the local bakery.

Who would have thought that normal things, simply walking down the street to grab a falafel sandwich, could result in your untimely death? Perhaps the Israeli army mistook the falafel stand for a bomb-making factory, or an ammunition shop? Make no mistake about it; the Israeli military have made too many “mistakes” that there is obviously a pattern there, wouldn’t you think?

A child that is robbed of the sense of security, therefore, is a child that is mature beyond her years. She knows that the bullets and the tank shells do not discriminate. Her father can shield her from the neighbor’s vicious dog, from the crazy drivers, he will hold her hand to cross the street, but he will not be able to capture a bullet in his hand like the mythological superheroes in blockbuster movies out this summer in theatres near you. He might be able to take the bullet for her though. But once gone, who will be her protective shield against the harsh reality of life that goes on in what seems the periphery of the conflict? And who will be there to share some of her joyous milestones; graduation, marriage, the birth of a child? Hers is a joy that is always overshadowed by a greater sorrow.

Is it fair that 31 Palestinian children have died in a 31-day period? A child-a-day; is that the new Israeli army mantra? Khaled was just a one-year-old, Aya was seven, Sabreen was only three. What lost potential, what lost promise – who knows what Khaled would have grown up to be? An astronaut? A veterinarian? A philosopher? What about Aya; she could have become a fashion designer, a teacher, a mother. By what right has this promise been so violently plucked and trampled upon cruelly and without a moment’s hesitation on the part of the Israeli soldier, who heartlessly unleashed a fiery rain of bullets and shells on a neighborhood as if he is in a simulated video game and those who die are fictitious and unreal? Perhaps that is what he is made to believe, otherwise, who in clear consciousness is so willing to pull the trigger and with one spray of bullets destroy life, potential and rob joy?

If you can see the smiling face of your own child, then how do you go out and unquestioningly take the life of others? If you value life, then how do you live with the burden of knowing that you have taken it so unjustifiably? Perhaps that is your perpetual punishment; the judgment of a child scorned is the harshest of them all.

To meet deadline, an obligation that political commentators, no less than news reporters, are enjoined by editors against toying with, I have to write this column today -- which just happens to be May 15, the time each year when Palestinians, along with sundry Arabs, commemorate the Nakba, the day in 1948 when Palestine was dismembered and Palestinians were expelled from home and homeland.

Commemorative events in the life of a nation are a central pursuit that lies at the core of that nation's assabiya, to borrow a term here from Ibn Khaldoun. It generates possibilities of collective apprehension, a consensus of perceived values and a communal sense of historical reference. We commemorate in order to remember, for memory is as indispensable to modern identity as modern identity is indispensable to memory. With memory, each generation judges anew. It marshals and weighs. It shapes it notions of self and history.

For those who sit back to remember that day, they find the Nakba diffused everywhere in the repertoire of their consciousness. For me it was, as a seven-year-old child, the refugee exodus along the coast road between Haifa and the Lebanese border, an event whose evocations have resounded around every corner of my being ever since.

But I was not there in Deir Yassein when the bodies were dumped in the village well. I was not there when our people were expelled en masse — herded like cattle — from the twin cities of Lydda and Ramleh. I was not there when the villages in southern Palestine were razed to the ground and their inhabitants arrived in Gaza (many of them children who had no adults' hands to hold), rent in spirit and whistled clean of everything they had laboured to build.

Yet, what happened during that catastrophic day of mayhem, when history had set savagery at the Palestinian people's heels, remains an indivisible part of my identity. How could I not remember events whose goal was to hound our name, our identity, our history, into oblivion.

And I remembered them on our day of the Nakba, so vividly, ever so vividly, 64 years after the fact, much in the manner of a man who had lost his sight at an early age and continues to recall his surroundings in remembered images.

And in our exile, where we forever lived close to the door for easy eviction, we recognised each other when we met. Perhaps by the unique accent we kept (for accent is identity), perhaps by the stateless travel documents we held, perhaps by how we had learned to resign ourselves in our diaspora to those gusts of exasperation directed at us for just being who we were.

Heavy cargo

Or perhaps by the casual hubris we affected at times in order to compensate for our sense of alienation. But above all, we recognised each other by that certain darkness we projected from inside our inner selves, by that heavy cargo that history had made us carry on our backs.

Meanwhile, when avatars of Arab nationalism, such as Jamal Abdul Nasser, Hafez Al Assad and Saddam Hussain, along with others before and after them (avatars more spellbound by self-aggrandisement than spellbinding by leadership skills), who professed the Palestine cause to be sacrosanct in their political canon, resented us, it was because we were their conscience. We nagged at them. We left them guilty serfs to ambitions they could not achieve.

