WASHINGTON — As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates head out Monday on a rare joint trip to the Middle East, it's not clear what they can accomplish.

Aides to Rice and Gates say the trip has three primary goals, each crucial: to persuade Iraq’s neighbors to do more to help stabilize the country, to counter Iran’s growing ambitions and to try to get real movement on peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But America's credibility in the region has plummeted. The U.S. has failed to stabilize Iraq, destroy al Qaida, pacify Lebanon, isolate Syria or bolster moderate Palestinians. Instead, its policies have fueled Sunni Muslim extremism and emboldened Shiite Iran, which America's moderate Arab allies consider the two greatest threats to their rule.

So far, its support for Israel's ill-fated war in Lebanon and its efforts to undermine popular radical groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon have borne little fruit. Along with its support for autocrats such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, such actions have undercut American claims that it's championing Muslim democracy.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the Bush administration’s time in office. Leaders of friendly Arab states have lost confidence in President Bush’s ability to deliver on his promises and are wary of sticking their necks out too far to cooperate, according to diplomats and some U.S. officials.

“Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

There are also signs of disarray within the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

The Bush administration also is divided over Iran, with Vice President Dick Cheney’s office pushing for an aggressive military response to Iran's reported aid and training for Shiite militias attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, senior officials said.

Gates and Rice will attend meetings together in Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Rice will then head for Israel and the Palestinian territories to meet with Israeli leaders and Mahmoud Abbas, the weakened Palestinian Authority president whose administration was run out of Gaza by the Islamist group Hamas. Gates is scheduled to visit other gulf states.

Senior Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, even as Congress debates pulling troops out of Iraq.

But Arab diplomats in Washington said their governments need more than reassurance. They said that while the U.S. has promised a more active role, they haven't seen a clear plan for Middle East peace or regional security.

Indeed, after Bush called two weeks ago for an international Middle East peace conference, some Arab leaders concluded that the speech lacked specific goals and simply repeated the broad hopes that he's articulated before — stability in the region and moderate, inclusive governments.

“There is no clarity,” one Arab diplomat said on condition of anonymity because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

The gulf states want to know how a possible drawdown of troops in Iraq would affect their security and whether it would lead to fewer troops in other parts of the region.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “people are monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions,” an Arab official in Washington said.

Sunni-led gulf states fear Iran, but aren't confident that the United States has a strategy for dealing with Tehran, the diplomats said. U.S. officials say they're in the early stages of building an alliance with the gulf states.

“Iraq may be an immediate destabilizing influence. But Iran is something we collectively need to deal with in the long term,” said Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to Hamas, which now controls Gaza. But Rice has repeatedly ruled out dealing with the group, which is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

"The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas."

Gates and Rice will encourage Arab leaders to attend the international meeting on Middle East peace that Bush called for in a July 16 speech. The gathering is tentatively scheduled to take place this fall.

Israel and the United States hope that officials from Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf states and Morocco — none of which recognizes Israel — will attend. But that appears far from assured.

Before the Iraq war, Washington had strong ties with the gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government and the rise to power of Iraq’s majority Shiites shifted the balance in the region. With an unstable Iraq and their own Shiite minorities politically awakened, many governments feel U.S. actions have weakened their grip on power.

Some countries, such as Egypt, have maintained close ties with Washington, but Saudi Arabia and others have begun to distance themselves.

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

First of two parts

On a recent November morning, in between his administrative hospital rounds and amid various workers’ strikes, continuing political uncertainty and growing worry that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was on the verge of yet another cycle of spiraling violence, Dr. Tawfiq Nasser pulled out his wallet and showed a visitor his identification cards.

“In this country, we have a habit of collecting cards,” the Palestinian doctor said dryly.

He held up three cards in quick succession: a magnetic security card to expedite his way through Israeli checkpoints; an identification card issued by the Palestinian Authority; and a third card certifying that he works for a nongovernmental organization: in this case, for the Lutheran World Federation, for which he serves as head of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem and also oversees the hospital’s program of village health clinics in various parts of the West Bank.

Nasser’s main focus, and worry, however, was about a permit due to expire the next day that allowed him to enter Israeli territory and return to his office in Jerusalem. A strike by Israeli bureaucrats was suddenly complicating his life -- without a new permit, he and his staff would be stranded.

The sudden concern about the permit overtook Nasser’s rapid-fire explanation about the fragmented health care system in the Palestinian territories. He argued that as long as an occupation exists, with its attendant checkpoints, delays and transportation snafus, villagers closer to one city to will be forced to go to another for their basic health care. And as a result, their health will suffer.

