Buried Pots, Buried Lives

There is obviously a deep connection to one's land and one's past here in Palestine. The first time I flew over this area I wondered how people could be fighting over what is, from 15,000 feet, a seemingly brown, barren land. I have a theory that as Americans, we do not have such a deep connection and affiliation to land because it is so vast and plentiful, and so are the natural resources that come along with it. In Palestine, however, livable and arable land and natural resources are so less plentiful, and that is perhaps the reason why connection to land runs much deeper.

Similiar to the generations of Palestinians who have never lived on the other side of the green line, I now hear daily the stories of those generations who did and the lives and things they left behind. A colleague's father was born in a town called Lod, which is located near Ben Gurion airport, and is in full view from my apartment. It can't be more than 40Km from where I am living now and is clearly a burgeoning Israeli town. In 1948 he was 5 years old. Sensing the build up of conflict, his father took him into their backyard one day, and engaged his son's help in burying their most valuable family assets - china, silver and a grandfather clock. His father told him that they could not take these things with them, but if they remembered the site where they were buried, they would return to the home after the war and uncover their items. The next day he was whisked to Ramallah to stay with some aunts. As days and months passed, he and his family were registered as refugees and he was enrolled in a UNRWA school. He never returned to Lod and he never unburied his past.

This man now in his 60s still refuses to eat oatmeal or cereal. It was the food that was fed to him daily in the UNRWA school. He refused at such a young age to admit he was a refugee and to admit he was in need. He comes from one of the biggest Christian families in Ramallah. He owns a home and has raised a family of 4. He is one of the luckier refugees who doesn't live one of the hundreds of camps that still dot the West Bank and Gaza cities where multiple generations have been raised, but have never called these places their homes.

My son's babysitter is a college-aged boy. When I met him I asked him where his home is. He didn't miss a beat when he answered, "Lod." But I knew immediately that he couldn't actually live there. I repeated back to him, "Lod? You mean Lod by Tel Aviv?" His reply: "Yes, that Lod, that is where my family home is....or was." He was making a clear statement to me, a passing through, easy-life, expat.

The conflict is about something that runs deeper than the 12 foot seperation barrier between the West Bank and Israel. It is about something that runs deeper than the Israeli government's knee-jerk reaction to refer to all Palestinians as terrorist. In fact, it is a concept and connection to land that I do think Israelis feel with similar depth. However, I do not think it is a concept that many western politicians even begin to grasp.