Being Jerusalemite : A Jordanian Refugee in Israel

My daughter went to the Residency Office in Lyon to renew her residency as a student over there. She studied in France for four years, and things were usually fine.

I told her about my bitter experience of today’s suppressive feelings as I renewed her sister’s Travel document from the Ministry of Interior in “East” Jerusalem.

We both agreed that the treatment was different regardless of the long wait.

However, as if there is a curse following the Palestinian being, she sent me an hour later a photo with her new residency written on it: “A Jordanian refugee in Israel.”

Initially, she tried to rationalize with them, saying this was wrong. She is not a Jordanian refugee in Israel.

They insisted she was.

She was trying to explain to them that she was Jerusalemite. She tried to explain her status, and they insisted she was lying and that she was a refugee.

Somehow, together with the crisis of refugees, she was a cause of threat as an assumed refugee. A confirmed refugee after that new residency gave the employee a reason to panic and considered her a potential threat, to the level where she forced her to leave. And when my daughter refused to insist that this was a mistake, they called the police or got her out.

The woman was telling her: You are a liar. You are a refugee. This is not even a passport that you are carrying.

My daughter called me crying, trying to get out of the whole feeling of humiliation she experienced being dragged out of place by the police in front of people watching her in what felt like a public humiliation act. She was questioning something else: “ Am I a Jordanian refugee?” the whole thing made her question her identity. What she knows as basic rights. All those laws define her special status as a person living under occupation with a special status. A status that international law, with a country like France that secures the current situation of Jerusalem secures the status of Jerusalemites.

While we spend our lives carrying a nationality that is not ours. Living in our country as “immigrants,” moving around with a document that is not a passport that calls on a state of panic each time we check through borders. Moreover, then an employee who decided to carry on the Zionist vision of Israel with Jerusalem as the unified capital with no dignified, someday dead people also forces us on new definitions.

Did this woman decide a law? Alternatively, was it her idea?

This is a question that the French government should answer.