“Two of my friends died and I did not even cry,” says Aseel Kabariti. “Because I have a family. I need to give them all of my power. I need to support them as much as I could. I didn’t get to cry, and I don’t think I will until this is over. . .”
Kabariti is an ETSU alumni who was born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. She attended ETSU as an international student through a scholarship program, and has remained in the United States since graduating. This is her story.
“I experienced many wars, and it’s wrong to call them wars because they’re aggressions. . .” Kabariti has experienced four wars in her lifetime, and an indescribable amount of violence.
Palestine and Israel maintain a longstanding conflict that primarily began in the 19th century, with the decision from the United Nations to separate Palestine into two states, one for Jewish civilians and one for Arab civilians, following the Holocaust. Along with this, the state of Israel was created and would come to declare it’s independence. An agreement saw that Israel could obtain more territory than originally ordered, which forced significant numbers of Palestinian and Arab citizens out of that territory. The land that was left split into three territories: Israel, Gaza and West Bank. Today, that fight to claim land remains for both Israel and Palestine.
“My whole life, the city where I grew up was sieged,” Kabariti says. “That means that nothing could get in or out without struggle.”
At the start of October, war broke out after Hamas, Gaza’s militant group, launched an attack just across the border. Israel declared war soon after. Palestinians in parts of Gaza have evacuated their homes and the two sides have continued to launch assaults on one another.
“I really had my struggle getting the [student] visa. I really had my struggle getting accepted in the first place, because it’s a really competitive scholarship and it was my only way out. And I’d tried to get out of there since I was like 18,” says Kabariti. “But for many reason’s it didn’t work. First of all, I’m a female. It’s like, not common for families to allow their daughters to travel alone. . . then the fact that I didn’t have anybody to go to, anybody to take care of me if I travel. . . so the scholarship was the perfect thing for me.”
In 2021, she was in the process of preparing to come to America after a difficult fight to obtain her visa, when Kabariti found herself caught outside in the middle of a bombing by Israel. “It was brutal. I remember that I was out that day when they started bombing Gaza, and I felt like I [was] watching my dreams just going away. . . when they start aggression, when they start bombing, the borders close. So you can’t get out. So I can’t travel.”
“I had to just like, wish every day I would not be killed so I could get the chance to get out,” Kabariti said. “Luckily I was able to get out and the whole process was pure suffering because that’s what our daily life is.”
“We have to get through the Israeli border to the other part of our land so we could go to the embassy and do the interview for the visa. You would think it would be just a normal experience, like we just have to get through the border, and I was with two of my friends. . . we were just talking and laughing like normal people, two soldiers came to us with guns and they took our friend just because we were laughing. I can’t even begin to explain to you how scary that was, because we knew that if they do something to us. . . if they decide to arrest us, like, nobody’s going to talk to them. Nobody’s going to prevent them.” Kabariti said.
She has 17 family members still living in Gaza, separated from their home with no food, water or electricity. “The situation there is just not human. . . If you don’t have water, if you don’t have access to internet, if you don’t have electricity, like, it’s just the most scary thing to hear the sounds of these bombings dropping in your neighborhood and you don’t know where they’re dropping. And you can’t even see where your children are because you don’t have electricity, so you have to use candles.”
Kabariti made note of the misconceptions that people have about the state of Gaza. “Right now people are talking about ‘why can’t children in Gaza go to shelters?’. What people don’t know is that the Israeli occupation does not allow the materials that they use to create these shelters for the children. They do not allow [a specific type of concrete] to get to Gaza,” she says. “There’s almost 3,000 children. They’re dead. They’re gone. Their families have to accept that, and they have no time to grieve because the war is still going on.”
When asked about what this conflict means for her, Kabariti responded, “Since the war started, people have just been talking about what’s happening in Israel, and they’ve just been ignoring what’s happening to us, [which is] like 75 years old.” She described how many people who have suffered from these attacks years ago are still alive, only having to continue going through them again and again.
“This is just not going to stop. This is what occupation is about, like, occupation is built on extremeness. . . They’re going to keep trying to get more land because they want it all. They don’t want some part of it. No, they want it all, and as long as this is still going on, there will be more killing. There will be more suffering for the Palestinian people.”
Kabariti explained that American news often doesn’t cover accurate information on what is happening to her people.
“That’s what people have been ignoring. They’ve been talking about what Hamas did. . . do not misunderstand me, I do not support Hamas. . . but if we want to imagine a world without Hamas, we could see what’s happening to West Bank, they don’t have Hamas and they’re still getting harassed every day and killed. So what I’m trying to tell you is I wish the world could see what’s happening, and the whole picture, you know?” she said.
“There’s a whole lot of Palestinian people in Israeli prisons and nobody talks about them,” she noted. She went on to describe a Palestinian man named Ahmad Manasra, who was imprisoned when he was 13 years old and was tortured for eight years. “But nobody talks about that. Why do Israeli lives matter, but not Palestinians?. . . How did we get to this point where we’ve got to be selective with our embassy?”
Kabariti expressed gratitude for the opportunity to share her experiences, and encouraged change. “I really hope that somebody would read and change their mind. I’m not saying that I want them to want the Israelis to be killed. I don’t. I think every life matters,” she says. “I don’t want my people to be killed too, you know? I want them to survive this. I want them to get their basic human rights. I want them to live with dignity.”