With a sudden, unexpected snafu about permits added to the mix, Nasser began to lose patience, becoming increasingly impassioned and angry as he spoke to a visitor. “All of our lives are run by bureaucrats in a settlement. You tell me this is no occupation, that it this is just security,” he said.

“Tomorrow, I don’t know if I can go to work,” he said, his voice rising. “And who is punished? The patients. Hamas, they’re not punished. It’s my patients.”

Declarations of impatience, frustration and outright anger are becoming increasingly common among Palestinians these days -- particularly those whose faces and voices are too rarely seen or heard in depictions of Palestinian reality in the West.

The “moderate” sector of teachers, academics, students, government officials and doctors -- the vanguard of Palestinian “civil society” who are not questioning the permanence of the state of Israel, even though they are clearly fed up with the politics of the Israeli occupation -- have, by dint of professional training and patience, kept day-to-day Palestinian society running. They have done so amid an ongoing political stalemate between rival political factions, militants and the Israeli government, and a humanitarian situation that has been worsening by the week.

Weary of politics but keenly aware that just about everything in their contested land is highly political, they are increasingly pessimistic about any resolution to their plight.

Something of their situation was summed up recently by Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem, a longtime champion of Palestinian rights, when he met earlier this month with a group of American journalists who write for Catholic publications.

Speaking of the situation in the Gaza Strip but also about the fate of Palestinians generally, Sabbah said: “They are not terrorists; they are people who are living under oppression and who are reacting. And not all of them are reacting. There are Palestinians who don’t react at all, who go on living their lives in despair and humiliation and poverty. They go on living under occupation without any reaction.”

Others feel similarly -- with a pronounced touch of pessimism. “We’re going nowhere,” Rafik Husseini, the chief of staff to President Mahmoud Abbas, said during an interview at the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah.

Sulieman Harb Shalaldeh, the mayor of the municipality of Sier, near the city of Hebron, expressed the hope that he could soon govern normally.

“Let us keep the politics outside so that our people can continue their lives,” Shalaldeh said recently to the group of journalists. Shalaldeh has to deal with competing political claims, day-to-day-tensions, and now strikes by frustrated Palestinian workers who have not been paid since U.S.-led international sanctions and cuts to the Palestinian Authority by the Israeli government were imposed in March. The cuts by the Israelis alone have resulted in a monthly loss of $50 million in customs receipts.

The mayor’s comments were echoed by a teacher who greeted her American guests with fresh fruit, cakes and tea. “The majority of Palestinians, 90 percent, have no relationship with politics,” she said. “But politics are reflected severely in their daily life.”

So is history. To an outsider what is perhaps most striking in Palestinian refugee settlements and other public spaces are murals depicting uprooted villages lost for 50 years or more, with some still clinging to keys and land titles of areas now occupied by Israeli homes, public spaces and even shopping malls.

Given the overwhelming sense of history and grievance that prevails here, the teacher’s name is all the more revealing. The woman speaking was named Palestine Hussein.

Facts on the ground

The phrase “facts on the ground” is often used to describe the reality of what Palestinians see as the things that make a viable Palestinian state and society difficult if not outright impossible: Israeli settlements, outposts, settler roads, checkpoints, the routing of a 420-mile separation barrier. But it just as easily could describe the deleterious humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories themselves.

The territories’ gross domestic product stands at $1,183 per capita, according to the World Health Organization. Unemployment rates overall stand at 25.3 percent, while rates of poverty overall are 56 percent. The poverty rate in the impoverished Gaza Strip stands at an astonishing 80 percent.

“The population’s socioeconomic conditions and access to health care are severely affected by lack of contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza and restrictions on movements,” the World Health Organization said in a recent summary.

Current conditions -- exacerbated by an unsettled political situation -- are believed to have worsened humanitarian problems: Chronic malnutrition has long been a problem in the territories and has been particularly acute in Gaza, where a 2003 study by CARE International indicated that 13.3 percent of small children in Gaza suffered from chronic malnutrition -- 11 percent higher than a “normally nourished” population would suffer.

What precipitated the current crisis was the January victory of the political faction Hamas in Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Hamas’ victory in turn led to international sanctions that have cut assistance to the Palestinian Authority -- a move that Palestinians have decried as unfair and unjust.

“You wanted democracy and now when you see the fruit of our democracy you say, ‘No, we will boycott you.’ ” Sabbah said about the popular reaction to the move: “This is wrong, unfair and unjust for the Palestinian people.”

