What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife? A Memoir

The history of Jewish suffering has been etched into my memory since birth. It began subconsciously with the first pin-prick of pain felt at my circumcision, at the moment my covenant with God was consummated. It was a warning: Don’t worry, there’s more where this came from. In Sunday school, as a wide-eyed kindergartener, I first learned about the stories of slavery in Egypt during Passover and the tales of near-genocide during Purim. Then there were the stories of the Holocaust that I gleaned when family members felt comfortable sharing them – stories spoken in hushed tones about relatives I’d never met, the ones who had been lost to the ovens. These came together to form a lineage of victimization stretching back centuries. It seemed as though I was told, again and again, that I was descended from the weak, the helpless, the few lucky enough to survive. As a result, the one thing I truly understood about my Jewish identity while I was growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta was this: as a people, we were always on the brink.

This history of suffering was concretized while Jamie and I were living in Israel. The daily images on television of carnage, of innocent Jews exploding while drinking coffee, validated my lifelong sense of vulnerability. And then Jamie was thrown to the floor. And we became the narrative. We became Jewish suffering. We became a part of this history.

But it was a history skewed by our collective traumas. The full range of our vision had been obscured over the years by bandages and blinders. In my mind’s eye, Jews were the eternal victims – the people everyone wanted dead – which made anyone associated with our suffering a mere implement of history’s anti-Semitic, machine-like march. Never had I considered the humanity of Palestinians. Never had I considered their history. They were animals, terrorists, the contemporary incarnation of Amalek. They were just the latest in a long line of people wanting us dead, lined up throughout history: Arabs, Germans, Russians, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians.

And here then was the definition of irony: becoming a victim, becoming a footnote to a footnote in the history of Jewish suffering, led me to consider for the first time the history of Palestinians, the history of those who were ostensibly responsible for our becoming footnotes. It was a history which had been invisible, irrelevant to me. A history I had ignored. But in order to move beyond the trauma wrought on us by Mohammad’s action, I chose to turn history on its head. I chose to move toward him in order to understand him. I chose to consider him and his people and the historical chain of events that led to the moment the bomb went off in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria, the moment Jamie was thrown to the ground.

And in understanding Palestinians as a people, I thought that, perhaps, a new history could be written. I thought that such an understanding might lead to a different life, a life devoid of hyperventilating and nightmares. A life like the one that existed before the bomb exploded.

I purchased a ticket to Israel knowing that the Odeh family was preparing for my visit. I need to prepare as well, I thought, visiting the university library and its musty, cavernous bowels where information was hiding within the intestinal walls of its closed books.

The eighties carpeting and beige, metal stacks called to me, said, This will be your training ground, said, These walls will guide you. Feeling obedient, I listened, spending weeks under the humming fluorescent lights combing through volumes of history and psychology. First, those on my own people. And then, those dealing with the other side, with the Palestinians, with the collective traumas we’ve shared for a century.

Over time I constructed a regional tragedy I had never fully understood, a tragic narrative that began with the story of my own people thinking, We’ve got to get out of here. It was a thought that arose out of European anti-Semitism and the mind-numbing horrors it visited upon Jews in the nineteenth century. At that time, most of the world’s Jewry lived in an area called the “Pale of Settlement” in Russia’s vast, frozen empire. And life there was hell. Jews were singled out and treated as sub-human – they were forbidden to own land, were restricted in their movements, and were: “subjected to a brutal system of twenty-five year military conscription, which occasionally entailed the virtual kidnapping of their children … and their attempted conversion to Christianity by the authorities in special preparatory military schools.”

