By MARK MACKINNON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Fatem Toubasi can't identify the specific moment she gave up on Palestine. It was a slow, heartbreaking process.
It started maybe a decade ago, when she first noticed the West Bank's relaxed and cosmopolitan atmosphere becoming more and more conservative. As the hardships of Israel's occupation increased, Islam became the dominant ideology in the territories and women faced increasing pressure to wear the hijab.
As a Christian married to a moderate Sunni Muslim, Toubasi began to feel increasingly alien in her own city. She worried her children would grow up to be fanatics.
Then came the violence of the recent intifada. For three years, she and her family could see tanks from the window of their home as the Israelis laid siege to Yasser Arafat in his presidential compound. Even when the fighting eased, the Israeli occupation didn't. Military checkpoints were set up around the city, cutting Ramallah off from other West Bank towns.
But she didn't know for certain that it was time to leave until the Islamist Hamas movement won legislative elections in January and the international community responded by imposing crippling economic sanctions. Her husband, a restaurateur, can't find work. Life, they decided, had to be better somewhere else.
"It's the political situation, the economic situation, everything. We just don't see any future here for our kids any more," said the 45-year-old art instructor at Ramallah Women's Technical College. "It's not just Hamas _ the whole world is changing, the whole world is becoming more aggressive."
Toubasi, along with her husband and two preteen children, is in the final stages of completing the process of emigrating to Canada. They plan to move to Toronto early in the new year, where she hopes to resume her career teaching art. They chose Canada, she said, because her sister already lives there, and because of universal health care and other social programs.
When they leave, they will join the more than 10,000 Palestinians who have left in the past four months alone. It's an enormous outflow in a short period of time from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have a combined population of only 3.5 million. Even worse for the cause of future Palestinian statehood, a recent study by Bir Zeit University found that 32 percent of Palestinians, and 44 percent of young Palestinians, would emigrate if they could. Because of restrictions on movement, however, few can reach the foreign embassies in Tel Aviv.
Based on anecdotal evidence, it would seem that one of the top destinations is Canada. Canadian government figures show that 331 Palestinians applied for landed immigrant status in the third quarter of 2006, up from 194 last year.
The Palestinian territories have never been an easy place to live, but even when violence was at its peak, most Palestinians refused to contemplate leaving, believing that would be giving Israelis what they wanted. Similar polls taken a year ago found only about 5 percent were interested in emigrating.
But now, more than ever before, Palestinians are giving up on their homeland.
"I want to get out _ to Canada, to Norway, to Switzerland, to Nigeria even," said Fadi el-Fahr, 24, an unemployed telecommunications engineer. "All I want is a job."
El-Fahr was one of six recent engineering graduates from Palestine Technical College in the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem who traveled to Ramallah last week to the office of Homeland International, a private firm offering help emigrating to Canada, to see whether they qualified.
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