We all remember — yes, that word again — when close to half a million Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait in 1991; when the entire Palestinian community in Libya was kicked out of the country in 1995 and placed in camps by the Egyptian border; when that community's counterpart in Iraq, whose members had lived there for decades, was equally unceremoniously shown the door in 2003, where they found themselves stranded at the Syrian border, with no Arab country willing to take them in. (Iceland, bless its Nordic soul, welcomed some of them as permanent residents, mostly single-parent families with small children.)

In the Arab world, Palestinians are to be, if not eliminated, then banished. Their existential being is inadmissible precisely because they are a constant reminder of how Arabs had failed the challenges of modernity. Don't make a man uncertain inwardly, don't remind him of his inadequacies. After all, to be made to feel inwardly uncertain, inadequate at marshalling enough resources to confront that Zionist enemy ensconced in the heartland of your world, builds unbearable hatred within you, not just for the enemy, but for he who torments you daily of your condition. For an Arab, lest we forget, Palestine is the fulcrum, the test case, of the assabiya of the entire Arab world, just as it was in July, 1099, when European marauders established the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Oh, yes, the Arab world would have been better off had there been no Palestinians there, with their incessant demands on that world's conscience, or if Palestinians had simply stopped being Palestinian. But how could Palestinians stop being Palestinian? I could no more sever that immemorial intimacy I had with my native land, that I had brought with me as a child on that day of Nakba in 1948, than my parents — who died in exile with a sense of ‘at homeness' eluding them every miserable morning of their lives there — could have severed themselves from the memories they had had of the sky that sheltered the earth, rock and ash of their acre in Palestine.

That is what the Day of the Nakba is all about. It's about memories. We remember selectively, but we remember. Memories evoked, glossed, stumbled over, exchanged, judged anew. Memories resurrected from the attic of our subconscious. Memories that link the conjugation of verb ‘to be' to our core being.

Today I sit here, in my confortable, safe haven in the US, and remember. For not to remember, and to place on my children's backs that same burden, is to tear up the tree, root and branch, from which our history grows.

The much-trumpeted diplomatic effort that went into high gear around this time three years ago, when President Barack Obama made the Palestinian-Israel two-state solution his administration's first foreign policy priority in the Middle East, has ground to a pathetic halt, its hollow promise now preserved in the archives like an insect in amber.

It is obvious that Palestinians, and other Arabs to whom the Palestine question has historically been of paramount significance, owe themselves some hard thinking on the issue. What now? What is to be done now after a military occupation that has lasted 45 years and a colonial enterprise that has foisted 400,000 Jewish colonists on Arab land? Is the two-state solution still viable, or were Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) folks in the old days, who had called for a one-state solution in the late 1960s ("a secular, democratic state") for both Jews and Arabs in the land that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, on to a prescient idea? How possible, how probable, indeed how inevitable, is that outcome?

Columnists are meddlesome creatures who see themselves engaged in the business of leaving no question unanswered, no answer in doubt, an annoying habit similar to that of someone offering gratuitous advice at a card game. Yet sometimes we score. Consider those few of us who called on the Palestinian movement as early as 1972 to accept the idea of a "separate state" in the West Bank and Gaza, when a mere handful of Jewish colonists were ensconced there, an idea though that PLO officials at the time saw as anathema and close to an act of treason.

Now we are at an impasse. The 1948 Green Line, separating Israel from Palestine, has virtually disappeared. Israel's colonial expansion over the last 45 years has cracked the mirror and blurred the image. Historical Palestine has morphed into a latter day South Africa under apartheid where Palestinians, effectively disenfranchised citizens with no say in determining their political destiny, no control over their natural resources and no sway over their daily lives, are governed by laws ‘apart' from those that govern Israelis.

Bigoted view

No less than former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned recently about how Israel one day soon "may descend into apartheid and xenophobia". I beg to differ: Israel has already descended into that mould. The 400,000 colonists in the West Bank, along with their substantial number of supporters among Israeli and American Jews, have established what amounts to an ethnocracy, a political culture that celebrates a bigoted view of Palestinians as the "other" — much in the manner that white Americans in the Deep South had viewed their black counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s — and sees the West Bank, in its entirety, as the new and permanent frontier of "Eretz Israel".

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, who has not concealed his disdain for the American president and his administration, has agreed to go with the two-state solution only on paper. No further. As the prime minister's own father, a reactionary right-wing historian, was reported to have said gleefully about his son's putative consent to the Palestinians' call for a separate state: "He supports it under conditions that they will never accept".

