Searching for an Identity and a Homeland

The television set glows. On the screen are flashing images of violence from the strife-torn Middle East. A black-haired man with warm eyes sits besides a little girl, his daughter. Seeing the pictures of Israeli soldiers toting machine guns, bombed out store-fronts, hijacked airplanes, the man's thoughts turn to earlier days. He tells his daughter of what has been lost--a garden, a stone house overlooking the Meditteranean, a home.

DINA N. ABU-GHAIDA'S CHILDHOOD HISTORY reads like a travel log.

She was born in Damascus, Syria, lived until the age of nine in Beirut, Lebanon and Amman, Jordan, moved to Vienna, Austria and came to Harvard for college.

Throughout all her travels, she has forgotten neither her father, who died six years ago, nor her family's home, which now lies in Haifa, Israel. Dina N. Abu-Ghaida is Palestinian.

During Abu-Ghaida's four years at Harvard, she has struggled both to refine her political views and to reconcile different facets of her identity. In Vienna, she identified herself strongly as a Palestinian. In the United States, she has become part of a crowd of international students, many of whom are European.

But the identity that retains the most impact on her daily life is her membership in the Palestinian Diaspora community. This year she founded the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee on Palestine, and last year she served as the President of the Society of Arab Students.

"I don't remember a time when I didn't know I was Palestinian," she says.

For Abu-Ghaida, Palestinian activism springs from an innate sense of duty. During her years at Harvard, events occured--the outbreak of the intifada, the incident at the Dome of the Rock, the Gulf War--which left her no choice but to respond.

One of Abu-Ghaida's close friends, Salman Farmanfamaian '91-'92, describes her situation this way: "You can't help hearing the news. You can't help getting drawn in, even if you don't want to."

But getting drawn in is easy for someone raised in exile communities in the Middle East and Europe for most of her life. Abu-Ghaida spent her early years in Beirut, Lebanon. That means having a heightened sense of both ethno-religious identity and the chaos that accompanies war.

She lived in the neighborhood of Ras Beirut, a place that was "both Christian and Muslim." One day she was out playing hopskotch with her friends when she heard the rat-tat-tat sound of machine gun fire. The game was over--Dina's mother yelled to her from her porch to come inside.

ABU-GHAIDA'S LIFE TOOK A major turn in 1978 when her family moved to Vienna along with the United Nations agency for which her father worked. When she arrived, she devoured German movies and television broadcasts, learning the language as quickly as possible.

She also discovered that Austria welcomed those who fit in, who could speak the language. Unlike many of her friends at the Vienna International School who spoke English in public, Abu-Ghaida could avoid stares and comments from Austrians because of her command of the language.

Still, she could not forget that she was Palestinian. Her parents allowed only Arabic inside the home and encouraged her to perform Palestinian folk-dances. And never did they forget their lost homeland.

"I was always told how both my families left Palestine," she says.

Abu-Ghaida had no citizenship until she moved to Austria. Born in Syria, she possessed only a Laisser-Passer, which identified her as a Palestinian living in Syria. When she moved to Vienna, however, she obtained Austrian citizenship.

During her first year at Harvard, many students thought of her as Austrian. "I helped a lot of people with their German homework", she says "I had a Falco tape in German."

Those who at first wondered about Abu-Ghaida's identity would soon know that she was Palestinian. In December, 1987 the intifada erupted on the West Bank.

The news, she says, was both exhilarating and terrifying. "I often had my day spoiled from eight in the morning. But the feeling was that Palestinians were taking things into their own hands finally."

For Abu-Ghaida, the outbreak of the intifada meant forging closer ties with other Palestinians and sympathizers in the area.

To emphasize the struggle going on in the West Bank, she printed posters depicting Israeli soldiers suppressing Palestinian youths.

"One morning I put up one of these posters in my entryway. By the afternoon, it was gone. It was torn down," she says. Later, the woman who removed the poster confronted her, explaining why she took it down.

