Chapter 2

Two Brown Envelopes

I grew up with my father telling me all about his formative years in England in the late 1940s. It was a time of scarcity: there were no luxuries, rationing still existed, and austerity was the prevailing economic orthodoxy. And yet my father was filled with hope as he watched a nation try to rebuild itself anew in the aftermath of the Second World War. He was energized by the Labour leader, Clement Atlee, excited by the creation of the National Health Service, and enthused by ideas about workers’ rights and the cooperative movement. He was animated by the new mood of freedom that followed the defeat of Nazism, and he applauded the efforts of anti-colonial leaders—notably Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru in India—who fought for independence from the British Empire.

He enjoyed his four years as a law student in Leeds, and he knew that the experience had set him up for success in life. Everywhere he went, he carried his business card, stamped with the words: “Barrister-at-Law, Gray’s Inn.” He was justly proud of his achievement. Step inside Gray’s Inn’s ancient hall, with its ornate oak screen, which is said to have been carved from wood salvaged from a defeated galleon of the Spanish Armada and given to the lawyers by Queen Elizabeth I, and you can see how far my father traveled in those postwar years.10 And so it was inevitable that, when it came to my own postschool education, England would loom large as an option.

It is important to note here that Palestinians regard education as a critical asset. As a people, we are defined not by our faith—since there are Palestinian Muslims, Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Jews—but by the place we called home until we were brutally forced to leave in 1948. Since then, there has been nowhere that we can truly call home—where we rule ourselves. That loss continues to haunt us. How could it not? If you’re an American, can you imagine being banished from entering the United States? If you’re British, can you imagine having to apply for a visa in order to see the White Cliffs of Dover?

Without a home, we are, by definition, homeless. But with an education, at least, we can go anywhere, we can do anything, and we can succeed. As Yasser Arafat, the late Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), once put it, after 1948, “we had to struggle for sheer existence,” and so “even in exile we educated our children.” Why? “This was all a part of trying to survive.”11

So Palestinian parents prioritize education, and they are prepared to set aside considerable resources to fund their children’s schooling. That they do so is well known across the region. When Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Ibn Sa’ud, ordered Aramco to hire Palestinians, he did so primarily because he wanted to show “a sign of solidarity” with displaced fellow Arabs. But he also knew that he would be able to tap what Aramco’s official history recognized as “among the best-educated Arab populations in the Middle East.”12

As I prepared to leave my Kuwaiti high school, I had several possible options. One was to go to university in the United States, which