The Road to Oslo
The 1980s were a transformative time for Britain. Under conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, the country was being led into a new era of individualism and privatisation; an attempt to undo a post-war consensus that she saw as an impediment to the country’s growth. Her policies, particularly those aimed at deregulating Britain’s economy and shrinking the welfare state, came at a high cost: strikes had become a familiar occurrence, and mass unemployment had re-emerged for the first time since before the Second World War. It was a decade of unprecedented challenges and polarising politics, the legacies of which continue to impact the country today.
The National Health Service (NHS) was in trouble, too. Although Thatcher had promised that the country’s publicly funded health services would be safe in her hands, the NHS was struggling to keep its head above water. As a result, the 1980s were characterised by industrial disputes and structural reorganisations aimed to alleviate the NHS’s resource deficit. Both had limited success.
Despite these pressures, the NHS continued to grow its pool of expertise, advertising for jobs around the world and attracting an ever-growing pool of talented medical professionals. One of these job adverts made its way to a recent medical graduate in the Netherlands: my mother. The other made it to a young Palestinian doctor: my father.
These were simpler times, and coming to the United Kingdom was easier than it is today.
My mother boarded a ferry from the Netherlands to Britain. My father boarded a plane from Jordan to London on a one-way ticket. Neither had to apply for an advance visa. Neither had a firm job offer; just the vague promise of an NHS posting upon arrival.
My mother’s Dutch nationality afforded her the right to live in the United Kingdom without any administrative requirements. My father was a stateless person, and his only identity document was a laissez-passer, which he used to enter the country. A few days after he arrived, he visited an Aliens Registration Office in London and received a Limited Leave to Enter the United Kingdom as a medical student, as he had indicated his desire to pursue a medical specialisation with the NHS.
Under “nationality”, my father’s residency booklet simply states “uncertain”, next to a headshot of him wearing a military green flat-cap and aviator sunglasses, his facial features partially obscured - a far cry from the extensive biometric data required for such a document nowadays.
My mother and my father’s journeys are reminders of a time when things were different; when opportunity wasn’t just reserved for those with the right passport. The contrast between their journeys and the situation today is devastating.
Today’s decision-makers seem to have forgotten that Britain’s greatest source of cultural influence, and its greatest source of domestic excellence, was its long-lost openness to a foreigner with a dream. Case in point: my parents still adore Britain, even though they haven’t lived there for thirty years.
My father worked at a few London hospitals in the late 1980s before moving to West Wales General Hospital in Carmarthen, a town in the south of Wales. My mother went straight from the Netherlands to Carmarthen. It was in this small hospital that my parents crossed paths. They would marry and have their first child - me - within two years.
And within less than two years of having me, my parents decided to leave London for Palestine. Though there is no data to be quoted, my family was amongst a larger number of Palestinian families who made their way back to Palestine in the lead-up to, and immediate aftermath of, the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. I know a handful of these families, and all of them describe a sense of hope that motivated their return.
There were also sceptics. Perhaps the most well-known of these, at least to English-speaking audiences, was the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, who saw the Oslo Accords as a capitulation; the “Palestinian Versailles”. This view was reflective of growing discontent amongst Palestinian intellectuals, who questioned the ability of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Arafat to deliver progress for all Palestinians.
So what was it that made my parents decide to leave London for Palestine?
To understand this, we must inevitably look back. The following paragraphs narrate an alternate, personal conflict timeline that hones in on the events that paved the road to Oslo for my family. For a more exhaustive timeline of events, I recommend Oxford Reference or Al-Jazeera’s Palestine Remix.
The Zionist movement began establishing itself in Palestine in the late 19th Century, just as Palestinians themselves were edging towards the idea of nationhood. It was still a world of empires and colonies, and Palestinians were amongst many indigenous peoples to have never self-governed.
During this time, my great-grandparents lived in a coastal town called Isdud, just north of Gaza. Isdud was a thriving agricultural community; two-thirds of Isdud consisted of arable land, mainly dedicated to cereal crops and citrus groves.
My great-grandparents lived under the Ottoman Empire, before its fall during the First World War. During this period, Britain attempted to mobilise Arabs against their Ottoman rulers, promising to support the independence of Arab states in the region in return. One year after these promises were made, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration; a seemingly contradictory pledge to support the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in historical Palestine.
My grandparents, Fatima and Mahmoud, were born a few years after these two conflicting promises were made by the Brits. I’ll refer to them as Teta (Arabic for grandma) and Sido (Arabic for grandpa).
