Chemistry professor, blogger, 36
Born in Amman, Jordan
Interviewed in Ramallah, West Bank
Riyam Kafri Abu Laban was born in Amman, Jordan. Her father was one of thousands of Palestinians not allowed to return to their homes after the Six-Day War of 1967—marking a second wave of Palestinian refugees after the massive displacement of 1948. Riyam’s parents waited for the opportunity to return to the West Bank instead of leaving to pursue lucrative jobs elsewhere. They finally returned to the West Bank in 1980, after years of legal wrangling. On returning to Palestine, they settled near Ramallah.
We interview Riyam in her spacious kitchen in Ramallah. As she talks, she stirs pots, washes dishes, and checks the oven, effortlessly putting together a dinner for six as she tells her life story. We learn that this kind of multi-tasking is normal for her. She is the mother of twins, teaches organic chemistry at Al-Quds University, and she helps to run the university’s liberal arts program (designed in conjunction with Bard College). She also writes a blog with a fellow professor, and her posts are sharply observed explorations of daily life in Palestine.
Writing is Riyam’s passion, but she came to it later in her career. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and had the opportunity to live a comfortable life in the United States. She chose instead to return to Palestine where she started teaching, and she found her voice as a writer in describing life as a resident of the West Bank. She writes that Palestine is “like a distant land that inhabits the warmest chambers of one’s heart, so close yet so unattainable.”1
A DESIRE TO LIVE JUST LIKE ANY OTHER TEENAGER IN THE WORLD
When the war broke out in 1967, my father was an electrical engineering Ph.D. student in Germany. After the war, Israel gave ID cards to Palestinians. The cards were required for them to remain in Palestine, but since my father was abroad at the time they were distributed, he wasn’t able to get one. My mom, who hadn’t yet met my father, was in the West Bank at the time and was able to get an ID card. A little after the war, my dad moved to Jordan. Later, he met my mother while she was traveling through Jordan to visit a relative. My parents were married in November 1977, and then they started working immediately to return to Palestine. At first they thought that since my dad was marrying someone with an ID card, it would be easier for him to apply for one as well. But the Israeli government said that they needed to have a child to prove that the marriage was real. They got pregnant really quickly—and I was born nine months later, in Amman, Jordan, in October 1978.2
After I was born, my parents continued their pursuit of an ID card for my father. This time, the Israeli authorities told my mom that she needed to have a boy, because a girl didn’t count. Who knows what their reasoning was. My mom had to make the choice to get pregnant as soon as possible again, so that she could try to have a boy and reapply for an ID for my father.
An opportunity came up for my father to help build a new university out of a technical college that was located in Abu Dis.3 So we moved to Palestine in 1979, even though we didn’t have an ID for my father yet. We didn’t stay long. The faculty named the new university Al-Quds.4 Al-Quds is the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem, and the name drew a lot of attention from the Israeli authorities, who assumed the founders were implying that the city belonged to the Palestinians. Some professors were arrested, and my dad was sent back to Jordan.
The next year, my mother was pregnant with my brother Muhanned, and we tried again to live in the West Bank. My father had found teaching work. This time, we settled near Ramallah.5 Finally, my father was able to obtain an ID card not long after my brother was born. Then after he got his ID card, he helped found the engineering school at Birzeit University.6 My mother was a teacher, and later a principal, but she took some time off after the birth of Muhanned and later my sister Duna.
I grew up in a politically active family. I also grew up with parents who thought that their children had to leave a mark on society. We were raised to think that we had to live with a sense of purpose. And the main purpose, the underlying goal, was always to serve Palestine in one way or another.
I was sheltered from some of the problems many Palestinians have, but I can’t say I grew up completely sheltered, because I was educated about the Israeli occupation. You know, I grew up during the beginning of the First Intifada, so the entire atmosphere was different.7 Everyone, from teenagers to adults, was more aware of Palestine, of the political situation, of the prisoners and arrests.8 Demonstrations took place right outside our home, since we lived in a central area of Al-Bireh, just outside Ramallah.9 One of my earliest clear memories is from the start of the Intifada. I was eight years old, and I spoke to a BBC reporter. I told him, “We’re not just throwing rocks, we want our freedom!”
