Earlier this year, the Israeli army gave me a permit to leave the 11-by-40 kilometer Gaza Strip for the first time in my life and travel to the United States for work. Last month, I left again – this time, to see the rest of Palestine and Israel. The one-hour trip from the Israel-Gaza crossing to Jerusalem felt like a journey to a distant world.
I have always dreamed of smelling Jerusalem’s air and hearing the call to prayer ring from its mosques. When the prospect of traveling there was still a distant dream, I told a colleague, “I just hope to have the chance to pray in al-Aqsa Mosque before I die.”
“I felt like a prisoner released on bail, thrilled just to breathe unpolluted air and to see open space, so much light and no darkness.”
On my first trip outside Gaza at age 31. Read my story: https://t.co/lM1vrpIUeM
https://t.co/g3OtKkKxG8 via @YouTube— Abier-Almasri (@abier_i) March 19, 2018
I couldn’t sleep the night before my journey to Jerusalem to perform Friday prayers at al-Aqsa. All that stood between me and my dreams was a short drive and the Qalandia checkpoint, which divides Palestinians living in Ramallah from those in East Jerusalem, both within the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Having lived for years under Israeli closure, which has turned Gaza effectively into an open-air prison, what’s a checkpoint when you possess a precious permit to leave, I asked myself.
I was wrong. Packed tightly together, hundreds of Palestinians and I waited for metal turnstiles to turn for 30 seconds every 15 or 20 minutes, to allow a small group to advance and present their papers. An argument broke out when one person tried to cut in line. A woman fainted waiting her turn. Was I about to miss perhaps the only chance in my life to pray at al-Aqsa? I felt the humiliation of daily life under occupation in the West Bank, of being made to feel I don’t belong in my own homeland.
Two hours later, I finally walked through the turnstiles, showed a soldier my permit, and crossed over. We drove as fast as we could to al-Aqsa and dashed inside. We missed the sermon, but the imam, as if waiting for us, called everyone to pray just as we arrived.
“Friends & family back home keep asking, ‘How’s life outside #Gaza?’ I can’t answer. How to tell people who live on 4 to 6 hours of electricity that high-rise buildings in NYC leave their lights on 24 hours a day, simply because it looks nice?”: https://t.co/lM1vrpIUeM pic.twitter.com/gVQt2sGf54
— Abier-Almasri (@abier_i) March 20, 2018
Al-Aqsa was even more spectacular than I had imagined. I couldn’t hold back the tears – both of joy at beholding its beauty, and of sadness that such a majestic place has witnessed a half-century of ugly, abusive military occupation, where soldiers control who can pray there.
I also fell in love with Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jaffa, Acre, and Haifa during my whirlwind tour, snapping pictures everywhere that I could to share with family and friends back home.
I’m now back in Gaza, not sure if I’ll ever be able to return. But I remember the sights and smells, and wait for the day that everyone in Gaza can travel freely.
This post was originally published on Human Rights Watch’s site on August 20, 2018.
Thank you for sharing some of your story, Abier Ismail Almasri.
Interestingly enough, I just read this story by Samer Badawi @- +972. It’s a converse story to yours:
“Fortress Israel and the quiet dignity of Palestinian resistance
Peter Beinart’s interrogation at Ben Gurion Airport made headlines not because of his clout as a public intellectual, but thanks to the quiet dignity of Palestinian children, women and men who have endured Fortress Israel for years.
I first lost my father in the heat of a Jericho summer, 20 years ago this week. He disappeared, or so it seemed, between the river and the “rest area,” a concrete-columned bus depot known to Arabs as the istiraha. Teeming with travelers, some on their way to Jordan, others inbound for the West Bank, it was an easy place to lose one’s bearings, and foreign tourists were known to bypass it by paying extra for a private cab.
My father, though, was no tourist. Born and raised in the West Bank town of Tulkarem, he had lost his right to return in the 1967 war, when his absence — he was a medical student in Baghdad — cost him his residency.
For years, Baba had balked at the idea of returning. “Samer, in the final analysis,” he would say, employing a favorite phrase, “I simply can’t ask permission to visit my own home.” But five years after the Oslo Accords, he, like others of his generation, the last to be born before 1948, sensed his time was short. He began to ponder the possibility of an imperfect homecoming.
