Growing up Palestinian in the United States

My identity should not be up for negotiation. But sometimes it feels like it is. 

By Tala Alfoqaha

The first time I realized that my identity could make Americans deeply uncomfortable, I was 8 years old. Sitting in a doctor’s office, I watched in silence as my Palestinian mother told the doctor who’d just asked about our ethnicity that we were Jordanian. At the time, her response baffled me. This was the same woman who made my sister and I volunteer at the Palestine booth in the Festival of Nations every year, who dressed me up in my intricately embroidered red-and-black thobe* for any remotely pertinent occasion, who, in my opinion, made the best maqluba* and musakhan* in all of Minnesota, who raised me with pride and certainty in my heritage—and who was now claiming that we were Jordanian? I shot her a quizzical look, yet before I could correct this egregious claim, the doctor remarked, “Oh, nice. I have a friend who’s been there,” and we moved on.

Identity is complicated. Living in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, I grew up watching my parents identify themselves to white Americans with a variety of different ethnic labels—Jordanian, Kuwaiti, vaguely Arab, vaguely Middle Eastern—but rarely ever the label that they instilled in me most strongly at home, rarely ever Palestinian. On the way home from the doctor’s office that day, my mother explained that she didn’t want to be “controversial” by telling the doctor that we were Palestinian. We went to get a check-up, not to start the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I sat in the backseat and nodded silently, toying with the idea that my mere Palestinian-ness could spark conflict. 

Up until that day at the doctor’s office, I had understood my identity in terms of the affirmative—cultural ritual, cuisine, music, dance, embroidery, an intangible homeland that I felt I knew intimately yet had never actually seen. That day at the doctor’s office marked the beginning of a long descent into constructing my identity in terms of its absences—the loss of over 80% of historic Palestine’s land at the hands of Israeli settler-colonialism from 1948 to now, decades of failed “peace” deals, the ahistorical erasure of Palestine from historic representations of the Middle East, the lack of visibility of Palestinians in US media, the exclusion of Palestinian rights from mainstream liberal politics, the sense of feeling stifled, the sense of feeling compromised, the sense of feeling hyperpoliticized. 

Laila** is a freshman at the University of Minnesota. She carries a ten-year plan for her life after college and a sense of bright determination in her eyes. As a Palestinian who grew up in Nablus, she also carries a deep familiarity with injustice. “I was strip-searched,” she said, lowering her voice. We were sitting in the BioMedical Library as she recounted her experience partaking in the most standard college experience: visiting her parents over winter break. She explained that after seeing her Palestinian passport, airport officials in Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport separated her from the rest of the passengers and led her to a windowless room. First, they searched through her phone and laptop. Then, they demanded she take her clothes off. “At first I kept my bra on, but then I had to take that off too.” Laila wore nothing but her underwear as two women patted and interrogated her. “I didn’t really talk for two days after that,” she said.

Laila’s story, while traumatic, is not unique among Palestinians. Invasive searches and hours-long interrogations are part-and-parcel of the pilgrimage to visit family. For Palestinians born in the US, traveling to the West Bank requires deactivating social media, deleting pictures, and attempting to distance yourself from any past Palestinian activism. By writing this story, I risk being deemed a security threat and barred from visiting Palestine—my friends have been denied entry for less. 

That day at the doctor’s office, I did not—I could not—understand that my parents were engaging in an existential negotiation: trading their identity for a sense of stability. Twelve years later, I understand. Palestinians barter to survive. In 1985, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of the earliest Palestinian rights organizations based in the US, was firebombed—twice. The physical attacks followed a larger pattern of routine harassment, threats, blacklisting, and accusations of terrorism. Four decades later, attempts to silence Palestinian rights activists continue: Dunia, a student at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, received three rape threats this past year in response to her advocacy for a resolution urging her university to divest from companies complicit in human rights abuses against Palestinians. She constitutes one of many students whose photos, tweets, and personal information have been posted on “Canary Mission,” a site dedicated to compiling, intimidating, and smearing Palestinian activists. The site’s reach is extensive: three of the past four presidents of the University of Minnesota’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, along with many more general members, have been added to Canary Mission. 

My experience advocating for Palestinian rights has shown me that—despite Israel’s brutal military occupation in the West Bank and all-encompassing land, sea, and air blockade in the Gaza Strip—the discourse in the US spends more time policing my civility than listening to me. I am still searching for the civility in occupation. Checkpoints routinely force Palestinians into hours-long interrogations and strip searches. Home demolitions and forced evictions occur with impunity. 96% of water in the Gaza strip is contaminated. Illegal settlements are openly subsidized by the Israeli government. Electricity blackouts last up to 12 hours every day in Gaza. 42% of the land in the West Bank now belongs to Israeli settlers. Trump embraces these settlements. Even the most liberal politicians in the US still advocate for the long-defunct “two-state solution.” Google Maps can’t even show me a driving route from the West Bank to Gaza. I will not be civil. 

Being Palestinian in the United States entails navigating a web of existential contradictions. We are both inherently political and politically inconsequential. We watch students who denounce the maltreatment of Native Americans and Black Americans in the US accept free trips to Israel and participate in similar structures of settler-colonialism and ethnically-based brutality abroad. At the same time, as inhabitants of the US, Palestinian-Americans participate in settler colonial structures built off the land of Native Americans every day. Our taxes help pay $3+ billion in military funding to Israel. We negotiate—with our history, with our right to return, with our identity—to exist in spaces that otherwise hold no space for us. And yet, “I wish I didn’t have to talk about the occupation every time I say that I’m Palestinian,” said Laila. Me too. 

At 15 years old, my father’s father was shot by an Israeli militiaman while sleeping on the roof of his home in Palestine. He fled to Lebanon, where he spent a year in a mental institution. The anxiety haunted him for the rest of his life. My mother’s father was a nurse. After leaving Palestine, he and his wife resettled in Kuwait. Despite facing regular discrimination for being Palestinian, they attempted to rebuild their lives. Yet, in 1991, Iraq invaded Kuwait. My mother stayed inside for six months, making gas masks out of cloth and bomb shelters out of bathtubs at 21 years old. Her father left home every day to take care of injured Kuwaitis at the local hospital. After the invasion ended, Kuwait expelled over 200,000 Palestinians. My mother and her family were among them. They lost everything. My grandfather fell into a deep depression and became, quite literally, paralyzed by grief. 

I am still learning to make room for the generational loss that exists within my identity, to make room for so much more. Two years ago, I discovered that my best friend descended from the same man Palestinian man who my grandfather once called his best friend in Kuwait. They were both nurses, working alongside each other during the invasion. Last year, I sat in my Palestinian Film and Literature class and watched as a character in a movie* recited lines from a poem that my great-grandfather had written decades earlier. The character shot himself moments later. I walked out of class in a daze. My identity encompasses it all: the friendship that spanned space and time, the poem that endured generations to find its way onto a screen in Ford Hall, the loss, the occupation, the activism, the absence, and what it all gave me. These things are non-negotiable.

Yet I understand my parents’ negotiation now. They watched geopolitics unfold in their living rooms for the majority of their lives. They want what the American dream claims to offer: stability. I grew up with stability. The American dream has yet to offer us justice.

*Thobe: an ornately embroidered long-sleeve dress, traditionally red and black; Maqluba: traditional dish consisting of chicken, rice, fried vegetables, and yoghurt; Musakhan: uniquely Palestinian dish made with roasted chicken, onions, sumac, and pine nuts served over taboon bread

**Name has been changed for security concerns 

*The Time That Remains dir. Elia Suleiman