Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream

To Palestine and Back Quest for Place

To Palestine and Back Quest for Place Nabeel Abraham Mother, if I've never really been Jewish, and I'm not actually American anymore, and I'm not English or European, then who ami? TESS, THE SISTERS ROSENWEIG, WENDY WASSERSTEIN FROM MY VANTAGE point under a fig tree in the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley, I watched two Israeli military jets circle above, two silver triangles glistening against the pale summer sky. If they suddenly decided to swoop down on the Palestinian camp I was visiting, my life would be over. Having just turned nineteen, the absurdity of dying so young suddenly dawned on me. I thought about the futility of hiding under the fig tree. When the bombs and fiery napalm fell, I might as well have been hiding under the black umbrella I had left back home in Detroit. The bombs eventually fell. Fortunately for me and the fifty or so other men huddled in the fig orchard that day, their target was a Jordanian army position down in the valley, just across the river from the town of Jericho. The ground shook slightly, and the morning air rumbled with the thud of bombs falling in the distance. When the "all clear" sounded, I peered over the rocks into the valley below, silently watching the black plumage rise over the valley. As I tried to imagine the death and destruction wrought by the marauding planes, the people of the camp gradually resumed their business. It was an odd place for a nineteen-year-old American kid to be. This was my first trip outside the United States. My facility in Arabic amounted to a handful of words, "kitchen Arabic," which I Copyright 2000 by Nabeel Abraham. 425 Life Journeys retained from childhood. In my mind, however, I was not out of place, for I too was a Palestinian and an Arab. Had I not traveled a long way to get here—by plane from Detroit via New York, Istanbul, Beirut, and then overland through Damascus to Amman and this camp? Had I not sold my British sports car to pay for the trip? And, hadn't I taken several odd factory jobs at the end of my freshman year in college to scrape together enough money to fulfill my childhood dream? I was even prepared to die right there and then for Palestine. Little did I realize on that steamy night in July 1969 that I had already traveled a long way in the other direction when I took my seat on that Turkish Air charter from JFK airport to Istanbul. Everything seemed so clear back then. You were on one side or the other. You were on the side of the revolution or opposed to it; you were on the side of the people or you oppressed them. The late sixties was a heady time in my life and in the lives of those in my generation. The superficially placid world of the fifties had cracked and crumbled like parched clay before our eyes. First came the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then in succession the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther KingJr., and Robert F. Kennedy. During my childhood, the Civil Rights movement surged forward and backward like an incoming tide. By the late sixties, the movement had given way to the exuberance ofyouth and political revolution. As a college freshman in 1968,1 found it difficult—if not impossible—to avoid getting caught up in the excitement of the times—whether in the counterculture or antiwar movements, in the Black Power and women's liberation movements, or in the Third World liberation movements. In these respects, I was indistinguishable from others of my generation. The journey, however, that took me to the hills overlooking the River Jordan on that fateful summer day had begun long before the ferment of the 1960s. Parents I was born to Arab parents from Palestine. My father had immigrated to the United States sometime before World War I, probably 1910. The son of the village mukhtar (headman) ofBeit Hanina in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, he never knew the exact date of his birth, nor could he recall the exact date of his arrival in the United States. My brothers and I once calculated that he was born around 1896. He thought he might have been between twelve and fourteen when he left the village and made his way to New York City. His father put him on a steamer 426...