Annoyed

I'm in an odd mood at the moment.

There's a teacher at my school that I really like. She has a really pleasant and friendly disposition, and she kind of lights up the room whenever she walks in. Not in a flashy "I'm here" kind of way, but just in the way that she smiles and laughs.

A while back we had a staff party, and that was really the first time that I spoke with her more than just in passing, and it came up in conversation that I grew up in Sinai. When I told her this, she became very excited and told me that she, too, had lived in Sinai, and knew exactly what it felt like to be ripped away from your home.

A brief and very simplified version of the story of Sinai:

In 1967 Israel was simultaneously attacked by the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel was able not only defend its borders, but also to conquer the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.

In the early 70s, the Israeli government began to settle these areas. My parents moved to Sinai in 1971. We lived very close to the southern end of what is now known as the Gaza strip.

In 1979, Israel and Egypt began peace talks, and it was decided that Israel would return Sinai to Egypt in return for peace. All Israeli settlements were evacuated in 1982, and razed to the ground prior to being returned to Egypt. My family moved in 1982 to a farming community not too far north from what is the current border.

All settlers who were evacuated were offered both a cash settlement, and easements with respect to land ownership if they moved to a farming community within the new borders. Most people accepted the offer. There was, however, a very strong resistence movement against the withdrawal from Sinai.

The resistence movement included many of the local residents, but it also included many people who moved to Sinai just a few months before the final withdrawal date, and squatted in homes that had been left behind by departed settlers. Near the end, things got really messy, and the Israeli military had to remove many of the people from the area by force. (I should note that my family was not part of the violent protests.)

Anyway, back to the story about the teacher. She told me that she too had experienced the withdrawal from Sinai, and how deeply it scarred and affected her. So here I was, thinking that we really had a lot in common, and how fantastic, blahblahblah. Turns out her parents brought down her and her six siblings to the main town near us (a place called Yamit - not huge by any stretch of the imagination, but a city nonetheless) and they squatted in some of the empty buildings for two months, and were part of the big resistence movement.

When she first told me this a few months ago, I was a little annoyed, because I really don't think she has the slightest clue of what the whole experience meant to other people. She could hardly refer to a place in which she spent two months as a home. She wasn't born there, she didn't have any formative experiences there. Really, she was there for a two month vacation.

My parents built their first home together there, they had their three children there, and they spent a decade there, having taken part of the building of the first community in the entire area. HARDLY the same thing, don't you think?

When people leave a home willingly, be it to move up, or for any other reason, they always have an option to go back and point at a piece of land to say: "this is where I lived". Even if the house is gone, the plot of land remains. My parents don't have this option. They don't have where to go to say: "This is where my children were born". It's as if a decade of their life was erased.

The more I think about this, the more annoyed I get, because her words really belittle and discount the significance of the experience for my family.

I was able to sort of put these annoyances aside, but yesterday she brought me a book that her sister wrote. It's a memoir of her time there, written through the eyes of a 12 year old girl. I've read through about 4 chapters, and I realize that it's the account of a child, but the more I read the more angry I get.

I'm not saying that if you didn't live there, you didn't have the right to protest. What I am saying, is that she really has no right to compare herself to me in any way, or to refer to herself as someone who was ripped from her home.

And because I like her so much, it's hard for me to tell her this.

Posted by raptorgirl at December 11, 2003 03:25 PM