Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1988, Page 20
Seeing the Light
A Love for One's Own Land
By Helen Overdiek
The light dawned slowly-it was not a blinding flash. My first encounter with a Palestinian was in Saudi Arabia, where I worked as a secretary for a private U.S. oil company. He was an Arabic teacher, who told me that in his youth he had lived in a small village on the Mediterranean in Palestine.
The family's neighbors, with whom they socialized, were Jewish. The two families often shared picnics by the sea. In 1948 the Palestinian teacher's family was driven from Palestine. He subsequently married. Years later, his wife and his sister were given "permission" to go to her village, since he wanted his wife to see where he had lived as a youth. His sister located the village and the house. Neither, fortunately, had been bulldozed into oblivion, as had happened to so many others.
Their knock on the door was answered by a Jewish lady, who said she had come from Yemen. She invited them in after my friend's sister explained that this had been her home. It was then that her emotions overwhelmed her as she viewed the kitchen where she and her mother had prepared family meals and the family garden, now so changed.
I have a fierce attachment to my own home in Minnesota, where I was born and where I now live. Even during the 28 years I worked outside the United States, my family and the land were always there, and I returned almost every year to my haven. It is not possible, I believe, to put one's self in a Palestinian's place-to really understand the depth of longing Palestinians have for their lost land and former homes, unless one has sustained a similar loss. But already I was beginning to feel a great affinity with the Palestinians, since my own attachment to the land my parents tilled is so strong.
In 1967, Americans Were Targets for Arab Rage
I was still in the Middle East in June 1967 at the time of Israel's sudden, devastating attack on Egypt and Syria. We Americans also came under sudden attack-windows in our homes were broken, our cars were overturned and set afire. Arabs directed their rage at us as the symbols of what they perceived to be U.S.-Israeli aggression against the entire Arab world. By then I had lived many years in the Middle East and had participated happily in the daily life of my Arab friends and associates. I was both saddened and troubled to see the erosion of the prestige, popularity, and respect once enjoyed there by my country, just as I was disturbed at the misinformation, distortion, and stereotypical images of Arabs promulgated in the United States. As a result of Israel's attack, and the speed with which the reality was replaced by the myth that Israel was the victim rather than the aggressor, Americans living in Lebanon founded Americans for Justice in the Middle East (AJME). I became a member of the Saudi Arabia chapter, our aim being a presentation of the facts which U.S. citizens seldom heard about what was really happening in the Middle East.
When I returned to Minnesota on vacation that same year, I found friends and relatives generally apathetic, uninterested, or uninformed. Their main reaction was surprise that I wasn't "afraid" of being "over there." Had I mentioned the West Bank, I suspect some would have thought that I was referring to a new savings and loan institution in that part of town. They understood little or nothing of the cause of periodic wars in the Middle East-only that it was "dangerous" for me to be there. I responded that I felt safer in Saudi Arabia than I did in my own country.
U.S. Gas Lines Blamed on "the Arabs"
In the fall of 1973, while I was still in Saudi Arabia, King Faisal turned off the oil spigot. He was responding to Henry Kissinger's airlift and sealift of U.S. weapons to Israel for use in preventing Egypt and Syria from retaking the Sinai and Golan Heights, areas Israel had seized from them.
Later, when I was home on vacation, I found the American public angry at "the Arabs" because of lines at the gas pump. Reasons for the cutoff didn't make the headlines, but frustrations of motorists did. I have written to a number of journalists and companies about their references to the Arab oil embargo, saying that when they wrote about it they were remiss in not explaining to the public why the Arabs, who would prefer selling their oil to sitting on it, used a boycott as a political weapon. Few Americans realized then or now that the boycott was an Arab protest against unconditional U.S. support for an Israeli effort not to defend its own territory, but to keep Arab territory seized in 1967.
I had begun writing letters from the Middle East in 1968 to members of our government, editors of newspapers and magazines, clergy, and various individuals whose articles contained misstatements, downright untruths, or erroneous maps of the Middle East. Some of these mythmakers are just ill-informed. Others appear to operate on the principle that if they repeat an untruth or distortion often enough, it becomes accepted as truth. Since returning to my home in Minnesota, I have continued to be concerned about justice for Arab Americans here and for the Palestinians in the Middle East. I am thus a member of several national and local organizations.
When frustrations threaten to overwhelm the considerable personal satisfactions I derive from my continuing efforts to help others see the light, I remind myself of author Bonard Overstreet's lines:
You say the little things I do will do no good./ They never will prevail to tip the scales/ When justice hangs in balance./ I don't think I ever thought they would./ But I am prejudiced beyond debate/ In favor of my right to choose which side/ Shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.
Helen Overdiek lives in Hopkins, MN, and is active in local and national organizations seeking a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute and concerned with human rights, discrimination, and political action.