By the time he married Teta and they had their first child, Sido was working as a bike courier for the British administration in Palestine. He always spoke to me of his bike courier days with a lot of joy, seemingly proud to have been entrusted with the communications of an empire.
Sido kept a chest of documents under his bed until he passed away: photographs, letters and other papers he had collected throughout his life. Once, my grandfather pulled out an envelope with English writing on it; one of the many letters he had been tasked with couriering between British outposts. My father and I joked that a revocation of the Balfour Declaration may well be collecting dust at the bottom of my Sido’s chest.
The British Empire’s presence in Palestine tends to be spoken of like a blip: brief, minor, almost accidental. The longevity and impact of the Mandate in Palestine tend to be underplayed, perhaps in an attempt to create a sense of distance between Britain’s rule and Palestine’s fate. In reality, the British controlled Palestine for almost three decades, and it was during this period and under this rule that Palestine’s fate was sealed.
Another often-obscured fact about this period is the relationships between indigenous Palestinians and Jewish immigrants, which were generally good, and worsened only after a while.
There is, in fact, nothing fundamentally incompatible between Palestinians and Jews. Some indigenous Palestinians are themselves Jewish. This group is sometimes referred to as the Old Yishuv, and it included Jewish people who were culturally and linguistically Arabised and had lived in Palestine and other countries in the region since before the 15th century (so-called Musta’arabi or Musta’arvim). There is little research about what happened to this community after 1948.
Before 1948, my grandparents had Jewish neighbours: a family that had come to Isdud from abroad in the 1920s. They had bought a small piece of land in the village. They got along well with the rest of the town. My grandmother told me about them once but said little more than those three sentences: they came to Isdud in the 1920s. They bought some land. We got along well. She ended those three sentences with a heavy sigh.
Many Palestinians will find this a familiar story. At the start of Jewish immigration to Palestine, relations between the newcomers and the indigenous community were generally good. The newcomers brought outside resources and interesting stories, and they worked hard. This changed when, as immigration numbers increased, it became clear that non-Jews were no longer welcome to live and work on lands purchased by Jewish families or immigration funds.
Increasing frustration around this ultimately sparked the Arab Revolt in 1936. In the ensuing years, the Brits slowly but surely backed out of Palestine while Zionist immigration, land purchases and militarisation continued. Palestinians continued to protest against these developments but found themselves increasingly overpowered.
In May 1948, the State of Israel unilaterally declared its independence over 78% of the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. This came amid a wave of fear-mongering and systematic attacks by Zionist militias on Palestinian towns that led to the forcible displacement of at least 700,000 people - around half of Palestine’s indigenous population - between 1948 and 1949.
These events are known as the nakba (Arabic for catastrophe). My grandparents fled Isdud in October 1948 after reports of Zionist attacks on nearby towns. Sido heard the rumours first. After going to their home and warning Teta, he jumped on his bicycle to warn others. Teta was pregnant at the time, and she had two small children. She was young, 19 perhaps, and she was faced with an impossible task: take the children to safety.
But where was safety?
Teta told this story many times, to me and to everyone else in the family. She wanted us to know that we were not descendants of refugees. We were descendants of people who had an ancestral home, who owned land, who lived in a beautiful stone house that they built themselves, of newlyweds who were starting a family, who loved their neighbours, who believed in God, who earned what they had through honest work.
Although I never asked her this specifically, I think Teta would have loathed the idea of reparations. We are not beggars. We only ask for that which was stolen from us, and that which was stolen from us is material; it is tangible; it still exists today.
Teta taught us to never forget where we came from. To never forget Isdud.
Teta took a few small things from their home - I believe she mentioned a big pot and some clothes for the children. She and others began making their way to the beach. They figured that if they were away from the town when the Zionist militias attacked, they would be spared.
What they didn’t know at the time is that they had found themselves in the middle of Operations Yo-av and ha-Har, two military operations aimed at conquering the entire southwestern part of Palestine from Egyptian troops. In other words, Zionist militias were advancing from the central part of the country and pushing towards the southwest. To the west of Isdud lies the vast open blue of the Mediterranean sea. To the south of Isdud lies Gaza.
Teta thought that they could spend the night at the beach and wait until the militias left. She approached the beach after a short walk, sand seeping into her shoes as she tried, reluctantly, to put more distance between herself and Isdud.
