I Am From Palestine

A frequent feature of anti-Israel activism is erasing the State of Israel from the map and replacing it with Palestine. One insidious example of this comes in the short video “I am from Palestine.” The video tells the story of Saamidah, a young Palestinian-American girl (the description calls her a “refugee”) who feels out of place at school because there is no Palestine on the map in her classroom. In response, her father tells her about her wonderful homeland and that they will return one day. The next day, Saamidah proudly declares to the class that she is from Palestine while showing them a map of Israel, except it is labeled Palestine instead. While purporting to uplift this young child, the video eliminates the Jews from their homeland, erases Jewish history and instead claims it for the Palestinian Arabs.  

Saamidah wears a pendant with Palestine written over the map of Israel. She also wears a headband with a Levantine embroidery called tatreez. Pro-Palestinian activists often portray tatreez as uniquely Palestinian. However, it is common throughout the Levant and has no particular association with Palestinian Arabs. This unintentionally reveals a subtle point; the Palestinians are Arabs, similar to Arabs throughout the Middle East region, who spread out from their ancestral homeland, Arabia, centuries ago as they conquered the Middle East region, including Israel. 

At school, Saamidah’s classmates mark on a map where their families are from. Saamidah is crestfallen to see that instead of Palestine, the map says Israel, and the teacher tells her she will mark her home as Israel instead, which traumatizes her. This sequence is intended to engender empathy for Saamidah. But it is also manipulative. It is unlikely that a world map in a public-school classroom would not mark the West Bank and Gaza as separate from Israel. More importantly, the video is implying that the existence of the Jewish State, Israel, traumatizes this little girl.  

Despondent, Saamidah returns home and tells her father what happened to her. To cheer her up, he shows her another map in which Israel is replaced with Palestine and regales her with the glories of her alleged lost homeland. In particular, he focuses on the city of Jaffa, here shown as a vibrant Palestinian Arab city. But this is another factual distortion; Jaffa is not an exclusively Arab city but, rather, has long had thriving Jewish and Arab communities.  

Jaffa’s story goes back to the Bible as the city from where Jonah departed before he was swallowed by the fish. In a historical context, Jews rebelling against Greek rule more than 20 centuries ago reestablished it as a Jewish city. Jaffa continued to figure in Jewish history under harsh Roman rule and even after conquest and colonization by Arabs.   

Following Muslim conquest, Jaffa declined in importance and was destroyed and rebuilt several times before its familiar form was constructed by the local Ottoman Turkish governor, Muhammad Abu Nabut.  By the early 19th century, its population had shrunk to 2,500 people. It grew to almost 40,000 in 1914 as Muslims, Jews and Christians flocked there. In 1909, seeking to escape the cramped city, a group of Jewish residents purchased land in the sand dunes outside the city limits of Jaffa. Initially called Achuzat Bayit, this community would grow into Tel Aviv. 

During the period of the British mandate, anti-Jewish riots in 1920, 1929, and 1936-1938 forced many Jews to flee the city for Tel Aviv. After the 1948 war, it became safer for Jews in Jaffa, and many returned. By portraying the city as only Arab, the video presents a fabricated history.   

The next day, Saamidah returns to class, map in hand, and triumphantly declares to her classmates and teacher that she is from Palestine.  The video could have explained that attempts to reach peace in the region, culminating in the Oslo Accords, have given Palestinians self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza rather than promote irredentist dreams of eliminating Jews.