The Israeli and U.S. governments said sanctions are justified because Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians -- and this includes those aligned with the rival political faction Fatah -- acknowledge and even embrace Hamas’ militancy. But they have also stressed what they say is Hamas’ political and humanitarian roots and argue that Hamas is no al-Qaeda. In fact, they contend, beginning in the 1970s, Israel itself helped foster the creation of Hamas as an Islamic alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Israeli and U.S. governments have interpreted the Hamas victory as a worrisome sign of growing Palestinian and Islamic militancy, while Palestinians have tended to view the Hamas victory as a protest vote and a referendum on what they say was a corrupt and out-of-touch Fatah elite that had, the sentiment went, cravenly compromised with Israel during the 1990s. (While Hamas controls the Palestinian legislature, President Mahmoud Abbas is aligned with Fatah.)

Over dinner at a Ramallah restaurant, Nader Said, a development studies specialist who teaches at Birzeit University, said public sentiment went something like this: “Let’s try Hamas; we know Hamas won’t work, but let’s stick to our identity.” He said that Hamas had hit a deep public nerve.

However one defines Hamas and interprets the elections, the results proved a smashing blow in at least one respect: Western sanctions remain in place against the Palestinian government, with assistance being cut off until Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist and renounces violence against Israel.

These demands form the core of contention between various the Palestinian factions and were cause for continued dispute recently between Hamas and Fatah over a new compromise prime minister. The current prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, has said he would resign if it would help restore international assistance to the Palestinian government.

The practical result of all of this is that salaries for some 140,000 government workers are not being paid -- prompting a joke by Husseini, the presidential chief of staff. He said recently on a Sunday evening that he was beginning his second work shift, at no pay. “I knew this would be a 75 percent reduction of pay,” he said. “I didn’t expect it would be 100 percent.”

Jokes aside, the sanctions have not only caused obvious hardships but also prompted a 70-day teachers’ strike, as well as walkouts by other public employees. Worsening day-to-day public services have become the norm.

“The boycott has had a devastating and cumulative effect,” said Tom Garofalo, the Jerusalem-based country representative for Catholic Relief Services. “Things are declining geometrically.”

Maybe not indefinitely, however: The end of the teachers’ strike Nov. 11 proved a major relief, and Arab nations that had joined the boycott have announced they will drop it, in part because of anger over a recent Israeli military attack in Gaza.

Nonetheless, reminders of what has been a stark, confusing and dispiriting time are everywhere: A school built with assistance from Catholic Relief Services in the village of Sier recently stood empty. A group of school administrators and parents huddled around a small administrative office and said both they and students have felt stranded and isolated by the strike and the international boycott, which they said have worsened the day-to-day hardships imposed by the occupation.

“What can we do?” said headmaster Ahed Mohid Jebreen who, like the parents, spoke about their coping mechanisms in an economy that has stalled -- be it borrowing from shop owners (and piling up debts), or selling family jewelry to pay bills.

“All the world is punishing us for our democracy, and that is not fair,” Jebreen said. Such punishment, he and the others stressed, is not punishing Hamas, but punishing the struggling Palestinian middle class and poor people.

A recent survey spearheaded by Said’s Development Studies Program confirmed those anecdotal observations: Of 1,200 persons surveyed in September, nearly three-quarters said their daily lives and living conditions had become worst since the January elections.

The survey also revealed that while Hamas’ popularity has declined precipitously -- from 50 percent in April to a mere 31 percent five months later -- a majority of those polled still thought Hamas should form a coalition government. And a majority, 62.3 percent, also said Hamas should not be expected to recognize Israel immediately. The poll also found that distrust of the United States was as widespread and deep as could possibly be: a full 94.4 percent said the United States had not played a constructive role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian standoff.

This tense environment has also affected the response of American humanitarian agencies, such as Catholic Relief Services, that receive U.S. government funding for projects in the Palestinian territories. Catholic Relief Services has to abide by a no-contact rule with all Hamas officials, though it can still keep contact with such national bodies as the Palestinian president’s office.

As a practical result, that means the Catholic agency “has had to roll with some big changes,” Garofalo said. It has also made it occasionally difficult for local staff who, like any “on-the-ground” humanitarian workers, must deal with local authorities and governments no matter what their political affiliation. “We can function, but it has been difficult for our staff who work in Hebron, Bethlehem and Gaza,” Garofalo said.

These and other difficulties have changed a society that despite its many challenges was, in Said’s words, vibrant and hopeful. Now, day-to-day life seems more fragmentary and pinched, with horizons eclipsing. “The whole dream of a Palestinian state is in danger,” he said.

