Today in "Being Palestinian in Norway". My bank, @NordeaNorge, sends me text and email saying I have a very important message in my digital mailbox.
I don't have a digital mailbox.
I wanted one, but @NordeaNorge said Palestinians can't have one. We're second-class humans.
Second day I'm calling, and still on hold. Because Palestinians don't need to have their time respected either.
Yesterday I was on hold for 30 mins until my phone credit ran out (yes, it's a paid line, because they want to discourage calls, because who needs to call anyway other than people like me?)
Now I'm on hold for another 30 mins and counting.
I thought I could walk into the customer service office which is 5 mins away from where I live. But I can't, it's only open for pre-booked appointments.
Guess how I'd get an appointment? By calling the line. Which isn't answering right now.
It honestly isn't our fault that we were born Palestinian. It really, really isn't our fault that we were born Palestinian. Why are we being punished for being Palestinian.
Ok, please retweet, this shit can't fly. Please retweet.
I have a finite number of hours in my workday.
So far I have spent 1 of these hours today on hold with @NordeaNorge.
When I called they said estimated wait time is 29 minutes.
I have an important work call coming up. Looks like Nordea won't answer the phone in time.
1:10 hours later, I'm giving up.
And I have a huge headache and I'm PTSD triggered.
It's honestly exhausting. And it's lonely, really lonely. Nobody, not even people close to me, can understand the pain we're going through as Palestinians. The lived reality of being Palestinian is so far removed from most people's lived experience, and it's about to get worse.
It feels worse because as an Arab Spring activist I have over the years stood in solidarity with everyone. I put myself at risk for everyone. So now it does sting that when it's my own cause, when it's about me and my family and our destiny, I hear mostly silence.
Most people, including many from the MENA, think that what's currently happening is just a few normalization agreements and miss the deeper implication. This is the end of Palestinian statehood, and the start of naked apartheid and permanent statelessness.
Most people are not self aware and are really bad at figuring out the true reasons why they do what they do. A lot of the time what they think (or say) is their motive is really little more than a cover for what else is going on in there.
Consider this before we all have a collective fit about what this person or that is doing in the name of their religion or ideology or race or whatever. Consider it again when you feel you need to dissect the religion or ideology or race to find the roots of criminality.
I know this is less cathartic than many wish, but then if something feels too readily cathartic it's quite often a trap.
I'm a Palestinian and I want my Iranian sisters & brothers to live in dignity with a government that centers them and represents them - not one that robs and beats them. I am disgusted whenever dictators use the Palestinian cause as a washcloth to wipe the blood off their hands
Dictators are very aware of their morality deficit and so grab onto anything and everything that could make them look more moral, and that includes instrumentalizing moral causes. Our job as Palestinians is to reject that instrumentalization. It does not benefit our cause.
How do you think I feel as a Palestinian when I know that a Syrian sister or brother were tortured at the "Palestine branch", or that some of my Syrian sisters and brothers lost their homes thanks to the Al Quds force? As Palestinians we need to stay no.
This is literally the narrative being employed now - that Palestinians do not come from Palestine. How do we even begin to find common ground with an extremist movement that denies our very existence?
Note the essentialization (i.e. the racism) of it; the idea that all Arabic speaking people are interchangeable and if you're Arabic speaking you might as well be uprooted from Iraq and cast into the Algerian desert and you don't get to complain coz it's all Arabs anyway
This is like saying that someone from New Zealand can be uprooted and then sent to a refugee camp in Guyana and it's all fine and dandy because they're both English speaking countries where some of the population are of European descent so they're just the same people
How many of you woke up this morning to find that a political foundation in a European country deems your very existence to be an act of hate? Good morning to you too
Yesterday I observed a special day - the day I met my son for the first time. It was in Kuala Lumpur airport in 2014 and he was 4 months old. I was arrested two months before he was born, and subsequently expelled into nowhere, because I was Palestinian
The authorities in the UAE said I have to "go back where I came from". I was Palestinian, so I ended up in prison and then living in an airport. Palestinian pain is real, Palestinian trauma is real, but somehow they say we don't exist except as an act of hate.
Quick note: Everybody seems to hate MBS now, everyone is taking turns dumping on him. Meanwhile my team was working on this back in 2016/2017 when this work was frustrating and dangerous and when everybody wanted to believe MBS is the new "liberal reformer" who can civilize us
This isn't a statement about MBS but really about our work at @Kawaakibi. We do the hard work on the most frustrating subjects and we have a high tolerance for personal risk. We do this work so that in 2 or 4 or 10 years everyone can do it safely and even joyfully.
You can only imagine where we have our eyes set now. Again, it's on topics on which everybody wants to believe otherwise - it's the work that's frustrating and dangerous. We do this work today, and will be doing it for years, so that by 2025 what is niche today becomes mainstream