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October 31st, 2015 
Awake Goy Thank you for this intro and information, Phil. I’ll let folks know.
Somewhat related to your piece, I found this article and link over at Taxi’s site:
“I’m Longing for Palestine While Living the American Dream
My father was born in Palestine and raised in a refugee camp; I was born and raised in our national’s capital. Who does that make me, exactly?
… The light skin and eyes I inherited from my maternal French-English genes, and from my Sittu Mariam (grandmother) on my father’s side, have made that part easy for me. I can seamlessly blend into a culturally white world, never being subjected to that split-second suspicion and judgment that so many Arab-Americans deal with daily. My complexion has afforded me a very privileged life here.
And yet, this is the country where my Palestinian cousins with darker skin are given dirty looks on planes, and where presidential candidates casually suggest that Muslims shouldn’t be president. This is the country that gives $3.1 billion to Israel in military aid each year. This is the country that looked the other way when Israel sentenced my Palestinian cousin to nine years in prison for his role in a protest after the murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir. They came to his house in the middle of the night and took him away based on an anonymous tip. At age 22, he will spend the rest of his youth in a cell.
My father, as you may have gathered, was not born here. He was born in 1947, six miles from what is now the Israeli city of Jaffa, in what was then the small Palestinian village of Abbasiya. For generations, my family lived simply on that land and cared for it deeply; they were farmers, growing citrus and olives in the Mediterranean sun.
In 1948, he and 750,000 other Palestinians were forcefully expelled from their homes in what Israel sees as its independence, and Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe. My father spent his formative years in a refugee camp in the Jordan Valley. His feet are still rough and calloused from running around outside without shoes. He spent evenings listening to his elders wax poetic about home, still thinking they might one day return–not knowing they would all one day die in foreign cities, never again having laid eyes on Palestine.
Throughout my life, I’ve felt a constant longing emanating from my father, a sort of melancholy incompleteness. At some point his displacement became an essential part of my and my younger brother Layth’s identities. Perhaps we felt the tension of being Palestinian-American more acutely as time went on, and it presented us with a choice: hide that part of ourselves or wear it like a badge. So we embraced our Palestinian-ness—and our ethnic names—and never looked back. By now, we know what’s coming: unrest. And we brace ourselves for the status quo: American politicians will dismiss dead Palestinians as “terrorists,” while respectfully mourning each lost Israeli life. We live with the guilt that we are here, not there. The guilt that we can come and go as we please, while Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are barricaded into their homes, neighborhoods, or cities. Israel is flanked by water, but many Palestinians will never see the sea. …”
Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/ghada-karmi-comes
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