Incoherence or Paradigm: to go or not to go to bed with your Rapist

Incoherence or paradigm

I am thinking of the flag color I want to hold as I announce my surrender to reality. Going through the airport as a Palestinian remains like an actual suspicious item that makes you, at some point, seriously suspect your species.

This apparent fact of life being an anomaly didn’t suppress my thoughts of surrender.

In a particular city, I don’t remember, you stand before an old fountain, turn your head, throw a cent, and make a wish. The cent would be thrown anyway, but the trick is to have the percent fall not just in the fountain but inside a particular place in that basin to make your wish come true. I remember trying to throw as many cents that failed even to touch the fountain, and as usual, I found the excuses, on top of which I am left-handed and, of course, Palestinian!!!

I want to throw this cent of thought that I know wouldn’t make it any close to any fountain. But yet, I have to make this confession of a realization.

I lived my entire life dreaming of a day I would feel free. Free of occupation. After all, I was conceived when the Arab nation was mourning the loss\ death of Jamal Abdul Nasser, the last Arab nationalist. This should have affected who I am. But in the end, I was pushing out to come to this earth in Jericho, where the myth takes us to the fall of the city’s walls in front of the first Israelites. And my destiny in being Jerusalemite. A spell, a curse, or an enigma of a city as Jerusalem holds within its every stone.

After four decades of carrying the burden of being a result of blood treason under a notion of nationalism, a surrendering city under a concept of a miracle, and a defeated soul inside a continuously raped city … I feel it is time to raise my flag of accepting the reality.

The reality of the Palestinian notion of a Palestine that will never exist. A Palestine that continued to be a dream inside a reality of a nightmare. I don’t know if I am going through a paradigm shift or a state of anger. I am not angry, though. I feel ashamed. I feel ashamed of the reality of our history that persisted in not changing. A whole life of wrong notions based on parts of the truth and constant brainwashing. A complete set of systems in everything we breathe, from education to culture to religion, all in a politically deformed existence.

I felt the shame of a continuous failure of leadership that continued to buy and sell first in the land and when the land was gone with us—the people.

The feeling of being so naïve, believing in everything I believed in.

This image may explain how it is going at this instant in my head. …

I feel like a beautiful well-raised aristocratic woman who was raped by a scum of a man who fantasized about her and was obsessed with her and got disillusioned, and one day he decided to rape her. She has twins, and she condemns the rapist and tries his best to prove that he is fit for her. He works on himself to be the man she deserves. She hates him. Despises him, a feudal cousin comes on the scene and decides to marry her. A man of honor. She quickly falls in his incredible favor. She gives in entirely to him and feels of worth and honor. A day in. A day out. A month. A year. A decade after another, this husband proves nothing but possessiveness, control, a macho, useless, lazy, unambitious, a loser, spoilt, corrupt, cheater, a gambler, alcoholic… whatever makes him enjoy his day and time in any possible way. He takes her for granted. She gives him one chance, ten thousand chances of changing and improving. She gives him excuses. She tries to help. She begs. She pleas. It is just about him and around him. She starts to perish. Her children suffer. Her property fades along with her youth and beauty. The rapist stays around. After all, it is her kids she carries. It is his love for her. His obsession. She is what he wants. He converts. He learns. He works harder. He gets rich. He becomes powerful. He begs. He pleas. He urges. He sneaks. He tries. He pressures. He uses every single way to have her.

One day, she wakes up and looks at herself to realize that divorce is inevitable for her cousin. And maybe that insists obsessive man who was once a rapist did it all out of love, out of seeking recognition. Perhaps he wasn’t as evil as she saw him after all. Look at him and her cousin.

Something inside me always wanted to believe in a day when the Palestinian cause will win. When Palestine will be a reality. The dream of Palestine vanished within the decades of a vicious occupation and corrupt leadership that continued to breed itself with corruption. After decades of the same politics of corruption with leadership, that only changed the name of its men as they died and replaced with a system that the cause of Palestine has never been on their real agenda. They have been prospering, becoming rich, becoming powerful, and becoming pathetically disgusting in their greed. All under the name of a Palestine that they gave up long before the making of Israel.

A build-up of a state or nation needs a leadership that can bring the people into being, not a direction that makes its being on the people.

