The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
Colonial Park’s Knob Hill Pavilion was the scene October 27 of a gathering showcasing Palestinian culture.
Called “Connect with Palestine,” organizers designed the event to highlight the art, culture and heritage of the Palestinian people.
Among the sponsors were the Franklin Township Interfaith Council and Qidma, an organization founded earlier this year whose mission is to to shine a light on Islam in the Franklin Township community through acts of charity and service, according to one of the organization’s founders.
The day featured vendors of items such as clothing and art, food, speakers and musical presentation.
Speakers included Board of Education member Sami Shaban, who recounted his family’s experience in the Gaza Strip since the 1940s, when his father was a boy, and how in 1944 his family was “forcibly removed” from their house in Jaffa.
“My dad remembers that moment to this day,” Shaban said. “Fast-forward to 1988, and we’re in a car with my grandfather now and my father. We returned to that home. We weren’t allowed inside the home. It was no longer ours. It was somebody else’s home. But we went and we saw it.”
“And on our way out, my grandfather also showed me the land that he owned,” he said. “He started by saying, this was my land. We were in a taxi. We kept going. Two minutes later, he told me this was the end of my land. I was shocked. All of this was your land? Yeah, all of that was my land. He said, what happened? He said, well, it was taken, but it’s okay. This is God’s will. He said, okay, never fussed about it.”
Shaban then talked about how, as a teenager, he was strip-searched when trying to enter Palestine via Israel.
“They told me to strip down naked, as the officer with a metal wand went up and down my body, as if there was something wrong inside of me,” he said. “It was my bare skin and he was going up and down my body with this sensor. At 12 years old.”
“We then went into Gaza, and four of the five days that we were there we were bombed,” he said. “Now this is 1990. We’re not talking about anything recent.”
“I tell you these stories because I get this sense from people sometimes that things started or ended in the past year, that there is this sort of fog about what was there, and then all of a sudden, there was this,” he said. “But there was no fog for people like myself.”
Shaban told the crowd about the many members of his family who were killed in Gaza over the years, either by being shot or bombed.
“Now what I’m hopeful for, and I really thank Dr. Sonya Redd (of Somerset Presbyterian Church) for coming up here because I really look to my brothers and sisters, and when I say my brothers and sisters I’m not just talking about my Muslim or my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I’m talking about my Black brothers and sisters like the Congresswoman (Bonnie Watson Coleman), like Dr. Sonya (Redd), and others who can see the pain the struggle that we’ve been going through for seven decades and see themselves in the struggle that the Back community and the indigenous communities had in this community.”
“I want my Jewish brothers and sisters who are standing by us to see our struggle, to know that we saw their struggle when they first came to this country and the way that they were treated, and the way that they were treated in World War II and so on,” he said. “To see what is happening to us is just a mirror of what happened to them back then.”
“Because the worst disaster of all disasters would be if your heart doesn’t move,” he said. “If you don’t feel like you need to wake up and do something to change this. Work with our Jewish brothers and sisters, our Christian brothers and sisters, to try to find that peaceful solution. This is not a Muslim-Jewish-Christian thing … this is an opportunity for us to take this pain that my family’s felt, that all of you have felt, and forge a permanent solution based on the equality, freedom, and the right for human dignity for the Palestinian people.”
“And if your heart is not moved by that, then to me that is a disaster,” Shaban said.
Rev. Redd, head of the Franklin Township Interfaith Council, said that she loved celebrating culture because “it is educational.”
“And the more we learn about one another, the more we see the beauty and humanity in each other,” she said. “That is so important, and I hope that more cultures within the Franklin Township, we are so diverse, that they also come out and do something similar.”
“Because I think if we interact with each other, if we share each other’s food, and sit and talk, we’ll learn more about one another, we’ll learn to care about each other, and understand what it really means to be your neighbor’s keeper and to be a neighbor,” she said. “So I’m grateful for this day and I’m so grateful to see so many people that have come out and I hope twice as many continue to come out because this is truly a beautiful, beautiful event.”
“I think history and education is so critical in understanding to us as fellow brothers and sisters irrespective of what faith you celebrate,” Rev. Redd said. “I think it’s important that we see the humanity of God and I think as he expressed the Holy Land and all the faiths that are involved there, you can see that God has never been confused. We are God’s beautiful garden. No matter what you call yourself, no matter where you worship, God did not make a mistake. Everything and everyone he made is beautiful.”
Here are some scenes from the day:
