A fundamental complexity lies at the heart of Palestinian childhood: you are surrounded by love in its purest forms, and you are surrounded by violence in its most insidious forms. You feel both equally, though you understand neither fully. Or at least I didn’t - not until years after we fled.
My name is Samar. It means “evening conversations”, mostly referring to stories shared through music and poetry, an ancient oral tradition in Arabic and Islamic cultures. I can neither sing nor rhyme, but I do enjoy telling stories. Stories have always been my favourite way of getting to know the world.
I grew up in al-Bireh, a town so closely adjacent to the Palestinian city of Ramallah that it is considered its suburb. Travellers passing through Ramallah today may find it difficult to imagine the sheer destruction that was brought onto it in the early 2000s, during a period of near-daily violence known as the Second Intifada. Modern high-rises now stand in the place of their bullet-ridden predecessors and sleek cars drive over roads that were once dusty rubble.
Twenty years ago, evidence of war seemed to permeate every molecule of the city. Nowadays, one has to drive away from the city’s main streets to encounter the aesthetics of violence. There, for most travellers, the concrete slabs of the Separation Barrier (also referred to as the Apartheid Wall), are usually what catches the eye.
The city of Ramallah itself has become the urban nucleus of neoliberal fantasies of Palestinian Statehood; a stifled state of existence in which justice and self-determination for everyone have been substituted with consumeristic progress for the few. It operates with a false sense of normalcy that obscures, at least to the untrained eye, the extent to which violence continues to affect everyday life.
Nobody under the age of fifty-five has known life without occupation or apartheid, but if you are wealthy enough you can buy Alo Yoga's bum-sculpting leggings for NIS 550 (ca. £125/$150) at a high-end sports shop. To put this into perspective, the average daily wage in the West Bank is NIS 110 (ca. £26/$32). The system works for very few people, and yet it seems more entrenched than ever before. But that’s a story for another time.
The Ramallah and Palestine that I grew up in in the 1990s and early 2000s were different. Some would say better. Certainly, in the early 1990s, enough Palestinians seemed hopeful about life in their homeland - perhaps for the very first time.
I was 18 months old when my parents decided to leave London and make their way to Palestine. My family was amongst an unknown but significant number of Palestinians living abroad that returned home around the time of the Oslo Accords. It is important to note here that only those with the right papers were able to make that choice. Many Palestinians were forced, by nature of their location or documentation, to remain displaced. But that, too, is a story for another time.
The Oslo Accords were interim peace agreements between Israeli and Palestinian representatives. Signed in 1993 and 1994, they were meant to establish a five-year temporary period of semi-autonomous rule for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza under the newly minted Palestinian Authority. This governance body would be led by Yasser Arafat and overseen by Israel, which would maintain strategic military control over the Occupied Territories. Arafat had been a prominent figure in the guerrilla movement against Israel since the 1950s, as well as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation since 1969; a UN-recognised official representative of the Palestinian people that operated from exile. In return for semi-autonomous governance, Arafat agreed to recognise Israel and denounce terrorism.
The delineation of borders, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their indigenous lands, the status of Jerusalem, and Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories (the most critical fault lines of the Palestinian question) were pushed into the future as so-called “final status” issues. Today, almost thirty years later, these issues are not just unresolved; they seem more intractable than ever before.
In fact, it would take less than a decade after the signing of the Oslo Accords for the situation on the ground to deteriorate substantially. As a result, the years of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) became the deadliest chapter of the Palestinian question to date.
Despite its continued provision of humanitarian aid, the international community failed to make any substantial political interventions during the intifada. This political paralysis resulted from a combination of ineptitude, fatigue and a shift in policy agendas after 9/11. This remained unchanged throughout the intifada, even when its devastation reached an all-encompassing peak in 2002.
However, the international community was quick to erect new dwellings almost immediately after the violence had tapered off, perhaps eager to restore an aesthetics of normality to an infrastructure, politics, economy and society that had been eviscerated in ways it is still coming to terms with twenty years later. The Ramallah I left in September 2002 looked nothing like the Ramallah I see today, and yet the impact of the Second Intifada on Palestinians continues to reveal itself in new ways as time passes.
I was part of a very specific subset of evisceration: that of the social bonds among Palestinians that were irreparably changed by the war. In my case, my mother’s decision to leave Palestine with my sister and me - leaving behind my father, extended family and close friends - ended life as I knew it in more ways than I was prepared for.
When I speak to my extended family in Palestine about our departure, opinions are divided. Some maintain that they would never leave their homeland, regardless of how dark times might get. Others say that they would have chosen to leave too if the option had been available to them at the time. Others say they would choose to leave today if they could.
