Status Updates From Find me at the Jaffa Gate: ...

Australia, new word in itself, has primarily two categories of people, First Nations and other, and although some people have raised the question in settler-colonial contexts of when is a settler a local?, I would say when the horizontal axis denoting years is casually and even conservatively estimated at 60 000, then two hundred years is notable only for its staggering insignificance on any scale graph.

But when it comes to tropes, there is one often heard in Australia when Palestinians enjoy the implications of the rednecked epithet. Someone yells from a car with the windows rolled down and music blaring, ‘Go back to where you came from!’, and the dear Palestinians nod to their interlocutor like he’s on their side and they say, ‘Inshallah, God willing!’.

..like the story of what happens to his second-born daughter, third child, Salma, who at six years old is beaten so brutally on the back of her legs by the nuns for being left-handed that she is obliged to lie face-down on her stomach for three whole months before she can stand to walk again.

I am standing in a queue which is short but moving slowly,&the metal detectors are whizzing in overdrive&I remove all the obvious things&then the unobvious ones,which include my bra,glasses &hairpins (&an Israeli, who is holding my bra aloft in one hand as I walk through the security arch with no shoes on, says ‘beautiful eyes’,&I think this scene captures for you the intimacy of structurally ingrained oppression).

Palestinians, as I have told you, know place, and they know about origin, and while I tell you that Ellen was born in Bethlehem, the Bethlehemites say, ‘Well that may be, but the name’s from Jerusalem’.

And you may have heard of the exhumations from the cemetery, and then injunctions, and the flood and then the drought of funding that was raised for a Museum of Tolerance, designed by a great but hapless architect, to be un-ironically erected over the bodies of dead Palestinians.

I give him an example,because although he is trying to see, it’s hard to see what you have been taught to ignore,the way Australian children are taught about Gallipoli but know nothing of the Frontier Wars. When I am first planning to visit Jerusalem, I find an apartment available on Pa’s street, which boasts Arab style fittings. I tell him that quite obviously this apartment is not ‘Arab style’, but ‘Arab in fact’.

The Palestine Restaurants follow the modern science of nutrition. The League of Nations sets a base requirement for calculating calorific intake, and sets also a reduced Palestinian level. It will not be the last time that external parties impose diets on Palestinians.