The demonstrations during the First Intifada brought the neighborhood together. At that time, women would knit navy-blue V-neck shirts that they could send to prisoners. So that’s how I learned knitting. The prison would only accept that color, and it had to be V-neck, and it had to be plain—we couldn’t even use any stitches but the most basic ones. And my mom was part of a women’s group that would go into refugee camps to visit prisoners’ families, and they would also collect these knitted shirts and send them to prisons.
I don’t remember much about my first couple of years at school. Actually, the Israeli military shut down most schools in the area during the First Intifada. Schools might operate for only a few hours a week. So we did distance learning. I was enrolled at the Friends School, and I’d go once every two weeks to drop off my assignments and pick up new ones.10 The first day of the year, we’d go to pick up our books, get our first assignments, and then immediately go home to start working on them. We were really responsible for our own education. Kids from all around would come to our home, and my mother would teach them. Finally, when I was around twelve, the school reopened. But even then it was only open for half days.
Around the time I became a teenager, the Intifada took on a different emotional quality for me. I wasn’t just knitting sweaters anymore—I was watching my friends get arrested. I remember the powerful desire to live just like any other teenager around the world, to spend my time listening to music and not having to care about politics. It was suffocating. I say this with a lot of humility, because I didn’t even see what it was like to live in a refugee camp. So if I was suffocating in the middle of a city, with a home that had all the amenities that anyone could ask for, I can’t imagine what it was like for anyone in the refugee camps.
And then I saw this complete switch, with Oslo, around 1993.11 Things started to open up more. We could get to places we couldn’t get to before, including Jerusalem, and Haifa, and Jaffa.12 By the time I graduated from high school in ’96, even the topics of conversation with my friends were completely different—more the day-to-day concerns with living and work. We didn’t need to talk about fighting just to live and struggling just to exist. I could think about things like the New Kids on the Block, pop music. But even as a teen, I never trusted the Oslo Accords. We had peace, but it felt like an illusion, a hologram.
I WAS IN LOVE WITH THE CONCEPT OF A ROAD TRIP
I lived in Ramallah until I was seventeen. Then I graduated from the Friends School, and I received a full-tuition scholarship to Earlham College in the States.13 The Friends School had an arrangement where they’d send one or two graduating students to Earlham on full scholarship every year. I’d applied to a few other liberal arts colleges in the States, but I really wanted to get into Earlham, and when I got the scholarship, my family discussed it. It was a little bit of a conflict. It was very tough for my dad, particularly. My mother is a very realistic woman, and she felt like her children leaving home was inevitable. But I think for my father it was harder. He viewed the United States as a country that helped Israel. It was a matter of principle that his daughter shouldn’t leave this country to study in the U.S. Coming to terms with that was a huge adjustment.
In the end, we decided that I’d go with the idea to become a physician, and that I would return to Palestine after my education. My parents announced, “We’ll allow you, our first daughter, to go to the United States on your own, only under the following terms—you will not return with a bachelor’s in biology or chemistry, because you could always do that at Birzeit, and you will try to get into medical school.” I would finish my education, and then I would come back and work here in Palestine.
All I knew about Earlham was that it was a small school, that I wouldn’t have more than thirty or forty students in my classes, which was true. Except for introductory classes, I think most of my classes were like that. I think at seventeen you don’t know what to expect out of college, and I soon learned that the school was extremely challenging. I worked really hard. But the social life was far better than I expected. The kindness of people on campus made me feel really cared for in a small setting. And Earlham was very pro-Palestinian. As a Quaker institution, they were very interested in educating Palestinians—they’d been accepting Palestinian students since 1948.
I took biology in the first year, under the assumption that I’d be a pre-med student. But I was broken by the anatomy and physiology course. I just couldn’t do it—the smell, the formaldehyde. I worked so hard, and I could barely break a C in the course.
And in the meantime, I was taking organic chemistry, and I was practically sleeping through the course and I was getting an A, you know? And that’s when things kind of shifted. I had a great organic chemistry professor, Thomas Ruttledge, who’s still my friend and colleague, and I decided to become a chemist. And I thought, “Well, I’ll get a Ph.D. instead of an M.D.” And I wanted to work in the pharmaceutical industry. That part really enticed me—the idea of creating things.
