Conflicting Narratives
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Central Beirut. August 2019. Photo credit: Shelby Mathis
When I look back at it, I didn’t have much of a bias. I mean, relatively speaking. Even in my button-down days as a newbie Evangelical Christian, I understood intuitively, that the modern-day state of Israel is very different than the Israel of the Bible. So, when I found myself in Beirut in 2004 walking through a Palestinian refugee camp, as one does, it didn’t threaten my worldview.
It did however, blow it wide open.
When I found myself in Beirut for the first time, it was more a badass trip. I went to Beirut as a single, blonde, American researching opportunities, you know, Lebanon the land of opportunities. Could I be more hardcore? I wasn’t. Trust me. All I knew of Beirut was what I saw in the news in the 80’s as a teenager – civil war, car bombings, and kidnapping of Americans. You know Beirut stuff. I went scared and excited because in one of those rare moments of my life, it felt like I was destined to be there. We all have to start somewhere.
Now, if I am going to be completely honest with you, when the opportunity of visiting a Palestinian refugee camp presented itself, it sounded interesting and cool. I know, super American voluntourist attitude. Stick with me for a bit. I didn’t have a bias against Palestinians. What I remembered about them was that iconic picture of little Palestinian kids throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. What stuck in my mind was the disproportion of the conflict; a real David and Goliath situation but technically reversed.
What I thought was just a cool afternoon adventure through a Palestinian refugee camp turned out to alter the course of my life. It challenged everything I thought I knew about refugees or Arabs or about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Which I knew little, actually. What I saw that day I couldn’t really process - decrepit cement homes, narrow streets streaming with raw sewage, an extraordinary amount of low lying electrical cords and water hoses bundled together, trash everywhere, bullet laden buildings, the congestion, and the sheer amount of humanity shoved together. It looked like another world, an alternative reality.
But the people.
The people were beautiful and hospitable and welcomed me into their homes and shared what they had with me. It changed me.
How did I NOT know Palestinians were refugees? How did I NOT know they were living in Lebanon? In decades old, permanent refugee camps? That didn’t look like refugee camps at all but more like a ghetto. There were millions of Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the Middle East. Stateless. Without basic human rights. Unable to go home. I felt like I had been lied to my entire life. How could their lives and stories and voices be so hidden from the rest of the world? How could their justice be so elusive?
I left Beirut for Denver angry, really angry.
It felt like scales dropped off my eyes. It blew my heart wide open for the Palestinians. It also caused a struggle within me. A struggle for my mind to catch up with my heart and my emotions. A struggle for me to share what I experienced with skeptics. With passion and information instead of anger and confusion.
When I got back home, I voraciously read anything I could get my hands on about Palestinian narrative, displacement, and culture. I learned words like Nakba[1] and phrases like “right of return.”[2] I decided to pack up my life in Denver and move to Beirut to serve them. And I soon found myself immersed in war and violence and dysfunction, just like everyone else in Beirut.
I have often wondered what would have happened if I would have had a bias against Palestinians. If I had already decided who they were without actually knowing them. Would I have gone into the camp that day? Instead of compassion and horror would there have been judgement? Would I be able to write off the reality I experienced as a consequence, a price people pay for opposing God’s chosen people, the people in the right? What would have happened if my stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims made me blind to their truth and their reality?
Someone else’s truth is hard and very, very painful at times. It makes you look at your own inner reality and the walls you build to protect yourself from others. The walls that keep you from compassion, the walls that keep others as the “others.”
It is especially hard when someone’s truth stands in contradiction to your own narrative. This for me is the crux of the Israeli/Palestine conflict.
I’ve learned that protecting myself from someone else’s pain only hardens me to the point of not being able to see my own pain OR the extreme - thinking that my pain is the only pain that matters. The wall that I built becomes higher and higher.
The cost is to continue.
Continue to learn, continue to process, continue to be outraged at injustice and suffering, continue to be uncomfortable, and continue to listen.
And this is the most important, when we can do so safely again.
Continue to eat together.
Share someone’s food and recipes and stories and history. And let them experience yours. It’s that simple.
It could blow open your worldview and biases.
Think about what your small acts could actually do in the world.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Lee Harper, To Kill A Mockingbird.
[1] https://imeu.org/article/quick-facts-the-palestinian-nakba
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return