Trying to Reach Palestine
I cannot believe I find myself in the same process again, a Kafkaesque process as I seek to reach my father’s castle, which is turning into a Kafka’s castle.
I am scheduled to reach Tel Aviv in eighteen hours, but I do not know if I will make it. My plan is to spend my sabbatical with my husband and daughter in the West Bank. I have been looking forward to taking care of my father’s garden, to having space and time to write, to catching the almond trees as they bloom. I want my daughter to learn Arabic, experience Ramadan in a Muslim country, play with her cousins, inhale the sweet scent of apricot flowers, and to snuggle with her aunt.
But it is uncertain if I will make it. My sister, who was supposed to arrive before me, was not allowed to pass via the Allenby Bridge through Jordan. The reason she was given by the Israeli officer at the border was that she has two passports: one Jordanian and one Italian. She has had them for over thirty years. She has crossed the bridge annually on her Italian passport without much hassle, except during one of Israel’s wars against Gaza. It is still not clear what my sister’s mistake was this time, why she was being penalized for having an Arabic passport. The soldier at the border said her Italian passport, her EU citizenship, was irrelevant. She is an Arab, and as an Arab she needs a tazreeh, a permit, to enter the Palestinian territories which Israel controls.
The anxiety of trying to get to Palestine is becoming too much to bear. It feels as if it will never become predictable, let alone normal, to just go home. I find myself each time at the mercy of a humiliating soldier trying to apply some new rule. What is clear is that an Arab is not welcome in Israel. Sorry, I mean an Arab of Palestinian origins. Anyone from the Gulf is now received with open arms by Israel. My sister seems to be the wrong kind of Arab, even though Jordan signed a peace deal with Israel in 1994.
I do not know if I am going to face the same fate when I try to pass through Tel Aviv. I feel old traumas are being triggered, old PTSD resurfacing. The first time I came to the West Bank for a sabbatical fifteen years ago with my then three-year-old daughter, the Israelis denied my parents re-entry to their home. They strip searched my seventy-five-year-old father, who was already diagnosed with cancer, and detained him for twenty-four hours. The second time I tried to spend a sabbatical in Palestine (eight years ago) my mother died. This third time I want to live a few months in the land of honey and milk, I am denied the pleasure of being with my sister.
The precarity of it all is insufferable. Its goal could not be more clear: Israel does not want any of us — neither me, nor my sister, nor any Palestinian living abroad — to be home. Israel does not want any of us to visit, even if we’ve resigned ourselves to not exercise our right of return. It wants us to move on, to ignore all that we endured to come to our ancestral home, all that our parents suffered to return, all that we learned and know about the justice of our right to be home. Israel is telling us again and again to go find another home. We have no right of return, only Jews are entitled to the land Israel controls. We have no right to bask in the love of all those living on the land — all the cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends who love us and who I want to see. We are supposed to just keep this love in our hearts and move on. We are not allowed to plant roots, to transmit smells, tastes, and experiences to future generations. We must not create, let alone keep, a material connection to Palestine, to what is real and alive; the quintessential question of what justice and home mean.
Just pass by and leave. This is what Israel is telling anyone without an Israeli passport or an Israeli sanctioned Palestinian ID. Just pass by without being spared the mercy of the occupier. And if I were to make it, I should count my blessings, that would mean I am tolerated, and the situation is calm on the ground. Otherwise I should simply give up, forget, and move on.
But nothing is calm in the land after seventy-five years of continuous Nakba: the Gaza Strip is still under siege, the West Bank is on fire, settlers are unrestrained in their violence against the Palestinians, and people are being hunted and living in fear. The immigration officer at Ben-Gurion Airport let me through, though. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because my husband is German and a professor at MIT, or because the officer wasn’t tired and was in a good mood. Maybe it was simply because a plane from Abu-Dhabi landed next to ours at the same time.
I feel drained, exhausted, and angry to have to go through this ordeal all over again, at having to keep my cool while I burn with anxiety inside my body, at trying to accept a verdict I do not control. I am tired of experiencing this hellish colonial process that keeps perfecting itself.
My eighteen-year-old daughter is flying in from the US to join us in a few days, but I do not know if she will make it. When her father asked if she was prepared for all eventualities and knew what to say at the border, her answer was clear: “Of course I do, I prepared all my life for this moment! Don’t you remember how I played checkpoint when I was three years old?” I did not know whether to laugh or cry for all that I put my girls through, for the love they experience in this land which brings them back, for the intergenerational trauma I inevitably transferred and which they will have to work through.
I finally made it to my father’s castle on top of the hill, which overlooks the sea in Jaffa. Israeli flags, hanging from light posts, taunted me all the way from Ben-Gurion Airport to Birzeit. The road signs were cleansed of the names of Palestinian towns, mentioning only the names of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. I made it through the checkpoint and into area A, demarcated with a big red billboard stating that no Israeli citizens are allowed into these “dangerous” Palestinian areas. I made it despite all the precarity, all the angst, all the efforts to turn a basic desire into a nightmare.
And I found my father’s house waiting for us, in its defiant, embracing grandeur. The cyclamens were proudly adorning the rocks of the garden, the daffodils and irises about to make way for the poppies to sneak out of the rubble of incomplete buildings surrounding the landscape. The blossoms on the almond and plum trees were starting to metamorphose into fruits, the fig leaves about to sprout anew, the apricot and olive trees were waiting to be pruned. I found my aunt and my cousins with their wide-open arms, the famous makloubeh ready to be served, the stories of losses and gains told by those who are here to stay despite the death of the national liberation struggle, despite the pain and despair, determined to make life worth living in meaningful ways.
I finally made it home, not knowing when, or if at all, I will be allowed to visit again. All I know is that I will continue to come back no matter how draining and brutal the process of ongoing injustice and Nakba continues to be.
Leila Farsakh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She researches the political economy of development, with specific focus on the Middle East region and the Arab/Israeli conflict. She is author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization beyond Partition, and coeditor of The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond.