WE WERE STATELESS
My parents are from Gaza. My dad was born in 1941, and both his family and my mother’s family have been here forever. After the war in 1948, refugees from all over Palestine came to Gaza, and it was administered by Egypt.1 Even in the early sixties it was hard to find work in Gaza, so after my parents were married, they moved to Egypt and then to Syria. My dad was a math teacher.
During the war in 1967, Israel occupied Palestine. Not long after the occupation began, Israel took a census in the West Bank and Gaza, and any Palestinians who weren’t living in Palestine at the time weren’t allowed back in. Without the ID cards Israel issued after the war, my parents were no longer considered by Israel to be legal occupants of Gaza. So they were stateless, and they moved from country to country on visas—from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. During this time, my father continued to teach, and my parents started having kids. I’m the youngest. My oldest brother was born in 1965, and then they had four girls, a boy, and then I was born in Kuwait City in December 1979.2
A couple of years after I was born, my oldest brother, Alim, got a student visa to study in the U.S. Meanwhile, my father taught in schools in Kuwait City, and I grew up playing with my siblings, making a lot of friends, and going to school.
Then in 1990, when I was ten years old, Saddam Hussein decided to take over Kuwait.3 A year later, the U.S. came in and kicked him out. I remember the war as being kind of an exciting time, as scary as it was. We were living in an apartment building with four floors, four apartments per floor. I’d go to the roof with my friend across the hall, and we’d watch the lights of missiles in the distance. We thought it was so cool, and we thought the U.S. soldiers looked cool—they even wore sunglasses! They were especially cool compared to the Iraqi soldiers, who were dressed in torn-up rags for uniforms. From the roof we’d watch the fighting on the border in the distance, and we called the U.S. Al-Hakim, “the ruler.” We had a lot of respect for the U.S. during the war. The whole neighborhood would sleep together in shelters every night, which, as kids, we thought of as a lot of fun.
Of course, it was a scary time. My dad had to find food for us, and some days he’d have to drive out of the city to do that. One day he went out looking for food, and he didn’t come home. We were terrified and thought he’d been captured or killed. But he came home after three weeks, and it turns out he’d been stopped by the Iraqi army, and they’d forced him to transport the corpse of an Iraqi soldier back to the soldier’s family. The story of how he got back to Kuwait City is too long to tell.
For our family, life in Kuwait became hard after the war. Yasser Arafat supported Saddam, and so Kuwaitis sort of thought of Palestinians as traitors.4 In fact, a lot of Palestinians living in Kuwait fled to Iraq after the war. We tried to stay, but my dad couldn’t get our visas renewed because there was so much hostility. He’d had no trouble for fifteen years in Kuwait, but now we had to find somewhere else to live. And that’s when we emigrated to the U.S.
AFTER SIX MONTHS I FELT LIKE I FIT IN PRETTY WELL
I first came to the States on July 11, 1992. I was twelve, and I came with my parents, one older brother, and my sister who is a year older than me. Three of my sisters had already married or were studying, and one lived in Iraq, one in Sudan, and one in Libya. We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. My brother Alim, who had gone to school in Kansas, had since moved to Knoxville for grad school. We moved in with Alim when we first arrived, and then we found a place of our own. My dad used his life savings, about $50,000, to buy a house straight-up in cash. He didn’t believe in getting a mortgage, since he wasn’t sure he’d get a job. But he found a gig at Wendy’s flipping burgers. It was a little embarrassing for me, since I was used to him being this respected math teacher, but he’d say, “As long as I’m working, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.” My second oldest brother, Tawfiq, who was nineteen, he got a job at Wendy’s too and eventually became my dad’s boss. That was a little strange. But my father wasn’t committed to staying in the U.S., and he didn’t pick up the language very well.
I don’t remember much from the first months in the States, other than that they were really bad. Just the language barrier—I spoke no English. And people were different than what I was used to. Even their jokes were different. In the fall I started going to middle school. The administration made me stay back a year—they placed me in the seventh grade, just because of the language barrier. It was difficult in school at first. One middle school teacher, his name was Mr. Jones, I remember him telling me, “You’re very good in math.” And I didn’t even know enough English to really know what he was saying to me, if he was complimenting me or what. But math is like a universal language, right? It was the only subject I was good at.
I’d say it took maybe three to six months before my siblings and I started grasping the basics of the language. The good thing in the U.S. is that they had these English as a second language classes, so over time we just kind of picked it up, and English just started to flow. After six months, we were making new friends. My teachers saw me progressing so well within the first year that they moved me to eighth grade, where I belonged based on my age.
My sister Adiba and I, we were much better than my other brothers and sisters at speaking English. Adiba’s just a year older than me, and the two of us don’t even have much of an accent when we speak English. My older brother Tawfiq, he was nineteen when we moved. So for him, his Arabic tongue is still heavy, since he didn’t go to high school in the States. I’d say definitely, the younger you are, the easier it is.
After that first six months, I began to feel like I fit in pretty well, and I made some friends. I had an Iranian friend, Hamdi, who had the same story as me. He came to the U.S. when he was about ten or eleven years old. He speaks Persian, and I can’t speak that, so we’d only communicate in English. Then there were a couple of Russian guys and a couple of Romanian guys. We just kind of clicked, because all of us were immigrants. We didn’t dress the right way to fit in—we all dressed like we were just off the boat. We spoke broken English, so in a way we all understood each other best. I also got to meet the Americans around my neighborhood. I think the Americans I made friends with saw me as kind of weird—they hadn’t known anybody with a background like mine. Knoxville isn’t like Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco—some cities in the U.S. have had Arabs since the 1800s, 1900s. The Arab community hasn’t been there long. But I got to know some of the kids who were from Knoxville, and I watched some of my friends running around with the American kids, doing good things or bad things. But I just kind of moved with the groove. My friends and I went to Riverwood High School—that’s also in Knoxville—and then I was done with that and I went to the University of Tennessee.
At the same time, my parents were working on getting U.S. citizenship. What they really wanted more than anything was to go back to Gaza, to see the family they’d been away from for thirty years. My dad passed the citizenship exam first, and once he got a U.S. passport, he was finally able to get back into Gaza. So in 1997 he moved back there. He built a house on some property he inherited from his father—a couple of acres with some olive, lemon, and fig trees—and he got it ready for my mom to move there too. It was weird to us kids, and we wanted him to stay. But it was his life’s dream to go back to his home, to sit under the olive trees in the breeze. Or sit around a fire at night with his brothers and drink coffee. That’s what he always talked about. He always said he didn’t want to die outside Gaza. My mom failed the citizenship test a few times, so she stayed back in the U.S. for a couple more years. We’d see my dad only when he came back to the States to visit us for three or four months every year.
I ALWAYS HAD A RED LINE IN MY HEAD THAT I WOULDN’T CROSS
At the University of Tennessee I studied business information systems. I was interested in computers, because during my junior and my senior year in high school, I was working at Comcast, an internet provider. So I was already into solving internet problems and whatnot. My two older brothers studied computer science and computer languages, and they told me, “Try to do something different than us.” I took some computer language courses, but also I got into IT hardware.
During this time I was still hanging out with my friend Hamdi. Hamdi and I, when we hung out, sometimes we’d hang out with some of our American friends, sometimes we’d hang out just with each other. Sometimes we’d do the same things Americans did and go to bars and stuff like that. And then at the end of the day, sometimes we just liked to talk to each other, listen to some Arabic music or Persian music.
Sometimes we’d be with our friends from other countries, like Alex, the guy from Romania who we went to high school with. We always asked each other, “Do you guys feel like Americans, do you feel American?” Hamdi would say, “Well, basically we’re Americans, but we have an advantage because we come from a different culture, so we can enjoy that culture and we can enjoy this culture.” So it’s hard to explain, but being both Palestinian and American felt like an advantage. Politically, I’m American, but in terms of culture, heritage, I’m Palestinian.
When I finished school I was about twenty-one. I graduated on May 12, 2001. My friends and I wanted to celebrate, so we were like, “Where do we want to go? Somewhere special!” We drove to a casino in Paducah, Kentucky. It’s like four hours away from Knoxville. We had a blast. So that May, June, and July we’d go back to Paducah almost every two weeks. Growing up, I always had a red line in my head that I wouldn’t cross. Like, I’m gonna do some things that are bad—I’m gonna drink, I’m gonna go to casinos and gamble, do this and that, but there are some things I’m not gonna do, like drugs. I don’t know why I was like that, how I developed those boundaries, but I figured it had to be because I was raised partly in Kuwait and not in the U.S. for my whole childhood.
I WAS LOOKING FOR A SWEETNESS INSIDE
In July of 2001, I started working for a temp company, and then I got hired at IBM in November. While I started working at IBM, I was also working toward citizenship. I was twenty-three when I became a U.S. citizen. Of course, I had to take the citizenship tests and everything, but it wasn’t that bad. The questions were like, “How many states are there?” I think they wanted me to name the thirteen colonies and the governor of my state and the two senators from our state, that sort of thing.
