Freedom Is an Inside Job by Zainab Salbi

Author:Zainab Salbi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

As I struggled with my loss of David’s friendship and processed the meaning of my hidden arrogance, I thought of Rami Elhanan. Rami was an Israeli father whose fourteen-year-old daughter had been killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers. She had been riding a city bus with a couple of friends to buy books for school when the bus exploded. Rami had grown up in Jerusalem, as a loyal citizen in a Zionist household. He had served in the Israeli army and was proud of his country. He saw himself as defending Israel and his family from Palestinians, who, he was taught, had an inferior culture and base values.

When his daughter was killed, his heart was torn open. In the midst of his pain, he asked himself a question that had never occurred to him before: Why do the Palestinians hate us so much? His daughter was just an innocent teenage girl, after all. She wasn’t a soldier or a vigilante. She had no agenda. Why would Palestinians hate her so much they’d kill themselves to take her life? Why were they fighting with everything they had—with stones, bombs, and human lives? Why were they so angry? To answer these questions, he went into his rage and pain, to where his own inner “enemy” lived, to find out how to relate to the feelings and the drive of these people whose actions had hurt him so deeply. It meant questioning what he’d been taught his entire life.

Rami started reaching out to Palestinian parents who had also lost their children. He joined the Parents Circle, a group of six-hundred-plus bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families who had all lost family in the seemingly endless conflict between their nations. By crossing checkpoints into Palestinian territories in the West Bank to talk to parents, he began to understand their losses and their anger. He heard stories of a nine-year-old Palestinian girl shot in the head by an Israeli soldier as she came out of school during a curfew; a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy imprisoned for two years for demonstrating with a Palestinian flag in the street with a handful of his high school friends during a curfew; a Palestinian mother who lost her baby when she was not allowed across a checkpoint during childbirth.

After hearing many, many stories of Palestinian grievances, Rami started seeing what he had never known of the reality that Palestinians live in. His eyes were opened to who the “enemy”—whom he’d hated before—actually was. They were ordinary people like him whose homes were demolished while extended families still lived inside them; they were whole villages and towns cut off by giant walls so that people could not leave to work or support themselves.

Instead of hating the faceless Palestinian aggressors and wanting to kill them for killing his daughter, Rami started to stand alongside them. Working together with them in this way gave him a reason to get up in the morning. As he journeyed toward truth, Rami realized that as a proud Israeli, he had actually protected his ignorance of Palestinians.

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