A Charitable Interpretation:
We knew what it was to open a door.
For centuries, strangers had crossed this land carrying languages from elsewhere, prayers from elsewhere, grief from elsewhere. Empires came and went above us, changing the names on maps while the olive trees remained where our grandfathers had planted them.
Then they came from Europe.
Some came with money and plans.
But others came carrying almost nothing.
They came frightened.
They came from countries that had called them vermin, foreigner, contagion. They came from streets where windows had been broken and synagogues burned. Later, they came from a Europe that had tried to erase them entirely.
And we understood something about exile.
So there were doors that opened.
There was bread.
There was coffee.
There was the old instinct of the householder:
the traveler is thirsty; give him water.
We did not imagine that compassion required us to surrender the house.
At first the changes seemed small enough to measure: another field purchased, another settlement raised, another family arriving at the port.
But behind the frightened faces were also institutions, money, organizations, maps.
And elsewhere, men who did not live here were discussing what this land should become.
Britain promised a home in a country already full of homes.
The world had wounded the Jews, and somehow the invoice was delivered to us.
We watched the language change.
The guest became the pioneer.
The neighbor became an obstacle.
The farmer became a demographic problem.
The village became a question to be solved.
And eventually even our presence required explanation.
We had thought hospitality meant making room at the table.
We discovered that others had been discussing ownership of the table.
Then came the terrible years in Europe, and the ships carried people toward us who had survived something almost beyond human comprehension.
How could anyone look upon those survivors without pity?
But pity presented us with an impossible arithmetic:
Because Europe had murdered their families, must ours lose their fields?
Because Europe had burned their houses, must ours be emptied?
Because Europe had denied them belonging, must our belonging become negotiable?
We had not built Auschwitz.
We had not written the Nuremberg Laws.
We had not herded their children into trains.
Yet history was preparing to collect payment from us.
Then the maps arrived.
Lines drawn by distant hands passed through orchards, villages, roads, memories.
And soon there were other lines:
columns of people walking away from houses whose doors they believed they would open again in a few days.
Some carried keys.
Some carried deeds.
Some carried children.
Some carried nothing.
Behind them stood the houses.
The cups were still in the cupboards.
The trees still gave fruit.
The stones remembered the footsteps of the people who had laid them.
But the language changed once more.
The refugee had become the citizen.
The host had become the refugee.
And the world, exhausted by what it had done to the Jews, looked upon this transformation and found within it a kind of redemption.
Perhaps that was the cruelest part.
Europe committed the crime.
Europe carried the guilt.
Europe needed forgiveness.
And Palestine became the place where the debt was settled.
Not with Europe’s land.
With ours.
We had opened the door because we knew what it meant to be human.
We did not know that one day we would stand on the other side of that same door,
holding the key,
asking to come home.
-A Palestinian that didn’t know their great-grandchildren would be massacred for their generosity