Birthright

History is politics.

It's been this way since the beginning of time, and this is true for all countries.
But to Israelis and Palestinians history is not merely politics, but a ticking time bomb.
The ticking is obnoxiously loud and hollow, and cannot be ignored.

Israeli independence is palestinian dispossession.
Jewish settlements are colonizers. Israeli defence forces are occupation forces, and the palestinian right of return is an end to the exclusivity of the Jewish state.

What makes my blood boil the most is the word birthright.
There is a programme called Taglit, which means just that, Birthright.
On there website they have a banner with the words "Your adventure, Your birthright, Our gift".
The birthright boasted on the website is Jewish.
Jewish youths that are first time travellers to Israel will get a free ten day trip to the country, and a full programme of organized visits, activities, festivities and propaganda.
All this because they supposedly have a birthright to this land.
Every jew in the world is - according to this belief - entitled to the land that has been cleansed of its palestinian population.

I hate the thought of having to fly into Israel.
All of you who know me are well aware of this.
My terrible nervousness, the big lump in my throat, the looks I get that quickly turn away, refusing to meet mine. The way my daark hair and arabic features attract attention. The gaze turning into a stare when the security personell selects me for "random security screening".
I'm playing with the thought of writing a polite but assertive email to the friendly people at Ben Gurion Airport, asking them to rephrase the term "random security screening".
Because the process I am put through has nothing random about it.
Had it been random, there would have been a hypothetical chance of my being released from their grip.
Such a chance does not exist.
Therefore I suggest that they call it what it is: "Catch the Arabs – and their friends!"

I made the travel in my most skimpy dress.
All too inappropriate, all too bare, an emerald green, seductive and confusingly unpalestinian garment.
I cannot claim any birthright here, not at Ben gurion airport, especially not when explaining to the security staff the purpose of my visit. I tone down the palestinian, I emphasise the swedish, the shallow, the ecstatic, and the apolitical.
My dress, my lipgloss, my cute little sandals. Anything to compensate for my palestinian exterior, my palestinianness, my longing for the people and the land and the freedom for them both.
Some refreshing honesty is what I miss the most as I approach the visa booth in Tel Aviv.
The woman takes my passport, and without looking at it she asks where I am from. I answer in my most benevolent voice that she should look down, as she is afterall holding my passport. When she does not heed my call, I answer: Sweden.
Beside being placed back into the now so well known Arab room (for more information, see previous Trip to Gaza-blog) and being interrogated, I faced little difficulty.
This time it was not the Israelis that blev my mind, but my co-interrogated.
Opposite of me sat Nicholas. A trendy young american guy in an Indian silk coat, and a pink Taglit Tshirt with the word STAFF written all over it.

I hesitated for a few seconds, considering my options, before I said: "REALLY??? You're on the Birthright Programme"?
He looked a little confused before answering yes.
As I shook my head, he asked me what I thought of the programme, which got us talking.

The history presented by Taglit is a history emptied of all facts. A mythological tale of Divine promise, profecy fulfilled, purity and ideals of strength being victorious over the land.
His Birthrightprogramme sustains itself off of a continuous ethnic cleansing of this place, and as soon as we started talking, the tension was felt in the air.

This summer will be interesting. I'll soon reveal why.

Speaking of the Birthright Programme, I wrote a piece on the subject recently, and it is soon to be published at the Electronic Intifada, www.electronicintifada.net

Here it is





Birthright Re:plugged: The land beneath trees and stones


I'm approaching the gate at Tel Aviv airport, having just gotten off the plane from Sweden, when an advertisement catches my attention. It's a campaign for the Israeli bank Hapoalim, and above pictures of famous people and national symbols, they have written "The first...". So Monalisa is the First italian, The statue of liberty is the first american, and so on. By the end of the tunnel, there is a cactus, and above it, the words "The first Israeli".
The cactus, or the Sabra as is called in Hebrew as well as in Arabic, has come to symbolize the sprit of the first European jews to migrate to this land. It is the spirit around which the Israeli national identity has been centered, and the people who made up this first movement are consequently refered to as Sabra-jews. To this day, this is a compliment in Israel, to be resembled to one of these very special Jews.








Its supposed to brings to mind the rugged and seasoned adventurers, who after having escaped pogromes and exclusion made this place their home. They helped in building a small "We" in land that supposedly belonged to no one. The Sabras take pride in accomplishing every task, and by never wavering, they managed to build a home for a "people without land, on a land without people", as the Israeli myth has it.
In official Israeli history this land was empty, the needs and possibilities endless, and for the first time these dedicated Jews would succeed in building a land that would be a guarant for protection any and every Jew from further persecution.
The image of the sabra is still on my mind as I step off the landing platform, and approach the Israeli security woman who's job it is to seek out passengers with my very typical arabic appearance, my place of birth, and my name. She is the one who will be interrogating me in the hours that will follow.

