reflections from a Palestinian Princeton alumna | To my fellow Palestinian Princeton alumni, I wrote this piece, hoping to inspire you to share your experiences. As a people who are constantly erased, Palestinians have a right and a responsibility to share their stories in every space they are in. I can’t wait to read your stories. Forever in solidarity, Majida
I started Princeton in the fall of 2015 by pinning a Palestinian flag to my bedroom wall – a wall I shared with a half-Israeli roommate. I don’t think she cared where I came from, at least not in the same way I had to care where she came from.
But the boy down the hall who watched a movie with me once that first semester saw it, and he cared.
“You know I’m Jewish, right?” he said.
“Ok? I’m Palestinian,” I replied, gesturing towards the flag. What did his religion have to do with where my people came from?
I would come to understand that this was the classic equation for Zionists at Princeton and in the world, generally. Hanging a flag to symbolize my pride in being Palestinian was a threat.
But one person’s misguided fear didn’t change who I was. I had already faced racism in my hometown – what would be different at Princeton? I had grown up in northern Michigan, where my brother and I were the tokens of diversity and the only Arabs for likely hundreds of miles. I didn’t know anyone who was Arab beyond my immediate family.
Princeton was refreshing – so much diversity! Within my first few weeks, I made so many new Arab friends and friends from all different backgrounds; I loved it. I thought I felt so seen. And to make things easier for people to remember my name, I let go of my full name and started going by “Maj.” I didn’t think about the implications of the choice at the time and was just focused on being able to be there – Princeton was ranked number one. I would do whatever I needed to to make it work. It was unheard of for someone from my hometown to attend a school like this. How could I not be grateful? I was a poor kid from a small public school, happy that I had checked enough boxes to be admitted and have them pay for my education.
I was excited about the huge range of subjects I could study and even more excited to finally study my people’s language, Arabic. I was unfamiliar with the language besides family names and the food-related words my white mother had taught me (bless her for trying). Much to my surprise, learning Arabic didn’t come to me naturally at all; there was no genetic disposition that made it easy to study. And worse yet, my class was filled with Zionists, some of whom spent summers hiking my homeland with machine guns wilfully strapped to their backs. They excelled and far surpassed me at speaking Arabic. I struggled to handle the basics, but these people, who would use it to dominate us, easily mastered it. I tried not to let it deter me, and set my sights on an Arabic immersion program in Jordan –as close as I could get to Palestine.
Arabic finally started to make sense and as I surrounded myself with family in Jordan, so did the parts of myself I had never fully understood.
Like many Palestinian families, much of my family lives outside Palestine now. That summer, I met my paternal family for the first time in Jordan. I ate breakfast with my teta, my grandmother. Her memory slowly fading, she talked of the jinn she saw that scared her, and of how much she loved me and couldn’t wait to meet my brother. She encouraged me to speak more Arabic, so I let a few words clumsily tumble out of my mouth, with my cousin acting as a translator for both of us.
A different cousin invited me to her house for iftar and told me how special our jido, our grandfather, was. He had passed away years prior. She told me stories of him showing up to her door at 6am with bags of falafel for breakfast, wondering why the family wasn’t up yet. I loved it. I loved learning my family history from them. I didn’t question who I was with them. I was just Majida, bint Amrika, the daughter from the US.
I returned to Princeton that fall, wanting to surround myself with other Arabs and eager to do something impactful, so I began my short foray as the head of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (now, SJP). PCP had pushed for a divestment effort the year before I matriculated. But that year, our organization was dwindling in membership and I struggled as its leader. I didn’t feel comfortable or safe enough to encourage people to join the organization when Zionists were everywhere on campus, tossing out the word “anti-Semitic” like candy at a parade. And I was only half-Palestinian and grew up in the US with the other side. I didn’t feel I was Palestinian enough to lead something about my people. Despite having good instincts about organizing and family members who were organizers, I pushed off the leadership to someone else.
That spring, at the recommendation of a friend, I took a constitutional law course. Throughout the semester, the preceptor repeatedly commented that he could never “figure out” my ethnicity. Then, when discussing affirmative action, he racially profiled everyone in the room.
“You’re yellow. You’re brown,” he paused, looking at me. “You’re Islam.”
No one said anything, but just looked shocked.
He said, “Don’t act so scandalized.”
I stopped going to class as often. I didn’t want to intentionally subject myself to a man that barely saw me as a person and equated me to an entire religion, of which I wasn’t even a member. I was told to formally report his comment, and I tried to – I reached out to the administrator to report it. They never replied.
