The Palestinian and the Sea

It was over a decade since my feet felt the warm sands of the mediterranean, the same shore I had grown up to love. I had talked a lot about wanting to go to the sea in the last few months and finally after being permitted access by Israel I was there with newly made friends from Yaffa. It was the perfect day to go, the beach was full and vibrant without a cloud in the sky and with a breeze whistling passed gently. By the time we settled into a spot on the sand and spread our towels I was ready to reunited with the sea. Passing the line of broken seashells at the edge of the shore the water was lukewarm, dense with mellow waves. I floated there for a while and before I could be alone with my leisure I looked back to the shore as if looking back at the last decade and thought how wrong it was to be denied the sea for this long. My memory took me back to Ramallah, just a few kilometers west in the hills of the West-Bank, where I overlooked this very sea every morning on my way to work.
After floating for a few minutes I brushed the thought off, thinking I should enjoy the rest of my time on the beach and went back to rejoin the group. They, being all Palestinians or as Israel would prefer “arab-citizens” of the state were discussing internal politics which I found fascinating. Although we were virtually identical culturally it was clear that we lived under very different circumstances yet both our realities share in the same destiny. Their very presence is a testament to the tenacity of the Palestinian identity on this land despite the constant effort to displace, dilute and deny it.
I excused myself from the conversation and walked up the shore toward the modern buildings of Tel-Aviv carefully observing the people around me. It struck me how they were enjoying life with a kind of ease that was absent in the West-Bank. They were doing what people usually do on a beach; some were laying on the sand reading a book, others throwing frisbees or walking their dogs. And the more ordinary their activity seemed, the more I found myself envying them. I remembered the West-Bank, the streams of frustrated faces absorbed in defeat to whom as Kanafani puts it “even the thought of a happy life seems like a social deviance.” By the time I reached the far end of the beach I was confronting the condition of being a colonized subject. Frantz Fanon came to mind as I walked back to rejoin the group.
I stepped back into the water with Hoda who had joined us later in the day. She came to say her goodbyes to the sea since this was her last day in Yaffa, the city of her ancestors where she had spend all of her life. As she hopped the gentle waves, with the ancient city basking in orange light behind her, I noticed how solemn and hurt her eyes were. I tried to capture that image as we talked and thought how her skin matched the color of the old stones that made up the city. She told me how she was excited to be moving to Haifa, but scared that the gentrification of her city will make it impossible for her to move back. I stepped out of the water for the last time but I was still in Hoda’s melancholy Yaffa.