By the end of my undergrad experience, I felt very much at home at Earlham, and I do think those were the best four years of my entire time in the United States. You know, the one thing that fascinated me the most living in the United States was the ability to drive anywhere. I was in love with the concept of a road trip. I learned driving just to be able to drive out for endless hours, because it was mind-boggling to me that I could cross state lines and be in Tennessee for a couple of hours, and on the same day drive back to Indiana, no problem! That was new to me, and I loved traveling, even after starting my Ph.D. program.
I did my Ph.D. in medicinal organic chemistry at the University of Tennessee, and I focused on computer-based drug design and discovery. I learned to design compounds by modeling enzymes on a computer, which was a very cutting edge approach to medicinal chemistry at the time. I worked with a team that researched anti-HIV compounds and anti-cancer agents.
I briefly considered staying in the U.S. When you’re in graduate school and doing research, all you see as important is the science that you’re doing. And you don’t have a concept or understanding of what life really is, right? Because for a scientist, life exists within the walls of the lab, and the library, and on your computer. And so for a while I really thought that I should stay for a post-doc there. But my parents weren’t willing to live through another year of not having their children around. They were really adamant that we should all finish and return as soon as we were done.
Also, I started my Ph.D. program at Tennessee right before September 11, 2001. I remember the day of the attacks, I had to teach a class. As I walked into the classroom, I heard some students whispering about me, “She’s Palestinian, they’re responsible for this.” I couldn’t keep silent. I told the whole class that it couldn’t have been the Palestinians, and that there was no way I would condone such an act. I told them I came from a violent place, but that all I wanted was for things to be easier for my younger brother and sister. I ended up crying, and a colleague came to the classroom and took over the class for me.
Later I experienced real hostility, even from some faculty, who’d ask me questions like, “Why are Muslims like this?” I knew then I couldn’t stay in the U.S. I couldn’t go through life explaining myself to others. It sounds strange, but I thought then that if I had children, I’d rather they grow up with the problems of occupation and know who they were than to keep having to explain themselves and their identities to everyone else in their community.
There is a lot that I still love about the U.S. and the South—I still make sweet potato pie every November, around Thanksgiving. But since September 11, I’ve known there is no way I could be happy living my entire life in the States.
So an opportunity arose in Ramallah at a pharmaceutical company called Pharmacare, and it sounded interesting enough. Also, I thought, If I’m willing to try living in the United States and adjust to its cultural values—the way it works, its social structure, everything—then why not give this chance to Palestine itself?
So after my Ph.D. program I returned to Palestine in January 2007, and I began researching the antioxidant activity of Palestinian plants with Pharmacare. It was part of a project where we were looking for anti-cancer compounds in traditional Palestinian medicinal plants. I worked with herbalists throughout the West Bank. We started the lab from scratch. Up until that point, all pharmaceutical companies in the West Bank were generic drug producers. Our work was the first to invest in innovative research in the region.
THERE’S A RHYTHM IN PALESTINE THAT REALLY GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN
Palestine had changed quite a lot since I had left. I had been away for the entire Second Intifada. I had never seen the wall.14 That was my first impression of what had changed. I had seen pictures, but to see it cut through terrain I remembered well—honestly, to this day I haven’t resolved the feeling I had when I saw it. Passing into the West Bank through Qalandiya, I saw incredible poverty—Qalandiya looks like all the misery of the West Bank, including overcrowding.15 Then driving into Ramallah, I was amazed to see how things had grown. There were new tall buildings, signs that people were doing okay. The city was jazzy, sort of dressed up. Coming back home, it was as though that illusion of peace, the hologram, had shrunk to a bubble just around my hometown.
Still, being back in Ramallah was a challenge in some ways. Once you go to graduate school abroad, it’s an entirely different experience living in Palestine. Believe it or not, the culture shock was easier to get over going to Earlham from Palestine than the culture shock that I faced coming back after almost eleven years of being away.
I can’t exactly pinpoint what the reasons are for the difficulty. I think one of them is that I spent eleven years on my own, in a country that’s fairly free and accepts anything and everything. And I learned to think for myself, learned to accept people for what they are and who they are, and not judge them for what they think or what they look like or what they believe. And I came back to a country that’s fairly systematic. There’s a specific, almost rigid, structure in society here that you have to fit into.