After months of jockeying, I had managed to get him an Israeli-issued permit to enter the West Bank. A cousin, still a resident of Tulkarem, had used his hawiya, or Palestinian identity card, to sponsor Baba, and the timing — late August, with its promise of freshly picked figs — was enough to sway him toward the trip. …
But he was not on the next bus. Hour after hour passed, and my father was nowhere to be seen. I had no way of knowing where he was or what had happened to him, so I wove my way frantically through each busload of descending passengers, interrupting the reunions to ask if someone, anyone, had seen a tall man with green eyes, combed-back gray hair, and a mustache that made him look, for all the world, like Omar Sharif.
Five hours of this, and countless buses later, he arrived.
At some point after we leave our parents’ home, we children learn to brace ourselves for the inevitable signs of aging that accompany each reunion. The signs — weight gained in the eyes or a raspiness brought on by years of smoking — seem more stark with each return, compounding our angst before the next one. The first time I returned to Abu Dhabi, after a year away at college, I eyed my father from behind a glass wall, where I waited in line for my passport stamp. I saw a slump in his shoulders and, though he smiled back at me, I could only guess that the elder Bush’s war, which had ended months before, had taken a toll on him. …
As for my father, he vowed never to return as a visitor again. And though I buried him last year, on a hill overlooking an olive grove, he left volumes of letters to remind me: This is our story — our Palestinian story — and it will not be lost.
My Dear Ones,
As I told you a couple of days ago, I have left Saida for Damascus to finalize some paperwork and visit my cardiologist. I did my tests yesterday in preparation for my appointment tomorrow night. Thank God, the lab results are very good. Dr. Ayman will be very pleased but will probably give me shit for gaining some eight kilograms!
As you probably have noticed, the political situation in Lebanon is not stable these days. No one knows where or when and how it is going to end. We have not decided to leave Lebanon as yet but will remain ready to move quickly should circumstances demand it. Towards this end, I will go to Jordan for a few days. This will give us a valid option should we need to move again.
How incredible Palestinian suffering is. It is not enough that we couldn’t find a place to call home and live in it with dignity. We can not even find a place to die in peace.
I love you all and am proud to be your father.
Dad.”
https://972mag.com/fortress-israel-and-the-quiet-dignity-of-palestinian-resistance/137374/
Thank you for sharing your life with us.
I cannot look at a picture of the Dome without being reminded of an oddity of History:
When Umar marched into Jerusalem with an army, he asked Ka’b (al-Ahbar, a Yemenite Jewish Rabbi), “Where do you advise me to build a place of worship?” Ka‘b indicated the Temple Rock, now a gigantic heap of ruins from the temple of Jupiter.
The Jews, Ka‘b explained, had briefly won back their old capital a quarter of a century before (when Persians overran Syria and Palestine), but they had not had time to clear the site of the Temple, for the Rums (Byzantines) had recaptured the city. It was then that Umar ordered the rubbish on the Ṣakhra (rock) to be removed by the Nabataeans, and after three showers of heavy rain had cleansed the Rock, he instituted prayers there. Umar is said to have fenced it and, some years later, an Umayyad Khalif built the Dome of the Rock over the site as an integral part of the Aqsa Mosque. Until this day, the place is known as ḳubbat al-ṣakhra, the Dome of the Rock.
According to tradition, Ka‘b believed that “Every event that has taken place or will take place on any foot of the earth, is written in the Tourat (Torah), which God revealed to his Prophet Moses”.
https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FKa%E2%80%99b_al-Ahbar%3ASqb4EVsEAZMF5KAwDnNCcBeNKkE&cuid=4137049
The Israelis are bastards part 532
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/22/our-memories-have-vanished-the-palestinian-theatre-destroyed-in-a-bomb-strike
‘Al-Aqsa was even more spectacular than I had imagined. I couldn’t hold back the tears – both of joy at beholding its beauty, and of sadness that such a majestic place has witnessed a half-century of ugly, abusive military occupation, where soldiers control who can pray there.
I also fell in love with Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jaffa, Acre, and Haifa during my whirlwind tour, snapping pictures everywhere that I could to share with family and friends back home.
I’m now back in Gaza, not sure if I’ll ever be able to return. But I remember the sights and smells, and wait for the day that everyone in Gaza can travel freely.’
She lives an hour away and may not be able again to experience and sites and sounds of her own country. There seems to be no earthly end in sight to jewish injustice in palestine. What does one have to do to oneself to be so cognitively impaired 24/7 x 70+ years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmAj4Y8hC-c