Palestine Speaks, page 17
The important thing is that I have Khadeer back, but the attack has totally affected my life, because the boat that we lost was the new one, and it had a good motor. Now I have only the older boat. Now I’m using my friend’s motor because I don’t have enough funds for my own.
Even this old boat is at risk. Another worry that fisherman have is boat seizures. The Israelis find all sorts of reasons to seize boats. Then they’ll tell the fisherman that his boat will be returned, and it never is. Sometimes I think that Israel is financially fighting Palestinians in Gaza. Because they seize boats for reasons that have nothing to do with security issues, reasons that have more to do with fighting people and their source of income. Sometimes I think if they see a fisherman trying to haul in a huge amount of fish, they keep shooting until he leaves everything behind and runs. So the main target is to control what financial benefits people can get out of the sea.
It’s really hard now to support my family through fishing. It’s really bad. Before, I used to donate money to charity. But now I’m living on international aid. It’s only because of this that I can survive. We get some support from CHF, but it’s not money. It’s just flour and oil.6 I could make $500 a day before, and now I haven’t made anything for a month. If I could make even $30 in a day, that would be an incredible day of fishing. But I never feel discouraged. I’m always hoping for the best.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people. I’ve borrowed from family and friends. People don’t hassle me about it yet, but I feel the pressure whenever I see them. Since the incident of the boat, I don’t sleep much, only two hours a day. I didn’t sleep at all last night. How would I sleep knowing everyone wants money from me? And, more than this, I wake up in the morning and I’m not sure I’ll be able to feed my children. So it’s becoming complicated, and it’s affecting me and my state of mind because I’m not feeling fine. Still, I never thought of getting any other job because I feel like I’m a fish. If I leave the sea, then I will die.
1 Israel’s blockade of the Gazan ports began in 2007, partly in response to Hamas taking power in the Gaza Strip. Egypt also formally restricted its borders with Gaza at the time. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
2 Gaza was fully administered by Israel from the end of the 1967 war until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Israeli settlers and the Israeli military continued to occupy parts of Gaza until September 2005, when Israel evacuated all settlers from the strip and withdrew military forces. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
3 Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured in 2006. He was released as part of a prisoner exchange in 2011. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
4 Denees is the gilt-headed bream, often called dorade in U.S. markets.
5 Israel targeted Gaza with bombings during eight days starting on November 14, 2012, during what it termed Operation Pillar of Defense. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
6 Cooperative Housing Foundation (CHF) is an international aid non-profit now known as Global Communities. Following the air strikes of 2012, Global Communities began distributing food to 47,500 Gazans in partnership with the United Nations.
MAN PRUNING OLIVE TREE
FADI SHIHAB
Computer technician, 34
Born in Kuwait City, Kuwait
Interviewed in Gaza City, Gaza
In 2012, Fadi Shihab made an unusual decision: he chose to move his family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Gaza City, despite heightened tensions between Israel and Hamas at the time. Up to that point, he had only visited Gaza once.
Fadi emigrated to the United States from Kuwait when he was thirteen years old, but his parents were originally from Gaza City. After marrying in the early sixties, his parents had moved to Syria, where his father pursued teaching work. They were there during the Six-Day War—when Israel began its military occupation of Gaza—and because they were not registered as living within Gaza at the time of Israel’s initial census of the region, many were unable to return and claim residency rights. They were left stateless, without permission to even visit their extended families. The Shihabs’ exile lasted decades, during which time they lived in Egypt, Syria, Kuwait, and the United States. But ties of family and culture were strong enough to pull Fadi’s parents back to Gaza when they finally had the opportunity to return in the late 2000s.
We meet Fadi multiple times in 2013, mostly at the property he inherited from his father in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. He’s tall, and speaks English with a truly interesting accent—Arabic inflections mixed with a Tennessee drawl. He has a four-story house and a garden with olive and lemon trees covering almost two acres. As we sit in the shade of his garden, Fadi explains the reasons why he left a lucrative job and comfortable home in Tennessee to move his family to a city where electricity is only available for a few hours most days and the threat of war is always present.
