Sunaina Maira

English | اردو What shocked me was something I had not anticipated: the latent and sometimes overt hostility to Palestine solidarity and sympathy for Zionist propaganda. In 2009, I moved to Lahore for a year. It was my first visit ever to Pakistan, and to the city where my father was born, and from where my parents’ families were uprooted in 1947. Growing up in India, I had a dim awareness that we were originally from somewhere else—a distant place called Lahore that was by all accounts wondrous—and a dimmer sense that we were refugees. I had an even vaguer understanding, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, of the upheavals in West Asia or of the mass expulsions of Palestinians due to the Nakba (catastrophe) and the creation of Israel in 1948. But, I remember seeing a famous photo of Yasser Arafat embracing Indira Gandhi—it was apparent to me at the time that the PLO leader was a nationalist icon who had something to do with anticolonial struggle and Third World solidarity, and that this was a part of my own history. During the second Intifada, which began in September 2000, I was living and teaching in the U.S. As reports […]