Letters from Palestine by Pamela Olson Read Free Book Online

we were walking, I
looked down on my shirt and saw a big wad of phlegm.
    “Eeeeeeeeew! I have Zionist spit on me!” I
shrieked, jumping up and down on 5th Avenue, “Eeew! Eeew!” I held
the shirt away from my stomach so it wouldn’t touch me. I was
repulsed at the physicality of it—that I had someone else’s phlegm
on my shirt—but also that another human had spit on me, the
ultimate sign of disrespect. Manaal took me into the Zara that
conveniently appeared on the corner, and we bought a new shirt for
me.
     
    * * *
     
    “I told you why I was so weird and jittery
that day, right?” I ask Neel—not remembering if I’d told him about
my experience at the protest before I showed up late to our
date.
    “Yeah you did,” Neel paused and put down his
chopsticks, “Man, what an intense day . . . you know, I’m sorry I
didn’t call you after that—but I knew I was moving, and you told me
about all this shit, and I just thought to myself, ‘Damn, I really
care about this girl, but I can’t protect her from those crazy
motherfuckers!’ It was just too much, and I guessed you’d figure it
out.”
    I took a deep breath. It hadn’t been a huge
deal emotionally—I mean, we weren’t in love or anything—it was just
a premature affirmation that we were too different to have
something serious. I looked at Neel and felt sad. Not so much that
he’d shied away from me because of my politics, but because his
explanation punctured my ideological balloon of Third World
solidarity. His brown skin betrayed his colonized past. I am sure
his parents and grandparents must have experienced colonialism,
oppression, and racism. But his history of colonization and
struggle is over in a way that mine isn’t. He was far from that
here and didn’t make the connection between the message of the
parade I had protested against and his own history.
    Always I expect solidarity and political
awareness from people whose history involves being oppressed and
colonized—because to me the similarity is so clear. I think about
how much stronger struggles around the world would be if there was
real, meaningful cooperation and partnership between countries
which share common histories. I always expect politicization from
people based on their own histories. I still do. It continues to be
a rude awakening when people who come from countries previously
colonized—whose families experienced colonialism—are not
politically engaged with struggles. I don’t know Neel’s personal
family history, when his parents emigrated to the U.S., but feel
that now it is better to leave politics and history alone. He was
lucky that he didn’t have to fight for his parents’ country. I
still had to.
    “So,” I began, changing the conversation,
“tell me about your new job.”
     

 
     
    Letter from Rawan
     

     
    Rawan Arar is pursuing her MA in Women’s and
Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her current
projects include a gender ascription curriculum geared toward high
school students emphasizing the analysis of gender norms as
reiterated through popular culture, a qualitative study reviewing
the effects of the media on Arab-American male identity, and a
racial and ethnic appreciation curriculum incorporating the
accomplishments of racial minorities into high school history
curriculums.
    Arar graduated with Honors in May of 2008
from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a degree in
sociology and minors in legal studies and women’s and gender
studies. As an Archer Fellow, Arar spent the spring of 2008 in
Washington, D.C., interning in the Office of the Administrative
Assistant to the Chief Justice at the Supreme Court of the United
States. In 2006, Arar began filming a documentary titled The
Westernization of Women in Jordan where she conducted
interviews with men and women across socioeconomic classes
discussing key feminist platforms that include the following:
marriage, family, and relationships; women in the