But there is more: The United States, the "honest peace broker", has given up on the idea of putting its foot down and instead knuckled under to Israel's pernicious practices, having decided to form an alliance with Netanyahu and his cohorts, of brisk vulgarisation of the Palestine question. It is all evident in the diplomatic language used by the White House and the State Department — gobbledygook such as "settlement [colony] expansion is unhelpful to the peace process" — a language governed by a law of etymology that hinges on dissembling, or polysemy, where words are twisted around to mean different, even opposite, things. To us humble mortals, who string words together for a living, a statement where land-grabbing, a violation of international law, could be dismissed merely as "unhelpful", is known as cant, or at best as jargon. I have met people who flunked out of Hopkinsville University, in Kentucky, with better semantic skills than that.

All the more unfortunate, since Washington has constantly hammered into us the notion, at least since president Jimmy Carter occupied the White House, that human rights are the lodestar by which America guided its conduct of foreign affairs. And why not? While it is true that America did not invent human rights, let's face it, human rights invented America. Thus by its decision to go along with Israel's excesses, the United States has no less than subverted the American political compact, and the very value of universal human rights.

So who is to blame independent Palestinians and their supporters around the world — the Palestinian National Authority is so immobilised that it does not know whether it's coming or going — for initiating a campaign to convince the international community, and along with it progressive Israelis, that since the two-state solution has become barren, the only other option is the one state solution in the whole of historic Palestine, where the right of citizenship, regardless of ethnicity, faith and ideology, is enjoyed by all. We are, at any rate, inching willy-nilly in that direction. Otherwise a generation of Palestinians will in time come of age in a miasma of uncontrolled rage.

Oh, yes, the next time, for those you cannot convince by force of reason, you will convince by force of arms.

Consider the case of Khader Adnan, a Palestinian political prisoner held in jail by the Zionist occupation authorities without charge and without any semblance of due process since mid-December.

Adnan, 33, had gone on a hunger strike for 11 weeks to protest his incarceration and that of thousands of other political prisoners. He lost a third of his weight and, according to officials from Physicians for Human Rights who visited him, reportedly while shackled to a bed in his cell, "suffered significant muscular atrophy". He was said to be at "immediate risk of death".

When authorities arrest and hold a man on flimsy charges, even trumped-up charges, that is considered, in jurisprudence, problematic enough, but at least the accused in this case will have his day in court to rebut those charges, ideally with a skilled lawyer at hand.

But when you arrest and hold a man, keeping him incarcerated indefinitely, with no charges brought against him and no prospect of a trial, you are harking back to a judicial system plucked from the Dark Ages. It is not a system characteristic of a society that grandiosely identifies itself as "the only democracy in the Middle East".

No we're not taking about Iraq under the brutal regime of Saddam Hussain or about Libya under the lunatic regime of Muammar Gaddafi. We're talking about the racist regime (how else would you describe it?) of Zionist rulers, a regime whose courts continue to regard Palestinians, much in the manner that South Africa under apartheid had regarded black Africans, as a lower species of men and women to be judged by laws ‘apart' from those that govern Israelis.

Adnan was held under a law called Administrative Detention — applied only to Palestinians, never to Israelis — that seeks indefinite imprisonment of a suspect without charges or trial.

The imprisonment is not imposed as punishment for a known crime the suspect has committed, but in order to prevent him from committing a crime, if that person is deemed, say by an arbitrary occupation functionary, likely to commit one. And so where is George Orwell when you need him?

In civilised society (read, a genuine democracy) no one can be arrested without being told the grounds for such an arrest. Once arrested, a citizen has well-defined rights that include the right of being informed of the criminal charge levelled against him, the right of being brought for a preliminary hearing before a magistrate within a specified period of time, and the right to be represented by a lawyer of his choice. But that applies to an open constitutional democracy.

Israel cannot be defined, by any stretch of the imagination, as one such entity, at least when seen in context of the apartheid laws it reserves for Palestinians. Many of the occupation laws in force in the West Bank, that govern the everyday life of Palestinians, are draconian, but none surely is more draconian than the infamous Administrative Detention Law, under which countless Palestinian prisoners have languished in Israeli prisons for years. Currently, as many as 309 are held without charge.

Not a word from the State Department about any of it — and this is a government department well-known for its much-trumpeted annual Human Rights Report detailing abuses, similar to Israel's, by other countries.

The 2010 report, for example, included a long section on the repressive detention practices of China, berating Beijing for a "lack of due process in judicial proceedings and the use of administrative detention". Israel was not excoriated in the report for formalising exactly the same practices that the State Department was now condemning China for.

Alas, these practices, universally recognised as a defining attribute of despotism, have become normal in Israel, absorbed into the political culture as if by a process of osmosis. That is why the case of Adnan stirred little public debate in the Israeli press.

Irish reflection

Happily, a deal was reached on Tuesday when Adnan called off his fast in exchange for a formal promise by the Israeli authorities to release him on April 17. But had Adnan's hunger strike resulted in his death, as seemed very likely earlier in the week, there would have been hell to pay. (In the West Bank and Gaza thousands had rallied to his cause.) At the very least, Israel would have had a Bobby Sands case on its hands.

