Issues

Palestine

On the Loss of an Image

Posted on Thursday June 7, 2007

I learned early that, where the Palestinians are concerned, image is a tricky thing. My Palestinian grandmother came from Bethlehem and married my gruff, Jordanian grandfather, a Bedouin by ancestry. Wealthy yes, but sophisticated, no.

No one talked about being Palestinian when I was growing up To be Jordanian was practically synonymous with being Western, charming and fashionable. To be Palestinian, in Jordan, meant that you were a refugee—resentful, unknowable, poor and dangerous.

But Dad tells me, his Palestinian mother was the sophisticated one in the family, the one with education and class. She put together one of the first libraries in Jordan, right in her own home.

My grandmother, like so many Palestinians, was educated because she had to be. Because so many Palestinians are dispossessed of their land, they have to carry their culture and history in their heads.

The arrangement between my grandparents was that my grandmother kept their children with her in a house in the city during the winter, when they would be educated. And then turned them loose to my grandfather during the summer, when they would, in her words, “run around like wild animals.” In this way, my father was raised between their two worlds. Yasser Arafat may not have been an ideal—or even a desirable—spokesperson for the Palestinians, but at least he had a name and a face. The danger for the Palestinians now is of disappearing altogether, as their public image shrinks, as their lands shrink. So many people in their country seem to believe that the Palestinians are merely thugs, violent criminals, Philistines, interested only in wreaking havoc, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

And how sad it is: how easy it seems to be to hide the truth.

Diana Abu-Jaber