Months later during my junior fall, I was reminded again of the toxicity of Princeton’s campus on the way home from a trip. I learned through a friend that Princeton was hosting the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, who spewed hatred against Palestinians. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make any sense to me. Why would the university host someone who actively wanted my people dead? I was naive, not yet realizing the university would always claim “freedom of speech” when it came to racists and Zionists on campus. Between sobs trying to catch my breath, I sat on the airport floor and repeated, “I can’t go back. I can’t go back.” But I did, because leaving Princeton was never a real option for a girl getting her entire education paid for.
That spring, I took the class “Modern Middle Eastern History.” I sat in the back of a precept with two other Arabs (an Egyptian, and a Syrian) while white ROTC and security studies students debated our humanity under the pretext of sharing their policy and governance opinions. They loved to insinuate all Arabs were terrorists or that we deserved US intervention (read: occupation). We were all always on edge; we had to be ready to defend ourselves. We scribbled notes in our notebooks back and forth to each other, trying to decide who would say something. It was exhausting.
Three months later, I spent a month traveling around Palestine for my history thesis. I had researched the conceptions of identity in Palestinian and Israeli cookbooks for the previous few months and wanted to expand my knowledge of food history by speaking with Palestinians in Palestine. I intended to study the history of tahina in Palestine by traveling around and speaking to tahina manufacturers and sesame farmers.
I started in an archive outside of Al-Quds, hoping to find crop reports on sesame or mentions of tahina exports. I didn’t find anything. They either didn’t exist, were destroyed, or were trapped in the minds of people fluent in a language I barely knew. I traveled to tahina factories in Al-Quds, Ramallah, and Nablus in the West Bank and I learned how tahina was made. I searched for sesame growers in Jenin, an area I was told used to grow it, and found none. Most sesame used in Palestinian tahina is now imported from Ethiopia and Eritrea. It changed in 1948. Israel took the water; sesame plants need water to grow. The occupation killed sesame production. But there was no documentation and I wasn’t fluent in Arabic, so there was no way to study it. I had to change my thesis topic.
Resigned by the fact that my research was halted, I used the time to explore the city where my family came from, Nablus. I knew some of my family members still lived there but wasn’t sure how to find them. I asked for help from a hostel owner there, and he helped me find them. They were so happy to hear of me and immediately invited me to their house across the city in the middle of the night, waking up my jido‘s 90-year-old cousin to meet me. They shared a family tree on a giant piece of paper with me. I recognized my jido‘s name written in tight Arabic script. I had found my people. They invited me to lunch in the house my jido grew up in, steps from his childhood room. I stood under the olive trees that surrounded my cousin’s house. I bartered poorly in Arabic in the same market my family had gone to for hundreds of years. I got to walk the city of my people with them.
I returned to Princeton a week later, feeling affirmed in my identity, and began writing my thesis in the new Middle Eastern affinity room – as close as I could get to being in my homeland. I spent hours in the oddly decorated (Orientalist) room, writing my thesis while eating chocolate-covered pretzels, admiring whatever random Arabic phrase someone had sprawled across the whiteboard wall. I shared that space with some of my best friends – people I still lean on and call to now. It was a safe, usually Zionist-free space (unless some idiot with Polish descent decided that immigrating to Israel meant he was Middle Eastern).
My time at Princeton ended with the Title IX protests. It ended with another reminder of who the university supports and who it does not.
Now, when I begrudgingly tell people that I went to Princeton (not just “a school in New Jersey”), they eagerly ask, “How was it? How’d you like Princeton?” It’s been years, and I still don’t have a short answer. I usually stumble and utter something like, “I’m really grateful they paid for my education and the opportunities I got from it. But it wasn’t all that great.”
Perhaps I should say the truth next time. “Princeton paid for me to attend, in part to fill implicit diversity quotas, and yet they failed to protect me from the harsh realities of Zionism and racism on campus; in fact, they exposed me even more.”
I’m not proud of Princeton. I don’t have a blind allegiance to an institution that doesn’t believe my people have a right to fight against their oppressor, or simply a right to exist. But I am beyond proud of the courageous students at Princeton over the past year who have fought for my people in ways I struggled to conceive or dream of when I was a student. They’ve created the communities I desperately wanted in undergrad, created the only places that felt safe to me during Reunions this past May, and gave me new community that I didn’t expect to find as an alumna.
My allegiance is always with Palestine and the Palestinian people. I live for my people, for their freedom, for their liberation, for an end to the occupation.
I kept that flag up all four years at Princeton and the same flag hangs in my apartment in New Orleans now – five years later.