MIFTAH
Friday, 29 March. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

Much has and will continue to be written in the days following the death of Palestinian president Yasser Arafat. While the world debates his place in history, his enemies have embarked on a “crusade to besmirch Yasser Arafat”, as the Israeli newspaper Haa’retz reported in its pages.

Emotions and vicious attacks aside, I felt that I, as a Palestinian, who was born in Jerusalem, lived through the 1967 War as a 6 year old (we were forced to flee our homes and seek shelter in the caves of the surrounding hills for more than 2 weeks), and whose connection to Palestine is very much alive, must at least try to convey what Yasser Arafat’s impact has been on my life and identity as Palestinian.

My children are the grandchildren of Palestinian of refugees who, like the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, were forced from their ancestral homes and lands by the terrorism and criminal actions of Israel’s Jewish terrorist founding fathers.

Yasser Arafat was by no means a perfect man. His accomplishment and mistakes were many and I was never shy with my criticism. Yet, through it all, he embodied the Palestinian cause, making sure that we, the Palestinian people would not be cast aside and forgotten as the early Zionist founders of the State of Israel had hoped and worked for. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, is famously quoted as saying “the old will die and the young will forget”, in reference to the Palestinian people and the catastrophe of being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland.

The old did and do die, this is only natural, BUT Yasser Arafat made sure that the young would never forget. In a world that would have liked to see the Palestinians “just go away”, he made sure that we didn’t, that we were and ARE a people, complete with our own history and identity: Palestinian. He forced an uncaring world to see us as a people, not just a collection of rag tag refugees. He instilled in us hope and pride, even in our darkest hours, when the rest of the world could have cared less about our plight, dreams, and aspirations.

When the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir arrogantly announced to the world that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian people”, Yasser Arafat was there, defiantly proven to her and the rest of the world that we exist! This point was not lost on me as a little boy here in America. Yasser Arafat helped me and the millions of other Palestinian children discover and assert our identity to a world that had been accustomed to hearing the lies and propaganda of Israel and the Zionists!

I remember the day I became fully aware of my identity as a Palestinian...

The year was 1970 and I was 9 year old 3rd. grader in Salina Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, USA. I had been in the U.S. for a little over a year, having immigrated to the US in the summer of 1969. One day, they took all of the classes to the cafeteria for an assembly and to have us fill out some kind of a questionnaire/survey. I went along with my fellow 3rd graders and we sat down to fill out a survey for some government agency. Amongst the usual questions such as name, age, date of birth and such, was a question of COUNTRY OF ORIGIN AND NATIONALITY...Since I was not yet a U.S. citizen, I naturally wrote in the box: Palestine and Palestinian.

After about 15 minutes, the teacher came around and collected the forms that we had filled out. There were kids from just about every corner of the globe as well as most countries in the Middle East, since Dearborn had been a magnet for Arab speaking immigrants from the Middle East as well as Eastern Europe due to the availability of jobs in the Auto Industry. We lived, played, and went to school in the shadows of the mammoth, smoke belching Ford Rouge Plant.

The teacher went through the forms as they were collected one by one to check if they were complete. When the teacher who was charged with collecting the papers approached my desk, I handed her my paper. She took one look at it and let out a nasty groan. She stared at me and began to lecture me, in a rather loud tone, that I had made a mistake. I had written in a nationality and a country that did not exist and was not recognized. She made me stand up and asked me in front of the whole class what my nationality was.

I said, "Palestinian."

She replied, "Nonsense, there is no such thing."

She then handed me back my form and told me to correct it. I was confused. Exactly what was I supposed to write? She erased the words Palestine and Palestinian and told me that I had a choice. I could be Lebanese, Syrian, or Jordanian. I protested to her that I was none of those. I was born in Jerusalem not in any of those other countries that she had listed.

To no avail, she wrote in the words SYRIA and SYRIAN on the form. She then scolded me in front of the whole class as someone that did not know who he was or where he came from. Of course all of the kids, being the kids they are, made fun of me and had a laugh at my expense. The cruelest ones were kids from other Middle Eastern countries. They so desperately wanted to be accepted, that they chided me mercilessly even though I was “one of their own”.

This episode occurred about around the same time that Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, made that infamous speech. In it she said that there was no such thing as Palestine or a Palestinian people. That episode only made me more aware and proud of my heritage and helped shape who I am. A Palestinian!

And for that, I am eternally grateful to Yasser Arafat. Now the entire world knows who the Palestinian people are. My own children do not have to go through what I went through as it pertains to their identity. They can show pride and the world can never again pretend that we “didn’t exist”!

 
 
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