Then came the pogroms, the mobs wielding scythes and torches, raping and murdering and decimating entire Jewish towns. And from this suffering came Zionism’s call – the desire for Jews to return to their biblical homeland. Out of these traumas came a secular, political movement, a movement to return to the land of Israel, to find a sanctuary. To live.¹

But when the waves of Jewish immigrants fleeing Europe arrived in Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs didn’t see victims standing before them. Instead, they saw European Jews trying to gobble up their own homeland. Which, in truth, is what they were doing; as soon as the immigrants arrived, the mass-purchasing began. Jews – most of whom weren’t allowed the basic right of land-ownership in Europe – were now clutching the soil, kissing it, claiming it. They wanted to transform the land into a Jewish one, to redeem it.²

For Palestinians, this meant a wave of dispossession, as farms were bought up by these financially backed, white-skinned new comers. For Palestinians, Jewish “redemption” meant becoming invisible. They were asked to watch as colonizers carrying the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” gained both momentum and acreage over a soil that was plenty populated already. They were asked to witness a Zionist movement that looked straight through them and saw nothing but open space. Property disputes were inevitable; so were violent clashes. Arab peasants, dispossessed and aggrieved, began to attack Jewish settlements, striking out, the seeds of conflict planted in this sandy soil.

Despite the Zionist slogan, Palestine was far from “a land without a people.” Just before World War I, Ottoman-controlled Palestine’s population was more than 700,000, with just 60,000 of those living in the region being Jews.³ Given that they were massively outnumbered, with Arab landowners rebelling around them, it’s not surprising that Zionist leaders sought outside help in their quest for a national homeland. It was a quest not only precipitated by necessity – by the pogroms and hatred from which the Jews had fled. It was a quest fed by spiritual visions of a redemptive history, fed by the promise that biblical Israel was not just a land, but a fertile woman beckoning the Jewish people back to where God wanted them. A land calling out to be reclaimed, to be rescued from captivity and released from the temporary grip of her captors, to have her soil tilled according to biblical commandments, by the hands of those fulfilling biblical commandments, by those who understood destiny.

The Zionist leaders, desperate for land and intoxicated by this spiritual vision, nudged destiny forward by seeking help from the British government, which, after the Allied powers’ victory over the Ottoman Empire in World War I, had taken administrative control of Palestine. In a letter now known as the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community, confirming that Britain would not, in 1917, stand in destiny’s path:

What was remarkable about the Balfour Declaration wasn’t that the British government came to defend the nationalist rights of the Jewish community; it was that the letter negated the existence of any nationalist rights for the nearly 650,000 Arabs living in Palestine, calling them “non-Jewish” communities that would be granted civil and religious rights, but not nationalist ones. The British government, it seemed, didn’t consider the Arabs in Palestine as a people.⁵

This view would, in part, keep Palestinians from realizing their dreams of an independent country for themselves, a view perpetuated and sustained for decades with such staggering tenacity that more than forty years later, in 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meir could state with a straight face, looking into the mirror of history standing before her, that “There was no such thing as Palestinians … They did not exist.”⁶ And indeed they didn’t – at least according to the Western world after World War I. For when the League of Nations carved up the Ottoman Empire and drafted the Mandate for Palestine, which officially gave control of Palestine to Britain, the document included the text of the Balfour Declaration and recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and … the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”⁷ Yet not once in the twenty-eight articles of the mandate was there mention given to a Palestinian people. Instead, they were referred to as “the inhabitants” and “natives” and “non-Jewish.”

The sudden introduction of a European, nationalist paradigm into what was once Ottoman-controlled, Arab land compelled Palestinians to think of themselves as a people in newly realized political terms, to think of themselves as a nation.⁸ By denying Palestinian nationalism while championing the nationalist rights of the minority Jewish community, the British government unintentionally inspired Palestinians to stand up and demand their collective, political rights and identity as a Palestinian people. They weren’t just some native, faceless entity. They too were a people with a destiny. Zionism forced Palestinians to look down upon a land to which they were connected, both religiously and historically, and see it anew: not just as their home, but as their country. And so Palestinians began demanding political rights just as they were learning how such rights functioned among Western nation states.

And here is where I learned the story of Palestinian subjugation began in earnest. After the British took control of Palestine, they denied Palestinians any form of administrative autonomy. Palestinian leaders, frustrated, demanded that Britain give them some form of representation and self-determination.⁹ British officials responded with a smirk, reaching out to the Palestinians and saying, Don’t be silly. Of course you can have your representation. Simply accept our Mandate, and poof – representation you shall have.