“We’ll do the small things we do each day,” he said. “But the big picture is desperate.”

He paused for a moment. “We’re asked, “Why do you have fundamentalists?” he said. His response: “It’s because you are closing all of the windows of fresh air.”

That is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Gaza, a place other Palestinians call everything from a prison to a mental asylum.

Potential powder keg

It doesn’t take long to learn that Gaza can break your heart.

A sunny Mediterranean outpost that contains some of the most crowded and densely populated urban areas on the planet, Gaza is an impoverished and dispiriting place until you listen to college-age students and young people speak passionately about furthering their skills in computer sciences and English -- although they do so amid the more-than-occasional and not terribly distant cracks of gunfire rounds.

Kidnappings are common here -- though it is said that they often stem more from boredom than from any political or even monetary motivation -- and have added to the sense of a powder keg in the making.

Now in the hands of the Palestinian Authority after a series of well-publicized withdrawals by Israel, Gaza is distinctly different from the West Bank, where Israeli and Palestinian communities collide and jut into each other. In Gaza, a sense of isolation and even imprisonment has taken root, resulting in ennui at best, contempt and extremism at worst.

“Throw whatever you want at us” is how presidential chief of staff Husseini describes popular sentiment in Gaza. “They are desperate. They have no hope. And they have nothing to lose but their chains.”

It is from Gaza that small, homemade rockets are often fired into Israel, prompting what Palestinians have called Israeli overreaction, but what Israel has declared as justified security measures of self-defense.

“I know the Gaza people are suffering,” said Bahij Mansour, a one-time member of the Israeli diplomatic corps who now heads Israel’s department of religious affairs and who spoke on Israeli policies recently to a group of Americans. But he said that Israel feels justified in protecting its borders along the Gaza Strip.

It is Gaza, in the town of Beit Hanoun, that drew worldwide focus recently when Israeli artillery killed 18 Palestinians -- including 13 members of a single family -- in a military operation that was criticized internationally and resulted in a United Nations Security Council resolution of condemnation that was vetoed by the United States. Israel, apparently embarrassed by an incident that killed primarily women and children, called the shelling “a mistake.” The move prompted new threats of suicide bombings, as well as fury throughout the Arab-speaking world and even talk of a third intifada within the occupied territories.

If the long-term ramifications of the Israeli action and the Palestinian response remain to be seen, it is not hard to imagine that the voices of Palestinian moderates in Gaza may become harder to hear.

Mohammed Ismail, 22, is one such voice. Active in a Gaza youth leadership program, Ismail is a one-time English student, an avid reader of Ernest Hemingway, and has hopes of studying English at the graduate level. He acknowledged that Gaza residents have reached a level of anger where they are “not afraid of losing everything.”

At the same time, though, he knows there are liberals in Israel who do not support their government’s policies toward the Palestinians and wishes there was a way for them to make common cause with Palestinians like himself.

One reason he believes that should remain a priority is because of a simple truism, recognized by many but maybe by not all on both the Palestinian and Israeli divide.

“We are here, they are there. We’re not leaving, and they’re not leaving.”

Chris Herlinger, a New York freelance journalist, recently traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories as part of a prize for Catholic Relief Services’ Eileen Egan Award for Journalistic Excellence, which he won for reporting on Darfur for NCR in 2005. Photographer Paul Jeffrey, also an Egan Award winner, assisted with the reporting for this article.

We are either living in a reverie or in denial. When someone you know gets injured in this conflict, you expect to have feelings of outrage, deep sadness, or at least the manifestation of these feelings should be the normal outpourings of grief, sorrow and concern. And yet, news of casualties of a latest Israeli atrocity or an inter-factional battle does not faze people as it once did.

I want to be in hysterics. I know it is not something ordinary to say, but the truth is, this conflict has made people accept as normal, things that elsewhere would elicit deep reactions of wailing, or at least tears, or the momentary satisfaction of venting anger by breaking dishes across a room. Are the restrained reactions that many Palestinians have are merely a self-defense mechanism? Or are we really in denial about what is going on in down town Ramallah or on the beaches of the Gaza Strip? Has the daily dose of grim stories become such an ordinary thing in our life that we wake up each morning, wanting, needing a fix of the usual blood-drenched front page that we pour over while doing something as normal as having our morning coffee and scrambled eggs?

