One Year Ago He Left Tel Aviv and Never Went Back: the Story of Palestinian Traveling the World
By Albert Chang-Yoo
This past summer I traveled to Keelung, Taiwan to volunteer at a local community organization, where I met fellow traveler Adam. He amazed me right off the bat: cheery and friendly, together we walked through a Taiwanese fish market until two in the morning. It was only later that I realized the depth of his life story. I believe it’s a worthwhile and necessary perspective on how the war in Gaza has impacted the lives of ordinary people – Adam’s story is only one of many.
After seven years of working as a nurse in Tel Aviv, Adam Bayaa decided to take a well-earned vacation to Portugal. He hasn’t returned home. Adam, a 34-year old Palestinian, left Israel on Oct. 3, 2023. On Oct. 7, Hamas launched attacks on Israel, sparking the most destructive bombing campaign in Gaza in half a century. Just four days into his vacation, Adam canceled his flight home. He quit his job as a nurse and started traveling.
Adam was born and raised inside the Qalandia Refugee Camp in the West Bank. Qalandia borders one of the main checkpoints into Jerusalem and is frequently the site of ethnic confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis. According to the U.N., Qalandia’s problems include a high unemployment rate, substandard living conditions and routinely violent raids conducted by the Israeli military. Like most Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, it was formed following the establishment of Israel in 1948, which drove mass displacement of Palestinians (aka the “Nakba”). “It was an experience – I cannot imagine my life now if I wasn’t born in a refugee camp,” Adam said.
When Adam was 10 years old, his family saved up enough money to move just over 3 miles away, to the Israeli side: “It was very important for my family at this time to get Israeli I.D., they get better education, better movement, better jobs.” As citizens of an unrecognized state, Palestinians lack the same opportunities and social mobility. His father worked as a bulldozer driver, and his grandfather as a water salesman. Adam wanted something different. “I remember I always went with my grandma to the clinic in the camps. It was a nice experience to go with her,” he said. He decided to enroll in Arab American University, a Palestinian university in Jenin, to study nursing.
Attending college inside one of the most heavily watched areas in the world came with challenges. “I was going to school every day, and every day the soldiers would stop me for two hours just to check my bag.” When Adam had class at 7 a.m., he would need to wake up at 5 a.m. to make it on time.
When Adam finally got a job, it was at a private hospital in Tel Aviv. “At this point, the country was not bad for me; good jobs and good salaries,” he said. Yet, he felt there was always an undercurrent of wider tension.“It was a taboo, like we don’t speak about that, yet you can feel it by the conversation.” As his department, Adam remarked, “Some days I overheard the managers, we cannot receive more Arab nurses. We have to be balanced.”
For nearly a decade, Adam barely took any time off. That changed last October. His trip to Porto, Portugal was supposed to last one week, and he only brought a 22 pound carry-on. “I woke up one day and saw all the stories and I was shocked. I called my manager, and she said ‘if you can extend one week more, you can’,” he reflected. He decided to use all of his saved vacation days to take the month off. First, Adam traveled to Madeira Island, and then through Europe. Finally, he called his manager: “I said, ‘okay, I don’t want to come back. That’s it. I just want to travel and to see Asia.’ It was my dream.” Since quitting his job and renting out his apartment in Tel Aviv, Adam has traveled through Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
A year ago, Adam’s life changed forever. So too did the lives of millions of others. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed over 40,000 Palestinians. The West Bank has seen expanded Israeli settlements and military incursions, and the Gaza Strip is in ruins. Amnesty International reports almost 2 million Palestianians in Gaza have been forcibly displaced. The war follows decades of simmering tensions between Palestinian nationalists and Israeli Zionists. Following Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2007, Israel has imposed a strict blockade on Gaza, essentially isolating it from the rest of the world. The current war has been the largest and deadliest since the conflict began nearly a century ago.
When I interviewed Adam, he was calling me from a Bangkok hostel. He informed me that he had just booked a flight home. He wanted to cross into the West Bank and reunite with his family. