One of the formative experiences of my life was visiting Al-Khalil (aka Hebron) circa 2013 with a group of other diaspora Palestinians and seeing the “situation” there. What used to be a very active market in the heart of the old city was pretty much dead because settlers lived in the upper levels of the buildings; there was a metal net over the remaining shops to catch the trash that settlers and non-Palestinian (and I mean this as a legal status) visitors would dump out of their windows at the Palestinian population, but this couldn’t catch things like chemicals, rotten eggs, dirty water, etc. As a card-carrying (and I mean this literally) Palestinian, I was not allowed to enter the Jewish quarter, but a settler was allowed to come and scream at the Druzi soldier guarding the checkpoint at the time for letting us—I was with a group of people who mostly did not have Palestinian ID, but were ethnically Palestinian—into the city at all. I swear someone tried to hit us with a car. The Palestinian shopkeeper we talked to quickly got scared and told us we had to disperse. I have passed through clouds of pepper spray less tense than that.
Like, if you’re reading this as, say, a US American with no Palestinian heritage, you have more access to places under Israeli occupation as a visitor than I ever will, and my family heritage is traceable to Palestine only, nowhere else. I believe anyone should be able to live wherever they want, but I have family members living in the West Bank who haven’t been able to travel much past the cities they live in, e.g. to visit the Dead Sea or Jerusalem, despite living relatively close. Meanwhile, most people I know in the US, Jewish or not, could go visit any time they want without begging for permissions that might be denied to them arbitrarily. *most* of the USAmericans I know could visit the post-1948 borders easier than me.
My partner and my best friend are both Jewish, so they could immigrate to the land of my parents’/grandparents’/great-great grandparents’/etc’s birth with relative ease, despite not feeling any connection to the land; I could not. If I lived in the land of my parents’ birth, my partner would have to legally declare interest in me and we’d have to have a “cooling off” period in which we separate. This is very obviously wrong to us. The fact that I even have to argue its wrongness to anyone else is fucking ridiculous. If you’re even capable of excusing that injustice, then nothing you have to say is of any value to me and I’m not sorry about it. A different set of laws applies to me than the person who is reading this (unless you’re also Palestinian). That is the definition of apartheid and I have nothing to prove to anyone who refuses to believe it. Because it’s clear. You either choose to deny the truth or you don’t. I just hope my presence can elucidate that truth to others. I cannot emphasize enough that being Palestinian is not just an ethnic or national status for me, it is a LEGAL status. I am legally Palestinian. Are you legally ethnic in any way? If so, can you see how our circumstances align? Ask yourself that.
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