So, shouldn’t I be in hysterics? When I heard that a photojournalist that I know, Osama Silwadi, had been shot while doing something quite unexciting as to look out his office window during a procession on Ramallah’s main street, I cannot describe the feelings that went through my head. Funny, but I thought emotions are not supposed to be cerebral, and yet, I block feelings, like so many Palestinians (and even some foreigners living among us) have become used to doing, in order not to allow myself the luxury of sinking into a depression every time I hear a story of a child killed or a family annihilated, because there are far too many to count. Many of us have learned over the years that if you allow yourself the slightest chance to let the situation overcome you, you are done for and you will be unable to function.

Osama used to be a photojournalist for AFP and Reuters before he decided to become a freelancer and create a Palestinian image bank (www.apollo.ps). He is a father of three children, who now lies in a coma in a hospital bed in Tel Aviv, so far away from his family and friends in Ramallah that no one can visit him or offer his wife the support she needs at this time.

As Osama watched the procession below on Ramallah’s main street from his office window this past Sunday, boys were shooting into the air to commemorate a fallen comrade. I say boys because my (female) mind cannot accept the fact that mature men would be so irresponsible as to shoot in the air in a densely populated area, where the chance of a stray bullet hitting someone is not a remote possibility, but a certainty. And so, the bullet traveled from the barrel of one of those boys’ guns into Osama’s now non-existent spleen, up near his heart to lodge finally in his spinal cord.

The prognosis is not good and we all hope and pray for his recovery, knowing that when he finally wakes up from his coma, he will find that his reality has changed so dramatically around him and he will have to grapple with whether or not he will be able to resume his life as he had once lived it. All those times in the field when he knew that he was a taking chance on life by snapping shots of stone-throwing youths confronting soldiers, or non-violent protestors against the Wall, did he never stop to think that life is so fragile in any case that even a simple walk under rickety scaffolding or taking the wrong turn in a road can result in a fatal accident?

Not to sound like a cliché, but such is life, whether you have lived in a conflict zone all your life or not, you cannot cower in your house forever in the off-chance that you might be struck by lightening. Perhaps, however, people who have gone through trauma feel invincible and the sense of danger is blunted and lightly brushed aside, and so it could quite have possibly been those thoughts that went through Osama’s mind seconds before the impact of the bullet ripped through his body.

It is odd how yesterday morning, when I heard the news, all I could think about is how ordinary this news sounded, despite the fact that Osama had been on my mind quite often these past few days, because I was looking at some recent photos I had taken with his voice about light, lines and frame running through my head. I realized with some unease that I lost the ability to be shocked, indeed a friend told me once that he also lost the ability to be astonished by such things as the first flowering of spring or the birth of a child and that is how I feel sometimes, like I am a car in neutral mode most of the time. And while I am deeply saddened by what has happened to Osama, I am unable to reach down into that deep place where I will allow myself to feel more than the very superficial of feelings and I know that tears will not come.

It completely worries me, this sense that we are becoming a nation of zombies, who have turned off the tap of basic human responses to bad and good news alike that something like the recent inter-factional fighting is not so shocking or unexpected. Once you stop being shocked, then you stop being afraid, and once you stop being afraid, you can do anything out of the bounds of acceptable human behavior. The signs of intimidating armed men running unrestrained among the population should be dealt with immediately and decisively.

More importantly, the indications that we are heading toward a civil war that so many are trying to suppress and deny, will become a full-blown reality if this is allowed to continue and then there will be no turning back to a time when Palestinians put the national interests before the factional, if ever there were such a time. If that should happen, there will be more innocent bystanders like Osama, who will pay the heavy price of the craziness that we have sunken to in recent months, and ultimately Palestine will hemorrhage outwards and be drained of its wealth of people, who today still have the ability to save it from becoming yet another tragic tale for the history books.

Much has and will continue to be written in the days following the death of Palestinian president Yasser Arafat. While the world debates his place in history, his enemies have embarked on a “crusade to besmirch Yasser Arafat”, as the Israeli newspaper Haa’retz reported in its pages.

Emotions and vicious attacks aside, I felt that I, as a Palestinian, who was born in Jerusalem, lived through the 1967 War as a 6 year old (we were forced to flee our homes and seek shelter in the caves of the surrounding hills for more than 2 weeks), and whose connection to Palestine is very much alive, must at least try to convey what Yasser Arafat’s impact has been on my life and identity as Palestinian.

My children are the grandchildren of Palestinian of refugees who, like the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, were forced from their ancestral homes and lands by the terrorism and criminal actions of Israel’s Jewish terrorist founding fathers.

