Rula Khalidi: Leaving Jerusalem
Rula Khalidi, a Palestinian-American nurse, was part of the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Health and Human Rights Delegation I traveled with in October. She is a thoughtful, caring person, and I was glad to get to know her. Last time i saw her, she and another delegation member and I took a taxi from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where we all went our separate ways. Rula walked with her luggage into the Old City to visit a relative.
Rula writes in Sunday’s Arizona Daily Star about her final moments in Jerusalem before her ride to the airport. A short excerpt:
It’s hard for me to accept my own anger and cynicism regarding all that I’ve seen and heard during the past two weeks traveling through the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Nothing can prepare you for the cruelty of an occupation that hangs in the air so thickly and pervasively that you’re forced to breathe it in every second of the day. There isn’t an inch of the West Bank or East Jerusalem where one can escape its suffocating heaviness.
My journey has been filled with bitter ironies. I’ve waited my whole life to visit Palestine, something that was practically impossible for me (and other Palestinians in exile) to do before I became an American citizen about 10 years ago. My father was born and raised here, walked and played through these very streets of Jerusalem as did countless generations of our family before him. After the Israelis occupied Jerusalem in 1967, he was not allowed to return until he became a Swedish citizen almost 25 years later.
At the airport in Tel Aviv, I watched as the mostly Jewish members of our group passed through Israeli customs and immigration in a matter of minutes, while I was interrogated repeatedly for almost six hours when I arrived.
From the moment I landed and throughout my visit, my American citizenship was negated by my name and place of birth. I simply became a Palestinian woman born in Lebanon — a combination apparently too dangerous to overlook.
And this:
The one-dimensional media images one sees of the occupation are fundamentally different from the ones that float in and out of my mind’s eye. The missing quality is spite. Malice for the sake of it. Cruelty for the fun of it.
The essay is worth reading. Also instructive, for a different reason, are the 23 comments now posted at the end. The paper has a comment system where other registered commenters can give comments thumbs up or down. If there are more thumbs down, the comment isn’t visible when you scroll down unless you click on it. Sadly, but not surprisingly, aggressively pro-Israel comments blasting Rula’s piece get plenty of thumbs up, whereas those who found the piece moving, thoughtful, and useful were rated into invisibility.
This disparity in reaction is so common that it’s always hard to know how to respond to such different frames of reference. That’s about what Jimmy Carter is dealing with these days, a lot more publicly than Rula.
Carter has the facts down pretty well, at least in dealing with the occupation. Rula gets the feelings.
Thanks, Rula.
