Wasim Salfiti: My Family's History with Nakba

Wasim Salfiti is a writer living in Washington, DC and frequently travels to the Middle East. He was an Editorial Fellow at Mother Jones Magazine and is a graduate of Columbia University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He speaks Arabic, Hebrew, English, and French. He was born to a Palestinian family and raised in Amman, Jordan.

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine] 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wasim-salfiti/palestine-nakba-israeli-palestinian-conflict-_b_1528615.html 

This week, Palestinians around the world commemorated the Nakba, or "catastrophe," referring to the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians at the time of Israel's founding in 1948. From the West Bank to the West Coast, protestors waved colorful flags and held signs demanding recognition for the plight and rights of the dispossessed.

Yet beneath the barrage of political symbols and slogans lies a human experience of heartache and loss, to which Americans of all backgrounds might possibly relate.

I was shielded from this experience as a child. In Amman, Jordan, where I grew up in the '80s, events across the ever-dwindling river were background noise. My friends at school mostly talked about last Thursday's party and the cute girls in class.

It was at an American summer arts camp, of all places, that I began to confront my family's ruptured past. At age 15, amid Michigan's woodlands and the sounds of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, I made Jewish friends for the first time. At first, we mostly talked about music...READ MORE