Traveling Through the Palestine You Don’t See in the News
Palestinians are not real — according to some people. Their identity is a forgery dreamed up purely as a political maneuver to undermine Israel’s right to exist. Although the number of people who call themselves “Palestinian” are over four million, trying to find their home will leave you scanning through image after image of the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, tracing a variety of dotted, dashed and solid lines that show up in as many colors as there are meanings behind them.
While Israel is only a tiny sliver at the edge of the Arab world, Palestine is the smaller “nowhere” that exists in between and among its convoluted borders. Palestine is not real in any post-Hiroshima-international-community definition of real, but you can still visit. — unless you have posted support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, in which case there is a travel ban against you in effect in Israel, and you will have to enter via Jordan.
I visited Palestine several times in the summer of 2016 after learning about it mainly from Jewish Israelis, and historians raised in the West.