11 Flying to Amman

As I was finishing my degree at the University of Toronto, I began reading more about Palestine and my desire to return to my ancestral home got stronger. It was a call to me, like the adhan. I wanted to go to Palestine and get to know more about my people first-hand. I wanted to know more about my cultural heritage and the suffering of my people. I had saved up a little money, and I finally made a conscious decision. “I’m going to return to Palestine,” I told my friends and family. “I can take care of myself, and I can be a bridge between people, using my fluency in Arabic and English. I will document it somehow.”

“But you are not a journalist.”

“No, but there are ways to do this online …”

Towards the middle of September 2000, I boarded a plane heading to France for the first leg of my journey. I was aware of the many Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters with me on the flight, but I didn’t feel like talking to them. I wanted to be in my own little world, but the close quarters on an airplane don’t always allow it. The Texan sitting beside me was planning to tour Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, and I heard about it at length.

He didn’t ask me about my travel plans, but I’d given myself a project called “Compare life as a Palestinian Canadian in Canada to life as a Canadian Palestinian in Palestine.” Uncle Yazan had challenged me to write about the suffering of Palestinians in the occupied territories. In some ways, I was going to a place where I belonged, yet my impressions, beyond being in Jordan for three years as a child, had been formed mainly by the Western media. I had begun to understand the art of media spin. The camera shot that says a thousand words, often none of them good. The mind that arrives at a conflict scene already made up. The pro-Israeli bias in the media that showed Israelis looking “civilized” and Palestinians looking angry, yelling, with scarves tied around their heads and faces, to give the impression that most Palestinians would bomb people in public places and kill themselves doing it. I wanted to go where I could dig behind those biased reports.

My parents and friends weren’t entirely on board with my plans.

“You want to go to the Middle East now?”

“Look at what you’re getting into. What if you find yourself in the middle of a war?”

“Mowafa, you are going at such a sensitive time, when so many things could happen. I don’t think it’s wise. If you must go, go for a quick visit and come home.”

“It will always be sensitive there,” I replied. “I may never have this chance again.”

For months, Palestinian people had been preparing for large-scale protests against the Israeli Defense Forces if the peace talks floundered. The Israelis had certainly been doing the same and had been chasing the pump, as bodybuilders say, by stocking up on billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment given to them by the United States. My dad said he would rather I stayed home and worked.

He was afraid for me, and he was thinking like most fathers would—if your kids have the opportunity, they should work, make money, get married, have kids, carve out a future. But he also knew I had to do this. It wasn’t just that I was the firstborn, the oldest son, and had his name as my middle name. I was also at the age and time of life when this trip was most possible. I had finished my degree and was thinking about grad school and settling down in a few years’ time. The time for Palestine was now.

My plan was to go to Al-Quds, the capital of Palestine (known in the West as Jerusalem) and find an inexpensive hostel there. My ultimate goal was to offer the isha, the daily nighttime prayer, at Al-Masjid al-Aqsa, which was located on the Haram esh-Sharif, the Temple Mount.

As the plane crossed the Atlantic Ocean towards the Middle East, I could feel myself reaching into the past, becoming an extension of my ancestors. As I was wrapping up my graduate studies in Toronto, I felt a strong urge to study Arabic and religion, and for me that also meant connecting with my cultural and political heritage. There was no better place to do that than in Palestine, I’d reasoned, and so here I was on my way to take courses in Islamic studies and Arabic at the Islamic University of Gaza. Though I’d lived in Jordan as a child for three years, had heard Arabic at home constantly, and could speak it at the mosque, it was not enough for me. I also wanted to learn more about Islam at Al-Aqsa, and the time felt right. The Camp David Summit had taken place in July 2000, with US president Bill Clinton, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat meeting in hopes of negotiating a peace settlement. During those meetings, four major items became four big obstacles: territory/borders, Jerusalem and the Haram esh-Sharif, refugees and the “right of return,” and Israeli security concerns.

The photos of the three leaders standing around in casual clothes in the woodland like old friends did not tell the whole story. In the end, the Camp David Summit of 2000 was a failure, just as the Oslo Conference of 1993 and the Camp David Summit of 1978 had been, and other summits before, between, and after. The problem was always the same: the most that the Israelis were willing to give did not meet the least that the Palestinians were asking for. Two things the Palestinians wanted were a reversion to the lines of 1967 (the year of the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War) and recognition of the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees. Bill Clinton tried floating a “bridging proposal,” which would result in additional flexibility on territory, and some EU observers reported that Israel would accept the idea of East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

I held to a youthful optimism that voices of passion and reason would prevail and that matters would be resolved. I needed to assess the situation with my own eyes. It was easy to be critical in a classroom on the other side of the world, but in the end being on the street in Palestine would give me the best understanding of the situation.

