Mazin Kased, a resident of Palestine for four years, explains life inside the age-old conflict

When American friends start to talk about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Mazin Kased gets a little irritated.

“Unless you’ve been there, don’t speak,” he says. Kased, president of both the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) and the Student Associaton (SA) Senate, has some justification for saying this. After all, he lived in Palestine for four years.

In 1996, Kased says that there was a “sense of peace” in Israel/Palestine. His parents, both native Palestinians, had watched their son grow up in Brooklyn, and he had not learned to speak Arabic. The most practical way for him to learn, as it turned out, was to have Mazin live in the West Bank city of Ramalla, where he would attend an American private school while gaining firsthand experience of his Palestinian heritage.

Kased fit in well, but he was always considered an American. However, he was not alone. During the period of peace, he says that many Palestinian Americans went back to the Middle East. “We feel it’s better to raise our family over there,” Kased says.

In his spare time, he became involved in a local television station. His program, which he describes as a “TRL-type call-in show,” was broadcasted in English to Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. “There were Arab Israelis, and that’s who I would get the most feedback from,” he says. “I just wanted the Americans to feel conferrable.”

After a few years, and the resurgence of terrorism in the area, Kased’s half hour commute to school became a two hour ordeal. His route from Ramalla to Rame, a town just outside of Jerusalem, became laden with checkpoints.

“The checkpoints, well, they sucked,” he says of the roadblocks manned by Israeli soldiers.

“I don’t think [the soldiers] abide by any book,” he says. “They’ll stop anybody.” Day after day, and stop after stop, Kased would take out his passport, and show it to the soldiers.

Sometimes Mazin was asked what he describes as “unnecessary questions” that just added more time to the check stop. “I am going to school, what do you think?” Mazin said. Sometimes, those “smart answers” would be rewarded by a light hit.

“They want to be assholes. They want to show their power. And in a sense, we can’t do anything about it. We have no army or resources.”

He has even seen 14-year-old boys get arrested because they were accused of throwing rocks. “They take them in when they are young, and offer them to be spies,” he says. “When you are 14, and you are brought to an army base, you could shit your pants.”

Because he was an American citizen, Kased was able to go across the border into Israel. There, he visited his friends, many of whom were Jewish. When soldiers would come around, Mazin says that his friends and their neighbors had to hide him.

If one of his Palestinian friends wanted to visit Israel, they had to get a permission slip, which was obtained by waiting nearly ten hours in a government office. Mazin says that these people were just Muslims who wanted to go to Jerusalem, to pray at the Muslim holy sites.

“It’s really sad that you have to get permission to pray in the holy land,” he says.

Because going to school had become so difficult, Mazin had to return to the U.S. in 2000.

“That’s one of the main reasons I left,” he says. “We would go to school maybe once a week.”

“I hate the Israeli government, I hate the Israeli soldiers, but I love the Israeli people,” Kased says. As a member of the SA senate, he works with clubs such as the Jewish Student Union, and the Zionist Organization of America. At UB, he has Jewish friends, Muslim friends, and Christian friends.

“The people can do it,” he says. “They can live in peace.”

Mazin admits that there are some people who are racists, but many other people just want to live in peace and “have a good time.” He condemns the work of suicide bombers in Israel. “It makes me throw up to see both sides lose their children… but when you have it going on for ten years, there’s something wrong over there,” he says. “I really want peace. I believe that if we can stop the politics, the people can live together.”

Kased wants his state to be recognized. “Of course I want a Palestinian state, and an Israeli state, both capitalizing in Jerusalem,” he says.

Last year, he was shocked when Israeli Parliament member Shimon Peres said that he supports Palestinian statehood. Traditionally, Peres had been against it. Mazin says that he taped the news broadcast so that he can play it over and over again.

“I didn’t believe it,” he says. “When you change people on the parliamentary level, that’s a good thing.”

After living in Brooklyn and at UB, Mazin is confident that the two sides can come to the table and settle their differences. “Stop the politics so that we can live together,” he says. After living there for four years, Mazin knows a thing or two about the land he is fighting for.

“I’ve lived something,” he says. “Don’t come and tell me the Palestinians are fighting for no cause.”