As the Israeli government continues its war crimes, blatantly disregarding all human rights and refusing to give the Palestinian people back their land (encouraged from the sidelines by the United States – its major cheerleader and investor) the world is becoming increasingly divided. Some claim anti-zionism is antisemitism, while others advocate for a shared state. In the midst of this turmoil of information, with people posting everyday about every aspect of the conflict, I started to feel suffocated, yet I did not want to stop informing myself. By seizing my readings about Israeli war crimes, I would be turning a blind eye on the suffering of the Palestinian people. Yet, I have been unable to publicly post about it, for as much as I support Palestine, there is a deep and raging conflict in my family about it.
My father is a Zionist Jew, riddled with the complexities and turmoil that arise from growing up in a country that were not his parents’, in the East of France, near the German border. He is a careful man, always on the lookout for antisemitism, quoting the Torah every day, and the atrocities of the Shoah have never left his mind. He believes that Israel is a safe haven in a world of hate.
My mother is Lebanese and Egyptian, the product of two Christian parents who entertain a strong dislike of Israel; my grandmother’s mother fled Palestine, and a street in Haifa still bears her family’s last name. My grandparents are proud of their identity, and they pray for the freedom of Palestine; my grandmother will never forget the stories her mother told her of bombs and theft, the stealing of land (her land, their land, that was so rightfully theirs), and neither will I.
I grew up in France, a place where being antisemitic is a considered a disease and where many people are still sick. It is a country where being Arab is glorified and demonised, where one’s face and accent is reason for fetishisation and blatant racism.
The world is a place where Arab and Jews are pitted against each other because of the nations that want it to be that way: “diviser, c’est mieux régner” (to divide is to conquer better). They sent the remaining Jews away instead of dealing with the fascism in their own country, which in turn forced Palestinians to leave their homes, which in turn transformed Gaza in a giant, open-air prison.
Must we perpetuate the horrors of the past? I wake up every morning to my grandmother sending me articles and quotes about peace, and when I call her, I hear the worry in her voice when she talks about her native Lebanon, a country heavily bombed notoriously by Israeli aircrafts. It is not just her heart, or mine, that goes to the Palestinian nation. It’s a deep anger, the kind that never dries out, towards the Israeli government, but also towards the UK, and the USA and Europe for doing what they did to the Middle East.
They bombed hospitals and murdered children for oil, pretending to fight against a terrorism they created. They ruined countries that used to be glorious, inflating their money until it was worth nothing, making them live in the dark, thirsty and literally powerless. God, what have they done to my countries?
I wish I could stand tall and say that I am from Lebanon and have people tell me about how beautiful the mountains and the sea are, about the culture that seeps from it, the great writers and mathematicians that were born and thrived in the mother land. Instead, I will hear about the food, and the beautiful women, and the lack of electricity and think “is this what the Western World has reduced us to? Hummus and big lips, bombings and a frail, dying government?”
Dying identities in a hyper-mobile world that will tolerate our way of life no more, the incapability of being of more than two cultures that are not made from the same building blocks, and a people tearing themselves apart trying to defend an Apartheid state, a genocidal state, a monstrosity created by the countries we live in.
Yet, I implore you, do not let the Middle East be defined only as war and chaos. As Amin Maalouf once wrote: “God, she was beautiful – my first image of the Orient – a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.”
“Jounieh Bay With Blue Sky, Lebanon” by Paul Saad is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.