Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family by Najla Said

Author:Najla Said [Said, Najla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-01T05:00:00+00:00

I SET OUT TO FIND a way to exploit the “good” things about being Arab, to make myself at least seem as if I were beautiful, mysterious, and exotic, even if I privately knew otherwise. If eighth and ninth grades had been my horrible, ugly, awkward, and chubby years, I was determined for the remaining years of high school to fashion myself into the “beauty” that friends like Jenny insisted I was.

By this point, in the early ’90s, my dad had become quite famous. It was impossible not to notice the way people acted around him and how they reacted to the fact that he was my father. Or was it that I now had a greater appreciation for his accomplishments? I no longer felt the embarrassment in my elegant, cosmopolitan parents that I had felt when I was younger. But that doesn’t mean I was actually comfortable with my own Arab-ness.

There were still those moments like these in my life: The bus pass lady at school once said to me loudly, “Your father is Gaddafi, right???” I felt the long line of students behind me lean forward with curiosity, grabbed the pass from her, mumbled something corrective and apologetic, and walked away.

I was still a non-Zionist in a sea of Zionists. When Jenny asked me if it bothered me that her parents were Zionists, I said no, because it didn’t. Then I went home and asked my parents what that actually meant. They explained that Zionism was a political movement that was exclusionary, inasmuch as it asserted that Israel retain its Jewish character, within at least parts of historic Palestine. I knew Jenny and her parents had been to Israel a handful of times and considered it a place for Jews, but that hadn’t surprised me, or made me uncomfortable, because I also knew, very clearly, that her parents adored me, and had no cultural or racist misconceptions about Palestinians. In fact, they knew more about what was going on in Palestine than any other Jewish people I had ever met.

I knew that my parents were against violence in all its forms, and I knew that it wasn’t fair that my dad was born in a place called Palestine that ultimately became a place called Israel. I didn’t know it then but I believed in social justice and had been steeped in secular, humanistic thought since birth. I believed in the cause of a people that others quickly labeled “terrorists.” This “cause” that I was attached to was definitely not something I thought of as in any way noble or just, though. In my adolescent consciousness, it was an embarrassing nuisance that made me different from my friends. I wished it weren’t something I had to think about. I continued to wish that I were just “a quarter Irish, a quarter Scottish, a quarter German, and a quarter Swedish” like all my friends seemed to be.

When I entered high school, in the fall of 1988, the Palestinian intifada, which had begun a year earlier, was well under way.

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