Somewhere, in what used to be Palestine prior to 1948.

As I slowly ascend the mountain southwest of the israeli city of Haifa, something brings back the memory of that advertisement campaign.
The mountain I'm standing on is an Israeli national park. There are pine trees, large boulders spread out across the open plains below, and occasionally you'll find a sign in english and hebrew talking about the location and its history.
What catches my eye is the information missing about this place.
Not too far from there I find a large hedge of cactus, and I don't need a sign to tell me what used to be here before. It's all there, if you just know how to recognize the clues.
I'm walking with five children from the palestinian refugee camp of Jenin, located in the occupied West Bank.
With us is a man from a town not too far from here. His name is Mustafa, and he is a professional tour guide born and raised in Israel, by Palestinian parents. And the national park is what used to be the location of the village of Um al Zinat.
This also used to be the village where Amers grandparents lived.
Amer walks quietly as Mustafa tells us the story of Umm al Zinat, the village who's women were famous for their beauty, and who also rendered the highest dowrys in marriage. Equally famous was the village for the resistance and bravery which the men and women of the village displayed in fighting first the british occupation, as well as in attempting to defend the village against Jewish assailants in the fighting leading up to the 1948 expulsion.

The village has disappeared now, but it would be inaccurate to say "without a trace". For the traces are omnipresent, in the pomegranath trees still to be found standing here, despite that the houses that surrounded them have gone missing.
Here we find pieces of walls, hidden under the tall grass and shrubbery.
If one only chooses to acknowledge the traces of history, then history will step out and tell you a beautiful but sad story of Um al Zinat.
The children I am escorting make up a part of a group of 20 in total, and they are all here as participants of the Birthright Re:plugged programme.
All of them are between the ages of 12 and up to 16. None of the kids are allowed to be above 16, as that would naturally disqualify them from the opportunity to come.
That is the age when a palestinian child is issued an israeli identity card, and the card makes it virtually impossible to travel around the country without a permit.
They can be tracked to the Jenin refugee camp, and will then be denied passage through the military checkpoints surrounding the area.
Because of a loophole in the law, these children are here on a 36 hour long field trip, visiting their could have been homes.
These kids are the descendants of refugees expelled from their home villages in the 1948 Catastrophe, or the Nakbah as it is known in palestinian history. It was a disaster that turned the majority of the Palestinian people into stateless refugees,

The name Birthright has been taken from the Israeli pro-zionist Taglit-Birthright programme, designed to send Jews from the US, Canada and Europe on a 10 day visit to Israel. This trip is said to be the inalienable "birthright" of every Jew. There they will learn that the trip is a part of a prophecy being fulfilled. Israel as the one national home land for all Jews.
Hundreds of thousands of young Jews have been on these trips, and the main reason is to create a personal tie with Israel, and to make them into advocates and defenders of Israel in their home countries.

in 2004 the Birthright Unplugged programme was created by two American women of Jewish-American descent. Its purpose was just the opposite that of the Taglit.
Dunya Alwan and Hanna Mermelstein wanted to show these Birthright participants the real Israel, beyond the fancy malls and holocaust-museums.
So they took them to the West bank city of Hebron, to talk to palestinians who'd had their homes confiscated by fanatic settlers. They've taken the participants on field trips to the Aparthied Wall built solely on Palestinian land, and they've sat down with peace activists and human rights workers.
The second part of that programme has been to take Palestinian children from the occupied West Bank into Palestine of 1948, Israel proper.
The Palestinian children are -often for the first time- allowed to visit the lands from which their relatives were expelled . They are also given the opportunity to meet Palestinians with Israeli citizenships, as a way of tying these two realities of the Palestinian exodus together.
The latest trip had another added bonus, which was that three of the chaperons were Palestinians from exile, as two of us were Palestinians from Sweden, and the last one an American-Palestinian. Together with the kids of 1948, the Jenin kids, my two palestinian chaperon friends, and the rest of the chaperons being fiercly antizionist, Jewish human rights activists from the US we make up an amazing counterimage to this forgetfulness.
I walk around in what was descibed by the Swedish jewish author Goran Rosenberg as "the land beneath the stones".
And never has that land revealed itself so completely to me.

A lot of the times, the land beneath the stones has not even been buried. It was merely emptied, with the intoxicated arrongance of the conquestor.
The trails have therefore never been dispersed, the explanations barely covering the crimes, and the evidence left out as clearly today, 60 years later, as the day the perpetrations took place.
Another Israeli human rights organization commited to laying bare the land beneath the stones is Zochrot. Zochrot means memory in Hebrew, Zakira in Arabic, and it is within the confines of memory that the explosivity is to be found.
They put up road signs and street signs with the names of the palestinian cities and streets that once were, written in both arabic and hebrew.
They recreate narratives and places as remembered by the people who lived the expulsion and ethnic cleansing. They participate in these kinds of trips, with children from places like Jenin, to show the remains of memory, when "the rhetoric and rubble has been cleared" as the wonderful Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad wrote.
They will remind you of the perspective left out of the story, and question "historic facts" in a state where history is in itself sensitive politics.

