Walking the Hyphen in Palestine-Israel

This essay appeared in Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #49 (Fall 2016)

Excerpt

In Haifa, in Jerusalem, in Ramallah, in Jaffa, I walk Israel and I walk Palestine. I walk Palestine and I walk Israel. These are not consecutive movements—as if there were two discrete terrains, “Israel proper” and “the (occupied) territories,” let alone two contiguous states—but adjustments of posture, stances toward the facts on the ground, pivots from one identity position to another, leaps across time. I am as hyphenated, as contingent, as Israel-Palestine, Palestine-Israel, that which names both the wretched reality and the hopeful possibility of one state. But I move through the country as an American: no political division of the land is off-bounds to me. I arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, stay the night in Jaffa, take a sherut to Jerusalem, and soon after I am in Area A, those urban zones of the West Bank that Israelis are legally—though not strictly—forbidden to enter.

In Ramallah I am welcomed as a Palestinian, even a returnee, with a family story not unlike so many of the Palestinians I meet who grew up in Algeria, Bosnia, Lebanon, Kuwait, or the United States, and who came back after the Oslo Accords. Even theirs are not true returns to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes in Haifa, in Nazareth, in Palestine, but to those diminishing fragments of “the West Bank” tenuously controlled by the languishing Palestinian Authority. In the eyes of the Israeli state, however, I am not a Palestinian, and I can go back to Jerusalem each night, even avoiding the traffic at Qalandiya as I take the Hizme checkpoint (used mostly by settlers). As Yazan tells me, “it’s not apartheid in black and white; it’s apartheid in blue and green and white and yellow.” ID cards, passports, and license plates define your identity—your precise coordinate in the spectrum of citizenship, fixing most Palestinians to an ever-waning portion of land or freeing someone like me to travel from the river to the sea with only the most minor of indignities that come with crossing checkpoints.

I understood this at one level, but I also imagined that in Israel’s increasingly racist society, I who pass as White in (much of) the United States would suddenly be seen as Black, as an Arab, a threat. Before I entered the country, I deleted hundreds of emails that included the words “Palestine” and “BDS,” deactivated my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and even ripped pages out of my journal (a friend, also an American of Palestinian descent, had recently told me of her hours-long harassment by Israeli soldiers reveling in personal details from her diary). But I had no problems entering. And I quickly realized how light-skinned I was, in relation to the millions of Mizrahi Jews whose families hail from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Syria. Only my first name betrays an Arabness that the great majority of Mizrachis in Israel have been trained to expel from their language, their customs, their relations. Until I offer it I am just another American tourist, enjoying my own, self-declared “birthright” to see the country in which my family lived only two generations ago.

Read the essay, which appeared in Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #49 (Fall 2016) here: [PDF]