“In 2005, I travelled from the US to visit relatives in Palestine, but my trip was cut short when the Israelis denied me entry to Gaza. I tried again the following year. This time I was detained at the Erez crossing and held in a gated area for around twelve hours. I conceded defeat and set off via the West Bank to Jordan, from where I was to fly back to the US. My mother suggested I should take advantage of the stopover in Jordan to meet my great-uncle Mahmoud. All she knew about him was that he had spent several years in South America. He now lived near the Coca-Cola bottling factory in the industrial suburbs of Amman. As my taxi pulled up, he was waiting in the street: tall, friendly, in his mid-fifties. He showed me into his flat to meet his family – he had four children, teenagers at the time. I asked him why he’d been in South America. He said he’d been ‘messed around’. Perhaps he was hoping to leave it there, but I was inquisitive, and it wasn’t long before he told me that he had been involved in an ethnic cleansing experiment dreamed up by the Israelis after the 1967 war, intended to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the newly occupied territories.”
Published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 45 No. 10 · 18 May 2023.
Hadeel Assali is a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University.