Accepting the Mandate, Palestinians knew, would be political suicide. It would signal their “recognition of the privileged national rights of the Jewish community in what they saw as their own country, and formal acceptance of their own legally subordinate position.”¹⁰ Palestinians balked at such preconditions. Britain tsk-tsked back with wagging fingers and said, You ask too much of us; nothing can be done. Then, just to make their point clear, they granted the Jewish community “fully-fledged representative institutions, internationally recognized diplomatic representation abroad … and control of most of the other apparatuses of internal self-government, amounting to a para-state within, dependent upon, but separate from, the mandatory state.”¹¹

The march toward establishing a Jewish state, with no consideration for the nationalist rights of Palestinians, was on. And the logic that led this march was best articulated by Foreign Secretary Balfour himself, who wrote in a 1919 confidential memo that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires … of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”¹²

Jews’ blood, in other words, was redder.

It pains me to admit this, but there was a time when I thought that Jews somehow populated a different spectrum in God’s moral universe. After years in Israel, in the Holy Land, studying mystical texts from mystical teachers subtly suggesting that we – Jews – mattered in unimaginable ways, I couldn’t help but believe. After all, who doesn’t want to think of themselves as unique, as special in some ethereal way? And the evidence that the rabbis brought to prove this point seemed compelling. “There must be a reason we’ve survived so long,” they’d say. “There must be a reason the world focuses a disproportionate amount of attention on a people which make up less than .01 percent of the world’s population,” they’d say. “It must be that we indeed are a light unto the nations,” they’d say. I couldn’t help but believe.

But the story of Palestinian oppression began to complicate such pedestrian notions. The story of Palestinian suffering began to cloud my worldview, one which had cast Jews as good and Palestinians as evil. But the words “good” and “evil” were suddenly difficult to dole out with a child’s simplicity, as I had done in the past. Even if I had wanted to believe in the simplicity of such false absolutes, the words no longer allowed it, parsing themselves, splitting in the air and reconfiguring before me, “evil” becoming “veil,” wrapping itself around “good” and hiding all that had previously been clear to me. Palestine’s history complicated matters because the Palestinians were my enemy, both theoretically and practically. And Palestine’s history complicated matters because I couldn’t stomach the brutal ways in which my enemy was, in part, created.

After World War I, Britain and France were handed control over a number of territories that the League of Nations recognized as “independent states.” These were Arab territories “deemed to be in need solely of a period of external advice and assistance” until they could be turned loose as nation states in their own right. Such territories included Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine.

Now consider this: of these Arab territories, all – save the Palestinians – were given some form of governmental representation by the British and the French during their training-wheel years, and by 1946 all of these Arab territories – save Palestine – had become full members of the international community as free, self-governing states. In Palestine, the Jews were given the Jewish Agency, which served as a pre-state government, while the Palestinians were given virtually nothing. Sure, the British had offered them a similar Arab Agency, but only if this agency supported the terms set out in the Balfour Declaration, which gave national rights only to the Jews. That left the Palestinians as the only group with “no international sanction for their identity, no accepted and agreed context within which their putative nationhood and independence could express itself, and their representatives had no access whatsoever to any of the levers of state power.”¹³

Why were Palestinians the only significant population of people in the Middle East not granted nationalist rights in the early twentieth century? And why is this still true nearly one hundred years later? One hundred years: five generations of political suppression, colonial occupation, brutal violence, and shame.

I had never known any of this history – had never cared. But the more I read, the more I thought, Man, they were fucked. Yes, some of their plight came down to incompetent and corrupt leadership – as is so often the case – but the reality was that the Palestinians were victims. The British government had chosen to champion a competing victim, my people. Zionist leaders gained the sympathy and support of British officials, principally Balfour, after years of lobbying in the early 1900s. And in recognizing not merely the Jews’ tragic existence in Europe but their dream – the necessity – of a homeland in Palestine, the British government made the people already inhabiting Palestine invisible. It was a zero-sum game, and in the end, we won.¹⁴

I could no longer feel the jubilation of that victory.