When on March 1, 1981, Irish Republican prisoners, in a showdown with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, went on a hunger strike, 10 prisoners ended up starving themselves to death nine weeks later rather than give in. Bobby Sands became the most famous among the group after he was elected as a member of parliament during the strike, which prompted media interest around the world.

The strike, along with its tragic conclusion, radicalised the Republican movement and nationalist politics, and was the driving force that enabled the Sinn Fein to become a mainstream political party. Sands's funeral alone attracted 100,000 mourners and he went on to become an iconic figure in Irish cultural lore. It is true, very true, that when a man dies his life ends, but when a patriot dies his life begins — its impact durable and pervasive.

It was a happy ending for Adnan, a baker by trade and a political activist by inclination. But what about those 309 prisoners who continue to languish behind bars without being charged or brought to trial?

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.

Without seeming to overdo the comparison, I'll say this: Israel is the most isolated — and in certain quarters the most reviled — entity in the world today. Even in the United States, where it has for years enjoyed the status of a sacred cow that commentators would not dare subject to moral scrutiny lest they be branded anti-Semitic, this compelling fact is now beginning to be broached in public debate.

The Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, is convinced, however, that Israel is not isolated at all. In a piece on the op-ed page of the Washington Post recently, he said that "Israel does not stand alone". Far from it. "Many democracies stand staunchly with it", he wrote. And the devil, he posited, with those political analysts in the national media, like John Heilman, Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman, not to mention the newly appointed Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta, who asserted recently that Israel is indeed "increasingly isolated" in the international community.

To be sure, Oren is no dummy. Israel always makes sure that its ambassadors in Washington, a pivotal capital for Tel Aviv, are experienced diplomats as well as accomplished academics and intellectuals. The American-born Oren is a former historian by calling and the author of several books, including Power, Faith and Fantasy: A History of American Involvement in the Middle East (2002). A predecessor of his at the embassy was Itimar Rabinovich, yet another academic who had authored several books, including Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations (1999).

Darling of the West

All of which brings us back to Israel's beleaguered condition as an isolated state, with few, if any, friends, left to stand by it. The isolation is all too clear. Thus, when someone like Oren avers, with a straight face, that this not a fact for all to see, he is raising very serious doubts — as former prime minister Golda Meir had done in June, 1969, when she claimed that "the Palestinians do not exist" — about the professional skills of his optometrist.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Israel was the darling of the western world, whose establishment in Palestine in 1948 expatiated Europeans of their guilt over the treatment they had meted out to Jewish communities in their midst. And "tiny Israel" was an underdog surrounded by dreadful Asiatics hell-bent on "driving it into the sea". For two decades Israel was seen as a new nation with a pioneering people, alluring and glamorous as they "turned desert into orchard". And why bother consider the fact that any meaningful assessment of Israel's creation could not — should not — be advanced independently of the impact that such a creation has had on the lives and destiny of the native people of Palestine? Then came 1967, and with it came the true face of Israel — the coloniser, the occupier, the warmonger.

The problem for Israel is that, in the post-colonial world, no country does what it has done over the last 44 years and hopes to get away with it. In the olden days, a colonial master could put down, exploit and subjugate the "restless natives" with the swish of a few muskets, with nary an objection from anyone. Not in our time, when colonising another people is seen as an anomaly. But here's Israel, a century after the Wilsonian principle of self-determination was propounded at Versailles, occupying that hazy terrain between colonial values, that suffuse its Zionist tradition, and a modern world that sees those values as anathema.

Well, the 21-gun salutes have stopped. This entity, like the proverbial guest from hell, has long since worn out its welcome. And just as apartheid South Africa found itself a beached whale on the shore in 1994, so is Israel beginning to find itself today. And, yes, it is isolated, alone and beleaguered, precisely because its practices are out of tune with the times we inhabit.

The chilling and violent quest for wealth and power that the Euro-American states conducted beyond their borders in the middle of the 19th century, for example, gave way in the middle of the 20th to a shadowy kind of hegemonic leadership; where a hegemon like the US creates legitimacy by establishing rules for other states to which it also presumably submits — a far cry from colonial times when Britain's consul general in Egypt sent British troops and tanks to surround the Abdeen Palace in Cairo, in 1942, in order to force King Farouk to accept London's choice of a prime minister (from the Wafd Party), at pain of being presented with a decree for abdication. Those times are gone forever.

Not for Israel, though, which continues to draw its weld of sensibility, whether consciously or not, from its archetypal roots in the shtetl, the isolated ghetto communities of Central and Eastern Europe, where Jews lived apart, bedevilled by constant existential fears of an outside world with which they shared a hidden fraternity of mutual loathing. Yes, Israel is beleaguered and isolated. All for good reason.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.