"See you in paradise", a Palestinian journalist and Hamas member told me, half-threateningly, on the second day of a training program in Gaza City--delivering the words with a sardonic smile that haunted me half the night, as I tried to figure out if he had been serious or simply had a bizarre sense of humor.
Over the three-day period I spent in Gaza, training a group of Palestinian journalists on behalf of a non-governmental organization, the young man from the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, bent my ears about the "great evils of America." But then the same man surprised me even more over lunch on the last day of courses by asking if I knew how he could obtain a student visa to study in the United States, preferably in Illinois or Michigan. Somewhat startled, given his professed strong dislike, even hate, of the United States, I asked why he would want to live and study there. "I like the American people. I have nothing against them", he said. "It's the Bush policy that I hate. Particularly his policy regarding Iraq and Palestine."
Ah, politics and religion, two thorny subjects preferably not brought up at the dinner table, but topics of conversation that are as unavoidable as they are confusing, particularly to the uninitiated in Levantine travels. After that stay in Gaza, I heard that general antipathy for Bush but fondness for Americans expressed by others: an elegant Turkish professor in Istanbul and an American-educated Saudi business executive in Riyadh, for example. Raise the topic of the United States and its politics these days with almost anyone in the periphery of the Middle East, and you will likely hear the same anti-Bush, pro-Americans mantra.
