Fact and fiction: Understanding the Palestinian perspective

The following is a fictional account based on real events.

My name is Ali Shadid, and I am 20 years old. I was born in 1982 in the refugee camp of Jenin inside the West Bank. For 54 years, my family has lived as refugees, and for 35 years we have lived under a military occupation. Our tribulations started on Friday, April 9, 1948 — a full month before any Arab armies 'invaded' Israel — in the picturesque village of Deir Yassin, where 750 men, women and children lived. My grandparents, then a young couple, did not think that they had much to fear, because their village was part of the land apportioned to the Palestinians in the UN partition plan of 1947. That day in April, Manchem Begin's (the future Israeli Prime Minister) Irgun commandos raided the small village, massacring over 100 people, half of them women and children. My grandparents were able to flee in the early hours of the attack, to a small town in the West Bank called Qibya. Their neighbors, however, were not as lucky. They were removed from their homes, and the father and son were shot dead.

After that day, there was no more Deir Yassin. Most of the houses had been destroyed, and the residents remaining after the invasion were forcefully expelled to East Jerusalem. That year, 400 Arab villages disappeared from the map, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, such as my grandparents, fled out of fear or were expelled from their land; almost all were never allowed to return. In 1953, my grandparents were forced to move yet again. In the evening of October 14, a strong military force called Unit 101, led by a young soldier named Ariel Sharon, attacked the village of Qibya and its residents with indiscriminate artillery fire. The next morning the Israeli forces withdrew, leaving in their wake 67 civilians who had lost their lives. Many more had been wounded, and the village mosque, school and water tank had been destroyed. My grandparents' house was demolished, as were 56 others, and they chose to flee to the refugee camp of Jenin to live with relatives. The massacre of Qibya was meant to be an example to us — the Palestinian people.

My father was born in Jenin in 1957. He said he could not remember too much about his life under Jordanian rule, which lasted until 1967, but he said he was lucky to have lived as a free man, even if for just 10 years. He used to go out and play without fear, without seeing Israeli soldiers surrounding his cities. In 1967, my father's freedom was robbed when he was only 10 years old. In a quick expansionist maneuver, the Israeli army seized the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and the West Bank along with my father's village, placing hundreds of thousands of people under a military occupation. It was under this suppression of my people's self-determination that my brother, Ahmad, and I were born.

I was born in a year of infamy for Palestinian refugees, for in 1982, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli Defense Minister, 1,700 Palestinian refugees were slaughtered in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon was found indirectly responsible by an Israeli government commission. Growing up, I would look in my father's eyes and see despair; he felt helpless as his own children were born under occupation and not as free men. That despair was in the heart of every Palestinian; before we could build our own society, we needed our own land and we needed to be free. The Israeli government controlled our water supplies, monitored our movement and peppered our land with thousands of settlers. Where we could once live or build, we could not even visit anymore because a new Jewish settlement would have been established nearby. In 1987, the desperation reached a culmination, and thousands of Palestinians took to the streets demonstrating against the Israeli occupation. Although I was only a small child, I remember my father crying one day that year, holding my brother Ahmad in his hands. I could not tell it was my brother, because his face had been disfigured by a bullet wound; his crime was that he participated in a demonstration for freedom.

Later that year, we were placed under curfew for 13 days. Can you imagine not being able to leave your house for 13 days? That was a time without hope. I grew up used to checkpoints, the occasional house being demolished in my town, the curfews and Israeli soldiers everywhere in my own land. When the Oslo Accords were signed, it was the first glimpse of light for any of us. That year, 1993, my father was shot dead by a Jewish settler just outside Jenin. Although I was angry, I was still very young and I had reason to hope. As the years went by, my hope dwindled slowly but steadily. Each year, more Palestinian land was confiscated, more homes were demolished and thousands of acres of olive groves were uprooted in order to make space for Jewish settlers; for seven years, from 1993 to 2000, tens of thousands of Jewish settlers moved into the West Bank, 50,000 of them under the auspices of our peace partner, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

I quit school at the age of 16 to work because I had to support my mother. Yet everyday I would have to wait at checkpoints — and often be strip-searched — in order to travel from one Palestinian village to another. A five mile trek would last me hours. If that was not enough, work was scarce for myself and other Palestinians. Last year, about half of us were unemployed, subsisting on the aid that would be given to us by humanitarian organizations. We cannot even support our own families without help. In the past 18 months, however, that has been the least of our concerns. We are a paralyzed society as we cannot go anywhere anymore because the Israelis will not grant us "permission." All of our police stations have been destroyed, and every family is struggling. Fifteen hundred of my brothers and sisters have been killed and almost 30,000 have been injured over the past year and a half during the Intifada.

Today, all hope has disappeared — nothing but anger and sadness remains. My refugee camp of Jenin, where once Jesus was said to have passed through, has all but disappeared under the invasion by the IDF; a town of 15,000 people barely exists anymore. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed by bulldozers and helicopter gunships. Hundreds of my brothers, mostly civilians, have been imprisoned by Israeli soldiers, their location unknown. I lie under the rubble of my own home, destroyed by one of the 25 missiles fired by the Apache helicopters into my refugee camp.

I died at the age of twenty. I never had children, nor did I want to, because I did not want them to be born into the prison of occupation. The next time you see a Palestinian terrorist, please think of me: Ali Shadid. Taufiq Rahim is a Wilson School major from Vancouver, British Columbia. He can be reached at trahim@princeton.edu.