A leadership after the other, and tragedies of this being named Palestine have been evaporating into nothing—no more land to dream of. No sovereignty. No economics. No dignity. There is no hope for a future of liberation. Liberation is no longer a notion. Occupation became a fact of life, as much as the wall, the checkpoint, and the daily humiliation. For what? For an authority on leadership, that sucks?

I am standing at this challenging moment of an intersection of choice or a realization I am unsure about. But Israel seems to be a lesser evil in the current state of affairs.

At least being a Palestinian surrendering to Israel’s autonomy and power will give me more power as a Palestinian to fight for my freedom as a human being—something I will never find in a Palestine of leadership that will continue to be the same.

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In an ironic twist, I would say I was thinking about all this on my way out of the country. I was “scanned” in the airport, and “anomaly detection” showed on the screen. I was giggling from within, thinking something in me was like that transgender woman they stopped some days ago in an airport in the U.S.A. The anomaly wasn’t in my sexual organs (thank goodness) but was in my abdomen. I usually go to the airport with minimal clothing so that nothing can ring. I double-check, ensuring no metal is attached anywhere, even in my underwear. One becomes an expert by traveling to Ben Gurion airport. But this time, as they, of course, decided I had to be body searched, the friendly security woman continued to apologize, and I continued to assure her it was ok; I was ready to strip at their convenience. It was a surprise when the other lovely woman said the scanning machine showed something like a scar on my stomach. “Have you had an operation here?” she asked nicely. And I was: “Which injury exactly do you mean.” Well, one has to be very precise regarding my precious scars. And I was amusingly explaining to them my scars pointing to my abdomen. I started showing her the map of my children, and I said, laughing: “These are Palestinian children.”…

Anomaly…..I repeated to myself.

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It has been exactly ten days since I wrote this. The eruption of the events hasn’t occurred then. As harsh as it may sound or as efficiently influencing my usual state of mind, my automatic relation to the situation of my secret marriage and divorce is a natural resemblance. Luckily, I was not in the worst-case scenario when I decided to leave at the dead end of the wedding, as I was still relatively young, but I remember that situation of continuing to give that man a chance. And each time, he insisted on proving that running as far as I could was best. Today, ten years later, I fully acknowledge my decision and admit that my naivety had to do much with what continued to occur. Naivety should be a characteristic in the Palestinian mind. This week of eruptive incidents, I have again brought us as a nation into this anguish of a feeling mixed with some hope that a miracle will occur. The miracle we want is as simple as a miracle of a life with some dignity. The sparkle in the street and among the young generation proves once again that the Palestinian blood is that of resilience that also characterizes the Palestinian hearts. Everyone prayed in his way that the leadership would stand up for what it should.

It is not a matter of declaring war against Israel. This would be suicide. But in the simplest way of standing up for their own words and statements. When Abbas made his “firework” bomb announcement, he made a “threat” to end Oslo. It was less than a few days, and while hundreds of Palestinians were wounded and four were at least killed, he came out to say that he respects the agreements and he was pledging Israel to commit to any contract they signed. He practically disappeared from the scene while bulldozers and tanks waved in the West Bank streets. The unfortunate statements came from the different leadership levels. The confirmation from Israel’s side that together with Abbas, they decided to coordinate even more and not allow the situation to deteriorate makes this leadership in its last instant of existence to someone like me.

I have never thought I would declare my detachment from this leadership. Until that last moment, I prayed that there should be hope.

As the people themselves proved that they were still alive. The leadership showed that it doesn’t belong to the people.

We continue as people to struggle to survive this harsh Israel of a fascist state that is marked by racism. A Palestinian state is no longer what I yearn to see. It is just a Palestinian proper build-up. And like many, it will be a personal build-up from within the very basic, what one’s own family and existence are.

I feel lost in this state of severe loss. Again, it is like that feeling accompanied by divorce. But somehow, seeing the natural face of Israel doesn’t make it a choice for a husband. And that much attachment to this Palestinian identity makes decisions null in this dramatic state of being.

It is hard to be a Palestinian, and it is impossible to get rid of the Palestinian that resides within.

My flag remains that of the color that mixes my identity with an olive tree so rooted in, and branches that spread out like veins filled with pure oil blood and carry black and green olives…

A state of an incoherent paradigm.