This is an excerpt of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, by Linda Quiquivix
They say the sociologists in the United States are worried the children of today’s immigrants are not assimilating like the previous immigrants. By today’s immigrants, they largely mean Indigenous and Afro-descendants south of the United States border called Latinos or Hispanics. By previous immigrants, they mean the Europeans.
For children of today’s immigrants, the sociologists have coined a term of caution: downward assimilation. It’s what they call Brown people who share their lives and fates with Black people more than they do with White people.
The place where I first learned English was where I first learned I was supposed to upward assimilate into Whiteness. Television taught me I was a Democrat, and I went with that for a while. Republicans had never hid how much they disliked my family and anybody who wasn’t White.
The only politics I knew of back then meant “electoral politics,” which I found myself following more closely than most people around me. I’m not sure if it surprised anyone that I applied to become a Congressional intern once, but it surprised me that I was quickly accepted. The year was 2001. The Congresswoman’s office was looking for somebody good at computers in a sea of Political Science applicants who weren’t yet good at computers.
I had submitted my application on a whim after moving to the East Coast for two semesters to see it snow. California State University Northridge was part of a national student exchange program popular with cold-weather students curious about Southern California.
For Fall semester 2000, I traded spots with someone at Rutgers University in New Jersey because my student loans couldn’t afford New York City. At Rutgers I took a writing class, a music theory class, and a drawing class where I learned how to work with different types of charcoal.
For the next semester, Spring 2001, I traded with someone at the University of Maryland because my student loans couldn’t afford Washington, D.C. I was accepted as an intern by the office of a Latina Congresswoman from California. She was famous for losing elections as a Republican until she switched her party affiliation to Democrat.
Congress is an unpaid internship; getting it on your resume is supposed to be payment enough. I was required to enroll in a Political Science class while at Maryland in order to receive college credit. In that class is where I first heard the name Bernie Sanders, often mocked by the professor as “The Independent Socialist from Vermont” whenever he called on our classmate who interned for Bernie Sanders. She was the only Black student in the class. In 2001, saying the word “Socialist” in public without as much ridicule wouldn’t happen for another decade. It would became safer after the housing crisis of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street Movement that followed in 2011 that made a lot of people hate capitalism for the first time.
In January 2001 when the internship began, the Republican George W. Bush has just been inaugurated as president after a stolen election. The Democrats on Capitol Hill didn’t seem to mind that much by the time I arrived. They seemed more worried about their committee assignments in Congress more than about democracy. The Republicans controlled Congress when I was there, which meant they controlled committee assignments, the places granting Congressmembers direct influence. The Congresswoman I interned for was on the committee dealing with “defense” questions, dealing with war, a theme important to her political futures because of the so-called “defense contractors” in her district. Lockheed Martin, the largest weapons manufacturer in the world was in her district, who invited her interns and staff on a Black Hawk helicopter to take a joyride above Washington D.C. when I was there.
The United States finds a gruesome joy in naming its weapons and military operations after Native warriors it has battled. Black Hawk was born Mahkatêwe-meshi-kêhkêhkwa in his native Thâkîwaki language, on Rock river, in the year 1767, a place renamed Rock Island, Illinois by the colonizers following Black Hawk’s surrender and imprisonment.[1] Black Hawk was a defense chief of his people, sometimes called the Sauk people. They had allied with the British against the United States in the War of 1812 in the hopes of preventing the United States from colonizing further west.
Without question, everybody thought riding on a Black Hawk helicopter was special, which made me think it was special too, also without question. For this, and not only for this, I have had to learn to forgive myself. For this, I have had to learn to surround myself with people who always question, with people who pray they never stop being people who always question.
Republicans and Democrats as people are not simply colleagues; they are friends more than they are enemies, sometimes they are best friends, roommates, spouses, lovers. I did not witness existential battles between them, only re-election battles. The work of governing to them seemed to be a sporting event, slinging mud at each other in public, even calling each other evil in public, seeming to be high-fiving each other in private.
One day, the Chief of Staff of the most powerful Republican of the House of Representatives at the time came to give the interns an inspirational talk about a day in his life. He came at us with low energy, holding a drink in his hand, describing these days in Congress as “boring” because
“there wasn’t very much going on right now,” nothing like in previous years with all the wars. After September 11th, I imagined he must have been feeling better.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington D.C. happened shortly after I returned home to California, making my head spin. I was frightened and upset. I considered joining the Air Force but thankfully they didn’t call me back.