WE WERE STATELESS
My parents are from Gaza. My dad was born in 1941, and both his family and my mother’s family have been here forever. After the war in 1948, refugees from all over Palestine came to Gaza, and it was administered by Egypt.1 Even in the early sixties it was hard to find work in Gaza, so after my parents were married, they moved to Egypt and then to Syria. My dad was a math teacher.
During the war in 1967, Israel occupied Palestine. Not long after the occupation began, Israel took a census in the West Bank and Gaza, and any Palestinians who weren’t living in Palestine at the time weren’t allowed back in. Without the ID cards Israel issued after the war, my parents were no longer considered by Israel to be legal occupants of Gaza. So they were stateless, and they moved from country to country on visas—from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. During this time, my father continued to teach, and my parents started having kids. I’m the youngest. My oldest brother was born in 1965, and then they had four girls, a boy, and then I was born in Kuwait City in December 1979.2
A couple of years after I was born, my oldest brother, Alim, got a student visa to study in the U.S. Meanwhile, my father taught in schools in Kuwait City, and I grew up playing with my siblings, making a lot of friends, and going to school.
Then in 1990, when I was ten years old, Saddam Hussein decided to take over Kuwait.3 A year later, the U.S. came in and kicked him out. I remember the war as being kind of an exciting time, as scary as it was. We were living in an apartment building with four floors, four apartments per floor. I’d go to the roof with my friend across the hall, and we’d watch the lights of missiles in the distance. We thought it was so cool, and we thought the U.S. soldiers looked cool—they even wore sunglasses! They were especially cool compared to the Iraqi soldiers, who were dressed in torn-up rags for uniforms. From the roof we’d watch the fighting on the border in the distance, and we called the U.S. Al-Hakim, “the ruler.” We had a lot of respect for the U.S. during the war. The whole neighborhood would sleep together in shelters every night, which, as kids, we thought of as a lot of fun.
Of course, it was a scary time. My dad had to find food for us, and some days he’d have to drive out of the city to do that. One day he went out looking for food, and he didn’t come home. We were terrified and thought he’d been captured or killed. But he came home after three weeks, and it turns out he’d been stopped by the Iraqi army, and they’d forced him to transport the corpse of an Iraqi soldier back to the soldier’s family. The story of how he got back to Kuwait City is too long to tell.
For our family, life in Kuwait became hard after the war. Yasser Arafat supported Saddam, and so Kuwaitis sort of thought of Palestinians as traitors.4 In fact, a lot of Palestinians living in Kuwait fled to Iraq after the war. We tried to stay, but my dad couldn’t get our visas renewed because there was so much hostility. He’d had no trouble for fifteen years in Kuwait, but now we had to find somewhere else to live. And that’s when we emigrated to the U.S.
AFTER SIX MONTHS I FELT LIKE I FIT IN PRETTY WELL
I first came to the States on July 11, 1992. I was twelve, and I came with my parents, one older brother, and my sister who is a year older than me. Three of my sisters had already married or were studying, and one lived in Iraq, one in Sudan, and one in Libya. We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. My brother Alim, who had gone to school in Kansas, had since moved to Knoxville for grad school. We moved in with Alim when we first arrived, and then we found a place of our own. My dad used his life savings, about $50,000, to buy a house straight-up in cash. He didn’t believe in getting a mortgage, since he wasn’t sure he’d get a job. But he found a gig at Wendy’s flipping burgers. It was a little embarrassing for me, since I was used to him being this respected math teacher, but he’d say, “As long as I’m working, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” My second oldest brother, Tawfiq, who was nineteen, he got a job at Wendy’s too and eventually became my dad’s boss. That was a little strange. But my father wasn’t committed to staying in the U.S., and he didn’t pick up the language very well.
