It was a journey 18 years in the making, thanks in part to my son graduating from high school.
We had one final Israeli checkpoint to pass through, the last of three that particular day. Seated under a makeshift tented structure and protected from the hot June sun above, a border policeman eyed us suspiciously. Behind him clustered a number of Israeli soldiers. One in particular stood out: a woman carrying a machine gun who watched us as we approached.
The policeman motioned me to place my backpack on the table. My wife and two sons stood behind me. The policeman unzipped each of the compartments of the backpack and rifled through our belongings.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Atlanta, Georgia,” I answered, as I handed him our U.S. passports.
“No, where are you originally from?” he clarified.
“What do you mean?”
“Where were you born? Where is your father from?”
“I’m Palestinian,” I answered.
I couldn’t tell if he was happy hearing that answer, but he was satisfied enough that — after glancing at my wife and two boys, now 18 and 15 — he waved us through.
We climbed the final steps and walked onto the Haram al-Sharif platform, also known as the Temple Mount, probably the most contentious piece of real estate on the planet. The well-known Dome of the Rock came into view, and my younger son’s smile matched the shine of the golden dome that symbolizes Jerusalem in every picture of that historic city. It was his first time in occupied east Jerusalem and the land of his ancestors. Pictures can’t match the exhilaration of being there and seeing the Dome of the Rock firsthand.
It was the same with me when I first mounted those steps back in 1991, having come to the Middle East on a journalism internship. I felt it those many decades ago, and now my two sons were experiencing it for the first time in their lives. That 1991 trip had reconnected me to this place, my first time back since having left as a 1-year-old refugee in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. Now, we were reenacting that moment as a family, reminding our boys of their historical roots 33 years later.
The last time I had come back was in 2005, soon after marrying my wife, whose family hails from Gaza. Since Oct. 7, she has lost at least 108 members; many more are still missing, with no way to tell if they are alive or dead. Israel has dropped more than 70,000 tons of ordnance on the narrow Mediterranean enclave, one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
A Changed Place
This is a very different place from the one I left in 2005. No longer is it an existential struggle for Israel. Quite the opposite: It is the Palestinians that are desperately seeking to fight erasure — as a people, as a national movement and as a culture. Indeed, there is a sense now that Israel, especially around Jerusalem, has entered a period of consolidation, filling in the raw lands seized from the Palestinians by ever growing illegal settlements — never mind multiple U.N. resolutions, U.S. administration admonitions and world public opinion. The vast swathes of land Israel has illegally appropriated are now being constructed with settlements on the outer perimeter, serving to both secure the raw land while geographically stymieing future growth of the nearby Palestinian villages and towns, my birthplace of Al-Ram included. Having geographically limited the Palestinians, Israel is continuing to slowly economically strangle them, through a sophisticated 21st-century watch tower and checkpoint system, which we encountered countless times in our weeklong trip.
Credit: Tristan Holley
Credit: Tristan Holley
Also in stark contrast to past visits, settlement building, which once caused deep friction within Israel, evokes little controversy among Israelis themselves. It is evident in the rise of the right-wing Likud Party and in its continued stranglehold on the Israeli political system. When Likud, under then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, accelerated Israel’s illegal settlement building in the late 1970s there was resistance from the dominant Labor party, which favored the land-for-peace formula embraced by the international community, including the United States.
Instead, some Israelis now vote their pocketbooks and see the settlements as a way to buy homes at government-subsidized discounts. Some Israelis, including the now more than 700,000 settlers, support Likud and other extreme right-wing parties not out of some messianic, reclaim-the-land-and-fulfill-God’s-prophecy mandate, but for simply economics. Misgivings about living in a house built on stolen Palestinian land doesn’t enter into the equation.
What stood in even sharper contrast was the discrepancy between Israeli and Palestinian areas. We stayed in the occupied West Bank and were lucky enough — thanks to our U.S. passports — to be able to navigate the 440-mile-long, 30-foot-tall wall that Israel built to physically separate itself from the Palestinians. Even within the West Bank, however, you’re essentially seeing the rise of Bantustans, the apartheid-era South Africa model that served to compartmentalize and marginalize natives South Africans into mini population centers. Palestinian villages now serve as such, and Israeli checkpoints, some permanent and some pop-up, discourage Palestinians from visiting each other in nearby cities, as checkpoints regularly mean a wait of several hours.
Past the checkpoints and guard towers, Israel looked very much like the Southern California where I grew up, with wide, developed highways, treelined streets, and expansive apartment towers and single-family developments crowning the many hills surrounding Jerusalem.
But behind the checkpoints, Palestinians continue to live in crowded, traffic-packed Bantustans, with multiple families residing under one roof, part of the legacy of a tightly controlled economy in which building permits for new construction or expansion are rarely granted, even when there is open land to accommodate new buildings. Israel’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has encouraged and armed extremist settlers to seize more Palestinian land. To date, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including a significant number by rampaging settlers under the idle watch of Israeli soldiers.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
One of the questions that had eternally vexed me regarded how American Jews, some of whom I have worked with and consider friends, could stay quiet given this wide discrepancy. On this trip it finally dawned on me why: They probably have never seen the Palestinian areas. Indeed, entering in a navigation app a destination beyond the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between the West Bank and Israel as agreed after of the 1967 War, one gets a warning regarding Palestinian areas. Instead, they are shown and sold an Israeli Shangri-La, complete with sunny skies, smiling faces and wide-open green space.
Even more appalling is the ongoing war in Gaza. You can be Jewish or Israeli or a supporter of the state of Israel and still be outraged by the atrocities in Gaza and its expansionist and apartheid policies in the West Bank. It is ethically and morally reprehensible to systematically dismember a society; kill innocent men, women and children; destroy its health care system; pollute its water; and culturally erase a people through the destruction of its hospitals, schools and universities — all of which we are witnessing in Gaza. There’s nothing Judaic about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The United States once sought to serve as an honest broker in the region, but it stands naked today as the Biden administration’s knee-jerk support for Israel has forever tainted it as a party to genocidal war.
The Future
Where do we go from here? The day after question regarding Gaza hangs over all things.
There was much more optimism when I visited the region in 1991. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush had convened the Madrid Conference, an ambitious effort to solve the Israel-Palestine conundrum that for the first time included Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians and Jordanians. Hope was high for a two-state solution, with Israel and Palestine living side by side.
On that trip back to my ancestral homeland, I spent days sitting with my grandfather on the patio outside the bedroom where I was born. My grandfather was more than 100 years old — exactly how old we did not know, as they didn’t keep exact birth records when he was born. He regaled me with stories about his run-ins with the Ottomans as a child, with the Brits as an adult, and with the Israelis in his old age. He hoped yet to see a Palestine land free and to live as a free man, he said.
He died never having realized his dream.
Millions of Palestinians still carry that dream of independence in the West Bank and the devastated Gaza strip, hoping for the same rights claimed by others, including the Israelis.
But, sadly, because of Israel’s decades-long campaign to undermine the peace process and delegitimize the Palestinian people, I no longer believe the two-state solution is viable. Instead, I’ve come to the conclusion that a one-state solution — yes, encompassing all of the land and people from the river to the sea — offers the best chance for long-term reconciliation, a state that protects the rights of minority Palestinians and gives them the right to vote side by side with Israelis. To do anything less is to institutionalize the obvious apartheid that has taken root in the land of my birth.
Nidal M. Ibrahim is former executive director of the Arab American Institute and former publisher of Arab American Business Magazine.
About the Author
