When I try to explain to Najat how I came to seek an internship at the Palestine-Israel Journal, inevitably I end up in tears, choking on my words and unable to finish my story. I start to tell her that I went to Religious School for thirteen years of my life. I spent five weeks in Israel at the age of fifteen but not until my second year at UC Berkeley, which coincided with the Second Intifada, had I ever heard of the Palestinian people.
I try to recount to her the demonstrations of Fall 2000 on Sproul Plaza, picket signs with "Jews are Nazis" and "Sharon=Hitler". I explain my confusion, ignorance and shock. And how I felt deeply deceived by the very community that shaped so much of my identity.
Turns out, Najat and I came to know of the plight of the Palestinians in a similar way.
Najat is a Palestinian and so perhaps it is strange to hear that she was not aware of her own people's struggle until her late teens. Najat's family is one of the wealthiest Palestinian families in the Jerusalem area. They have been in the clothing industry for decades, specializing in fashion imports from Italy.
She grew up never allowed to walk the streets with the people. She and her siblings had a driver take them to school and back home each day. If they needed anything from the stores, the driver escorted them there and back, or fetched the requested items himself.
Najat attended a school right outside the Old City, a high-walled fortress run by German nuns called Schmidt's Girls College. We walked by the school only two days ago en route to the Arab souk during our lunch break. It is enormous, safe, enclosed. Tall walls made of Jerusalem stone with fencing, making the enclosure reach from ground to sky. Within those walls Najat had no idea what was going on right on the other side. Her father insisted that his daughter take full advantage of their elite education, meaning, Najat's school day ran from 8am until 5pm every day. Her school-sponsored extracurricular activities included gymnastics, piano and guitar.
After Najat graduated from Schmidt's, she attended Bethlehem University in Bethlehem, about 10 kilometers or 6 miles south of the Old City in Jerusalem. Before checkpoints Najat took a bus to get there in about 40 minutes. Now with checkpoints, that same distance can take up to one and a half hours and there is no direct transport.
Her father could no longer protect Najat from the reality of what was happening to her people in those years, the years of the First Intifada. Najat started to hear terms like occupation, 1948, 1967 borders, checkpoints and all the stories involving these words.
"Heidi," she tells me, "I am a Palestinian, I have lived here all of my life and I did not know."
And when she found out, Najat was furious. She was angry with her parents, quarrelled with her beloved father. Najat started to uncover what she had been protected from all of her life. She visited Nablus, Jenin, Ma'ale Adumim. She started asking her grandmother what happened to her grandfather how did he die? Why did they no longer live in Deir Yassin?
In the early nineties, the First Intifada was still rocking the streets of Israel. Any time there was heightened resistance fighting, universities were surrounded and often shut down immediately by the I.D.F. Najat recalls many lectures in the homes of professors, exams taken in the gardens, and often classes were cancelled.
Najat's life changed forever one day in a courtyard of Bethlehem University. An outburst of violence brought soldiers to the university, storming the walls and planting themselves -- armed -- on the rooftops of university buildings. Najat and her friend were standing outside, talking and watching the troops gather overhead and on the periphery. Looking, watching, waiting to see what would happen. Najat looked at her friend to say something and suddenly he began to fall.
Pointing at the place above her brow, between her brown-gold eyes Najat said,"I saw blood here, on his forehead, he was shot right in front of me."
Her friend died instantly.
"I put my hands over my ears and started screaming. Then I lost consciousness."
When Najat awoke she found herself in a hospital bed, her hands still clasped over her ears.
"Can you believe it Heidi? The doctor's could not remove my hands from my ears. I lost consciousness and awoke with my hands in the same place, the doctors and the nurses couldn't remove them from my head."
In the following weeks, Najat's hair began to grow in silvery-gray. The doctors told her it was shock and trauma from witnessing her friend's murder. Najat says her mother is always asking her to dye her roots, but Najat refuses.
"Najat is proud to have this hair, it reminds me every day of who I am. What I must do to help my people," she said, looking me straight in the eyes.
When Najat's roots went gray, she sought work to help her people. Defying her parents' wishes for her, Najat worked in Ramallah at a legal rights center of sorts. Doing legal work to help Palestinians suffering from violations of human rights. With closure however, it became increasingly difficult for her to go back and from the Jerusalem to the West Bank. She wanted to take an apartment near work but her mother protested, claiming it inappropriate and unsafe for a single woman, her daughter, to do so.
"You need to see, Heidi. You need to see how these people suffer, my people. How these people live. Don't listen to Najat. Don't cry because of my words. Don't be affected by my moods. Go see it for yourself. No one can help us. Why doesn't anyone help us?"
Najat admits Palestinians are not perfect. "We are not all angels, I know we have problems," she says.
"But we just want to live, here. Najat is Palestinian. So I don't exist," she exclaims.
On Najat's identity card where the category of nationality sits there is nothing. Actually, this appears: ----. There's something hauntingly inhuman about that designation that leaves me unsettled. To deprive an individual of an identity, a national identity that means so much in our world of 191 nation-states.
I begin to understand when Najat tells me she doesn't exist.
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