Then I got my passport, and that was really nice. In 2004 I left America, I took a leave of absence from work. By this time, all my siblings and I had grown up and left the house, and my mother had U.S. citizenship too, so she was ready to move back to Gaza and be with my dad. I was considering it too, actually. I was interested to find out what Gaza was all about. I’d heard so many stories growing up.
I traveled with my parents, and we first went to visit one of my older sisters who was living in Saudi Arabia at the time. Then we went to Kuwait, to see my old neighborhood. I still had a special feeling in my heart for it. I saw the guys I used to know there, and the situation was so bad. People had graduated from college, but they had nothing to do—like, no jobs. I was just like, Man, I’m glad I went to America. And I had other advantages from being a U.S. citizen. Maybe most Americans don’t think about using a U.S. passport to travel, but for me it was like a way to go to wherever I wanted. ’Cause as an American, you know that you tell the American embassy that you’re going to Gaza or Saudi Arabia or wherever, and you just go. If I’d been a Kuwaiti citizen, I would have had a lot of trouble getting across some borders. So it was nice, just the freedom of traveling with a U.S. passport.
Then I was in Gaza for about six weeks. I got to see my dad’s family, got to know them a little and stay in his house. I met some of his friends, too. My dad had a friend who was a teacher with him in Kuwait. After Kuwait, the friend moved to Yemen for a few years and then moved to Gaza. My dad ran into this friend one day while we were visiting Gaza, and the friend invited us to his house.
So we got to his house, and I met his daughter, Houda. I’d actually known her from Kuwait, but I didn’t remember much—she was a few years younger than me. After we left their house, my dad was like, “You saw Houda, what do you think?” I just said, “I’m not sure.” At that time, the idea of getting married was in my head. I was twenty-three, I had my own house in the States, I was somewhat stable financially, I had paid off my student loans and all that. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to find a girl from Gaza, someone who thinks differently about life, someone who listens to different music, has different values—just everything could be different and it could be a bad fit. I really thought of myself as Palestinian, but maybe a little more American than Palestinian.
Then a week passed and I said, “Okay, let’s give them a call.” The reason I kind of tilted toward seeing her again was that she already had three brothers in the U.S., and she’d already lived in Kuwait, so she wasn’t completely unaware of the world outside Gaza. Plus I thought that her experience with Arab life could be a good thing for kids we might have—she could really teach them some of our Arabic culture when I might not be able to, just because I had lived so much in a Western country.
My dad told his friend that I was interested in meeting his daughter, and so we went back to visit a week later. At Houda’s house, the two of us went into kind of like a private room, but with the door open of course. We chatted. It was weird, because I never really—she was nothing like the American girls I knew. All my life, I’ve talked to boys and girls, no problem. But it was weird being in a room with a girl like Houda. I didn’t know what to talk about. She asked me some questions, I asked her some questions. Just small talk. I think we both left smiling.
Then soon after our talk, I asked her brother to come with us on a date to the sea. Her brother was there as a chaperone. Even though our conversation was limited because her brother was there, we felt a connection. We ended up going to the beach together every day, and even went swimming together, which made her mom go crazy. That was scandalous to her mom—she thought that was so inappropriate. Houda and I were really starting to feel comfortable together, though.
During that time that we were courting, one of the things I was trying to understand was her sensibility, and I was looking for something genuine. I wanted to know if she was one of those girls who maybe just wanted to leave Gaza. Some girls might just be thinking, Hey, this guy’s a U.S. citizen! I was looking for a sweetness inside, like a smile that’s too sweet to be fake. And I saw that, I saw something genuine in her. And she was pretty smart, too. She was getting a computer science degree, so we had that in common.
So before I left Gaza, I proposed. She said yes, and her parents agreed. She was still in college, and they wanted her to finish that first. We had the engagement party in Gaza before I left. It was on the beach, and we had all of our families there and we ate and danced. And then a year and three months later, in September 2005, she came to the U.S. and we were married in Knoxville.
YOU DON’T ENTER HEAVEN UNLESS YOU ARE UNDER YOUR MOM’S FEET
For my wife, I think it was really easier for her to adjust to life in the U.S. than it is for many people, because she had somebody from here to help her out. She didn’t have to deal with feeling like an outsider, a weirdo, as much as I did when I came as a kid. And she loved the U.S. right away. She fell in love with the way people were just friendly to her. Even strangers would smile and say, “Good morning!” She said it was so different from Gaza, where everyone was unhappy and people you’d run into on the street were just rude. America seemed like a happy island to her—a bubble where people weren’t affected by any bad things happening in the world. Plus we had a nice house in Knoxville, and I got my job back at IBM so we had a good income and didn’t have too many worries.
