“Don’t you have any better music?” Ten different things about that sentence caused me to do a double take. The unmistakably American accent. The unmistakably female voice. The completely comfortable English. The apparent distaste for the standard Arabic Top 40 cassette that usually thrills Palestinian kids, and the subsequent conclusions that this girl was passionate about music and about some different kind of music than her peers. The lack of “Sir,” “Mister,” or “Excuse me, teacher,” anywhere in the sentence. The direct, almost obnoxious tone. The simple fact that this mysterious young Gazan female had the confidence to ask this question at all, a brazen act with a total stranger. When I turned around to see who it was, I multiplied my double take. She had a bright face wrapped in a colorful scarf, and she was the first hijab girl to smash my stereotypes, and later, tragically, to break my heart.
It was midnight, the day before camp, June 1998. The 15 Gazan members of the new Palestinian delegation and I were cruising to
I had grown accustomed on camp flight night to meeting Gazan Seeds who were especially excited about their upcoming trip to America, it often being their first time out of Gaza—but who were also shy and fastidiously respectful of their strange, over-friendly American escort. Until they got used to over-friendly Americans after a few days at camp, the girls often barely spoke to me at all. But this girl, wrapped in the symbol of Islamic piety—that despite my relatively extensive experience with Palestinians, clearly triggered a lot of assumptions in my mind—wasn’t just talking, she was initiating conversation, and she was pissed off I hadn’t brought anything from Pearl Jam.
She didn’t initiate conversations just with me; she was a smash hit at camp, a crack hitter on the softball field, a powerful Palestinian voice in the coexistence discussions, and especially popular with those Israeli girls who were fellow devotees of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’s not your typical hijab girl—but she’s not alone. Several more such Seeds followed in her footsteps, leaving me and their Israeli acquaintances with eyes and minds more wide open. Alas, in the eyes of her parents, the original dazzling hijab Seed had indeed gone a little too far on her trip to
But next summer two new hijab girls with no previous American experience came and smashed stereotypes by simple force of personality. One of those is our famous fugitive from yesterday—we’ll call her Salma. She’s from the closest to
Salma stayed in close touch and remained as active as she possibly could, even during the intifada when Israeli soldiers and settlers have repeatedly shot up and shut down her village, often cutting off electricity and water and imposing curfews. She described the events and her continued hope for peace in the Olive Branch, and appreciated the concerned phone call she received from an Israeli Seed, consciously distinguishing between her friend and the soldiers that afflict her and her family.
Salma is a fugitive because, as a West Bank Palestinian, she is not legally permitted in
Even to get the point where we could help her, she literally had to climb mountains. The Israeli army has encircled and separated all the Palestinian cities in the West Bank throughout most of this year, more tightly than ever after the assassination by Palestinians of an Israeli minister three weeks ago. Salma hiked one and a half hours over the mountains surrounding Nablus and crossed five checkpoints in three different taxis before we picked her up. Her car was the last one to pass between
So, my moral of today’s story: It takes endurance, chutzpah, courage, cleverness, good luck, and the intervention of a major international organization for ordinary Palestinians to travel pretty much anywhere right now, and before the intifada it wasn’t that much better. For those who have concluded that I am radically pro-Palestinian, I’m just telling the story of one girl’s trip to take a test. And tomorrow, we’ll meet the Israeli teen from a settlement who declared in the most permanent possible way that she’s a Seed of Peace.
