AMMAN, 16 May — I am still in Amman trying to gain access to my home in Palestine. I am still so close yet so far. I am here, running from one office to another, from one embassy to another, from one taxi cab to another, sweaty and tired, with various passports, travel documents, tickets and permissions, yet with no avail. The Israeli logic is simple: You are a Palestinian, therefore you don’t belong in Palestine.
For the first time in eight years, today, I felt the breeze of Palestine, so refreshing and loving. I was so close that I almost touched the other side of the border, where Israelis stand in a place they don’t belong, between Jordan and my home.
For a whole week, I have been trapped between my overwhelming desire to reach Palestine, and the political reality, cruel and irrational. I was told to go the American embassy in Amman.
Americans don’t allow anyone to mistreat their citizens, I was told.
When I visited the American embassy in Amman, I was aghast by the castle- like design. I made my way through a crowed of people, seeking visa in the military zone around the embassy.
“The Israelis sent me back,? I told an official at the embassy while handing my American passport. “They told me that an American passport will not change the fact that I am a Palestinian.”
“Well, you know, this is Israel, we cannot help you there.” she bluntly replied while sipping some coffee.
So who would help me? Who can understand that a man can be away from his family for too long? Who can comprehend the pain that strikes you when a boy-looking Israeli solider orders you with so much carelessness: “Yallah, don’t waste my time, out, out.”
But I felt the breeze of Jericho, I almost tasted Palestine’s water, I almost hugged my dad and held my nephews and niece, I almost handed them the gifts I bought for them, I almost bought my daughter that special Palestinian dress with “the colors of the rainbow” she has been asking me for.
But I am a Palestinian, I don’t belong in Palestine.
So desperate for the right to enter Palestine, I brought all the papers they asked for so that I am allowed entry. I compiled it all and came back.
“Here are all the papers you needed.” I gave it all to them. I told them, hold on my US passport if you don’t trust me.”
But they still refused to allow me in.
They shouted at me again, and once again I was dragged to wait in the same uncovered spot under the gazing sun for a bus to take me back to Amman.
Israeli soldiers, with too little English, ask me if I speak Arabic.
Once I say yes, they insult me in Arabic. So I stopped speaking in Arabic.
Nevertheless, they practiced, using the little English they know. “Ramzy, you go home to Washington. You don’t need Gaza.”
But Gaza is my home. Refugee camp or no refugee camp. Bombing or no bombing. Massacres or no massacres.
Do they understand what home is?
My home is where an ailing father waits to say that last say good bye.
Home is a place where the neighborhood’s children, have become men and women and now have children. Home is where my mother’s grave is. Home is where everything tastes better, sounds better, and feel much better. Home is where you are not racially profiled for being a Palestinian, where you don’t have to defend yourself for just being a Palestinian.
But the soldiers had no time for me. They are too busy to explain why I wasn’t allowed to my home. But they had enough time to search my luggage and spread my underwear to be scanned.
They had enough time to read every paper I had, to read my notes and write down my telephone numbers. They had abundance of time to review my family album and ask me about names of individuals they found suspicious.
But no time to tell an exiled man why is he being sent to exile.
A young female solider, with dark hair and a machine gun asked me, as she tried to practice her English, on a broken man awaiting his bus away from home.
“Do you love Israel, Ramzy?”
“How dare you ask me such question, how dare you?”
— Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian American journalist based in Washington.