Once Upon a Palestine

Once Upon a Palestine

Aimee Rubensteen
January 2009

She walks in with a disguised strut. Palestinian. Waiting to hear the “enemy’s” voice, we hold our breaths. Arab. Her hair borders her sunken eyes that seem to be all-knowing. Muslim. She begins with explaining how it may be “harsh” to hear what she’s about to say. I laugh it off. Sure, a roomful of Jewish seminary girls shouldn’t be ready to bolt as an Arab who supported Hamas begins to tell her story.
Nadia is like any other mother I know. A smile stretches her wrinkles when she tells us of her three children, the oldest my age—18. It seems ironic that we’re her audience, nothing like her teenage daughter. Nadia is 37 and an activist. Her foreign beauty is surprising with her cut-up words. Her hollow cheeks tell the memories of Palestinian motherhood. As soon as words escape her mouth, my eyes widen and undivided attention invades the room.
This year, I decided to educate myself after feeling ignorant upon my arrival in Israel. I’ve been attending a once-a-week class of factual information about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This meeting with an Arab couldn’t have been a better way to kick off the year and learn how the preconceived notion that “all Arabs are terrorists” is wrong. Her presence was welcomed in our school for a peaceful discussion. Maybe we would be the next target. Or maybe we could be the ones to change the fear held inside each of us.
I wasn’t expecting her to say that Jerusalem is a holy place because of Muhammad. Beginning with the history of Islam, Nadia spoke with her obvious accent. The way she sounded with so typical an Arab accent would ordinarily have brought me anxiety, but I tried not to judge. She spoke of the history I have learned every year in school. But hearing it from her perspective seemed like she had been reading from a different textbook. She spoke of a different people.
Yes, the Jews’ presence in the Koran is repeated, but she never once puts down our importance, although she doesn’t acknowledge it as the same. And the Koran speaks of killing nonbelievers, she bluntly states, but it’s almost always taken out of context, just as God commanding the Jews to wipe out Amalek can be perceived in the wrong eye. Neither religion can be based on one line. Her points were valid and seemed to burst the bubble that we sometimes seem to live in.
After she gave a summarized history and confessed, “Maybe I’m not so good,” referring to her lack of religious ways, a brief giggle flooded the air. The relief was the perfect segue from the history to the present. Nadia now had an open floor of questions, questions we’ve all had in our heads but never had the opportunity to ask. 
Luxury. The way Nadia speaks of how she’s lucky to be able to even come and talk to us after being shunned by certain people is the least of the surprises she unwraps. She lives in a town in Jerusalem, Beit Hanina, where she’s clearly educated. As she begins to see our hopeful hearts opening to her, her long, piano-like fingers move in motions and sway with her words of fear and happiness. She feels a strong connection to the land we both dwell in, especially Jerusalem.
She “identifies” with the Holocaust and sees no difference with how Jews were treated and how Israel is using the security fence Israel being completed in the West Bank. Comparing us to the Nazis seems laughable to us. But today in Jenin, she says, the Palestinians are living in ghettos. The West Bank has been put in a box. She doesn’t see Israel’s defensive ways as anything but fragmenting the Palestinians and Israelis. “This,” she says, “is worse than killing.” She fears this separation and scares us with her words of voting for Hamas. Palestinian leaders did not offer a “normal life,” she said, so she voted for new leadership, even if it was Hamas. She even “understood” suicide bombing—until it happened in her daughter’s school. She feels humiliated to the point of having nothing left to do in this “dirty political game.” However, after her own blood was in danger, she would never take part in that inhumane act, she says. 
The couple of hours together have bonded us in an unimaginable way. Awareness is key now in a time when I’m not allowed to walk around my homeland completely free. The world needs to sit down and speak. After months living in Jerusalem by myself, these hours have definitely had the most impact on me. Touring and learning has personally matured my knowledge, but speaking freely with Nadia has broadened my horizons. She repeats, “We don’t know what will happen … what will be the end.”
We can only start here.

Aimee Rubensteen