I came back here to Palestine, and I had social obligations and family obligations, and I was no longer able to read in my free time. Even the way I dressed had to change. So it was very difficult at the beginning.
But even in those early days back, I felt like Ramallah had a way of making me feel comfortable. And it’s not just the city—it’s the people. There’s a rhythm in Palestine. Every country has its own rhythm, but there’s a rhythm in Palestine that really gets under your skin, even with all the difficulty of travel, with all the difficulty of being stuck on the road in traffic. There’s something that just gets under your skin, and it’s very difficult to leave, once you start to get settled in here. I also finally found old friends, and a lot of my friends were going through the same difficulties. They’d been gone for a while, they were educated outside, whether in France or England or the U.S., and had returned. So we had something in common, and a common language, and that’s kind of what’s got me slowly coming back into living here.
OUR FIRST CLASS
I worked for Pharmacare for over two years, until around 2010. But there were several reasons why I thought it was not the right place. I was spending my entire time in a lab with only one other person, and I realized more and more that I wanted to work with people. And what does a Ph.D. do with people, other than teach, right? When I was nineteen years old, my adviser Thomas Ruttledge told me that I would end up in teaching, and I thought he just didn’t know me. He said that I had it in me.
So in 2010, I applied to Al-Quds University and Birzeit University for teaching positions. Al-Quds had recently developed a partnership with Bard College in the U.S., where Bard would establish a liberal arts degree program within Al-Quds.16 And Bard thought I was the perfect candidate to teach for them—I was a liberal arts college graduate. I would understand the concepts and the teaching methods of liberal arts education.
Originally, it was a part-time position for a semester, so I only taught one class. After that first semester, Al-Quds and Bard immediately offered me a full-time position. They kind of took me in. They didn’t care that I didn’t have an extensive publication history or anything like that. It wasn’t an old boys’ club like Birzeit University.
I became a core faculty member and one of the founding faculty members. We had no program—only thirty students—and I remember running these internal transfer campaigns, where we encouraged students from Al-Quds University to give it a try for one semester. We basically opened it up for everybody, so good students and bad students were applying, and we accepted all of them just to be able to run a program. Then I started building the science program, and now we have the largest and most successful division in the entire college. I have sixty students who are hoping to complete their degree in either biology or chemistry right now. This year, at the end of June 2014, we were able to graduate our second class and my first class of chemistry majors.
I WORE A HEADPIECE THAT’S 200 YEARS OLD AND MADE OF GOLD LIRAS
In the spring of 2009, I met a man named Ahmad through a friend of mine who works with him in the municipal government. We saw each other occasionally for a year and a half, but I wouldn’t say we were dating, really. I saw him once or twice, and I think we were both busy with our careers, and so it kind of just took its time.
We would send each other messages every now and then, check on each other. Then it took a more serious turn in the fall of 2010, in September. We started seeing each other among groups of friends so that we could keep it on the down-low, so no one would really catch who was dating whom.
Then in the end of December, we decided that we wanted to be together. He invited me to dinner on December 30 at his family’s home. He said that after dinner he’d love to go to my parents’ home—he wanted to meet them. From there, things developed really quickly. On Friday morning, New Year’s Eve, he called me and he said that his older brother would like to talk to my father and that he’d like to make this official, which is the culturally correct way of doing things. And so they set a date to talk to my parents officially and ask for my hand in marriage.
The night of New Year’s Eve, Ahmad surprised me by proposing in front of 360 guests at the Mövenpick Hotel New Year’s Eve party.17 So, by the next morning, the entire city knew that we were engaged.
It was right at the beginning of the second semester for me, so it was a little bit hard to think about getting married during the semester, but semesters at Al-Quds University are never properly planned, because there are strikes, and there are closures and political reasons not to go to school. So we thought about April for a wedding date, and then it didn’t work with one of his brothers, whose daughter was expecting a child, and they wanted to be with her when she had the child. We decided that it would have to be pushed till June, but his mother was not willing to see that happen. She felt like she was old, and you never know what happens, and she wanted to be there for the wedding. And so we actually ended up getting married in March 2011, on a very cold, rainy day.