Yasser Arafat was by no means a perfect man. His accomplishment and mistakes were many and I was never shy with my criticism. Yet, through it all, he embodied the Palestinian cause, making sure that we, the Palestinian people would not be cast aside and forgotten as the early Zionist founders of the State of Israel had hoped and worked for. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, is famously quoted as saying “the old will die and the young will forget”, in reference to the Palestinian people and the catastrophe of being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland.

The old did and do die, this is only natural, BUT Yasser Arafat made sure that the young would never forget. In a world that would have liked to see the Palestinians “just go away”, he made sure that we didn’t, that we were and ARE a people, complete with our own history and identity: Palestinian. He forced an uncaring world to see us as a people, not just a collection of rag tag refugees. He instilled in us hope and pride, even in our darkest hours, when the rest of the world could have cared less about our plight, dreams, and aspirations.

When the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir arrogantly announced to the world that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian people”, Yasser Arafat was there, defiantly proven to her and the rest of the world that we exist! This point was not lost on me as a little boy here in America. Yasser Arafat helped me and the millions of other Palestinian children discover and assert our identity to a world that had been accustomed to hearing the lies and propaganda of Israel and the Zionists!

I remember the day I became fully aware of my identity as a Palestinian...

The year was 1970 and I was 9 year old 3rd. grader in Salina Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, USA. I had been in the U.S. for a little over a year, having immigrated to the US in the summer of 1969. One day, they took all of the classes to the cafeteria for an assembly and to have us fill out some kind of a questionnaire/survey. I went along with my fellow 3rd graders and we sat down to fill out a survey for some government agency. Amongst the usual questions such as name, age, date of birth and such, was a question of COUNTRY OF ORIGIN AND NATIONALITY...Since I was not yet a U.S. citizen, I naturally wrote in the box: Palestine and Palestinian.

After about 15 minutes, the teacher came around and collected the forms that we had filled out. There were kids from just about every corner of the globe as well as most countries in the Middle East, since Dearborn had been a magnet for Arab speaking immigrants from the Middle East as well as Eastern Europe due to the availability of jobs in the Auto Industry. We lived, played, and went to school in the shadows of the mammoth, smoke belching Ford Rouge Plant.

The teacher went through the forms as they were collected one by one to check if they were complete. When the teacher who was charged with collecting the papers approached my desk, I handed her my paper. She took one look at it and let out a nasty groan. She stared at me and began to lecture me, in a rather loud tone, that I had made a mistake. I had written in a nationality and a country that did not exist and was not recognized. She made me stand up and asked me in front of the whole class what my nationality was.

I said, "Palestinian."

She replied, "Nonsense, there is no such thing."

She then handed me back my form and told me to correct it. I was confused. Exactly what was I supposed to write? She erased the words Palestine and Palestinian and told me that I had a choice. I could be Lebanese, Syrian, or Jordanian. I protested to her that I was none of those. I was born in Jerusalem not in any of those other countries that she had listed.

To no avail, she wrote in the words SYRIA and SYRIAN on the form. She then scolded me in front of the whole class as someone that did not know who he was or where he came from. Of course all of the kids, being the kids they are, made fun of me and had a laugh at my expense. The cruelest ones were kids from other Middle Eastern countries. They so desperately wanted to be accepted, that they chided me mercilessly even though I was “one of their own”.

This episode occurred about around the same time that Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, made that infamous speech. In it she said that there was no such thing as Palestine or a Palestinian people. That episode only made me more aware and proud of my heritage and helped shape who I am. A Palestinian!

And for that, I am eternally grateful to Yasser Arafat. Now the entire world knows who the Palestinian people are. My own children do not have to go through what I went through as it pertains to their identity. They can show pride and the world can never again pretend that we “didn’t exist”!

Though I knew Yasser Arafat was dying, I didn't know how I would receive the actual news of his passing. He had been written off so many times in the past, I think I was expecting him to miraculously recover, the ever- defiant survivor. Like most Palestinians, I never knew a world without Arafat. During our darkest hours, he was there, reassuring us that our struggle for freedom would not be forgotten.

I remember the great excitement and pride when my father took me to a local coffee house here in the US in the 1970s to watch Arafat give his famous speech at the UN. I was filled with a pride I had never felt before as a Palestinian. He carried the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the entire Palestinian people when he strode into the general assembly. The world was forced to recognise we were still there, that we would not "just go away".

He symbolised Palestinians right to the end, when Ariel Sharon had him imprisoned in his Ramallah compound. His confinement and Israel's vilification of him, mirrored the daily mistreatment, oppression and vilification of the entire Palestinian people.

