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A note to my readers:
A long time ago, I published a blogpost in which I referred to myself as “sort of” white.  I got an inordinate amount of feedback, both positive and negative, some just curious, some weirdly aggressive, about my use of “sort of” in that context.  In an attempt to unpack that phrase, I am sharing my experiences of being “white-ish” in what I expect will be a good number of blogposts, including this one, over the years ahead.

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Last night I had a dream – a nightmare really. I found myself, wearing my clergy collar, at a conference table of people with different skin tones, all of which were darker than my own. It was a meeting, it turned out, of “The People of Color,” and in my dream it felt capitalized like that – like it was a formal, official meeting of “The People of Color.”

I was sitting to the right of the leader of this gathering and it was as though he had invited everyone in the room to share their racial-ethnic background, starting with himself and then the person on his left and so on. And we had gone around the table and heard everyone else’s identities and now, finally, it was my turn. I was to be the last person to go.

And I said, “I am Palestinian.”

And the leader turned to me and looked me up and down, slowly, as though marks on my body might prove the veracity of my statement. And I felt caught in his gaze and could not move.

Finally, he shook his head, left and right. “No,” he said. “That doesn’t count.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him, feeling my white cheeks turn red, the flame of humiliation rising from my gut through my esophagus, just beginning to smart in my eyes, which threatened to overflow with tears to cool its heat.

“Palestinians don’t count as People of Color,” he responded matter-of-factly. “You cannot be one of us.”

And before I knew what was happening, the flame that I thought would bubble over into tears of embarrassment instead came out of my mouth in a torrent of fiery language. I wish I could remember exactly what I said to articulate it here. All I know is that it was like a litany of pain, my own pain, beginning with the heartache of not knowing my own identity for so long, through the experiences of watching my Arab friends and family who don’t “pass” so easily encounter injustice and rejection again and again, and ending with the assertion that just a mere three years ago I was the victim of racist discrimination myself. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t belong here!” I yelled. “Here is my pain! Hear my pain!” As though my pain was the proof of my belonging to this club, this conference of “The People of Color.” Who knows? Maybe it is…

Perhaps my subconscious was working out the awful contradiction and constraint I feel as one who is white-ish these days. For it is times like these when I feel my white-ish-ness, my non-whiteness most acutely. It is times like these, when a handful of Palestinians have done something terrible and my whole people are blamed, that I feel the most confused about my belonging. It is times like these, when my Facebook feed blows up with so many people I thought of as my friends, as ones to whom I thought I was dear, posting, uncritically, unnuanced defenses of Israel and the horror of retaliation being wreaked upon Palestinian civilians even as I write this, that I feel trapped by my white skin and my olive-tinged blood. I cannot educate everyone in the comments of Facebook. But isn’t it the demands of my privilege, of this white skin, to at least try?

The horrific violence that Hamas wreaked upon innocents in Israel is unspeakable, inexcusable, unjustifiable. But here’s the thing – it’s not inexplicable.

I remember seeing the images of white men in polo shirts, arms linked, faces either contorted in rage or smug with satisfaction, marching in Charlottesville carrying lit tiki torches in the “Unite the Right” rally of 2017. There was one in particular that I must have stared at for hours on end. I looked at the people and wondered, What made them show up this night? What are they thinking? Where does such rage come from? I simply could not understand. Honestly, I still don’t.

Yesterday, I watched a short but nonetheless horrifying video of the music festival-goers in Israel being attacked by Hamas fighters and running for their lives. I cannot begin to imagine their fear, though it is palpable enough in the few minutes I saw of that video. Those precious people did nothing to deserve such terror and trauma. Those innocents killed are the victims of truly evil actions.

Among the footage I saw were some short clips of the Hamas fighters who perpetrated such evil. Like the images of the “Unite the Right” rally, the images in the video out of Israel turned my stomach and broke my heart.

But there was one key difference in my response to these two incarnations of hate: unlike my confusion about the men in the “Unite the Right” rally, I understood those Hamas fighters. I do not sympathize with or condone them, but their rage is not inexplicable to me. I know exactly what brought them to this terrible, despicable moment, this moment in which their own humanity is forever lost – a humanity that had already been stripped off of them by state-sanctioned violence and oppression, day by day, minute after minute, humiliation after humiliation, as they lived in the degradation of the Israeli apartheid that is Gaza. Such bestial behavior is to be expected of human beings who have been treated like beasts for decades. I am shocked, but not surprised by it. Sickened, but not confused.

I will not here go into the story of the past 75 years since the nakba, the catastrophe to my people, Christian, Muslim and, yes, Jewish Palestinians who were living peaceably in the British mandate of Palestine when their lands and livelihoods were violently ripped from them in order to give birth to the nation-state of Israel. There is not, now, time and space to walk through the horrifying history of the oppression and attempted ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over the past decades. But if that summary sounds different to what you thought you knew about the history of Israel, I hope you will seek out sources that tell the truth. There are plenty out there if you just scratch beneath the surface of mainstream media and the US political lobbying system.

But, the thing is, the story that gets told, over and over, here in the States and – to a slightly lesser extent now than before, thank God – in the West at large, is so prevalent that it makes those of us in the Palestinian diaspora, even generations away from it, feel like we are constantly being gaslit. The US narrative of the so-called Israel-Palestine “conflict,” is so different from the lived reality of my refugee-grandparents, of the family of my Palestinian student in Gaza, of my siblings in Christ who share stories of the constant suffering under the boot of Israeli apartheid, that it often makes me feel like I’m going crazy. Like my voice will always be silenced. Like my identity “doesn’t count.”

No wonder my subconscious is desperate to declare its truth to myself in such dreams as I had last night.

Even if this blogpost goes unread by any, even if the powerful politicos here succeed in silencing all of us who know and speak the truth, even if Israel obliterates whoever is left of my people in our homeland in the coming weeks (which, I fear, seems entirely possible), I will not stop. I will not stop speaking. I will not stop writing. I will not stop telling the stories of my ancestors, of their resilience and their beauty, of their capacity for joy and love, of their striving for justice and their deep and wonderful humanity, of their endless hope. I will not stop being who I am. I am not white. I am a proud member of this holy people, oppressed and forgotten by all but the God who loves. I am Palestinian. And I count.