Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Apartheid is alive and well in Israel...

"Unbutton your pants," Sara, the stone-faced security agent at Israel's Ben Gurion airport, told me. I sobbed, choking on my words, "My dad was born in Nazareth."

"Lift your shirt," she continued.

"He's dying, and he can't return here," I mumbled. I thought of what my father looked like at that moment, bruised and broken from a drunk driver, unable to breathe on his own, and helpless in a hospital bed in South Carolina.

As the daughter of Palestinian refugees, it was already a harrowing experience for me to make my way from my father's homeland, where I have been working, back to Travelers Rest, South Carolina, where he chose to raise us after he was forced from Nazareth by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and forced from Palestine altogether by the occupation of 1967.

But my latest attempt to return to my father, carrying memories of his lost home with me, was a devastating lesson in the indignities of exile and the fragility of life. Full story...

Related posts:
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  2. Israel's "humane" society...
  3. Finkelstein: There was no war in Gaza, it was a massacre...
  4. The wretched scandal of Gaza...
  5. How Israeli soldiers deal with Palestinians...
  6. Inter-racial dating being discouraged in Israel...
  7. Jimmy Carter sued for Israel 'apartheid' book...
  8. Segregation of Jews and Arabs in 2010 Israel is almost absolute...

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