7 Uprisings

I had just turned ten, and I was still living in Jordan, when an uprising began in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after an Israeli Army truck had ploughed into a line of cars waiting at a checkpoint, killing four Palestinians. Many thousands of Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces over the years, but this incident was the spark in the tinder box.

In Gaza, in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem, Palestinians rose to protest the Israeli military occupation. For the most part, the protesters were unarmed civilians. They erected barricades; they took part in mass demonstrations and general strikes; they boycotted Israeli products; they refused to pay taxes; they scribbled graffiti on walls. Although they sometimes fought back against Israeli troops by throwing stones or Molotov cocktails, the UNLP (the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising) deliberately discouraged the use of firearms in favour of civil disobedience.

Seldom guilty of underreacting, Israel deployed some seventy thousand soldiers to quell these acts of resistance. Israeli forces began by using live ammunition, but as the number of civilian deaths rose and the United Nations Security Council condemned Israeli policy, the soldiers were equipped instead with clubs, supplemented by rubber-coated metal bullets and plastic bullets. By the end of the first year of the uprising, 332 Palestinians were dead. According to Wendy Pearlman in her book, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement, Israeli casualties stood at twelve.

This uprising came to be known as the First Intifada. It began in December 1987 and lasted for six years.

When I was in Grade 7, one of my friends, Nuno, came to my house hoping to play video games—Super Mario, Blades of Steel, Duck Hunt. We both loved the hollow sound of the spring clicking inside the orange and grey Nintendo gun as we fired at targets. He waited outside while I asked my mother for permission to invite him in.

“Is he Muslim?” she asked. He wasn’t.

“Is he Arabic?” Again I had to say no.

“Then I don’t want you playing with him. He doesn’t belong to our religion and culture.” My mother knew that my dad was always worried we would integrate and forget our heritage and religion if he didn’t monitor our friendships. That never happened, and Nuno and I are friends to this day.

I glared at her. I couldn’t see what religion and culture had to do with playing Nintendo, but I knew it was hopeless to argue with her. I went back outside and said, “Not today, Nuno.” I was embarrassed. I was back in Canada, trying again to be normal. But my mother was making this impossible. It was as if she was loved the idea of being an outsider.

If there had been an all-Muslim school in Edmonton, I would have been in it. But there wasn’t, so my parents—mostly my mother—found ways to make up for it. On weekends, we would spend all our free time at the Al-Rashid Mosque or go to visit other Muslim families. The only parties I was allowed to attend were those organized by the mosque or by the Canadian Arab Friendship Association. I had the feeling that my mom thought I would end up in some kind of Hell for Children if I went to a “real” party, the kind that Canadian kids had. But then my mother never had any non-Muslim friends either. So what did you come back to Canada for? I wanted to ask her. Aren’t we all supposed to be multicultural?

I remember being sent to a retreat for youth organized by the Al-Rashid Mosque when I was in my early teens. I resented the experience, and, like a typical teenager, I held my mother responsible for my misfortune. When I got back from the camp, I tried to get back at my mother for sending me. If she wanted me to be more Muslim, I reasoned, I’d give her what she wanted. I started eating with my hands, the way I’d seen some other Muslim friends do. My efforts were met with a curt, “Stop eating with your hands.”

“That’s what they taught me at the retreat,” I’d reply. And so it would continue. The bickering seldom stopped, and although we are best of friends now, I cannot recall many conversations with my mother from that time in my life that did not involve fighting. My selfishness made me overlook the many things she did for us, like taking us to piano or swimming lessons, or taking us to the library or taekwondo. At the time, I just resented her and her inability to adjust to a Canadian way of life, as I saw it.

It didn’t help that my name, properly transliterated from Arabic, is spelled Mowafaq. The kids loved it. “Mo-fuck you!” they would yell in the schoolyard to embarrass me. So, in Grade 7, while I was still at Killarney Junior High, I changed my name to Moe. A lot of my friends did the same thing—Chadi became Chad; Muhammad called himself Mike; Saeed became Sid. But it didn’t really help. An Arab by any other name is still an Arab.

In Grade 8, after the start of the First Gulf War in August 1990, my Arab friends and I got called names like “Camel jockey!” or “Paki!” The antagonism made us feel alienated and rebellious—at home I wasn’t Muslim enough and at school I was not allowed to forget I was a Muslim.

I was a moody kid, at once self-conscious about my ethnic background and yet ready to defend it at the drop of a hat. Part of me was desperate to fit in, and part of me was angry that I wasn’t allowed to—not by my mother and not by white kids at school. Like most adolescents, I was also keenly sensitive to differences in social and economic status, and this was another source of pain. My family was managing to get by, but it wasn’t like the old days before my father lost his business in the fire. At that age, though, I had little understanding of household finances. Nor did I care.

To me, my mother just seemed clueless. She would buy me clothes at the BiWay store—a betrayal that made me want to disappear. Nothing was more humiliating than the BiWay brand logo. We were on the wrong side of the line between those who didn’t have to shop at discount warehouses that reeked of sweatshop adhesives and those who did. At school, everyone made fun of people who bought anything other than chocolate bars and gum at BiWay. When I saw the store bags come home, I wanted to explode. I would beg my mother not to go there, but she didn’t understand.

We did not have a nice car. We had an old Pontiac, a burgundy station wagon. I didn’t want my friends to see it, so I would get my mom to drop me off three or four blocks from the school. My excuse was always the same: “I just feel like walking.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I was doing the same thing my father had done back in the refugee camp—trying to keep up false appearances to avoid feeling ashamed.

As I struggled with my identity in Canada, trying to sort through warring emotions that pulled me in two directions, the Intifada continued in the occupied territories. My father and Uncle Faisal followed the resistance movement closely, and my parents and other family members often talked about it. Some were very worried, especially my mother, who had a sister living in a camp in Mukhayyam Balata, which was located adjacent to Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Many of the casualties were ordinary women and children attempting to defend their neighbourhoods. Schools were closed. Utilities were cut off. Homes were demolished. People were arrested and jailed.

Accounts of the Intifada are full of statistics. In sufficient quantity, numbers work like anesthetic, allowing us to blot out our feelings. But a few stand out for me. During the first two years of the Intifada, an estimated 23,600 to 29,900 Palestinian children required medical treatment for injuries sustained in beatings. Arthur Neslen points out In Your Eyes a Sandstorm: Ways of Being Palestinian that a third of these children were under ten years old—younger than I was when it started. In those two years, children died at an average of one every five days. Some were victims of tear gas; others died from beatings, or from gunshot wounds, or from burns. Of these children, 35 percent were under eleven; 19 percent were less than a year old.

In 1993, when I was nearly sixteen, Israel and the PLO signed the first Oslo Accord, thus marking an end to the uprising. By then, upwards of twelve hundred Palestinians—the majority of them unarmed civilians—had been killed by Israeli forces since the Intifada began. News images of Israeli soldiers viciously clubbing Palestinian youth had at one point evoked a certain sympathy in the West for our struggle in Gaza and the West Bank, but by 1993 this compassion had largely evaporated. In Edmonton, as elsewhere, the mood had turned against Palestine.