Dear friends,
I’ve been back in Palestine for just under a week now, and tomorrow will begin a busy month of work. Since I’ve been back, the most common question I’ve gotten from Palestinian friends, colleagues, store owners, and taxi drivers is, “Who’s going to win, Clinton or Obama?” When I explain that this is only the primary, most people seem to have a small inkling of that, but most of them have never heard of McCain. They seem quite informed, however, about the Democrats, telling me that they used to think Obama might be better but now he keeps talking about how Israel is an important friend of the US’s and that he will continue to support Israel.
I’ve been surprised at the number of people who seem to have taken Bush’s recent visit to Israel as a real slap in the face. Don’t get me wrong, I do not think the president of the world’s only superpower should be unabashedly celebrating Israel’s creation while Palestinians’ mourn and resist the ethnic cleansing of their people. But it was not at all outside of the realm of what I would expect of Bush. Apparently some people here expected at least a surface-level acknowledgment of the Nakba on his part.
The owner of the local music store near my Ramallah apartment mentioned Bush to me, and then thanked me for being here in Palestine at this time. He said it’s important that foreigners be here around the time of the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. “For Israel,” he said, “it’s a happy occasion. But for us it’s a tragedy. I left a part of me behind 60 years ago. I look like myself, but it’s only my body. My mother, my grandmother, all my family are buried in Jerusalem, and now I can’t go there anymore. Somewhere inside me there’s still a little boy playing in the gardens of Jerusalem. I miss him.”
Until soon,
Hannah
