Amid conflict in Gaza, a Palestinian American navigates two worlds

To be Palestinian right now feels as if the whole world is observing your naked body, which has been bruised and mutilated for more than 75 years. Everything is out in the open.

“How much can it handle?” the torturer asks. “What if we trap it? What if we poke it here? Or maybe from here? How much longer until something bursts? Could it survive without food or water? Surely something’s got to burst. Ah, this side over here seems to be getting aggravated — will this be the part of the body that bursts?”

And then, when something does inevitably burst, there is one question that everyone seems to ask, which I’ve come to realise is nothing but rhetorical: “Why did it burst?”

To be American is to know, or finally realise, that you have been not only complicit but also a catalyst in this body’s torture for decades. And to be a Palestinian American feels as though you are yelling, between the stabs and punches, at those who are standing by: “Do you see this? Is anyone going to do anything? Do I deserve this?” While through it all, you know that you are inadvertently funding your own torture.

Gaza has been under attack for more than 88 days, and there is no end in sight to what can only be called a genocide — an extermination, unfolding before our eyes in real time on TV and on social media.

Entire regions of the city have been flattened to rubble as the West continues to unapologetically support Israel’s genocidal intent under the guise of “self-defence,” branding it a war between two equal entities rather than what it is: a war waged on a strip of land that Israel has occupied for decades, and which is filled to the brim with internally displaced refugees.

There is no way for those in the diaspora to separate themselves from the Palestinians in Gaza, any more than it would be possible to separate the parts of a single living body. Those 2 million people under siege could be any of us, were it not for our ancestors being expelled or displaced somewhere else. I see my childhood self in every little girl who weeps for her mom to come back to life and in the remnants of a dead child’s burned face.

It was only a couple of months ago that I was in my home in Ramallah, West Bank; I returned to the United States just days before the war started on Oct. 1.

I wish I could say I had a premonition that the inevitable burst was going to happen when it did, and at such a scale - that Hamas would breach Israel’s security, previously assumed impenetrable, killing 1,200 Israeli civilians, military officials and soldiers, and taking 240 people hostage in an ambush that no one could have thought possible.

That Israel would respond with the indiscriminate bombardment of the already besieged and impoverished Gaza, killing more than 22,000 people, including more than 8,000 children and babies — and counting.

Few could have imagined that more than 320 people were going to be shot by either the IDF or settlers in the West Bank (which was already experiencing its deadliest year since the Second Intifada), that more than 5,000 would be arrested, or that dozens of Palestinians in Israel, who hold citizenship in the so-called only democracy in the Middle East, would be detained for allegedly “condoning terrorism” on social media.

But for me, the days before gave no such indication. It was the same old, same old.

When you visit your homeland, you must subconsciously relinquish every basic right that is inalienable for you as an unoccupied American so that you can endure the occupation as a Palestinian. And you try, for the time being, to forget that you are your own occupier.

Every checkpoint you pass, every Israel Defense Forces soldier who is stationed there (most of whom are close in age to me) and every machine gun that they point can be traced right back to you.

And in order to enjoy the simple right of being where your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents and their parents lived, you must accept the potential violence — whether from the military or armed settlers — that may be waiting for you at every turn.

When you spend time under occupation, your standards must recalibrate. With every humiliating experience, your threshold for tolerating discrimination gets higher. The struggles of the occupation seep into your daily life, creating a new normal that makes you forget that such a dehumanised existence would be impossible to accept in your other home.

But despite your ability to function in your occupied parallel reality, your subconscious is still absorbing every act of injustice you face or witness — inching you closer and closer to your own imminent burst.

The longer you’re in Palestine, the easier it is to ignore the pungent smell of faeces every time you drive down the street known as “Oyoun al-Haramiya” (Eyes of the Thief), where Israeli settlers are known to dump their sewage.

You start to learn which checkpoints close earlier or later so your 30-minute commute doesn’t turn into three hours of waiting in long lines for “security checks.”

You start memorising the corrections that Google Maps or Waze make when navigating your driver because these apps don’t account for the differences between the Jewish-Arab segregated roads and could take you through armed Jewish settlements that bar entry for Palestinians and, in fact, pose a threat to life if you are Palestinian.

When the IDF conducts its weekly military raids in the northern West Bank villages of Nablus or Jenin and kills a young person, and this dead youth becomes a “shaheed” (martyr), you know that all shops in the city will be closed until the evening.

With all these protocols in mind, your routine when leaving the house becomes muscle memory — phone, keys and your designated green-coloured “haweeya” ID card, which marks you as Palestinian and therefore determines where you can drive, walk, sit, eat, drink, patronise and live.

And when you leave that dehumanising experience, supported by the US, and return to America, there is always a transition period for a Palestinian American to revert to their unoccupied self: a time needed to detach yourself from a deep sense that you are inferior, second-class and a “security threat” in your own land.

With each passing moment on your 12-hour flight back to the US, it’s like you time travel from the Jim Crow era to present-day America. You slip on the armour that you had to take off the second you got to Palestine, where your US citizenship and all the protection it affords you elsewhere in the world is stripped of its power and your Palestinian-ness overrides any human rights and civil liberties you have elsewhere.

Israeli forces faced no repercussions when Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist, was assassinated in 2022, or when Omar Assad, an 80-year-old Palestinian American, was killed at a checkpoint last summer. We know that our US passports don’t protect us from the Israeli regime, and they will not ensure us justice when we are killed.

The second you land in the US, you notice that the anxiety over whether you can be let into your own home has disappeared. The thought of being detained for no reason now seems impossible to comprehend — despite it being a distinct possibility only 12 hours earlier.

You don’t have to expend energy analysing the mood of each border patrol officer to try to get into the right line. Rather than feeling like you’ve snuck into your own homeland, you may even hear a “welcome home.”

But this time is different. Because of the timing of my trip, I have not been able to shed my feelings of inferiority. As I sit here in my Brooklyn apartment, these feelings have only grown. And I have never felt as subhuman as I do right now.

For the past three months, I and every other Palestinian — Christian and Muslim — have been internalising everything that is being said and done. And it has not been without consequence.

As I hear the Western public worry about their safety and lock themselves inside their homes, I have come to feel as though I — a 5-foot-2 Palestinian woman — am the one causing fear. Seeing Palestinians and their allies as perpetrators has become so normalised that Republican representatives like Ryan Zinke have even proposed to expel all Palestinians from the US (though it’s not clear where one would send “stateless people”) and ban them from entering.

This while simultaneously supporting the bombing of what remains of the home we do have, using American-made and American-financed lethal force. The politicians and mainstream media may be saying “they,” but all I can hear is “I.”

I am a “child of darkness.” I am a human animal. I am a barbarian. I am a savage. I’m both a terrorist and a human shield. I don’t exist. I am nothing but a bag of limbs being carried by my father. I am a security threat. I am a price that must be paid. I am the inevitable, the expected and accepted collateral damage.

The Palestinian diaspora in the West is in its own remote Gaza, where screams can be heard over the walls, but there is no response and no support to be found.

You can even hear the cheers in the background, the same ones that can be heard from nearby illegal Jewish settlements as they watch the white phosphorus bombs, whose use on heavily populated civilian areas like Gaza is prohibited by international law, rain down on Gaza.

Over the decades, with every stance we have taken to assert our existence and resistance, we have been met with deafening silence or vitriol — and I still don’t know which is worse.

This article is an abridged version of a piece that first ran in New Lines Magazine in November 2023. Read the full article here.