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The first time I visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it was the tall of 2004. Six months pregnant at the time, I had decided to travel on the Israeli airline El Al. I figured if I weren't to be allowed to enter Israel, I'd rather he held up in New York and not after a long flight. I had been told I would face difficulties trying to enter Israel because my American passport reveals that I was born in Iraq.
Sure enough, I was detained with El Al Airline security for nearly five hours while my American friends passed through without incident. I was questioned over and over about my motivations for entering Israel. Was I visiting relatives or friends in the West Bank or Gaza? What about my relationship with Saddam Hussein? My political affiliations? My history? My parents' history? Was I a Muslim, and did I know any terrorists? What was I doing, where was I going, where had I been? Each question was asked as an innocent accusation: "Going to work with Arab groups in the West Bank, yes?" They scanned my body seven times, lifted my shirt to "make sure" I was pregnant, searched my bag three times, and confiscated my lotion and shampoo. I politely answered each question, but offered very little. I told them nothing of my hope to find my mother's childhood home in Jaffa, Palestine, now a part of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. "I'm just an artist," I said. Just an artist looking to take pictures of a home stolen from my mother's family in 1948.
The creation of the state of Israel in 1948, known to Palestinians as "Al Nakba" ("The Catastrophe" or "The Disaster"), was built on a systematic destruction and depopulation of more than four hundred villages, massacres, looting, and the displacement from the region of 800,000 of the 900,000 Palestinians who lived there.1 Currently, there are more than four million registered Palestinians and descendants living in the diaspora, as a consequence of typical birthrates, subsequent wars, two intifadas, and a brutal occupation.2 Millions more are displaced from their own families' land and continue to live in internal exile throughout Occupied Palestine and Israel, prompting Palestine's poet laureate, Mahmoud Darwish, to ask, "Where...