The sound of strange vehicles grew louder in the distance, and she knew not to look back. Voices grew louder as people began to realise the threat was near. Some began to run into the sea, walking into it until the water reached their waistline before realising it offered no escape but death.
A sharp, brief whistle filled my grandmother’s ears, and a small tuft of sand flew into the air shortly after. Bullet. She pushed her two sons to the ground behind a small sand dune, so shallow it barely concealed the children’s bodies. Bodies began to fall around her.
Were they being pushed into the sea?
There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to do but wait and pray.
Teta held her two sons tightly and glanced around. Others were laying low behind small dunes, too. To one side, she noticed that bullets were lodging themselves into the sand. The sand seemed to stop the course of the bullets, and they didn’t seem to penetrate the sand deeply. It gave her an idea. She began to dig into the ground at the base of the dune, her hands working one at a time, reaching denser and wetter sand with every handful.
She soon noticed others digging too. Nobody spoke. The only audible sound was a soft rustle, the sound of dozens of hands digging makeshift bunkers in the sand, turning a landscape that was once the backdrop of sunsets and play into a resource for survival.
My grandmother spent the night in the hole at the beach. She waited until dawn to make sure that the militias had moved on, making her way in the only direction left: south.
The village of Isdud was entirely ethnically cleansed by 28 October 1948, and my grandparents both passed away without ever setting foot in it again.
A few months after they fled, Sido and Teta were reunited in the newly built Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Here, only 60 kilometres south of Isdud, alongside the camp’s other 35,000 residents, they rebuilt their lives from scratch.
Some of the Palestinians who were displaced in 1948 ended up in other parts of historical Palestine. Others crossed borders into Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Others made it to further destinations, immediately or eventually. Did you know that Nicaragua has a substantial Palestinian community?
A small minority of Palestinians wasn’t displaced. Instead, these Palestinians continued to live as second-class citizens in the new state of Israel.
This is a large part of the reason why there is no singular Palestinian life story. All Palestinian life is defined by the nakba, but the nakba pushed us in different directions. I often wonder what it will take for these directions to converge once again.
Palestinian nationalism had already existed before the birth of the State of Israel, dating back to the nascence of nationalist discourses under the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Political thought was diverse, too, and leftist ideas made for lively debate amongst young adults. Palestine had a rich political life, but no central political body.
From 1948 onwards, however, Palestinians faced a new reality: self-determination was no longer an inevitability, held back only by the refusal of empires to accept the death of their era. No, instead, self-determination had been forced to make way for a colonial entity that was threatening to usurp all indigenous Palestinian lands. Worse even, Palestinian society had been ruptured, with half of the indigenous population now refugees.
This was earth-shattering.
Some of our young and ambitious turned to guerilla warfare, others to poetry, writing, or visual arts. These endeavours all have one thing in common: resistance.
Resistance became the soul of every individual Palestinian endeavour because simply existing as a Palestinian had become a radical act.
To declare “I am from there” in the face of discourses about “a land without a people for a people without a land” had become a radical act.
Not because we are inherently radical, but because the prospect of annihilation demands radical resistance.
While Palestine was shattered, Israel flourished. Witnessing this unfold was devastating for Palestinians. My grandparents left everything behind - land that they owned, a house that they had built, a radio, clothes, and furniture.
Look around your house and witness all that you would have to leave with only a minute's notice, two free hands, and two children to carry. Then, imagine being forced to bear witness to immigrants building new lives on land that was once yours.
Perhaps my grandparents’ generation thought that if only the world knew what was happening, someone would have acted.
The world knew.
Nobody acted. That is, nobody with enough power.
Violence was a common feature of the decades after the birth of Israel. There are the events we recognise as wars (the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Six-Day war in 1967, and the Yom Kippur war in 1973), but there are also the forgotten episodes of violence that bookend wars, constituting the everyday.
To my family, one of the most memorable of these forgotten episodes is the Khan Younis massacre of 1956, when 275 people, mainly boys and men, were rounded up and killed by the Israeli army. My father was only six months old at the time, but Teta was so afraid of the rumours of soldiers killing boys and men that she hid him under her dress. The soldiers came to search their dwelling, but only my grandmother and her daughter were home. Sido had taken the other children - the boys - to hide.
Teta told me this story many times, too.
Two soldiers stood in front of my grandmother as my father cooed from under her dress. She tried to cover up the sound, but it was difficult. One of the soldiers pointed to the shape underneath her dress. She shook her head. He pointed again. She shook her head again.
