Summary
Palestinian American solidarity tourist whose 2012 tour is analyzed in Chapter 2 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine as a case of the unstable categories of tourist, guide and host (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.97-99).
Details
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She was the first Palestinian in her family — scattered since 1948 across Jordan, Kuwait, Canada and the United States — to see Palestine, outside relatives in Gaza who have been unable to leave and whom she has never met (PDF p.97).
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She was detained at the airport for “somewhere between five and seven hours” in a room ostensibly for random checks that was populated solely by “brown people like me” (PDF p.97).
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At a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, after Palestinians were ordered off the bus to be searched, a Palestinian woman signalled her to stay on: “because I was a foreigner — even though I’m just as Palestinian as them — but I have my American passport, I get more rights than the people that have lived there, and their ancestors who have lived here for hundreds of years, and they pay taxes to Israel” (PDF p.98).
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She rephrased it: “I have more rights than them, from being a tourist, even though I’m just as much a Palestinian” (PDF p.98).
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Her guilt was also tethered to being able to leave: she can “go home and not worry that there’s going to be an intifada the next day”; in her experience of diaspora, Kelly writes, “home” both must be elsewhere and can be elsewhere (PDF p.98).
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In Chapter 7 Alzanoon reuses her bus moment — ordered to stay on while Palestinians were ordered off to be searched — as a Jim Crow analogy in her report-backs: “where you have people with more rights than others, who are first class and second class” (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.238). She also shared, as translation that would “hit home” in California, stories of Israeli theft of West Bank water (PDF p.235).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Maggie Goff, Yvonne Lory, Checkpoint 300, Solidarity Tourism