Palestine

When I was in 6th grade, I befriended a girl named Dalia Ahmed. We were both in the same grade, although in different classes, and we lived in the same condo building in Virginia. When I asked her what her family was (meaning, ethnicity), she told me her family was Palestinian. I asked her where Palestine was, and she said that well, technically, there was no more Palestine, which is why her family had moved to the US.

Her family was Muslim, but Dalia and her mother never covered themselves with hijab, and her mom was a modern working woman. The only real differences between us was that whereas when it came to my brother and me, I was the boss since I was older, she had to do whatever her little brother Ali wanted; and one time, for a few weeks during a period that she referred to as Ramadan, she didn't eat anything all day but then would run to the McDonald's behind our building as soon as the sun went down with the $10 her mom had given her to buy happy meals.

This was my first personal introduction to Palestine and Islam. I don't know what happened to Dalia since we lost touch after my family moved to a different city, but I thought about her today after finishing reading Son of Hamas.

Over the years, I've taken a marginal interest in the politics of Israel/Palestine. Although in Virginia I had several Muslim friends, once I moved to hippie-infested Northern California (many NorCal hippies, might I add, are Jewish), I went to school with mostly kids of hippie Jews (the kind that would brag about smoking pot with their moms), black kids bussed in from Richmond and fobby Asian kids whose parents were post-docs at UC Berkeley (the UC Village, Berkeley's post-grad housing facility, was in my town). The Jewish kids at my high school spoke of Israel without any hint that it might be a place that didn't have a right to exist, and many of them would spend their summer vacations in Tel Aviv, coming back with dark tans and raving about how wonderful Israel was.

Israel. Palestine. The Middle East conflict. It is, in my view, THE major world conflict during my lifetime. In an attempt to understand Islam better, I took a religion and law class in law school, where we spent a significant amount of time discussing Shari'a law, the law of Islam. But I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss was (i.e. the Israel-Palestine issue) about, so I made sure to include Israel in my RTW trip in 2008. Afterwards, I blogged about some of my impressions of Israel (http://deb79.blogspot.com/2008/06/politics-of-israel.html), but I didn't say outright what I really thought - which I thought then, and think now: Israel does not have a right to exist - at least not in what has for hundreds of years been Palestine. How do we (the US and the West) condone the displacement of thousands of people from their homes in order to allow whatever Jew who feels like it to come and occupy the land?

I'm digressing a little bit though. Son of Hamas is not so much about whether Israel or Palestine has more of a right to exist. It's about the first son of the one of the leaders of Hamas, an Islamic socio-political rights movement/group that advocates some fundamentalist notions and has been labeled by the US as a terrorist organization. This guy is just about my age, but while I was attending college and law school, he was spying for Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency, to help them nab suspected terrorists and suicide bombers. In large part, it reads like an intense episode of 24 - with many near-death experiences and escapes in the nick of time. But it is also about how he became a follower of Jesus Christ, and his belief that the message of Christ (love your neighbors AND your enemies) is the only path to peace in the Middle East (or anywhere else). And in no uncertain terms, he indicts the Koran as a book that includes instructions to Muslims to kill Jews and Christians, and Allah as a vengeful, merciless God. He outright says that politicians and leaders in the West are too chickenshit to come right out say what he believes to be true: that it is not fundamentalist terrorists that are the problem, but the ideology of Islam itself. As a result of his book, he has been disowned by his family. He arrived in the US for the freedom to practice his faith in peace, but now the US Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport him because they believe he poses a terrorist threat.

Too many issues - political, historical, religious - to get into in a blog, but I highly recommend Son of Hamas as an interesting, eye-opening read.