One of my own first childhood memories is from the refugee camp Al Yarmouk in Damascus, Syria.
I remember resting my head on my paternal grandmothers Nazhas lap, as she cleaned out the beans she'd just bought at the market. I remember being sad about something, and crying.
The cold stone floor in an even colder refugee camp, with a father in a far away place, waging a battle I did not understand, and with whom I could not be.
More than anything I remember granny Nazhas comforting love, scented by vegetables and mint. She embraced me, and asked me gently to stop crying, persuaded me with the gem of her life.
Do not cry, habibti, Don't cry. If you promise to stop crying we will pack ourselves a bag, and take the first bus back to Safad, just you and me.
Safad is her hometown. From there my grandmother and thousands of other Palestinians were expelled in the early months of 1948, as a direct result of jewish militias attacks on the town in the Galilee. The city is no further than a day's travel from the refugee camp in which my grandmother spent the rest of her life, and where she also died, and where her children and grandchildren were born.
Neither my grandmother nor any other palestinian refugee is entitled to even visit the land from which they were expelled, and my own privilege is due to the fact that I carry a Swedish passport.
These days Safad has been thouroughly cleansed of its palestinian inhabitants, but the houses are intact, history rewritten.
My grandmothers words, of that bus resonate in me as I travel around in her homeland, under the approval of the very state that was formed as a consequence of her own expulsion.
I am one of several million palestinian children of the palestinian diaspora, and I am in awe over how vibrant a bond can be to the place where roots once were grounded.

Just off an Israeli high way, not too far from there

Ahmad, 15, and Mohammed 13 stand next to me, on a huge pile of gravel, looking out on the garbage dump stretched out before them.
It stretches across hill after hill, and is located in between two high ways.
We've lied our way passed Israeli soldiers and policemen to get this far, and to prevent these children from being stopped before they've reached their goal. We've climbed under barbed wired fences, and crossed thorny shrubs.








And now they're here.
In what was the boys grandparents village no less than 60 years ago, in the village of Bureyka. This is Mohammeds and Ahmads origin, this is their history.
Their grandparents were expelled and today live in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Thst is where they were both born, along with their parents generation.
But grandfather has managed to instill his grandchildren with the dreams that are still with him, 60 years later. His longing back to his village, his love for it, and his stories about what used to be is as real for Ahmad and Mohammed as anything else. Of course he's instilled in them the fact that this village was the most remarkable and beautiful place in all of Palestine, and the boys do not even seem to notice the dump they're in.
Their grandparents cannot come back, not even for a visit, but as Mohammed and Ahmad walk around the cypress tree, and look at the village underneath the stones, they talk to their grandfather on the mobile phone. Ahmad approaches a tree, and runs his fingers across scores in the bark. This, he tells me, are the names carved into the tree by grandfather before they were forced to flee. He carved it there so that there would be no doubt as to who's home this was.

I ask the youngest of the brothers, Mohammed, what he's feeling at the moment, and he tells me he is very happy.

His voice is strained, as if it is being forced out of his throat.
His amazingly brown eyes, with the longest eyelashes I've ever seen and the warmest face watch me carefully, and they are filled with grief that he dares not express. So I kneel next to him, and I ask him to close his eyes, and I repeat the question. How do you feel, and what do you see, sweety?

His voice changes, and he starts to talk:
I see a vegetable market, and my grandfather walking around it, as a young boy. This place is so beautiful, a lot more beautiful than the refugee camp.

Later he tells me: I'm both happy and sad, simultaneously.
Sad because I've now gotten to see where my family is from, and where I might have grown up if it had not been for the Jews, if my family had not been run out of here.
But I'm also happy, because atleast there is no one else living here. I'm happier knowing that this place is a dumping site, than I had been if it had been filled with Israeli houses.

He carries with him a plastic bag, where he carefully places the little clues he's found on the journey. Small pieces of evidence showing that his families village will never be forgotten. He looks aloof as he walks around in the dust that could have made up his home, had everything been different.
Before it is time to leave I see Mohammad walk past a sea of cactuses, the Sabras, and leaning forward, to pick off a beautiful sunflower.
I'm taking it to Jenin, he says, and I find myself wishing that I could add one picture to that Israeli ad. It would be a picture of Mohammed, holding his sunflower, and above it, I'd write "The first Palestinian"