Hello, happy Friday, and happy correspondence-versary! Foreign Correspondence is officially a year old this week. OG readers will recall that my primary ambition for this newsletter was to get my mom to keep up with my articles (mission, thankfully, accomplished). In the end, nearly 200 of you joined her, for which I am immensely grateful. To those of you who have read, responded to, and shared these emails, thank you! Your support and feedback mean a lot to me.
While I don’t have any grand plans for year two of Foreign Correspondence, I’m keen to make it as enjoyable a read as possible. If there are changes you’d like to see (format, frequency, etc), I’d love to hear from you.
In podcast news: I joined The Bunker this week to discuss the devastating situation in Israel and Palestine, as well as how COVID-19 variants could scupper Britain’s reopening plans. Tune in via your preferred podcast app or by clicking here.
What I’ve written
In a conflict where words matter (so much so that even using the word conflict invites disagreement), it’s notable when the words used begin to change. I wrote about the new word defining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Washington—one that U.S. policy observers say reflects a progressive push to focus on human rights.
“All of the sudden, and I mean all the sudden, the word equal is appearing in [President Biden’s] rhetoric and the rhetoric of the secretary of state,” Martin Indyk, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel and Barack Obama’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, told me. “That’s totally new.” Keep reading here
The European Union is officially reopening its borders to tourists—and when it does, it hopes that Americans will be at the front of the line. I took this opportunity to write about the cliché of the “ugly American” tourist and whether this can be its summer of redemption.
“Only in America do you have the idea of the ugly American tourist,” said Jenkins, from the European Tourism Association. “Nobody hates tourists more than a fellow tourist. Running into a compatriot abroad is an acutely painful experience. It’s a bit like hearing your own voice.” Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This week's reading is heavily Israel-Palestine oriented, I'm afraid. More diverse content next time!
This fascinating overview of Joe Biden’s record on Israel, which puts into context a lot of what we saw this week (Jewish Currents)
When it came to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Oren notes in his memoir, Biden sometimes employed an uncomfortable analogy: “Never crucify yourself on a small cross.” The message: The Palestinians aren’t pliable or important enough to be worth the trouble, given the political cost domestically.
Yousef Munayyer’s excellent essay on why, for Palestinians, this moment was different (The New York Times)
But as Palestinians took to the streets in recent weeks, defiantly raising their national flags and chanting against their subjugation, Israelis awoke to the reality that for Palestinians, the divisions between Gazans, residents of the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel do not exist. Palestine is not “over there” but is everywhere around them. With their bodies and their feet, Palestinians were acting out the lines of the famed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “I am from here. And here I am. I am me. And here is here.” They have reasserted that they are all Palestinians, with one flag and one struggle.
This moving piece by Abdallah Fayyad on the one thing Israel cannot take away (The Boston Globe)
Not only did Israel steal my grandfather’s land; it has also stolen Jerusalem from me. Growing up in the city, I was an undocumented resident in Israel’s eyes despite the fact that my mother’s family has lived there for generations. My mom was born and raised a mere 10-minute walk from my childhood home, but my father’s family is from Tulkarem, a small city in the West Bank. And so my dad, mysiblings, and I have West Bank IDs while my mom, a Jerusalemite, has a Jerusalem ID. That meant that while my mother had a right to live in Jerusalem, the rest of us were only guests in our own home, living there because we renewed travel permits that technically allowed us only entry into Jerusalem, not a permanent stay. (Israel has been trying to revoke Jerusalem IDs from Palestinians like my mom for decades.)
What I’m thinking about
This lovely bit of joy from an otherwise grim week:
Until next time,
Yasmeen