The television kept repeating something about how Americans can now understand how Israelis feel. A flash of Yasser Arafat donating blood to the victims surprised me. Arafat was the long-time Chairperson of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. I didn’t know much about Palestinians other than Arafat was their leader and that I should be afraid. They hate Americans, the television kept repeating, They hate our freedoms.
Some months before, I had seen an Arab woman on the news debating a White man. She said Palestinians are suffering. She had used that word, “suffering.” And then the news host cut her off. It was the Second Intifada, which had erupted in September 2000, exactly a year before. I added Arafat donating blood to my growing collection of things about Palestine that weren’t making sense.
Palestine had been the reason for the September 11 attacks, they were saying on the television. My list of questions was getting long. I couldn’t find someone to trust. I didn’t know any Muslims. I didn’t know any Palestinians. My bosses at the time were Jewish, and they were helpful in how unhelpful they were. We had watched the news coverage together on September 11th while at work. When I asked their thoughts about Yasser Arafat donating blood, they responded, “I spit on his blood.” I didn’t know Palestinians, but I didn’t like how Israel’s defenders were talking about Palestinians. It brought a fire to my stomach I couldn’t fully understand. I quit that job days later and moved on, curious about what I had just done.
Wikipedia, the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia, was new at the time and became my starting point. The expensive corporate encyclopedias that for generations had been sold in printed sets, like the colonial Encyclopædia Britannica, were beginning to lose influence at the time. They had tried to delegitimize Wikipedia as a reference, but I had heard of a research study that concluded Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica averaged the same number of errors. Today almost nobody has heard of Encyclopædia Britannica and everybody knows about Wikipedia.
Wikipedia was the first to tell me about the creation of the State of Israel, and my heart broke in disbelief. No one had mentioned Israel had been created through the destruction of Palestine. I had been nine years old when I first learned about Israel when in Spring 1988 at the Oxnard College Auditorium, my prima, my cousin, invited me to watch her perform in a play. She had just arrived from Guatemala, sent to live with us by my tía, my aunt, who was afraid my prima attending university in Guatemala would turn her into a Marxist.
The play was The Diary of Anne Frank, a story with an ending my prima hadn’t prepared me for. I had only gone to cheer her on; I had never heard about the Nazis or about Europe’s crimes before. On the television, White people were the ones who seemed to have it all together. We hadn’t yet learned about Columbus and Them in school.
I was confused that Anne and her family, although light-skinned, were not officially considered White. By the end of the play, Anne and her family were captured by Nazis and taken to an extermination camp because they were not White. It was the first story I confronted with a terrible ending that nobody was going to rewrite. Nobody could tell me why it had happened, only that it had happened, relieving my heart right away by telling me about the creation of the State of Israel, that Jews were safe now with their own state, supported by the might of the United States.
More than twelve years would have to pass before I’d learn the truth: that Palestinians have had to die for Europe’s crimes.
Soon after the September 11 attacks, universities across the country reported their U.S. Foreign Policy courses were overflowing. Our Foreign Policy professor often compared us at CSUN to the students in the Ivy League, and not positively, alleging that the Ivy League students did all the readings before class, which I would learn was untrue ten years later when I would teach in the Ivy League.
But the professor did say something I’ve regularly seen proven true: states exist only to preserve themselves as states, and that’s it. States don’t exist for the people, they are not there primarily for the nation; states exist to preserve their own continued existence as instruments of force with internationally granted legitimacy.
Also, there are no friends in foreign policy, only allies.
Also, allies are not the same thing as friends.
I’ve noticed Republicans and Democrats get along best when it comes to foreign policy, meaning when it comes to waging war on the ones who don’t get to vote. I didn’t learn that part in class, it’s been more of an observation. The politicians teach that everyone outside the United States can be sacrificed as long as the United States is kept strong. Far too often, the voters agree.
The Gulf War of 1990–1991 is officially timestamped this way by History with capital-H to make it look like that war ended. The bombing of Iraq began during the Republican administration of the first George Bush and continued throughout the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton. By the time Clinton left office in 2001 and the second George Bush came in, the war had already killed half a million Iraqi children. When asked if the price had been worth it, the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State, a woman named Madeline Albright, affirmed: “The price is worth it.”
Shortly after September 11th, a wounded and dangerous United States began retaliating against the people of Afghanistan and the people of Iraq, lands Americans are fine waging war on but cannot point to on a map.
This has been excerpt of Palestine 1492: A Report Back, by Linda Quiquivix
Footnotes
[1] Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of His Nation, Various Wars in Which He Has Been Engaged, and His Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, His Surrender, and Travels through the United States. Dictated by Himself. (1833)