After what felt like a long silence, the second soldier nudged the first. He said something in Hebrew. My grandmother thought that he said something along the lines of “come on, leave her alone,” because the soldiers left.
This event is known amongst my family as the first time my father almost died.
The second time my father almost died was when he became ill with diarrhoea. At the time, this was a potentially lethal illness for young children in the camps; Teta had already lost one son, Hassan, to dehydration resulting from diarrhoea.
Wartime or otherwise, violence was taking its toll, and popular discontent was growing within the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. These areas had come under Israeli military occupation after it won the Six-Day War in 1967, and became collectively known as the Palestinian Territories. The Six-Day War is the third time my father almost died. But that’s a story for another time.
My father had lived through three wars and a decade of occupation when he left Khan Younis to study medicine in Egypt. There, he found his footing as a young man in a big city, learning to stand on his own feet and building towards something big. My father has always been a social person; he is charismatic and funny, and he laughs with a sincerity that instantly softens those around him. It was no surprise to me that his social life during his student days was blooming. Many of his friends were Palestinian, and many of them were politically active.
In the 1970s Egypt had a small Palestinian community, mostly consisting of students. Some Palestinians had reached Egypt during the forcible expulsions of 1948, but they were unwelcome. Most Palestinian refugees were returned to Gaza after the territory came under Egyptian military control in 1949. In the 1950s and 1960s, under the pan-Arab government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, any Palestinians who remained in Egypt were given rights on par with Egyptian citizens; a generous move considering the status of Palestinian refugee rights in other host countries. Everything changed in 1978.
Egyptian politics had been heading in a different direction for a while. The defeat of the Arab coalition during the 1967 war against Israel, as well as the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, had sent pan-Arabism into a death spiral. Abdel Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, changed the course of Egyptian politics through the re-institution of a multiparty system, economic reforms that involved a shift in market focus from the USSR to the United States, winning a war against Israel in 1973, and ultimately becoming the first Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel in 1978.
Sadat managed to secure several important Egyptian strategic interests in the peace deal with Israel, but Palestinians felt that they had been sold out. For Palestinians in Egypt, the shift in the country’s political course was immediately palpable: state documentation was changed to label Palestinians as “foreigners” once again, mobility between Egypt and Gaza became restricted, and education fees for Palestinian students in Egypt went up.
Palestinians in Egypt and elsewhere took to the streets to protest. My father joined his friends in a few of these protests, but the Egyptian state was tightening its grip on the Palestinian community.
The last time my father joined a protest, they were met with force by the Egyptian police. My father and his friends ran, turning sharp corners into narrow passages, trying to lose the officers who chased them. At a certain point, they lost one another, and my father found himself standing alone in an alleyway, catching his breath.
A door opened and a man called to him: “hurry, come in!” My father looked up at the man, then at the storefront. He suddenly realised he was standing in front of his regular barber, a friendly Egyptian man not too much older than him.
My father was pushed into an empty barber’s chair right in front of the shop window, and the barber quickly slapped some shaving cream on his face. From the corner of his eye, my father watched three police officers run down the alley, briefly glancing into the barbershop, and seeing nothing but a man in the middle of a shave.
Some acts of solidarity seem small, but they alter the course of a life.
That day, my father evaded arrest, and the police never found out that he was part of the protest. One of his friends wasn’t so lucky. He was caught at the protest and deported from Egypt, ending his medical studies effective immediately and forcing him to settle in Tunisia instead.
I think that we need stories like this sometimes, to remind us that, as small as we may feel in the face of big things, our choices as individuals are powerful beyond our imagination. Helping others matters.
Instead of deportation, my father remained in Egypt, finishing his medical studies and travelling to Saudi Arabia, where many young doctors from the region were flocking to work hard and make money.
He loathed Saudi Arabia. Outsiders tend to think of Arab or Islamic societies as similar to one another, but this is far from the truth. Palestinians are incredibly social. We love going out for food or drinks. We love a good evening stroll with friends. None of this was available in Saudi Arabia. My father described his years there as: working, eating, and sleeping. This was a tolerable fate because he had already set his eyes on the great prize: that of a cardiology specialisation, preferably in an English-speaking country.
