Saturday, January 20, 2007

On Palestinian nationalism...

My friend Mimi asked me last night what is it with Palestinians only wanting to marry Palestinians? She argued that my father is Palestinian, and yet he married a Lebanese... so why am I so insistent on my guy being Palestinian. As I was explaining to her, I realized that t all has to do with nationalism.

I want to marry a Palestinian, because I want my kids to have the Palestinian identity, I want to raise them 100% Palestinian. I want them to stand up for her, call for her, bleed for her, and cry for her. I want them to know that they come from a country that is suffering from being raped onetime after another. I want them to raise their voices and state that they are Palestinians. Obviously, no one knows what the future holds, but I would prefer for them to grow up knowing that their father is from there, their ancestors are from there. I want them to be as passionate about it as I am. I want them to be more active as well. I want to raise them to be able to recite both narratives -Arab and Israeli- by the age of 10. I want them to be able to shut any Zionist up by the age of 12. I want to instill in them the need to fight for her, even if they never saw her, touched her, saw her moon or smelled her beaches.

I guess I want to do all that because I feel that it is the least we could do for her. We should insist on Palestinian nationalism being engraved in our children, even if they reject it at first, only because if we do not, she will be forgotten. She will have no one to look out for her, to feel for her, or to scream for her. In time, people will forget that she needs someone to hold her up high, that she needs to lean on someone to stay upright. People will forget how much she has bled, how hard she fought to hold on, how badly hurt she was. In time, she will be lost, and that could never happen. We have to keep fighting for her, we have to struggle for her, and it is our duty to raise generations that will do that.

Golda Meir once said "The old will die and the young will forget". My reply to Meir? Go screw yourself. The bond we have with the land, even though most of us have never even seen a glimpse of it, is one that travels by blood. It will never fade away, it will not be easily forgotten. History has taught us that!!!


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