“Choice” is a misleading term here. Nobody chooses to leave their home so radically and irreversibly unless they are pushed to their very limits; unless the unknown prospects of life on the other side of a perilous extraction somehow seem a worthwhile risk; unless their home - penetrated by bullets, the smell of teargas and the voices of enemy soldiers - is suddenly no longer a home at all.
Most of the people who wanted to leave Palestine during the Second Intifada were never able to. Most of the people who want to leave Palestine today will never be able to. Not all people in need of refuge are equal in the eyes of the world. Not all are welcomed with open arms in foreign lands, with instructional leaflets written in their native language, with strangers carrying the colours of their flag in solidarity.
Most people are lucky if they reach Europe after months on the road, in the backs of trucks, or on boats. The relief of arrival then swiftly makes place for the uncertainty of asylum centres, makeshift camps, or even prisons. Some might become lucky enough to commence a semblance of normal life in their new countries. And even then, some wait a lifetime to obtain a secure legal status.
A singular variable separates me from the common experience of forced displacement: I was born to a Dutch mother, which automatically made me a Dutch citizen, too. This was regardless of the fact that I had never lived in the Netherlands before we fled Palestine. Apart from my light skin, my collection of Dutch-dubbed Disney VHS tapes and my white-blonde sister, nothing about my life until then had been marked by my half-Dutchness.
For a long time, I felt uneasy about the privilege that my second nationality afforded me. In fact, for a long time, it prevented me from identifying as part of the diaspora community, even though I felt deeply out of place in the Netherlands. For a long time, it prevented me from telling my stories, because I felt uneasy taking up space to speak about a situation in which so many have it so much worse.
I had fled war, but was I a refugee? I had witnessed a war, but did I have the right to narrate it?
I was eleven years old when we fled, and so although I could have hardly understood the magnitude of what was happening, I think that part of me knew. I see it in my drawings and my diary entries at the time: attempts to record and narrate something bigger than me. Though my native language was Arabic, I wrote and read in English from a young age because my parents believed it to be the gateway to the world.
I obviously recognise my own thoughts in my diary entries. I was acutely aware of what was going on around me. I was encountering violence on a daily basis. And yet I also recognise a narrative that is alien to me, a vocabulary that I know was not yet mine at that age. In this narrative, I recognise echoes of adult discourse that I had overheard and absorbed as my own. I think that children do this regardless of their circumstances. Particularly in war, however, I think that children look towards adults to articulate the things they are too young to comprehend but are forced to reckon with nonetheless. To me, nothing is more illustrative of this than the above diary entry in which I write about “wore”, not knowing how to spell the word “war” itself.
I have come to understand that this is how many Palestinians engage in the process of memory. We possess the memories of our ancestors before we can make our own. We know narrative before we know our own place in it. Our stories span across generations, as do our memories.
I spent many years trying to untangle these layers, first driven by the pressure of societies and academic systems that demanded a vapid sense of balance over difficult truths, then driven by the desire to live a fully examined life. I learned to adjust my vocabulary, to filter and edit my thoughts. I learned to question everything but that which I had witnessed with my own eyes. And even that, I learned to revisit.
Perhaps the most unhelpful thing I learned was to artificially separate my memories and experiences as a Palestinian from my work as a policy researcher and academic on Palestine. The only part of me that I was allowed to keep in my professional life was my native language, which bosses and colleagues paraded as a marker of legitimacy, unaware of how much my Arabic had in fact eroded in adulthood.
I don’t want to be reduced to a vessel for a cause, as much as I know that this desire is born out of the privilege of being able to opt-out. But I also don’t want to submit to colonial systems of knowledge, in which indigenous historiographies - especially oral history - tend to be ridiculed, discredited, and ultimately excluded from the realm of “serious” academic thought.
What I return to in the end are the stories I can tell without a doubt, the contours of which I trace with my own eyes and ears, the smells of which I can recall as if I were still there. They are stories that begin with memories that present themselves to me almost as mysteries: I am standing in front of my childhood home and I see a helicopter approaching. It drops a bomb, then it flies away again. That is all my memory gives me. Until I investigate it, stringing together different clues, be it from other people’s memories or from archival research. Only then do I understand why the helicopter was there and what it did. But that’s another story for later.
It has been difficult to find a space for these stories. They are not quite analytical enough to be considered academic or policy writing, and not quite literary enough to be considered prose. It has also been difficult to find a way to tell them while keeping them safe from other people’s agendas. Opponents of the Palestinian narrative are quick to silence us. Proponents of the Palestinian narrative are quick to reduce our stories to pity parties. I have always felt stifled by both.
Wore Stories is an attempt to do something on my own terms. This essay series will bring together memoir and research to tell stories of Palestine unlike any you’ve read before. I hope you’ll come along for the journey.