And then I could see what had happened to the Jews and how that led to the situation in Palestine.

A more whole and meaningful picture emerged about the situation of the Palestinians and what was happening to us.

That was so freeing, and suddenly things started to make sense. I kept reading until I finally could see things from a much larger perspective. When I came to America, I realized that there was a big picture, and I needed to study it, so I studied journalism and focused on the Middle East.

The world wars, the Holocaust–I just didn’t understand what happened. But I really didn’t understand the larger picture. I’d see tear gas canisters that are made in Pennsylvania and used by the Israeli army against Palestinians. I’d hear about the British and their role in Palestine. I saw the Israelis as soldiers, and I heard from Palestinians, not from books, just from oral histories, and I knew that the situation was larger than us. Whatever was available was pretty much one-sided. I was apolitical because I didn’t have information. You write that you were largely apolitical in your late teens, yet you came to New York five years later to intern at The Nation –what changed? I chose to aim the gaze in Tasting the Sky on what is humanizing and healing in order to break the chains that had made me live in so much fear while I was growing up. This happens not only to individuals but also to the culture at large too. Such conditions stunt the mind and starve it. So for people living there, minimal attention is paid to one’s own inner life, dreams, culture, relationships and personhood. Part of the dehumanization of the Palestinians is the obsession with the occupation, because the basic survival of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza depends to a large degree on what the Israeli army does or does not do. I consider the occupation a dehumanizing fact of Palestinian as well as Israeli lives. I wanted to write from the personal experience and not have the story be a political argument in order to blame this side or that side, or to justify anything.

So as much as I could in Tasting the Sky, I took the narrative focus off the occupation. Palestinian life under Israeli occupation is drenched in politics to a suffocating level. In writing this book, I finally could own a piece of my childhood, which itself felt like a piece of Ramallah, in the form of story.Īside from a brief historical note, there is little discussion of history or politics in the narrative–was this a deliberate decision? When I lived in Ramallah, there was the sense that anything I loved or owned could be taken away from me in an instant. So I wrote Tasting the Sky as an exercise in freedom and as an expression of it. I grew up in a world that ached for freedom but could not touch it.

Tasting the sky a palestinian childhood