Palestine: An open-air museum of colonialism

Palestine has been turned, brutally, into a permanent museum of colonialism whose doors should have closed long ago.

On a recent visit to Palestine (I belong to a category of Jordanian Palestinians who can visit Palestine using an Israeli-issued ID card), a Palestinian friend of mine in Ramallah invited me to drive with him to Bethlehem. Thirty minutes into the trip, we stopped at an Israeli checkpoint, pulling into a huge queue of cars. The place was engulfed by an apathetic silence, perhaps indicative of how normal the situation was for those experiencing it. I, however, felt increasingly impatient, and I asked my friend if it would take too long before we were allowed to move. My friend responded, rather sarcastically, “This is Palestine. You can never predict when to move or to stop. People have lost any sense of what a meeting time means. You arrive when you arrive.” Welcome to Palestine – an open-air museum of colonialism. For most people nowadays, colonialism is part of a bygone era. The majority of the world’s population has no first-hand experience of it, and many cannot imagine what it means to live under total foreign control. Today we have museums of colonialism, where people can go to learn about how this form of rule affected natives’ freedoms to live, to move, to speak, to work, and even to die peacefully. We live (supposedly) in a postcolonial world, and museums of colonialism serve to transport visitors back to a cruel era, granting them a glimpse of the damage this type of governance wrought on native communities.