From Gaza Correspondent Falastine M El-Ghezawi….
When RELATIVITY OnLine magazine editor David Anthony Hohol asked me to write about myself as a Palestinian living in Gaza, I was confused about what to say. “Others need to hear directly from you. Don’t worry… just write about you and your experiences,” he said, “The rest will take care of itself.”
I tried to direct my feelings and emotions inward and slowly, my memories took me back many years.
I thought back to when I was just a little girl and not even in school yet. I used to hide inside and feel confused about how the Israelis treated us. To me, they were the monsters. I remember running behind an Israeli Intelligence vehicle, after they arrested my mother and took her to Gaza Central Jail. This happened on the heels of my father being arrested, accused of bombing a Gaza branch of an Israeli Bank. He was also a member of the P.L.O (People’s Liberation Organization), a crime at the time of his arrest in 1979. The United States and Israel considered them to be a terrorist organization until 1991. I was in panic and alone with my grandmother, who did her best to calm me down. Partially paralyzed, I was already old enough to know my grandmother would not be able to care for me and my 9 month old sister.
This tragic fact doubled my fears as we anxiously waited to see what would happen to my mother. After she was interrogated for information, my mother was eventually released, but my father’s trial continued. In the end, he was sentenced to life in jail.
I didn’t know the meaning of life in jail at my age, but nevertheless was soon told I would never see my father again. I loved my father very much, even more than my mother, but she never complained. She worked hard to raise my brother, my sister and me, with my baby brother being born shortly after my father was locked up.
Days passed heavily. The last Friday of the month was always the most special, because it was on that day we could visit my father. It was only once a month and only for thirty minutes, but it was all the Israelis would allow. Until this very day, there is a part of me that remains that lost child staring at the prison entrance, watching the Israeli soldier slide his big iron keys into the lock to open the jail gate, listening to the speakers, waiting for our name to be called so we could visit my beloved father. I used to run to him and kiss his fingers through the iron bars. He did the same to me.
After a while I came to understand that the Israelis were responsible for jailing my father. As I grew older I understood the Israelis were in fact the jailers of my people; the jailers of my identity. When my father was arrested in 1979, people were less political, more involved in their jobs and careers, and few followed the P.L.O. Less than ten years later, at the onset of the First Intifada in 1987, Palestinians rose up against their Israeli occupiers. Israel’s prejudiced and racist treatment of everyday people become too much to bear. They had been either killing or jailing people like my father for years, but my father had stood up to them long before others were there to stand by his side. People began referring to men like my father as a Fedayeen, and I never felt prouder.
One of the ways I felt I could fight back was to study hard. I learned how to read and write even before starting school. The main reason I was so motivated, was so that I could write my father letters and read his. I always made sure to be the first in my class, so I could make my father proud.
No one imagined my father would be released alive again except my grandmother. She always said she would be able to see him before she died and much to everyone’s surprise and joy, that’s what exactly what happened six years later. A prisoner exchange between the P.L.O. and the Israelis in 1985 brought my father back to me. I was overcome with happiness. Finally he’d won his freedom.
For my family and I, it was a great victory and a step towards the freedom of my people and homeland. It was then I knew I would always have to fight what was mine.
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