Peace Without Reconciliation

Jerusalem, Israel

I came to buy a phone at the local Watiniya cell phone, the man behind the counter asked what I was doing in the land. “Muslaha,” meaning reconciliation in Arabic, was the name of the organization I worked for, all it took was the utterance of that name to strike a nerve with him.
 
 “A lot of people here do not believe in this kind of institution, you know?” 
 
 “How can you ask someone like me to believe in peace if there is no action of reconciliation done to me?”  He asked.
 
“It is as if I come up to you and slap you and then say, ‘I want peace.’ It doesn’t work like this.” He wore his frustration.

“How can you work for peace if there has been nothing done to reconcile first?” He asked.

He told me his name, Samer Qumsieh. And his life story unveiled from there. Samer is a Palestinian born in Beit Sahour, a small city in the West Bank right outside of Bethlehem. His grandparents, the Qumsieh family were one of the families to have their home demolished by Israeli forces in 1981.

In the late eighteenth century, ancestors of the Quimsieh family came to Beit Sahour and built homes in the high west, where five sons carried on the family named and heritage in Palestine. In 1981, Samer’s mother and father were forced out of their homes and unable to come back. Samer’s parents fled to Beirut, Lebanon to a refugee camp. One week later, their home and family village was destroyed, Samer’s parent’s house was one of the first one to go. 

Samer was born in Beirut where he grew up most of his life. At age 14 he moved to a refugee camp in Damascus where he says, “You cannot imagine the situation people live in there.” The more he talked about his family history, the more passionate he became about the effects of Israeli imperialism.
 
“I will never understand how an Israeli guard can come into a refugee camp, shoot whoever he wants, rape whatever woman he chooses, and have to answer to no one.” 

When Samer was 16-years old, his family was finally able to come back to Israel after 27 years. Living in a refugee camp, the family did not have a form of identification, they could not acquire citizenship from Lebanon and were refused identification from Israel. This kept them from returning for so long. Once they were finally submitted in, it took Samer about 15 more years to acquire an I.D.
 
It was apparent through Samer’s conversation skills that he was an intelligent person. However, even though he graduated high school top 5 in his class, he was not able to go to university without any identification. “I will always  regret this,” he says, “I have worked my whole life at basic jobs, but I always wonder what I would be doing with a further education.”  

“And now I cannot even go into Jerusalem.” Samer said. The dividing wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem forbids Palestinian entrance without a permit, which demands very strict procedures to acquire.
 
“And I don’t want to, I don’t feel comfortable, I feel like they are the enemy, they have done something terrible to us and I don’t want to be around them.”
 
“I am not saying that we haven’t  done anything wrong, we have definitely made mistakes,” he spoke about his Arab community. “I think Hamas is wrong, most everyone here does, they bring a bad image to Arab people.” We then talked about the importance of not blaming an entire country or people group for the actions of a small percentage of that group. This speaks for Muslims, Palestinians, Arabians, Israelis, Jews, Christians, Americans, and so on. Samer even admitted that he has heard of Israeli citizens who do not agree with the actions of their military.

Samer’s story is a story of many Palestinians who have faced the hardship of losing their land, their family and their identity. There is still 5 million refugees living in surrounding countries of Israel, who do not have any form of identification and no opportunity to leave their situation. This is unsettling considering Samer’ s accounts of soldier mistreatment of refugees. 

In Samer’s eyes, Palestinians are the oppressed. At the end of our conversation, he felt the need to tell me that Arabic Palestinians have long existing roots in Israel, almost to prove his existence. It is unfortunate to think someone has to remind people of their identity.