None of this mitigates the unspeakable traumas experienced by European Jews, including my grandmother and grandfather, out of which the State of Israel arose. After the pogroms, after the Holocaust – where nearly half of my family was turned to ash – there was a legitimate need for a Jewish homeland. A Jewish refuge. The Jewish immigrants who descended upon Palestine after the wars weren’t buoyed by waves of enthusiasm. They were treading currents of desperation. And after World War II, when Hitler’s murderous regime was fully revealed, there was no doubt that Israel would be established. Not as a colonial enterprise. But as restitution for the sins of history.

However, Israel’s establishment became a defining moment for Palestinians – a defining trauma. Every year, as Israelis celebrate Independence Day, Palestinians mark al-Nakba – the catastrophe.

Before Israel was born in 1947, both Jews and Palestinians suffered. Jews had struggled against anti-Semitism and genocide in Europe, and Palestinians had struggled against a lack of self-determination and colonial suppression – two very different victimhoods. Victim-hoods which can be noted, side by side, but cannot be compared. Nor should they be. Yet noting them side by side offers a glimpse into the lens through which each people was looking when 1947 turned to 1948. A lens tinted by bitterness and sorrow, by injustice and suffering. A lens through which it would have been impossible to consider the needs and desires of the other side with any clarity or empathy.

When the time came for me to fully consider the birth of Israel, I thought, This is just about understanding my enemy. I have no interest in judging the circumstances around which Israel was created. I have no interest in exploring why Palestinians refused the United Nation’s partition of Palestine into two states in 1947 – one Jewish and one Arab – or how the war started between the two sides in 1948 and ended with Israel claiming nearly eighty percent of Palestine. There are already too many who-shot-first arguments, too many who-is-to-blame explorations; there is no need for another. Yes, multiple Arab armies simultaneously attacked Israel the moment it defeated Palestinian fighters and declared independence. Yes, Jewish para-military forces conquered Palestinian lands and kept them. But I’m not interested in finger-pointing, I’m interested in the result, in what happened to the Palestinians and their society after the war, in why they consider themselves the true victims of history.

What I had not known, what I could no longer ignore, was that the original Arab–Israeli war ripped a majority of Palestinians from their homes and scattered them across the region. It altered the landscape to such a degree as to make it wholly unrecognizable, with the most vibrant Palestinian cities, such as Jaffa and Haifa, conquered and subsumed into the new Jewish state. I learned that:

After the war, over half the Palestinian population had become refugees as Israel conquered and seized seventy-eight percent of what was once mandatory Palestine (up from the fifty-five percent offered to Jews in the UN Partition Plan). Overnight, those Palestinians who remained in the new State of Israel became a super-minority, with everyone else either huddled in the twenty-two percent of Palestine that was left to them or living in camps elsewhere.¹⁵

During our time in Jerusalem, Jamie and I lived right in the heart of some of this subsumed land; many of the stone homes that surrounded us, now occupied by Jews, had been abandoned by Palestinian families in 1948. Living there, it was difficult to imagine the neighborhood differently than it now stands: a wealthy, vibrant Jewish area full of synagogues and falafel stands and boys with yarmulkes playing football in the streets. But beneath our lives, a Palestinian neighborhood had disappeared, with someone, some where in Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem, telling their grandchildren in hushed tones about the ways things used to be before violence forced them to leave their dishes and bedding and family photographs, before they were forced to abandon their ancestral homes.

Even with the passage of over sixty years, emotions remain raw. Claims to the land remain tenuous, fragile. Ask an Israeli casually whether an old house here or a domed structure there used to belong to Palestinians – as I did innocently on occasion – and you’d risk an angry look, as if the question alone suggested that things could or should be given back, that the country could be pulled out from under their feet. And when the words came from a Palestinian – “That was my childhood home” – they were taken by some as a provocation, a threat.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was stunningly honest about what a realistic Palestinian perspective on things might be:

We have taken their country. I learned that there were some in 1948 who wanted to take more than seventy-eight percent. After routing the Egyptian army, Yigal Allon – a thirty-year-old commander and future acting Prime Minister – wanted to push his soldiers all the way to the Jordan River and take what is now the West Bank (or the Occupied Territories, depending on which side of the divide you’re on). He wanted to reclaim a “Whole Israel.” Allon’s reasoning was partially strategic – taking this land would widen Israel’s narrow waist – but Ben Gurion rejected the idea because he didn’t want to absorb the West Bank’s Arab population into Israel; he wanted a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