We had a full-on traditional Palestinian wedding. I wore a traditional dress, and I also wore a headpiece that’s 200 years old and made of gold liras—Ottoman liras. The wedding party was huge. There were over 700 guests. I should have known that my life would be loud after that. After the big wedding, we had a smaller wedding reception for the family and close friends.
Within less than a year, I went from being single and career-oriented to a wife, a pregnant woman, then a mother of two. I had my twins on November 10, 2011. I came from a small, nuclear family where everybody’s educated, and we had a very quiet breakfast every Friday morning, and suddenly I shifted from that into this huge, clan-like family, with a whole lot of brothers and sisters who are all married with children, whose children were having children. Life with my husband’s family was loud and lively, and I learned how to cook for forty people—while pregnant. And I found myself completely entrenched in Palestinian life in a way I hadn’t been before.
I DISCOVERED THE WRITER IN ME
My husband worked as the mayor of Ramallah’s right-hand man. When we married, in a way, I thought I was marrying Ramallah. My friends actually nicknamed me “Lady Ramallah,” because I was everywhere, I would go to all the cultural events, always out in the city.
When I finally got to know my husband’s family well, I realized that I didn’t marry the city, I married Abu Shusha and Zakariyya, which were the two villages that his parents had left in 1948.18 I suddenly found myself completely entrenched in Palestinian culture that I’ve only read about—the diaspora refugee culture. Now, my kids are descendants of refugees. It’s been a total switch for me. And it was more eye-opening to me—there’s real suffering in Palestine, there’s real heartbreak. And it’s a lot more than what people think it is. When I began to see these things, that’s when the writing happened.
In July 2010, Bard sent me to the U.S. to do this writing workshop called “Language and Thinking,” which is part of our core program for all of our students, and all faculty from all fields are encouraged to teach the course. And that’s where I discovered the writer in me. At the Bard workshop, I discovered how much I love human beings and that I like to learn from them. That is when I started to write in earnest. Before long I had started a blog about Palestine called The Big Olive.
I started it with a woman I met at a wedding named Tala. I met Tala exactly two weeks before I went to that writing workshop, so all these things started to come together at the same time. Initially, the blog was supposed to be about Ramallah and about my return to the city, and how the city helped me really adjust. But it became more about growing close to this big Palestinian family of my husband’s as well.
Another reason I felt I needed to write about the real Palestine was that I was traveling a lot through the West Bank doing school recruitment. I spent a lot of time traveling to the Abu Dis campus near Jerusalem, visiting Bethlehem, going from checkpoint to checkpoint. The blog became a place where I could examine what it was like to live in this growing, cosmopolitan city—Ramallah—and then going out and observing a culture that you don’t see within the city.
Back when I was living in the U.S., I used to get asked about life in Palestine quite a lot by my friends there. I would tell them to imagine that you are commuting from New York City to a small town in New Jersey, which should be an hour drive. But in order to get there, you can’t take the regular highway, you have to take all these back roads. And even the back roads aren’t all open, and at any point in time, any of the state police might stop you and ask you questions for an hour or more without giving any reason. Suddenly most of your day, most of your work, has been commuting home. It’s exhausting. That’s what living in Palestine is like, and that’s what I wanted to capture in my blog.
I’d always tell my American friends, “You take your freedom to move too much for granted.” I remember being stuck in traffic going to JFK after my workshop with Bard in 2010. I was trying to get to the airport to go back to Palestine, and I was really getting antsy. I was with my friend, and I said something like, “Oh my God, I’m going to miss my plane, and I can’t understand this traffic.” And my friend looked at me and said, “What do you mean you can’t understand this traffic? You’re the one who lives it every day in Palestine.” But that’s the thing—we take gridlock for granted in Palestine. It’s possible to be surprised by terrible traffic in the United States. And so I think that’s the difference between traveling here and there.
As Palestinians, we can’t take any of our day-to-day plans for granted. I may plan to start my class at eleven o’clock, and on any day I could easily be fifteen minutes late, an hour late, no matter how early I left—for no reason other than a random pop-up checkpoint somewhere between home and school. There may not even be a tense situation or security reason for the pop-up checkpoint. It could be just because.
