Excerpt:
Twenty years ago, I was eating fresh fish in the old Yaffa port with one of my best friends, a Palestinian-Israeli Bedouin from Ramle. His tribe had been resettled to the ruins of a depopulated Palestinian town after the 1948 war. We made this pledge: that for us the struggle would never end until our children could look up at a flag, and feel that it represented all of them. It was natural for us to have a politics that made room for two national stories, two groups formerly in conflict, but living not only in a shared state, but a shared society.
First memory: In 2001, I participated in a militant demonstration in East Jerusalem against the construction of the separation barrier, often called “‘the Apartheid Wall.” There were thousands of us, including Israelis, both Jewish and Palestinian, and many “internationals” (a blanket term for folks from overseas doing Palestinian solidarity).
We were teargassed, and some of us climbed to the side to rest for a bit. A foreign journalist approached me and an older man wearing traditional Palestinian garb. The old man didn’t speak English, and the journalist didn’t speak Hebrew, so I was asked to translate between the two of them, using Hebrew with the Palestinian and English with the journalist. It went something like this:
The journalist: How do you think the conflict can be resolved?
The Palestinian: God willing, all the Jews will be removed from Palestine and then we can have peace.
The journalist’s eyes opened wide, suddenly very nervous, as if she had inadvertently provoked conflict between me and a local Palestinian elder. But it wasn’t like that at all. He and I nodded to each other knowingly, and I repeated his answer faithfully. Then I added to the journalist, “This is normal. Don’t worry. It’s fine.”
Of course, it is normal, I’m still not worried, and nothing is fine. The elder and I shook hands when the short interview was over. And I climbed down to inhale some more tear gas.
Source:
https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/peace-palestine-and-me/