POSTERS TORN DOWN, signs removed, vocal arguments--all these would characterize responses to Abu-Ghaida's activism at Harvard. Even her mother was concerned about the stridency of her daughter's actions.

"My mom has encouraged me to keep a low profile," she says, explaining how her mother fears American support for Israel and nationalist fervor. As Abu-Ghaida speaks, sipping a water at Au Bon Pain's outdoor cafe, a man approaches wearing an Operation Desert Storm t-shirt and hawking "Support the Troops" decals.

During moments when she was discouraged or tired, she thought of those living in the Occupied Territories. "People felt that if Palestinians in the West Bank are sacrificing their lives, we could at least sacrifice our time."

Abu-Ghaida's sophomore and junior years were punctuated by continued activism, long political talks at cafes and biochemistry coursework.

After her sophomore year, Abu-Ghaida visited Israel. Travelling as an Austrian citizen, she studied Hebrew at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "I wanted to see the land," she says.

That summer she returned to the house in Haifa that had at one time belonged to her family. She found a picturesque stone building in the hilltop city that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians who left another part of the country now live in the house, located in the Arab section of the city.

"It was very much the way my father described it to me," she says.

The summer was one of tension in Israel. Abu-Ghaida was riding in a public bus when she heard that a Palestinian man had caused another bus elsewhere in the country to drive off the road. Speaking Hebrew and travelling as a foreign national, Dina--which is one of the most popular Israeli names--was able to see a side of Israelis that is invisible to most Palestinians.

On her return to Harvard, Abu-Ghaida joined the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) and sponsored meetings for concerned Arabs and Jews. The alliance was borne out of campus Arab-Jewish dialogue and continued because members of both groups were interested in bringing an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

"I felt there was a lot in common," she says.

ABU-GHAIDA'S PLANS for a normal senior year came to a halt in August, 1990 when, serving as a summer school proctor, she learned of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The invasion and subsequent Gulf War disrupted and traumatized the lives of many Palestinians. For Abu-Ghaida, the war brought immense amounts of tension.

"I have relatives there, uncles and aunts who survived the war," she says.

During the build-up and subsequent war, Abu-Ghaida constantly had to argue and defend her positions on the war. Students, knowing of her Palestinian background, sought out her opinions. Even when weary or reluctant to talk, Abu-Ghaida says she felt she felt obligated to provide an alternative opinion on the war.

Like many other Palestinians, she felt ambivalent about the conflict. She opposed both the invasion of a sovereign nation by Iraq and U.S. interventionism. "I felt torn," she says.

She also felt alienated from the American peace movement. "People were forgetting about the people of Iraq. Everyone had their own agenda," she says.

Abu-Ghaida plans to return to the West Bank this summer to work with a human rights groups on an Isabella Briggs Travelling Fellowship. She hopes both to play an active role in the movement to end the occupation and to come closer to everyday Palestinians.

With her Viennese background, Harvard education and strong views on women's rights, Abu-Ghaida does not fit the profile of the average Palestinian. But just as being the best speaker of German among the Palestinians in Vienna helped her to get to Harvard, her Harvard ties may help her reach positions where she can best help her people.

"I definitely know I don't come across like the average Palestinian in the West Bank. I am looking forward to living in the Palestinian community there and bringing my own ideas to them," she says.

For the short term, she is awaiting elections--both Israeli and Palestinian. The war, Dina says, may finish the political careers of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the rightwing Likud Party, and Palestinian Liberation Organization chair Yasser Arafat, now being questioned by many Palestinians for his handling of the Gulf Crisis. A change in leadership, she says, could bring relief to the Palestinian people.

But this stands a long way off. For now she can't really imagine a Palestine state.

For a moment she imagines what it would be like if a Palestinian state were established during her stay in the West Bank. She would then have her own nation and would not have to return to Vienna or the United States.

"Wow," she says with a smile. "That would be great."

Posters torn down, signs removed, vocal arguments-all these would characterize responses to Abu-Ghadia's activism at Harvard. Even her mother was concerned about the stridency of her daughters actions.