It is a sad day for me and for all Palestinians, our loss is great. But his spirit, the spirit of the Palestinian people, will live on.

I can’t say for sure when it happened. Nor can I say for sure how it happened, but rest assured it happened. I had fallen hard for this, my first love. I was smitten but could not really explain how or why. I was a mere child who could not put into words the feelings that I had for this fair maiden, the true extent of which did not reveal themselves until much later on, only after I was separated from her. The vast distance between us only made me yearn more for her ever more. She was in my blood and there was nothing on this earth that could remove her.

Her name is Palestine. The first time I laid my eyes on her was December 1st 1960. That was the day that I was born onto her soil and drew my first life giving breath from her sacred air. She nourished me with food grown in her earth, watered by her dew and this mixed with and formed my flesh and blood.

It wasn’t until 1965 that I began to see and feel her beauty and warmth. I was an inquisitive and very adventurous child, raised in the village of Beit Hanina, a suburb of Jerusalem. I spent days upon days exploring the hills and trees that encircled the village of my youth: running from my family’s fruit and olive orchards, to the caves in the hills; I was never at loss for adventure. A slingshot, handmade from olive wood and the rubber of a car inner tube, was my constant companion. All the children in the village had slingshots dangling from their back pockets: one's proficiency and marksmanship with a slingshot was a source of pride amongst the youth in our village.

How can I describe such a love affair between a man and his land? The early spring mornings, richly colored hills alive with wild flowers, plants, and blossoming trees, watered by life-giving spring rains. Standing on the balcony - high, overlooking the valleys and outward to the hills - that was built by my great grandfather, I saw what he had seen, admired and loved: an ancient grape vine planted in the early 1900’s, snakes its way up the staircase, covering the balcony, providing shelter and protection from the hot summer sun, its lush emerald canopy a source of shelter and its leaves rolled by my mother, grandmother and sisters with tender, loving hands into a staple of our daily food, as were the giant bunches of golden grapes, hanging just above my head, dangling in the breeze.

I would climb the hills, where my other grandfather lived and scan the valley below, seeing my village, and the mosque’s minaret - my compass from every point. To the west, my family’s fruit orchards, a living carpet of green pink and white blossoms’ the fields, hills, and valleys alive with village people tending their crops and orchards. Mule and horse drawn plows tilling the orchards and open fields: turning over long, straight lines of fresh earth as the plows dug up the dirt. Shepherds and their herds of sheep and goats, baby lambs born in the early spring months, dot the hills grazing on new grasses, plants, and flowers. To the east, my family’s fig and olive orchards, fields of red poppies waving in the breeze. The women of the village roaming the hills, collecting a variety of herbs and plants to be used in our everyday lives to season our food and heal our wounds and illnesses. Whatever was not used immediately was dried and saved for later. My mother assigned me guard duty at the edge of one our groves where the plums and apricots were grown: my job was to keep the girls from neighboring girl’s school away from the trees and their fruit. The girls loved to pick the small unripe and still green fruits: these are generally sour and they liked to dip them in salt and munch them for snacks, likewise, the green almonds, so abundant in Palestine. My mother, bless her, used to make pickles from just about anything: green plums, apricots, and almonds as well as the usual stuff like cucumbers, eggplant, and green tomatoes. All of our vegetables were grown in our own gardens.

Summer, with its heat, helped ripen the golden apricots, plums of every color of the rainbow, fuzzy peaches and other fruits that were in abundance. The early summer months meant the apricot harvest, later the plums and peaches, and finally grapes and figs that ripen only in late summer. Nothing has stuck in my mind more than the early mornings, waking at dawn and running down to our orchards to collect fallen apricots from the ground: these were ripened by Mother Nature and still covered by the cool, early morning dew that waters the Palestinian countryside in the summer months in the absence of rains. I would select one of these golden beauties, lift it over my mouth and squeeze the drops of golden sweet nectar onto my tongue. The taste still lingers with me today, 35 years after the fact, never duplicated. What we did not consume, my mother transformed into jams and jellies – so that year round, we enjoyed the abundant and delicious fruits of our land.

Fall ushered in the olive harvest: the most celebrated of harvests in Palestine. Olive trees can live for many hundreds of years and are a very vital part of Palestinian life. Cared for as one would for a newborn child, olive trees are synonymous with Palestine and her people. The orchards and their crops are an integral part of Palestinian life. The olive harvests were festivals: the hills and valleys become alive with people; entire families, scores of people carry ladders and sacks as they make their way to harvest their precious crops. The olive harvest was, by far, my favorite season of the year. I loved to be with my siblings as we picked olives and ate our meals under the very trees that my ancestors had planted and harvested before me: where they ate, like me, under the same trees hundreds of years before.

