FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nadia just wants to be out

By Sophie Claudet
Jordan Times
November 29, 2001


RAMALLAH — Nadia is 33-year-old. She was born and raised in San Francisco in a family that fled Palestine in the 1950s. Two years ago, she met her future husband on her first visit to Palestine. In July 2000, she moved to the West Bank and in September 2000, married Daoud and moved in with his family in a village ten minutes away from Ramallah. Little did she know that some weeks later she was to witness and live through the worse Palestinian/Israeli confrontations in decades.

On Sept. 28, 2000, the Intifada started. Soon after, Nadia got to experience checkpoints, harassment from Israeli soldiers and a daily trip to Ramallah that now takes her an hour. When she married Daoud, they made a pact. They were going to live in Palestine for a few years, then move to the US. Six months after the Intifada started, Nadia became restless. Now she wants out. Last January, she filled out her husband's emigration papers but “unlike many of my acquaintances, I chose not to lie about my husband's past political involvement”, says Nadia. When Daoud was sixteen, during the first Intifada, he was active like thousands of other Palestinians. One day, he was arrested by the Israeli army for having thrown a Molotov cocktail at an IDF jeep. These were the charges but this was not what he did. Nadia explains, a helpless look on her face: “Daoud was tortured to confess a crime he did not commit. He threw a bottle with gasoline in it, but it was not lit and he was 30 metres away from the jeep. He was a kid and ended staying four years in jail.”

Since January 2001, the couple has been through many interviews at the US consulate in Jerusalem. In August, they were told that Daoud would probably be denied an emigration visa. Then, Sept. 11 happened and Nadia knows from her lawyer back in the US that Daoud's chances to immigrate to the US are dimmer than ever. “If he had been a common criminal, they would have accepted him. The fact that he was a political prisoner complicates matters, he is considered a security threat,” says Nadia angrily. She feels betrayed by her government, she feels betrayed because she merely told the truth and knows that Daoud is a decent man that long abandoned politics: “Daoud came to the conclusion that fighting occupation would be much more efficient by getting an education and helping build his future country.”

Nadia feels estranged and depressed. Out of her American cocoon she has discovered what being a Palestinian meant in the occupied territories. To her great despair, she has come to realise that her country of birth was supporting Israel in crushing the Palestinian Intifada. Nadia has become political despite herself: “The US fully supports Israel's occupation and war effort and I think of the many Palestinian-Americans back home that pay taxes to the US government to fund Israel, my parents included, without realising the impact of their money here. I am in complete shock. I did not understand that when I was in the US, I was not aware of what it meant to live under occupation.”

She admits her naÔvetÈ. Her move to Palestine was going to be an experience not unlike that undertaken by many teenage Americans when they go to live a year abroad in the course of their undergraduate studies. For her, there was also naturally the idea of going back to her roots, a daring move that she is the only one in her family to have made. But after a harsh reality check, she feels she can no longer take “being Palestinian here.” Yet, Nadia's story is more complex than it seems for she now has reservations about being American as well, knowing what she now knows about her country's involvement in the region. A psychologist by training, she talks of “an identity crisis” to describe what she is going through.

She went back to San Francisco last July and felt “some disgust,” realising that some people from her own American-Palestinian community don't even understand or care about the magnitude and seriousness of the Israeli occupation. “It saddened me all the more that I used to be like them, blinded.”

Nadia the psychologist sought some psychological help herself. She needed to talk to a professional rather than to her family that was expectedly urging her to come back, even at the price of leaving her husband, concerned for her safety. During that short trip back home, she also understood the many faults of her own society: “Having lived in a Third World country, I got sensitised to the violence, the crime, the lack of safety, the condition of women, of minorities, especially African-Americans.” To her, America is no longer what it claims it is and what she believed it was: A free country where everybody, regardless of their race or gender, can make it.

After Sept. 11, she has a hard time imagining going back to the US, although she admits being so desperate at times that she would consider packing and leaving. “I remember that my husband's cousin was horrified when 5,000 people were killed in the US. It is a tragedy for sure, but I told him that this number was the same number of Palestinians that have been killed since the beginning of the Intifada relative to the population size of the two countries. In America, 5,000 people died and it was over. Here, Palestinians continue to die and will continue to die. The occupation will also continue to plague our lives,” says Nadia.

With Daoud's unlikely prospect of ever immigrating to the US, the couple is now seeking to move to Canada. “Daoud has his BA, I have an MA, so we should qualify for emigration. For the time being, we are looking at schools for Daoud to get his MA in political science. Once we secure a student visa for him, we'll see whether we can emigrate.”

When Nadia and Daoud leave, they will add themselves to the long list of educated Palestinians and professionals that have already left the occupied territories. Nadia knows that Daoud is committed to his country, the country she could not take: “He will want to come back, I know that. I guess I could come back if Palestinians were no longer under occupation and if there were a country free and democratic, but it all seems a far-away prospect. For sure it will take more than five years to get and build such a country. Look at the civil right movement in the US; it took a long time for desegregation to take place. Look at South Africa. Moreover, I don't see any vision on the Palestinian side, at least as far as the current leadership is concerned.”

For More Information Contact: emigration@emigrations.net