Imagined Palestine

My motivation to come to Palestine was mostly political and in part from cultural curiosity which I have had as I study anthropology. It was my dream to live with Muslim people and see how they spend their daily lives, while Palestine has been the most attractive destination among other Arab countries because of my political interest. I have read good amounts of books on Palestinian-Israeli conflict and my image of staying in Palestine was, not that I was thinking here is dangerous, which is totally incorrect, but that it can be hard and I would probably face harsh realities. In short, I imagined Palestine as a place with its specificity.

My assumption was partly true. I got to hear bunch of sad stories and those examples showed me that people living here are suffering daily from things I already knew from the books. When we have conversations, they suddenly jump into the topic of the occupation, sometimes even do not intend to, and they show me subtle, but clear anger for what they are talking about. Then they switch to brighter topics or daily conversations and the shadow I felt inside their voice disappears. Whenever you hear each of the story, I assure you will feel so depressed that you need to stay away from it for a little moment.

At the same time, contrary to what most of the people in the world who never visited Palestine think, which was kind of same for me before, these people are having daily lives as normal as people do in other parts of the world. It is stupid enough to inform you, “Hey, there is a life in Palestine. People are living there just like us”. Honestly, though, I have never watched media, which introduce the aspect of Palestinian culture and life. Everything is about the conflict, the violence and the number of deaths. It makes the image of Palestine ugly and prevents people from coming here. Because of that, I needed some time to tell my parents that I was going to apply for this program. How political it is. How we are not aware of it! I assume this situation on media or whatever information available for people are more or less same in other countries.

I cannot even summarize what I have got from this experience because it was not just knowledge on its culture and the politic, but it was something alive which I can see and feel from people and Hebron itself. Culturally, it was an amazing opportunity to live with my host family, through which I got to know their way of thinking as Muslims and as Palestinians. I cannot think of anything better than spending time with them throughout this whole month. If there was much space here, I would write about their hospitality, willingness to teach me Arabic and supports on everything. Politically, I found it much more difficult to solve the problem since I had a closer look on the situation, while at the same time, it motivated me to think of any possibility to work for it in the future. The situation must be changed.