I don’t remember much from the first months in the States, other than that they were really bad. Just the language barrier—I spoke no English. And people were different than what I was used to. Even their jokes were different. In the fall I started going to middle school. The administration made me stay back a year—they placed me in the seventh grade, just because of the language barrier. It was difficult in school at first. One middle school teacher, his name was Mr. Jones, I remember him telling me, “You’re very good in math.” And I didn’t even know enough English to really know what he was saying to me, if he was complimenting me or what. But math is like a universal language, right? It was the only subject I was good at.
I’d say it took maybe three to six months before my siblings and I started grasping the basics of the language. The good thing in the U.S. is that they had these English as a second language classes, so over time we just kind of picked it up, and English just started to flow. After six months, we were making new friends. My teachers saw me progressing so well within the first year that they moved me to eighth grade, where I belonged based on my age.
My sister Adiba and I, we were much better than my other brothers and sisters at speaking English. Adiba’s just a year older than me, and the two of us don’t even have much of an accent when we speak English. My older brother Tawfiq, he was nineteen when we moved. So for him, his Arabic tongue is still heavy, since he didn’t go to high school in the States. I’d say definitely, the younger you are, the easier it is.
After that first six months, I began to feel like I fit in pretty well, and I made some friends. I had an Iranian friend, Hamdi, who had the same story as me. He came to the U.S. when he was about ten or eleven years old. He speaks Persian, and I can’t speak that, so we’d only communicate in English. Then there were a couple of Russian guys and a couple of Romanian guys. We just kind of clicked, because all of us were immigrants. We didn’t dress the right way to fit in—we all dressed like we were just off the boat. We spoke broken English, so in a way we all understood each other best. I also got to meet the Americans around my neighborhood. I think the Americans I made friends with saw me as kind of weird—they hadn’t known anybody with a background like mine. Knoxville isn’t like Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco—some cities in the U.S. have had Arabs since the 1800s, 1900s. The Arab community hasn’t been there long. But I got to know some of the kids who were from Knoxville, and I watched some of my friends running around with the American kids, doing good things or bad things. But I just kind of moved with the groove. My friends and I went to Riverwood High School—that’s also in Knoxville—and then I was done with that and I went to the University of Tennessee.
At the same time, my parents were working on getting U.S. citizenship. What they really wanted more than anything was to go back to Gaza, to see the family they’d been away from for thirty years. My dad passed the citizenship exam first, and once he got a U.S. passport, he was finally able to get back into Gaza. So in 1997 he moved back there. He built a house on some property he inherited from his father—a couple of acres with some olive, lemon, and fig trees—and he got it ready for my mom to move there too. It was weird to us kids, and we wanted him to stay. But it was his life’s dream to go back to his home, to sit under the olive trees in the breeze. Or sit around a fire at night with his brothers and drink coffee. That’s what he always talked about. He always said he didn’t want to die outside Gaza. My mom failed the citizenship test a few times, so she stayed back in the U.S. for a couple more years. We’d see my dad only when he came back to the States to visit us for three or four months every year.
I ALWAYS HAD A RED LINE IN MY HEAD THAT I WOULDN’T CROSS
At the University of Tennessee I studied business information systems. I was interested in computers, because during my junior and my senior year in high school, I was working at Comcast, an internet provider. So I was already into solving internet problems and whatnot. My two older brothers studied computer science and computer languages, and they told me, “Try to do something different than us.” I took some computer language courses, but also I got into IT hardware.
During this time I was still hanging out with my friend Hamdi. Hamdi and I, when we hung out, sometimes we’d hang out with some of our American friends, sometimes we’d hang out just with each other. Sometimes we’d do the same things Americans did and go to bars and stuff like that. And then at the end of the day, sometimes we just liked to talk to each other, listen to some Arabic music or Persian music.
