You are still living in the same place, but you ask yourself, 'Is this still my home? Is the air mine? Is the sky mine?'
He left Nazareth in 1954 rather than live under the military government imposed on Palestinian citizens of Israel, walking 18 kilometres across the border to Lebanon.
Michael Kardoush stayed in Palestine in 1948 — his family was among those in Nazareth who were not expelled — and left six years later. In 1954 he walked eighteen kilometres across the border into Lebanon rather than go on living under the military government that Israel applied to its Palestinian citizens until 1966: a regime of permits, curfews and closed areas that governed where a person could travel, work and sleep. “To live under occupation is unbearable,” he said. “I wanted to live again.”
He studied engineering in Egypt, worked in Germany, and moved to the United States in 1969, settling near the ocean in Los Angeles and later in Houston. For decades his American passport let him visit his family in Nazareth without difficulty. In 2006 he arrived at Tel Aviv airport and was told that, having been born in a city now inside Israel, he could enter only on an Israeli passport. He says he sent the documents required and, seventeen years later, has had no answer. “I have a big family,” he told Al Jazeera. “There are a lot of weddings, and it is painful that I can’t be there. Now I will never go back.”
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Quoted exactly as published by Al Jazeera — Al-Nakba. Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Al Jazeera — Al-Nakba