"Where are you from?"

Rima Merriman writing from Jenin, occupied West Bank, Live from Palestine, 12 February 2008

"......For Palestinian expatriate nationals like me who have managed to find their way back to Palestine in order to contribute in some fashion, what's on the horizon is far from clear. Our foothold is tenuous; we are here on sufferance by the Israelis who control the borders and the areas between towns and villages and let us in carefully or not at all. Sometimes, even Palestinians fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough as the case may be) to possess Palestinian IDs wonder why we are here when we didn't have to be, suspecting ulterior motives of some sort.

Through Israeli noblesse oblige, we are here on B2 visitor visas stamped with "not permitted to work." Locally, we are sometimes made to feel like visitors from outer space. Even among people amongst whom any conversation initiated by "Where are you from?," if long enough, will uncover very few degrees of separation, bonds have slackened. Individual energies are, by necessity, focused on survival in the difficult present, and Palestinian collective "memory" is becoming increasingly fragmented.

The farther away geographically one's origins are from a certain community or clan, the more frayed the bond. And there is nothing in the world farther away from the West Bank and Gaza than the Palestinian villages and towns taken over or destroyed by Israel since 1948. "Where are you from?" students and faculty ask me continually. "Lifta," I answer, only to be confronted by blank stares here in the north of the West Bank. (Lifta, a Palestinian village only a few kilometers west of Jerusalem, is about to be turned into a luxury residential community for Jews, even as many of its original Palestinian inhabitants, especially the ones who live in annexed East Jerusalem now, are trying in vain to regain access to their homes and lands.)

"Where are you from?" asks the Israeli soldier at the checkpoint as he quizzically examines my American passport. I answer that, as he can clearly see from my passport, I am American. "No, but where are you from?" he asks again. "What do you mean?" I counter, to the discomfort of the driver of the van and my fellow passengers, who are holding their breaths now, wondering what illegality I am likely to fall under. "Do you mean where in America?" He gives up and satisfies himself by studying my tourist visa again. Should I have explained to this young person hailing from Russia or Ethiopia about Lifta?......."