“Occupied-Palestine” is what my school made us call our neighbor Israel, and whoever wrote “Israel” on the geography test was to be given an F. “We have to respect our martyrs and the young people we lost because of their evil, their selfishness,” we were regularly brainwashed. War, border problems, and a history of hatred and contempt amongst our elders. Blood, civilian blood, treason, an evasion of the land and the heist of our territory

Jews? We don’t have them in Lebanon, we pride ourselves on our land of diversity, home to eighteen religions, eighteen sects and sub-sects. Our churches are built at the edge of our mosques. While this coexistence between the cross of the church and the mosque’s crescent moon in our skyline is the most famous symbol of our mother Beirut, we don’t make space for the Jews – they raped our land, they burned our cedars, and they ruined our parents’ childhood and memories of our beautiful country. My grandmother used to call Israel “that godforsaken forbidden word” as she recalled my father’s innocence being taken away while fighting for his land and his father’s legacy.  Three of our homes were burned to ashes during the 1982 conflict – the picture albums, the family journals, my father’s first soccer jersey, my aunt’s prom dress, my grandmother’s wedding wrist corsage, my grandfather’s first hunting gun – all of that became ashes, ashes that Israeli soldiers stepped and spat on during what they called “Operation Peace for Galilee.”

Haunted by these scenes and memories, and carrying that heavy burden of anti-Israeli culture with me, I joined one of AU’s Israeli clubs to discuss war and its repercussions on the post-war generations.

AU’s Israeli Club was not the first time my assumptions had been challenged about Israelis. My first time was not a choice, nor an assignment. When I was a senior in high school, seven of my friends and I decided to attend the Barcelona Beach Festival for our senior trip. I relive this particular night every time I tell this story. It was Saturday, July 14th, 2018. I wore my prettiest outfit and my most genuine smile. I had slept fourteen hours so that I could stay awake till dawn. That night the lineup was unforgettable: Axwell Λ Ingrosso, Armin van Buuren, David Guetta, Oliver Heldens, Robin Schulz, Don Diablo, The Chainsmokers, and JP Candela. It was quite the party. I walked into that massive worldwide event, seeing thousands of people painted in their countries’ symbols and waving their nations’ flags. I, too, wore an accessory very dear to my heart; it was the huge Lebanese flag that I tied on my shoulders: our red and white colors with our proud green cedar rising from the middle.

Five minutes after walking in, I found myself on a stranger’s shoulders, waving my flag proudly, making sure that people noticed our powerful cedar. Gradually, I began to realize that my flag was unfamiliar to many. To the giant countries present, countries that had invaded and easily overpowered us, it was just a drawing of a “Christmas tree,” as a party-goer from Spain joked. But that night when people saw the spark in my eyes, more than fifty asked to take a picture of my flag with theirs, and the pride I felt when explaining the meaning of our symbols and colors was incomparable. I spent the night dancing in the first row. People would carry me on their shoulders and bring me there to spread my energy.

At one point, I was dancing with a group of people I thought were the most entertaining of all. We exchanged flags and waved at the DJs and the crowd of thousands behind us. After a while, as we posed for a photographer, I looked at the flag that I was carrying, and I realized it had a beautiful penetrating blue and a strange star in the middle, one that I had seen before. I hadn’t connected the dots earlier since our only way of communicating was screaming in each other’s ears. Therefore, it took me a while to realize that the group my friends and I had been dancing with were speaking Hebrew with one another, a language that I had never heard before despite my thirty visits to the U.S. The fact is, I had spent half of my night carrying the “enemy” flag. I hadn’t noticed that they were carrying mine, hoping to break the taboos by posting “peace in the Middle East” Instagram stories.

What makes my story interesting is that I still asked one of them to lift me up again. The second time, I was carrying their flag with an adrenaline rush that I had never felt before. I loved these people, their vibe, their company, their jokes. The hatred that my culture harvested deeply in my soul was replaced by a singular wave of excitement.

While I hadn’t planned on literally dancing with the enemy at that festival, that experience prepared me to take a deliberate step. In my next “dance” to understand the other side, people I had been taught to abhor, I joined an Israeli club at AU. Today at AU when I tell people where I come from, they find two reasons to make an awkward silence. It’s either a silence that means, “what if she’s an undercover ISIS missionary?” or one that means that they’re from Israel. The ones who break that silence are the ultra-liberals who scream, “That is soooo cool!” despite not knowing a single thing about Lebanon. Sometimes I would just break the ice by saying, “Oh, but I have a house in L.A too!” To others, I would just say, “Yeah… Well, I’d love to visit Tel Aviv, without getting imprisoned by my country!” The challenge was smiling at my Israeli peers and pretending that I didn’t notice the awkwardness filling the room when we had to introduce ourselves. I believe that the biggest challenge was to put aside the continuous slideshow that my brain would create when someone from Israel would say, “I wish I could visit Beirut, I hear it’s beautiful.”

