March 31, 2003
A misty day of slow-moving low fog. At noon, as the sun attempted to penetrate this gossamer veil that had fallen over Ramallah, I circled around the building that had once housed the Israeli military court and prison to see what remained. Perched on one of the highest hills of Ramallah, this rectangular British Mandate-built police fortress of reinforced concrete was constructed around an open inner courtyard. Commencing in 1938, the British built some fifty such structures in various parts of Palestine. They were initiated by Sir Charles Tegart, a former commissioner of police in Calcutta, who was sent to Palestine as a counterterrorism expert in the midst of the 1936 Palestinian popular revolt against Mandate rule.
***
June 5, 2011
Unlike in previous years, this year the forty-fourth anniversary of the Occupation passed unmarked. Life went on as normally as possible under a prolonged Occupation.
I slowed my car as I approached the entrance to Arafat’s gleaming limestone mausoleum on the southern border of this lavish headquarters of our remodeled self-governing authority. A ceramic plaque embedded in the wall announced the distance in kilometers to Jerusalem, the city which Arafat had hoped would be the capital of the Palestinian state and where he wanted to be buried. I was startled by a police siren leading a procession of cars with blackened windows, ferrying a high Palestinian official perhaps, which zoomed by, almost knocking my car off the road. As the siren receded in the distance, I found myself thinking once again about what has happened to the Tegart compound on its hill, the site of such profound memories laden with historical significance. Was it a justifiable transformation of a dismal past into a promising future? How could that be when the heroic past of those who suffered and paid heavily remains unsung, with the site of their memories eradicated?
The question I have so often asked myself returned: should I have left Palestine when I could well imagine what was in store for us? After the Oslo Accords were signed, I annoyed my friends with gloomy prophecies. Many have ended up as realities. Should I, then, have spared myself the pain and frustration? It’s a moot question, perhaps. In fact, I both stayed and left; I became an internal exile. It was the sight of this refurbished Tegart that brought this home to me.
When will this exile end? Perhaps when we, Palestinians and Israelis, living on this land, succeed in scraping away all the nonsense about the exclusive meanings we attribute to our small territory and our lives in it, and begin to live without the lies of divine rights and narrow nationalist narratives that are used to justify the designation of land for the exclusive use of members of one religious group. It will end when the land and its people are rid of illusions, when my life in Palestine ceases to be conceived as that of a samid (Arabic for someone who is steadfast) and becomes that of a citizen. I would be free then to come and go as I choose, without attaching layers of meaning to the simple act of leaving. I would be free to live elsewhere, if I wished, without feeling I am betraying anyone. When Palestine/Israel come to mean nothing more to their people than home, only then will my state of exile come to an end, and with it my sumoud (steadfastness).
(From Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home edited by Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh, Women Unlimited (2012))
(This appeared in the print as 'Steadfast In Exile')