Sometimes we’d be with our friends from other countries, like Alex, the guy from Romania who we went to high school with. We always asked each other, “Do you guys feel like Americans, do you feel American?” Hamdi would say, “Well, basically we’re Americans, but we have an advantage because we come from a different culture, so we can enjoy that culture and we can enjoy this culture.” So it’s hard to explain, but being both Palestinian and American felt like an advantage. Politically, I’m American, but in terms of culture, heritage, I’m Palestinian.
When I finished school I was about twenty-one. I graduated on May 12, 2001. My friends and I wanted to celebrate, so we were like, “Where do we want to go? Somewhere special!” We drove to a casino in Paducah, Kentucky. It’s like four hours away from Knoxville. We had a blast. So that May, June, and July we’d go back to Paducah almost every two weeks. Growing up, I always had a red line in my head that I wouldn’t cross. Like, I’m gonna do some things that are bad—I’m gonna drink, I’m gonna go to casinos and gamble, do this and that, but there are some things I’m not gonna do, like drugs. I don’t know why I was like that, how I developed those boundaries, but I figured it had to be because I was raised partly in Kuwait and not in the U.S. for my whole childhood.
I WAS LOOKING FOR A SWEETNESS INSIDE
In July of 2001, I started working for a temp company, and then I got hired at IBM in November. While I started working at IBM, I was also working toward citizenship. I was twenty-three when I became a U.S. citizen. Of course, I had to take the citizenship tests and everything, but it wasn’t that bad. The questions were like, “How many states are there?” I think they wanted me to name the thirteen colonies and the governor of my state and the two senators from our state, that sort of thing.
Then I got my passport, and that was really nice. In 2004 I left America, I took a leave of absence from work. By this time, all my siblings and I had grown up and left the house, and my mother had U.S. citizenship too, so she was ready to move back to Gaza and be with my dad. I was considering it too, actually. I was interested to find out what Gaza was all about. I’d heard so many stories growing up.
I traveled with my parents, and we first went to visit one of my older sisters who was living in Saudi Arabia at the time. Then we went to Kuwait, to see my old neighborhood. I still had a special feeling in my heart for it. I saw the guys I used to know there, and the situation was so bad. People had graduated from college, but they had nothing to do—like, no jobs. I was just like, Man, I’m glad I went to America. And I had other advantages from being a U.S. citizen. Maybe most Americans don’t think about using a U.S. passport to travel, but for me it was like a way to go to wherever I wanted. ’Cause as an American, you know that you tell the American embassy that you’re going to Gaza or Saudi Arabia or wherever, and you just go. If I’d been a Kuwaiti citizen, I would have had a lot of trouble getting across some borders. So it was nice, just the freedom of traveling with a U.S. passport.
Then I was in Gaza for about six weeks. I got to see my dad’s family, got to know them a little and stay in his house. I met some of his friends, too. My dad had a friend who was a teacher with him in Kuwait. After Kuwait, the friend moved to Yemen for a few years and then moved to Gaza. My dad ran into this friend one day while we were visiting Gaza, and the friend invited us to his house.
So we got to his house, and I met his daughter, Houda. I’d actually known her from Kuwait, but I didn’t remember much—she was a few years younger than me. After we left their house, my dad was like, “You saw Houda, what do you think?” I just said, “I’m not sure.” At that time, the idea of getting married was in my head. I was twenty-three, I had my own house in the States, I was somewhat stable financially, I had paid off my student loans and all that. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to find a girl from Gaza, someone who thinks differently about life, someone who listens to different music, has different values—just everything could be different and it could be a bad fit. I really thought of myself as Palestinian, but maybe a little more American than Palestinian.
Then a week passed and I said, “Okay, let’s give them a call.” The reason I kind of tilted toward seeing her again was that she already had three brothers in the U.S., and she’d already lived in Kuwait, so she wasn’t completely unaware of the world outside Gaza. Plus I thought that her experience with Arab life could be a good thing for kids we might have—she could really teach them some of our Arabic culture when I might not be able to, just because I had lived so much in a Western country.