 Remembering their invasion of our territory a third time during “ﺗـــﻤﻮز ﺣـــﺮب”[1], all I could see were images of our homes being devoured by flames, and all I could hear was the redundant voice of my father telling us to pack our bags because the bombs were getting closer and we had to flee the country the next day. I was only six at that time, and I was kicked out of my home. Twelve years later, my brain would choose very inconvenient times to haunt me with these reckonings.

Prior to this evening, the only Israeli person I had met here at AU was this guy from my floor; he would always say that I sounded and looked like Gal Gaddot, except that I was Lebanese and much shorter. And this is how he introduced me to his peers, members of the Hilal and Mishelanu communities on campus. These groups are meant to strengthen their Israeli and Jewish identity. I was standing there, choosing my words delicately to introduce myself, the fast forward slideshow messing with my head made that first task quite difficult for me. I mean, what was I going to say? “Hi, I’m Yara, I’m Lebanese, your countrymen are responsible for a few massacres in my country, and my writing professor made me challenge my beliefs, so I decided to join the ‘I-cannot-even-pronounce-your country’s-name’ group.” Instead, I came up with another joke, one that actually made them laugh. We hung out for hours and spent the evening laughing and sharing memories. For four hours, we rocked Centennial Hall’s third-floor lounge, sharing one another’s countries’ traditional music, food, art, dancing moves, site-seeing spots, history, and childhood memories. During these four hours, my mind was absent, I was busy enjoying their incredible stories, and the slideshows did not make their random appearance.  When the Israeli groups talked about their parents and how much they miss them, it was hard for me to imagine these people harming my country. In fact, their parents educated them just the way mine did. We shared the same values and the same identity as Middle Eastern people, except that tourists are more attracted to Tel Aviv because they do not picture themselves in a “black-ops survival mission” there as they do for Beirut. I also enjoyed watching videos of their nightlife, I thought it was very similar to mine. The reflection of the huge towers at the edge of the Mediterranean in our Zeituna Bay resembles the mirrored reflection in their Tel Aviv Bay.

Thus, that night was not only about challenging my points of view and the way my opinion was forged and fabricated throughout my childhood, but it was also more about learning how to accept and move on. As I grew up, the society I lived in made sure that I was loyal to the bloodshed of our martyrs, the stories I was told made the innocent child that I was experience hatred at an extremely young age. And being thrown away from my home only made it worse. The rancor I felt towards our neighbors of the South was deep, and a huge part of it disappeared that night as we laughed, danced and opened our hearts and minds.

The outcome of that experience made me realize that no matter what side you come from, no matter how intense a conflict is, no one should be held accountable for their ancestors’ mistakes. The example shown twenty years ago during the most politically-charged World Cup match, when the United States faced Iran in a soccer game and the two teams took pictures together to leave the politics “off the field,” is a perfect illustration that taboos can be put aside for greater purposes (Galarcep). No one should be judged by their ethnicity or country’s history. One can only learn from those who have experienced different points of views, those on the other side. No country should harvest hatred and loathing toward another in its children’s hearts. No country should be allowed to make this decision for them. I blame my school, my parents, and my government for hating Israel in front of me, I blame these adorable Palestinian refugees for making my heart melt when I visited them on our borders and I blame these people for making that judgment for me. I am sure that the people with whom I spent last Thursday did not know a single repercussion that their countrymen’s actions brought to my country, and I don’t blame them for that. On the contrary, I am now confident that if I show them the old pictures that my father kept of his childhood home, our old house that we were forced to abandon, my childhood favorite restaurants and parks that were destroyed and shut down, they would feel terrible – just as I would feel if I knew the casualties that Lebanese soldiers brought to their people.

I am glad that I got to explore another angle and perspective through this experience. My takeaways are life lessons which I will pass on to my children and grandchildren. The future generations should not suffer the consequences of their ancestors’ actions. We should embrace our descendants’ right to have their own pinions and erase this post-war culture that harvests hatred in their interaction with others. I know now that my experience was even more fruitful and powerful than Hochschild’s because the assumptions she had regarding Tea Party supporters were only guided by her disagreement. Her beliefs did not involve genocides, wars, and a personal agenda. While my aim was never to understand the reasons behind the Israeli invasion, I understood that Israeli people were people, just like us. And if the people I had spent my time with the other night had the choice, none of them would have chosen to separate me from my home, and none of them would have decided to throw thousands of refugees on our borders. My experience in the AU Israeli Club is something that my mother would probably be proud of, one that my dad would take time to digest, and one that my grandmother would never understand or approve of. Knowing that my grandmother’s slideshows will never disappear, I will respect her memories of the horrors that she saw during the war and keep that experience to myself.

One of the outcomes of that experience is the text I am starting to write to my dad: “Hey Dad! In case you receive a government alert about your daughter’s Lebanese citizenship being taken away, please know that this experience was very fruitful. Believe it or not, these people I met are just young adults, living their college life just like I am, probably having spent hours on this writing assignment with a Red Bull pack to keep them up just like I did.”