Allon’s desire to grab the West Bank was not merely rooted in military strategy. It was also rooted in a desire to redeem every inch of biblical Israel for Jews, a desire propelled by United Kibbutz, an organization that represented much of the kibbutz movement in Israel, a movement which played a central role in the development of the state. In 1955, United Kibbutz pushed the idea of a “Whole Israel” for “the Jewish people … and the Arabs living in the land.” The Palestinians as a people were invisible, again. United Kibbutz, following the lead set by European entities before them, “treated the Jews as a nation, and the Arabs as individuals without national rights.”¹⁷ The kibbutz movement cultivated a system in which collectives could take over large swaths of agricultural land. It provided a path to a future in which every inch of Palestinian soil could be planted by Jews, and defended by Jews. However, for Palestinians, it was the continuation of the discrimination they endured under British rule, to put it lightly. While it might be argued that the new Israelis, traumatized by history and fighting for survival, were simply defending themselves by pursuing their best interests at the expense of another, this truth cannot be ignored: it was at the expense of another.

The teacher then asked his class to rise and listen as the Israeli national anthem – Hatikvah, “The Hope” – was played. These American students, twelve and thirteen years old, knew the words, had them memorized in Hebrew, though many of them had never visited Israel, and might never press the grit of its sandy soil between their fingertips.

Of course, Hatikvah isn’t an anthem for everyone living Israel; it’s a song for those whose dreams in that country matter. It’s a song for those Jews who dream of freedom in “the land of Zion,” the word “Zion” – traditionally interpreted to mean biblical Israel – never spoken lightly. And while from 1948 to 1967, the country’s borders never stretched to the Jordan River, there were those who still dreamed that one day it would happen, choosing to ignore the massive Palestinian population standing in the way.

It was this yearning, perhaps, that led to what happened in the Six Day War of 1967, during which Israel seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (along with the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula). As the noted historian Gershom Gorenberg put it, once Israeli troops crossed into the West Bank, “the logic of the avalanche took over. On the ground, commanders seized opportunities. In the cabinet, politicians renewed dreams unconnected to defense”¹⁹ – those dreams of claiming (or reclaiming, as many Jews would say) all of the Land of Israel. And when Israel’s army decimated Jordanian troops so easily that the land stood bare, empty of enemy soldiers, Israeli politicians couldn’t resist. Thus, the Old City of Jerusalem was stormed and taken. The West Bank was flooded and taken. The reasons weren’t strategic. They were spiritual, irrational, based on two thousand years of longing. Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister who oversaw Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967, later described the West Bank as “part of the flesh and bones – indeed the very spirit – of the Land of Israel.”²⁰

But the flesh and bones of Palestinians were ignored. Again. That is, until Israel awoke and suddenly realized it was responsible for millions of Palestinians living in the now-occupied West Bank and Gaza.

In 1967, there were minority voices in the Israeli government, the voices of leaders who couldn’t stomach the idea of Israel taking these lands. The Minister of Justice at that time, Yaakov Shapira, said, “In a time of decolonialization in the whole world, can we really consider [controlling] an area in which mainly Arabs live?”²¹ Such voices were overruled when Jordan seemed unwilling to negotiate with Israel for normalized peace. And so, the Israeli government chose a wait-and-see strategy, uncertain what to do with the West Bank but unwilling to relinquish it.

Dayan, for his part, wasn’t worried about the Palestinians, as evidenced by the infamous way in which he described matters to the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan:

The situation today. Forty years later, Israel continues to force its presence upon a stateless Palestinian people. While Dayan was one of the first to correctly identify Palestinians as a nation – “You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today” – he incorrectly assumed that they would fulfill the awful imaginings of his metaphor and submit to his military.

He was right, though, that the Israelis would force their presence on the Palestinians, and that this would change Palestinians’ attitudes toward their oppressors. Today, the identity of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation is defined as much by their everyday interactions with Israeli security forces as by their interactions with their own family members. For Palestinians, there is no such thing as a routine drive to the store, no such thing as a quick jaunt to the doctor or the post office or the bank. The West Bank – the Occupied Territories – have been carved up by protruding Jewish settlements that reach deep into Palestinian areas. They are like fingers pressing into an inflated balloon, bisecting neighborhoods, communities, and even cities.

