Growing up, the subject of my heritage seemed taboo and shameful. Not because being Palestinian is any of these things, but because the prevalent sense in the schoolyard was to belong, not to be different. People did not understand Palestine; where is that, why have I never heard of it?

I found myself sitting at a house party in Ramallah with young, educated Palestinians engaging in casual conversation. The guys were making dinner that night while the ladies were sitting back enjoying the role reversal.
Some were recent graduates of Birzeit University near Ramallah, others had returned after completing their studies overseas, while the rest remained students. Many of them were also artists of various kinds, part of a flourishing art scene in the West Bank, in particular Ramallah. There was a liberal consumption of alcohol while Western, Arabic and Turkish …

It was about a year ago that we, both Canadian medical students at the University of Montréal, decided to venture out into the world of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. One of us, Ramzy W. is a Canadian born Palestinian Christian, and the other, Mahli B. is a French Quebecer. Our vision was simple: spend one summer volunteering in Palestine, give of ourselves what we can and absorb as much as we can about this part of the world. This small step turned into many and on June 7, 2005 we were both in the air on our way to somewhat uncharted territories that left a lasting mark on our lives.

On my last day in Palestine, just before leaving, I went back to visit one
of my favorite spots in Jerusalem. Located in the Western Wall plaza,
there is this place you can stand where the shining gold of the Dome of
the Rock arches ever so slightly over the holy wall. Seeing the two
religious sites juxtaposed against each other is breathtaking. It’s a
visual symbol of how close two societies in conflict are to each other,
yet it’s depressing because they’re so far apart.

At first I didn’t think about it, but now I’m mildly alarmed that I was not alarmed. I didn’t really raise an eyebrow when my roommate and I went to the movies a week or two ago and we had to sit down behind a row of seven or eight young Israeli soldiers whose m16s clanked every time they moved in the dark theatre. I didn’t bat an eyelash when going through three different checkpoints to see the (in)famous Ibrahimi mosque in the West Bank. In fact, my friend Jo was even daring enough to take a picture of a soldier searching my bag at the second checkpoint out of the three…