We traveled some after we were married, and then we had our first child, our son Azhar, in January 2007. Later that same year, she got pregnant again, and it was going to be a boy. I called my dad, and told him I was going to name my second son after him. But before my second son Iyad was born, in January 2008, my father passed away.
I wasn’t even able to go to the funeral—I flew to Israel, but the Erez crossing was closed at the time because of the war with Hamas, and I couldn’t get in.5 I was glad I got to tell him about my son, at least. Then we had one more child, my daughter Nada in 2009.
Houda got a master’s degree from University of Tennessee—a teaching certificate. And we were so busy, way too busy for me to go back and visit my mother right away after my father’s death. I really wanted to, though, especially to help settle his estate. But still, we were becoming more and more involved in the Palestinian community in Knoxville, even though it was small. You just end up meeting these other families, and there were about twenty-eight families in the city that would get together sometimes. We’d talk about what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank, share food, talk. I started to become a better Muslim, too. I stopped drinking after I got married, and I read the Quran. And I started to want my kids to have a closer connection to the Arabic world. I wanted to pass along Arabic language and culture to them. And frankly, I was worried about them growing up in the States and getting pulled into some of the stuff I saw as a teenager—drugs and gangs, that sort of thing. I thought having a closer connection to Arabic culture could help keep them away from that stuff. I think my time in Kuwait helped me develop some boundaries, even though I drank and did other things as a kid.
Finally, in 2010, I flew to Gaza to stay for a week and a half. I was shocked to see how my mom was living—she was so alone. She had a couple of cousins, but nobody to really look after her, and she was seventy-two. I was like, Man, it isn’t right for her to live by herself like this for so many years. But she didn’t want to come back to the U.S. She said, “I will have nothing to do there. I want to die here, just like him.” And she wanted me to stay. She wanted her family around her. It really bothered me. In Islam, there’s a saying that you don’t enter heaven unless you’re under your mom’s feet. It’s a weird saying, but it basically means that your mom really has to be pleased with you when she dies for you to get into heaven.
And so I went back home, and I told my wife, “Listen, you know I’ve been at IBM almost ten years, and I don’t want to let it go. Nobody does this, but I really feel like the right decision is to return to Gaza for a while. I have to do it for my mom. I can’t live with myself if my mom dies and I’m not there.” And Houda said, “You have two older brothers, let them help her out.” My oldest brother, he was in Houston, he had kids who were about to go into college. He couldn’t just leave his job. And my other brother, in Florida, he was a citizen, but his wife wasn’t, and he was applying for her citizenship—he couldn’t just throw all that away. And Houda was like, “Okay, fine, fine. I’m not sure this is the right decision, but I understand.” I said, “It’s probably not the right decision! I don’t know if I’m gonna find a job there. I don’t know how people think there, what their attitude will be.” There’s another saying in Arabic—you have to leave your destiny up to God sometimes, and just whatever happens, happens. And however bad it was going to get in Gaza, I couldn’t imagine being fifty, sixty years old one day and thinking, I wish I had gone to Gaza and helped out my mom.
I also thought, This is good for my kids. My kids are gonna learn Arabic, they’re gonna be able to read the Quran. Because if I stayed in the States another twenty years, yeah, I’m gonna be well off, my house paid off, everything fine, but it’s not worth anything to me if my kids can’t speak to me in Arabic, you know. So after considering my kids, I thought, Screw it. I wanna do this for two, three years—what’s the worst that can happen?
GAZANS ACT LIKE BOMBINGS ARE A NORMAL PART OF LIFE
We came here in April 2012. My sons Azhar and Iyad were five and six, and my daughter Nada was three. It was a big adjustment for our family. But in some ways it was a bigger change for Houda than for me. You have to understand, she came from a family of Palestinian refugees in Gaza. Her family lived in Ashkelon before 1948, so they didn’t really consider Gaza home.6 For my wife, she felt like she’d finally found a home in the States, and she wasn’t crazy about being back in Gaza. But we settled into the house that my dad had bought and my mom was still living in, which was in the Zeitoun neighborhood in the south of Gaza City.7 My mom lived on the first floor, then there was a family renting on the second, and we moved in on the third floor, and there’s another family on the fourth floor.