The stress of getting to work and then back home rules our lives. And now that I have children, I feel it’s even further compounded. I have to get to daycare to get my children, and to bring them home so that I can have an hour with them during the day, so then I can put them to bed on time. And that’s such a basic human want. That’s something that working mothers all over the world have to worry about. But I have to worry about it several times over. Every day I have to figure out how I might improvise if I can’t get to daycare to pick up my children on time.
This stress makes you age faster, I think. In certain areas of Palestine, you can cut the tension and serve it up on a platter. And it’s because people are not able to be regular human beings, because they’re completely controlled by these random obstacles that will stop life from happening.
When I was pregnant, I constantly feared that my water would break in Qalandiya and I’d be stuck. I had twins who were breech sideways, and so there was no room for them to come out. I couldn’t have natural birth. I knew that. And so, the last time I drove, I was about a week from giving birth. I went as far as making arrangements with a doctor in Bethlehem so that, should my water break, it would be easier to go to Bethlehem and give birth there than drive the few miles to my hospital. So I had a friend, and he agreed that he would have an ambulance on standby in Bethlehem that would come and pick me up at the drop of a hat and would take me right away to the French women’s hospital in Bethlehem. He would also make sure that he was in contact with my OB/GYN, who could explain to him on the phone the details of my pregnancy. That’s an extreme example, but the truth is that every time I leave the house, I have to have contingency plans. I never know how long it might take to run simple errands.
If you’re in much of the U.S., you’re pregnant with twins, and you work a few miles away from home and the hospital, you can get to any hospital at any time, no matter when your water breaks, no matter if your twins are breech, or both pointing downward with their heads and ready to be delivered naturally. You have that access. Here, you don’t.
The only access from one city to the other is roads, and when those roads are blocked, then life stops. And that’s how women end up giving birth at checkpoints. I wrote about giving birth at a checkpoint on my blog, and I was writing about my own fears. It was something that kept coming at me. And even when I was driving, I kept thinking, “What if I get stuck in this crazy traffic, and someone hits me, rear-ends me, and then I lose one of the babies because of the shock?”
For anyone who doesn’t know the road Wadi Nar—actually, it’s a little better now that the roads are a little bigger—but it’s this winding, uphill road between Ramallah and the cities southeast of Jerusalem where trucks of all kinds and sizes and cars of all kinds and sizes are traveling two ways. There are no clear two lanes, and literally, when you are going up, if you look to your right, you’re practically on the edge of a cliff. If your car gets hit, there’s nowhere to go except down the valley.
I tell my friends that it’s only by the grace of God that I make it from sunrise to sunset every day, and I go to Abu Dis, and I still have the energy to take care of two kids every day. The only way for me to deal with this stress is to write. I’ve gotten such positive responses to the blog from everyone who reads it, but I’m not sure if I’m actually a good writer, or if people just want to be nice to me. And this is where one of my fears exists. It’s not a fear, it’s maybe that I’m not willing to believe that I’m good at something else other than science.
On the other hand, I found this open-armed place with this community where anything you write is up for discussion, and it’s up for editing and up for improvement, and people are willing to read what you write. Because every time you write, you’re putting yourself on that paper. And I’m always submitting pieces to an online magazine called This Week in Palestine, or just putting work up on the blog, and thinking, Dear God, please have mercy on me. There’s a piece of me within those words. So don’t let them batter it because it would break my heart. And so I’m in between, as a writer, I’m still searching for the voice. I don’t know what narrative I’m going to take, I don’t know what I am trying, I don’t even know what story I’m telling.
So I’m still trying to find my voice. I’m not ready to give up science completely and just do writing. And at the same time, I can’t just let the science take over, because I’m so extremely happy to finally have that part of me alive again.
THERE IS REAL SUFFERING OUTSIDE OF RAMALLAH
When the Bard program at Al-Quds was just getting started, we didn’t have enough students to fill the classes. Besides teaching, I worked as a recruiter and traveled all around the West Bank to meet students. I traveled a lot in Bethlehem and recruited a lot of students from the refugee camps there. I also recruited quite a lot from around Hebron. Those trips were so valuable to me, because they reminded me that there is real suffering outside of Ramallah, beyond the day-to-day obstacles of checkpoints and uncertainty that I faced in moving around the West Bank.
