Six Palestinian Figures

Writer: Dr. Ahmad Rafiq Awad

This article is based on a video I watched on the TikTok platform, where the speaker humorously discusses four Palestinian characters. As for me, I made it six characters, perhaps because the Palestinian reality, after seventy-eight years since the establishment of Israel, has become more complex, fragmented, and contradictory, to the extent that it is difficult to summarize the Palestinian experience in a single character.

Character One: The Palestinian in the Occupied West Bank.

This Palestinian measures his travels and movements by the number of checkpoints and their opening or closing times. He plans his day according to which road might be opened or which checkpoint might be closed, and he prays day and night that it does not come close to him, his field, or his home, as a settler believes he is living in the days of our master David, peace be upon him. He dreams of visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque without obstacles or harassment. It is a character that lives in an open-air prison, stripped of everything, and exposed to everything.

Character Two: The Palestinian in the Occupied Jerusalem.

A Palestinian who holds multiple documents, yet he cannot build another floor on his house, and he may not even be able to fix a sink in his kitchen without entering a maze of laws, permits, and regulations. He spends his life working to pay what is called the 'Arnona' tax, drowning in administrative and legal details that seem never-ending. He lives in his city, but he discovers every day that the simplest details of life there require permission.

Character Three: The Palestinian in the 48 Areas.

This Palestinian lives in a space where he suffers from marginalization, demonization, and exclusion from the public sphere, and he works, above all else, to avoid being killed the next day, as his personal security is not guaranteed. He is a Palestinian who holds citizenship, but this citizenship does not necessarily grant him a complete sense of safety or equality.

The fourth character: the Palestinian in the Gaza Strip.

This Palestinian has had to pay the price of a phase of absence, disintegration, and weakness entirely. His dreams have diminished to the point where obtaining a sip of water or a piece of bread has become a dream greater than regaining his home or returning to a garden full of red peppers. The Palestinian in Gaza dies under the rubble or above it, while all the crossings seem closed before him, as if the world has shut its doors in his face and left him to his fate.

The fifth character: the Palestinian in exile who does not hold full citizenship.

He carries a travel document that does not rise to the level of a passport, remaining on the margins, closer to being ostracized or apprehensive. He lives on the edge of poverty; there are no full rights or full citizenship, and his dreams often become linked to survival through another nationality, a nationality that preserves his dignity and grants him some of the security he has long lost.

The sixth character: the Palestinian in exile who holds full citizenship.

This Palestinian may feel personal salvation, but he constantly confines himself with the obsession of not forgetting. You see him donating his money, time, or effort for his distant homeland, which is engulfed in fog and suffering together. He has managed to build a stable life in the vast lands of God, but he has not been able to cut the cord that ties him to that distant, yearned-for place.

This is, in part, the image of the Palestinian people now, after seventy-eight years since the establishment of Israel: a people that appears fragmented and disintegrated by geography, priorities, challenges, differing directions, and references. Six characters, and perhaps more, are united by one homeland and separated by maps, barriers, borders, documents, nationalities, camps, cities, and a heavy memory.

And yet, despite this bitter and dangerous reality, the Palestinian people have not dissolved or disappeared. Israel, despite all it has done and continues to do, has not been able to surpass the existence of this people or to end their cause. This is a fact that compels it, before anyone else, to reconsider its calculations and methods.

The problem may not be that the Palestinians still exist after seventy-eight years, but rather in the belief that another seventy-eight years can achieve what previous decades have not. Perhaps Israel does not have to wait all this time to record another imagined victory.