After the harvest, olives are either turned, cracked and pickled or sent to the nearby presses to become the best cold pressed virgin olive oil on the planet. To this day, I still receive olive oil from my mother that is pressed from the olives grown on our lands: the same trees that my ancestors harvested and that I climbed and harvested as a youth.

The winter months were spent in relative quiet indoors. There was no electricity in the village of my youth: we burned wood to heat our humble abode. A large metal barrel, with both ends cutoff, would be placed atop the round stove; the wood piled into the barrel and the fire lit. After the wood had become glowing embers, it would be carried inside to heat the. Some used kerosene heaters but most used these simple wood-burning stoves that I loved. As kids, we’d take eggs and bury them in the hot ashes of the fire to roast; after a few moments they were ready to be taken out and eaten: the taste so much better than simple boiled eggs; sometimes we’d bury potatoes and other vegetables to get them cooked. The elders would make coffee and tea at the edge of the glowing embers.

The winter months brought the much-needed rains, even the occasional snowfall: we kids absolutely loved the snowfalls. We would run outside to play in the snow, knowing full well that it would melt fast at it touched the earth. The sight of the snow-covered hills was a rare and awesome sight: olive trees covered in snow is also a sight to behold. Families huddled by the fire, exchanging stories and tales handed down for generations. We had an old radio, but we usually provided ourselves with our own entertainment, giving root to an indescribably feeling of closeness with community and family. Such was the life that made me fall madly in love with my beautiful Palestine. Her soil is intermixed with my blood; her air fills my lungs; her beauty forever displayed in the museum of my mind… One never forgets his first love…

Today, my village is barely recognizable from what I remember. It is encircled now by Jewish settlements that seem to dominate and choke her. There is a Jewish only highway that cuts straight through the heart of my beloved village like a giant scar on an otherwise beautiful face. Most of the olive orchards have been destroyed and uprooted by the Israelis in their unquenchable thirst for land. The village is cut in half; its people are not allowed to travel from one side of the village to the other – not even when their lands are there. People are cut off from their lands, crops, orchards, more importantly, families by roadblocks, and soldiers. Palestine today, is a land bleeding and in pain. May the grace of God heal the wounds and mend its broken hearts so that she may know true peace.

If I close my eyes and think hard enough, I can still see the things that made me fall madly in love with my homeland. Yes, she has changed. And yes, she has a few scars, some wrinkles and lines, but these only make me that much more attracted to her – my first and true love.

I remember the day I became fully aware of my identity as a Palestinian...

The year was 1970 and I was 9 year old 3rd. grader in Salina Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, USA. I had been in the U.S. for a little over a year, having immigrated to the US in the spring of 1969. My 3rd. grade class was asked to fill out a survey for some government agency. Amongst the usual questions such as name, age, date of birth and such, was a question of COUNTRY OF ORIGIN AND NATIONALITY...Since I was not yet a U.S. citizen, I naturally wrote in the box: Palestine and Palestinian.

After about 15 minutes, the teacher came around and collected the forms that we had filled out. There were kids from just about every country in the Middle East, since Dearborn had been a magnet for Arab speaking immigrants from the Middle East as well as Europe. The teacher went through the forms as they were collected one by one to check if they were complete. When she approached my desk, I handed her my paper. She took one look at it and let out a nasty groan. I was informed by her, in a rather loud tone, that I had made a mistake. I had written in a nationality and a country that did not exist. She made me stand up and asked me in front of the whole class what my nationality was.

I said, "Palestinian."

She replied, "Nonsense, there is no such thing."

She then handed me back my form and told me to correct it. I was confused. Exactly what was I supposed to write? She erased the words Palestine and Palestinian and told me that I had a choice. I could be Lebanese, Syrian, or Jordanian. I informed her that I was none of those.

To no avail, she wrote in the words SYRIA and SYRIAN on the form. She then scolded me in front of the whole class as someone that did not know his nationality. Of course all of the kids made fun of me and had a laugh at my expense. The cruelest ones were kids from other Middle Eastern countries. They so desperately wanted to be accepted, that they chided one of their own.

This episode occurred about around the same time that Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, made that infamous speech. In it she said that there was no such thing as Palestine or a Palestinian people. That episode only made me more aware and proud of my heritage and helped shape who I am. Palestinian then, now, and forever!