Accepting My Ethnicity Meant Applying American Standards Equally

By Nagla El-Bassiouni

For a while I led a double life. My "Arabness" was something of a secret life, away from my school and friends. Other than my weekly lessons in Arabic and Islam, my Arab side was limited to a number of two-week trips to Egypt, my parents' homeland. Somehow, that side of my life was constantly under attack. Value-laden words such as "terrorist" and "fundamentalist" were often equated with being Arab or Muslim.

All of my trips to Egypt followed the same painful pattern. I would get reacquainted with my relatives, fall in love with them, and then have to leave. Heartbreaking as it was, I became used to the routine. But one trip stands out in my mind the most.

It was August 1974. 1 was seven years old, and my biggest dilemma was how to get the courage to pull out my semi-loose baby tooth to make room for the new tooth that had already begun to grow in its place. Since I was unable to solve this problem by myself, my parents took the matter into their hands. One of my Egyptian relatives was a dentist. I was to go to her office first thing in the morning.

A Trip to the Dentist

I remember walking down the road in front of my grandmother's house. The heat of the sun made the dust in my sandals turn to mud. I was told that this veiled woman was my aunt. Even though she dressed differently than my mother, their resemblance to each other made me less skeptical. I clutched her hand tightly as we walked across the tram tracks on the way to her dental clinic.

We finally reached the building and made our way up several floors to her clinic, the heat following us every inch of the way. I sat in the patient's chair while my aunt cleaned her dental equipment. Then a strange man walked up to me and began to talk. I could tell by the way he was dressed that he, too, was a dentist. He smiled at me and asked what seemed like a million questions—what was my name, how old was I, what grade was I in? I could understand his Arabic, but my delayed responses revealed that I wasn't a native speaker.

"You're not from here, are you?" he asked. "Where do you live?"

"America," I responded with a proud smile.

"I don't like Americans," he said.

"They're bad people."

I was stunned by his accusation and, with an air of defensiveness, I asked if he had ever been to America. When he said no, I began to regain my confidence. I told him he was wrong. And, if he could meet my friends, he would surely change his mind. He didn't seem convinced. Without a word, he unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a deep sear on his chest. It looked as if someone had thrown a bowling ball at him, leaving a concave indentation on his chest.

I would get reacquainted with my relatives, fall in love with them, and then have to leave.

"This is what Americans did to me in the war! "

I was very frightened by the sight of the wound and asked him if he was sure that it was Americans who had done that to him. He said he was sure. It wasn't until much later that I realized he was referring to the US resupply of Israel in the October war of 1973.

I don't remember if I cried that night, but I think I must have. I don't know what hurt me more—the awful sight of the scar or the accusations that this colleague of my aunt had made. Definitely he affected the way I looked at things, but I would be exaggerating if I said I became "aware" at that point. The only thing that I was aware of was Saturday morning cartoons. Still, I never forgot that man.

At different points in my life, this dentist has meant different things to me. More often than not, his story made me defensive in the face of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world. It was humanness, not fundamentalism, that formed his feelings. Any dentist from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq or Palestine could have had a similar experience.

In 1989, I spent a year in Cairo researching the Egyptian feminist movement. Aside from the intellectual challenge presented by that topic, my real problem that year was in facing and accepting my own identity. Before spending this year in Egypt, I had internalized the contradictions involved in being an Arab American. Very quickly, I realized that I could not fool myself or fool others into thinking that I was Egyptian. My biggest mistake had been to try to separate, rather than accept, my hyphenated ethnicity.

A Changed Perspective

As a result, my perspective on the Middle East has changed. As a member of American society, I refuse to be defensive about my cultural background. Instead of going into explanations or apologetics when the subject of terrorism or fundamentalism arises, I have decided to reverse the argument by questioning our use of such terminology.

All Americans, myself included, should examine critically the path of our foreign policy. Too often, debates on Middle East policy get sidetracked, and American values of political, social and economic freedom are forgotten. For example, the Palestine-Israeli conflict rarely focuses on the basic issue, which is the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their own land. That our nation debated and eventually decided not to talk to the PLO is an excellent example. Such a policy is based upon arrogance, racism and hypocrisy. The message our policy gives to the Palestinians is that 1) the US knows what is best for Palestinians; 2) the US thinks Palestinians are incapable of choosing their own leadership; and 3) until Palestinians allow their Israeli occupiers and the US to choose their leadership, they cannot exercise any of the basic national and human rights we insist upon for ourselves.

The principles of freedom and democracy incorporated in our constitution clearly reject the notion of choosing another peoples' leadership. Yet, we allow our government to act as if it had that right in the Middle East. For this reason, we owe it to ourselves to subject our own actions, and those of all of our "allies, " to the same critical scrutiny we so readily apply to peoples and nations who do not enjoy that status. The situation at home is not so perfect that we should be criticizing others.

It is true that as an Arab I feel a sense of commitment to and compassion for the peoples of the Middle East. However, it is as an American that I question spending billions of dollars supporting one brutal occupation and billions of dollars fighting another. It is also as an American that I reject the hypocrisy of providing housing funds for Soviet Jews in Israel at the same time we ignore the homeless problem in our own country. Finally, it is as an American that I am searching for the response I was unable to deliver to the Egyptian dentist: Why is US policy so anti-Arab?

Nagla El-Bassiouni, who holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, manages the Middle East Video Monitor service for the American Educational Trust in Washington, DC