While these fingers of Jewish settlement – and the private roads feeding them – have cut off such economic centers as Bethlehem and Ramallah from each other, it’s the hundreds of temporary and permanent military checkpoints that are most disruptive, transforming a ten-mile trip to a friend’s house into a straitjacketed journey of several hours, punctuated by soldiers drawing guns at each passing car.²³

These checkpoints are the places in which Palestinians are forced to confront their subjugated status and feel the shame of submission on a daily basis. As the noted historian Rashid Khalidi writes in Palestinian Identity:

After coming across Khalidi’s words, an image surfaced in my mind. It was from a video of a Palestinian–Jewish dialogue group, a roundtable discussion in English held at the University of Minnesota, posted online, in which a Palestinian man recounted his checkpoint story: He and his wife and children were trying to drive home when they were stopped at a military roadblock by some Israeli soldiers. The family was asked to exit their car. The uniformed soldiers, guns drawn, just teenagers, started asking their checkpoint questions, harassing the family. They weren’t seeking information. They were looking to shame them. “But it didn’t really matter to me; they were just playing games with us,” the man recalled in the video. But then the man looked down at his son. The boy’s teeth were chattering violently and his pants were soaked, the piss running down his legs into a puddle in the sandy soil at his feet. The barrel of one of the soldiers’ M-16s was absently pointed between the boy’s eyes. The man, realizing what was happening, pushed the barrel away from his son’s face and screamed, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

The soldier – just a kid, just a stupid teenager who probably knew family or friends or fellow soldiers who had been killed by Palestinians – pointed at the man and sneered, “You’re a Palestinian. Tell him to get used to it.”²⁵

For nearly a hundred years, Palestinians have been expected to “get used to it,” have been expected to submit to a greater power – first Britain, now Israel – while subjugating their political rights, their humanity, and their identity as a nation. And the accompanying economic, geographic, and social devastation wrought upon the Palestinians during this time has trickled down from generation to generation. For too long, they’ve been under the thumb of an undemocratic, military legal system in the Occupied Territories. For too long, they’ve suffering through indefinite detentions, indiscriminate raids, home demolitions, and missile attacks. For too long, they’ve watched soldiers visit violence upon them for the temerity to protest nonviolently, within the borders of their own villages, Israel’s expanding settlements. This has been their inheritance. It was Mohammad Odeh’s inheritance.

Which is not to justify Mohammad’s murderous act – I’ll never be callous or naive enough to explain it away so conveniently. There’s no justification for the murder of innocent men, women, and children. None. No reason can be given to legitimize such brutality.

Reading historical volumes in the university library, I refused to justify Odeh’s crime. But I also refused to ignore the context surrounding it. I refused to ignore the historical backdrop out of which an East Jerusalem man with a newborn infant, who came from a decent, moderate family, could willingly place a bomb in a university cafeteria and think, This is good. Think it was good and then express remorse.

And I refused to acquiesce when fellow Jews, hearing of my plans to meet Mohammad, would look at me, shake their heads, and say, “There’s nothing to understand,” their eyes silently saying, Poor, poor David. He wants to know why the bombing happened. It’s because those people are pure evil, that’s why.

I often looked at such people, unwilling to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians, and would say nothing, unable to mouth a response. Instead, I would look beyond them and see my impending return to Israel, to Palestine. I would see an image of Mohammad’s mother staring back at me, her expectant face lined with worry, but willing to talk. And I would think, May this trip give me something to say to her, to them, and to myself.

Teacher:	As you can see, Israel’s national anthem is one that represents the spiritual hopes and dreams of an entire nation.
Student:	Wait, does everyone in Israel sing this?
Teacher:	Yes.
Student:	I think maybe some people wouldn’t sing it.
Teacher:	Everyone sings it.
Student:	What about the Palestinians –
Teacher:	I said it’s for the nation, not for the Arabs.