To the Editor:
I am an undergraduate student at Brown and a Palestinian refugee who was born and raised in Dheisheh, a refugee camp in the city of Bethlehem, West Bank. I am considered a “refugee” because my family was displaced from its own home in Jerusalem in the catastrophe (or Nakba) of 1948, on the day when Israel celebrates its “independence.” The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has never been and never will be a political conflict for me, but rather a human one in which humans are deprived of all sorts of things that make us who we are. I lived my entire life under the inequality and brutality of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Growing up in a refugee camp is difficult and challenging, especially when you are deprived of the most basic rights and freedoms. But on the other hand, it is where you find strong and hopeful people whose dignity is all that is left to sustain them.
I find it extremely disrespectful and hurtful that a member of the Israel Occupation Forces is coming to give a talk at my university. The Israel Occupation Forces have given me all reasons to hate them; they killed my cousin Jad and my soccer teammate Kifah and deprived me of seeing my dad throughout the first years of my life because he was imprisoned for standing up against the occupation and its unjust acts and policies. Therefore, I am all for stopping this IOF soldier from coming to talk at Brown, and so should everyone else who is against inhumanity and injustice.
Ma’an Odeh ’16
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