I’ve seen that suffering touch my students. We recruited quite a lot from the refugee camps, and so I taught many of the young people I was recruiting. I remember one student took an intro organic chemistry class with me—I always had to tell him to be quiet so I could get on with the lecture, because he was always asking questions. He was funny, sweet, handsome. One of the leaders in the program. Then in the middle of summer break, he disappeared for two weeks. His parents had no idea where he was—they just found his car abandoned in the street one day. He’d been arrested. And then when he returned to school in the fall, he was a completely changed person. He didn’t say a single word all fall semester.
But I think the liberal arts approach here is valuable. The students really take to it—they flourish. We have students reading Greek philosophy, drama. And writing as well. I remember one assignment where students read the “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet and recast it from a Palestinian perspective. The students shared their work in class, and the results were chilling and powerful.
I hope my students will have an easier time than my generation has had. I hope they make the Palestinian cause the way they see it and not simply follow leaders whose ideas have expired. And I hope they stay alive. For my children, I hope they find liberation through education, and I hope that they choose the pen and the book before anything else. For myself, I want to continue to write, though my hopes for Palestine feel more and more crushed. I hope to never forget for a moment that whatever peace and prosperity I have in Ramallah is temporary—an illusion.
1 For more of Riyam’s writing, see Appendix VI, page 341.
2 Amman, the capital of Jordan, is a city of over 2 million residents.
3 Abu Dis is a city of around 12,000 people just east of Jerusalem and the location of one of Al-Quds University’s campuses.
4 Al-Quds is a university system with three campuses—one in Jerusalem, one in Abu Dis just outside of Jerusalem, and one in Al-Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah. The system currently serves over 13,000 undergraduates.
5 Ramallah is a city of over 30,000 people. It has experienced rapid growth since it was adopted as a de facto administrative capital by the Palestinian Authority following the Oslo Accords. Numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and diplomatic outreach offices are also based in the city. Ramallah is located about ten miles northeast of Jerusalem, the city many Palestinians consider Palestine’s true capital.
6 Birzeit University is a renowned public university located just outside Ramallah. It hosts approximately 8,500 undergraduates.
7 The First Intifada was an uprising throughout the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli military occupation. It began in December 1987 and lasted until 1993. Intifada in Arabic means “to shake off.” For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
8 Israel carried out the mass arrest of Palestinian citizens during the First Intifada. More than 120,000 Palestinians were arrested or spent time in prison from 1987 to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.
9 Al-Bireh is a city of over 40,000 people just east of Ramallah.
10 The Friends School of Ramallah is a Quaker-run institution that was opened in 1889, during the time of Ottoman rule.
11 The first Oslo Accords negotiations took place in Norway, the U.S., and France during the summer of 1993. The Accords outlined a plan for the Israeli military to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank in stages while further negotiations would be carried out regarding Palestinian statehood, security, borders, and Israeli settlements. For more information, see Appendix I, page 295.
12 Access to Jerusalem was significantly restricted to Palestinians from the West Bank before the Oslo Accords in 1993. Haifa is a city of 270,000 people in northern Israel. Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv in Israel, was home to many Arabs before 1948.
13 Earlham College is a Quaker-affiliated liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana. It has an enrollment of 1,210 students and has regularly accepted a large cohort of Palestinian students since the signing of the Oslo Accords.
14 Though a small portion of the barrier wall in the West Bank was constructed as early as 1994, construction of the wall increased rapidly in 2002.
15 Qalandiya is a refugee camp and city of nearly 30,000 located between Jerusalem and Ramallah. It’s also the name of the nearby checkpoint, one of the biggest in the West Bank.
16 Bard College is a liberal arts college in Dutchess County, New York, on the Hudson River. It serves just over 2,000 undergraduate students. Bard formed an alliance with Al-Quds University in 2009, with the idea of bringing training in liberal arts education to Palestine.
17 The Mövenpick Hotel in Ramallah is part of a Swiss chain of international luxury hotels. The hotel in Ramallah was opened in the fall of 2010.
18 Abu Shusha was a Palestinian village of under 1,000 near the city of Ramla that was destroyed in the war of 1948. Zakariyya was a Palestinian village of just over 1,000 northwest of Hebron that was destroyed in the war of 1948.