Meanwhile, in Palestine, life under military rule took on a new dimension, with the landscape of the remaining pockets of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza now broken up by checkpoints and the advent of settlements. Frustration about life under occupation would culminate in a series of popular uprisings so disruptive that they added a new word to the vocabulary of observers around the world: intifada.
On the eve of the First Intifada in 1987, the occupation was twenty years old. My father had been away from Palestine for a decade. He had only just arrived in London.
The intifada began when an Israeli military vehicle collided with several Palestinian vehicles in Gaza, killing four Palestinians. It remains a matter of dispute whether this collision was intentional or not.
Although tragic, this incident was hardly unheard of, nor was it the deadliest incident that had taken place since the start of the occupation.
Nonetheless, the funerals of the four Palestinians killed during the collision erupted into mass demonstrations. A Palestinian man was shot dead by soldiers at these demonstrations. Anger spread, and soon Israeli troops clamped down on the entire Gaza Strip, besieging Gaza’s main hospital and putting Jabalya refugee camp - where the funerals had taken place - under a week-long curfew. This did nothing to temper the wave of outrage that the events had sparked, and soon Palestinians in the West Bank were demonstrating too.
The social conditions in Palestine had been ripe for a mass uprising for a while. Violence had been increasing for a year. After the incident that sparked the first protests, Palestinians soon began to organise under a unified leadership. Secularists even coordinated with some Islamists. Contrary to the previous decades, characterised by guerrilla violence at home and abroad, the Intifada placed popular mobilisation at the forefront of the struggle against Israel.
And, significantly, something had snapped. The repressive Israeli tactics that had previously worked to coerce Palestinians into temporary submission were now doing quite the opposite.
Five years of popular protest and violence ensued. Palestinians engaged in protests but also in acts of civil disobedience such as throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, strikes, refusal to pay taxes and other economic boycott activities. The First Intifada cost 200 Israeli and almost 2,000 Palestinian lives.
For Palestinians watching from the diaspora, it was a period of visceral yearning. My father recalls coming together with his Palestinian and Arab friends in London, sharing in this yearning to be part of what was happening back home. It felt like Palestinians were going through a period of empowerment, even though it came at a huge cost. My father and his friends found some solace in attending protests together, for Palestine as well as other social justice causes. Perhaps most memorable was the Anti-Apartheid Movement march and rally in Hyde Park in 1988.
Witnessing from afar can feel like a form of madness. It activates memories of the past, ensuring that you feel what you witness on a sensory level, because what you are witnessing from afar is something that you once lived up close.
You smell the teargas because you once smelled the teargas. Your teeth hurt from the metallic sounds of a tank on concrete because your teeth once hurt from the metallic sounds of a tank on concrete. Your skin tingles at the sight of a body falling to the ground because your skin once tingled at that exact sight. You feel unsafe because you once felt unsafe. What is happening to others is happening to you because it once did happen to you.
For Palestinians, trauma is not just generational; it is societal. When one of us dies, every one of us that remains feels that loss as if it were our brother, our daughter, or our lifelong friend. Our hearts are constantly pulled in sorrow across time and place.
The First Intifada garnered unprecedented international awareness and support for the Palestinian cause, ultimately forcing Israel to come to the table to negotiate a peace agreement under American mediation.
Although support for Palestinians had risen, the PLO - the official representative of the Palestinian people - was isolated. This was largely due to its support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which had isolated the PLO politically and financially from both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, opening up a desire to pursue a stronger relationship with the US instead.
The Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 ushered the beginning of bi- and multi-lateral negotiations that would later lead to the Oslo Accords.
I can understand, trying to see the world through my father’s eyes, why he would feel hopeful. After years of following events in Apartheid South Africa, he was now witnessing Nelson Mandela, a former political prisoner, lead a people to freedom. An injustice that had once seemed intractable was now on its last legs. A cause that once elicited the sneers of the elites was now being embraced. Perhaps for the first time since 1948, Palestinians felt that there might be a chance that the world wouldn’t just witness - it would act.
I can also understand the optimism that comes with new beginnings. My father had finally, painstakingly, obtained his cardiology specialisation in 1992. He was married and had a child. He wanted to do right by what he had built, and he wanted to do this in his homeland, surrounded by his family. I think part of my father always knew that he would return. My mother saw the opportunities for family life that increasingly individualistic societies such as Britain and the Netherlands couldn’t offer.
Many of the families I know who returned to Palestine around the time of the Oslo Accords were young families too.
This is how in 1993, our path to Palestine was paved. And this is where my stories begin.