World of Hate 3

My school made me proud to be an Arab. We didn’t care that much for religion, we were Muslim and Christian, we just loved that we could all speak the same language, we were normal teenage girls, with usual teenage concerns, but we didn’t have to suffer racism or discrimination, except once we stepped outside the school grounds.

As an adult, I remember the images of 9/11. I was at work that day, working for an Arab publishing house, we all gathered around a big screen TV, and watched in horror as the second tower went down on CNN. But before it even hit the ground, I swear, the news scrolling across the bottom of the screen was stating as fact that Osama Bin Laden had done it.

The next couple of days are a haze of these horrific images, that I could not stop watching, flipping obsessively between channels each time the coverage ended to see some more. I had a really well educated British friend with me throughout that time, who never knew anything about Palestine until we had talked about it. He had spent his whole life thinking that Palestine had occupied Israel. The publishing house had opened my eyes to things I hadn’t known before, namely access to AP pictures of what was really going on in Palestine, at this point I had close Palestinian friends, I was pro-Palestine now more than ever before, I attended meetings, went on marches. Then something happened, that made me question my beliefs, my entire existence. Let’s just say, life threw something at me, God threw something at me, a test of my humanity.