The Harvard Independent has a fine piece in on two Palestinian freshmen, titled "Citizens of Nowhere." One of the students grew up in a refugee camp in Tyre, Lebanon. The other lives on the West Bank. His village is bisected by the hateful wall.
Says the Tyre youth:
Refugee schools, he pointed out, are taught by refugees themselves, and
therefore inculcate young people with the cultural memory of a
homeland. “Jews were out of Israel for 3,000 years and made it back.
Now Palestinians are doing the same thing of belonging to a place.”
The other student offered a moderate point of view:
Majadla does not think that Israel could carry all of the blame, especially with the current civil war between Fatah and Hamas.
“It’s like a feudal system, where everybody is trying to be the
feudal lord and nobody is willing to be the peasant,” he said of the
current conflict. “They resort to Arab primitive — ‘I want to be the
leader and not you.’”
The article is noteworthy because once again, we are seeing Palestinians treated as human beings with a legitimate grievance in an American publication, albeit one on the margins. There is no effort in the article to get the "other" side of the story. The Palestinians have nuanced views, but they are sharply critical of Israel. One’s grandfather was forced to leave in ’48. The article is further evidence of the fact that Americans are growing impatient with the old Exodus/democracy narrative of Israel. Somethin’s shakin’ loose. Soon Palestinians will be telling these stories in the mainstream…