If the peace talks failed, I knew I would likely be travelling into a large-scale conflict. People living in impoverished camps would never see the Palestine that was taken from them. The new regime would suppress them further, and the Palestinian economy would continue to decline, and Palestinians would not take that suppression lying down.

At the time I arrived in Jerusalem, the Waqf, the Islamic religious endowment, was conducting extensive construction on the Masjid al-Aqsa. Muslims call it the Noble Sanctuary—Bait-ul-Muqaddas. It marks the location of Muḥammad’s arrival in Jerusalem and his ascent to heaven, and is the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. The same site is considered so holy by Jews (who call it Har HaBáyit, the Mount of the House of God), that they will not walk there. Because of its significance for both Judaism and Islam, sovereignty over the Haram esh-Sharif is a major point of contention. Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim sovereignty over it, and it lies at the centre of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, both geographically and emotionally.

One of the people I connected with before I left Toronto was journalist and consultant Mark Bruzonsky. The tagline for his website is “News, Views, and Analysis Governments, Lobbies, and Associated Interest Groups Don’t Want You to Know.” Mark’s perspectives amazed me and reminded me to get to know Jews as well as Arabs in the Middle East. The challenge might be finding ordinary Jews to talk to, as opposed to people who were part of the powerful Israeli elite.

With degrees in international affairs and law from Princeton and New York University, Mark has written and spoken for many years about world affairs, US foreign policy, the Middle East, the underlying realities of policymaking in Washington, and US-Israeli relations. When I contacted him in 2000, he was also producer and host of the weekly TV program Mid-East Realities. He has travelled to over forty-five countries and has been the official guest of many organizations (such as the PLO) and governments, including those of Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.

Until the Jewish Committee on the Middle East had to end its activities in 1994, Mark was chair of this group, the first American Jewish organization to call for a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state. JCOME’s statement of principles was published in more than fifty mainstream newspapers and magazines, including the New York Review of Books. It’s difficult for an Arab cause to get fair mainstream coverage, so this was a big deal. It’s the kind of thing that gives you great hope for even the possibility of understanding and resolution, I wrote in my journal at the time.

I had always thought that all or most Jews hated Arabs and Muslims—because Israel had stolen our land and displaced our people. It’s true that my father had a Jewish friend or two, and my Uncle Faisal had worked with an Edmonton rabbi as part of the outreach work in their respective communities of faith until the Israeli war in Lebanon caused a disagreement between them. If Mark Bruzonsky had been an Arab or Muslim criticizing his own people, he would have been ostracized from the community, as I suspected he had been from his own Jewish community. But here was a person who wanted to help and make a difference, despite that cost.

Mark suggested I read David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Fromkin’s book, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, looks at how the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during World War I led to great changes in the Middle East as it was carved out by the Allies. He explores the role played by European powers in creating the Middle East as it is today, with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the signing of the Balfour Declaration, which promised land for Jewish people in historic Palestine. That signalled the beginning of ongoing Arab-Israeli conflicts and hostilities and remains a major source of dissent. This context and this history should have been clear indicators of what would happen after the current “peace process” had run its course. I was heading into a volatile environment without a full understanding of the history. I would catch up quickly.

I could feel my body tense up as I listened to Ben, the American seated next to me on the second leg of my flight to Israel, talk about the Middle East. “All empires seek influence,” he said, “so American intervention in world politics is only normal. Think objectively.” As if that made it all right that Palestine’s borders were redrawn after World War II, that Israel was granted Palestinian land, and that the Palestinians became refugees in the aftermath of what had happened to European Jews.

Something was really wrong. So many of the current European settler Jews had little connection with citizens of Israel—and there were a few Jewish people who were not Zionists, who did not approve of the creation of a state at the expense of Indigenous people. But people like Ben think we should be “objective.” It’s the kind of thing that could drive a Muslim to drink, I thought as the flight attendant rolled the cart by my seat.

When I had fought back in school, people who saw me might have thought, “How typical. They start young. Troublemakers. Aggressive and uncivilized!” Yet being quiet and invisible doesn’t work either. “What is he planning? What is he plotting? Skulking around like that. Why doesn’t he talk to us and reassure us, if he’s not a terrorist in training?” Whether out in the open as an Arab or trying not to be openly Arab, we could never do the right thing. There is no place to go.

I was going to leave all that behind for a few months and see what kind of person I was in Palestine. I tried not to think of my mother worrying about me and talking endlessly to all her friends about it, and even to my dad, though they were divorced. There was enough worry when I was growing up, before university. I hoped instead that, whatever other feelings they had, they would feel proud of me for “going home.” I thought especially of my dad, whose birthplace was a mere twelve kilometres from where this airplane would land.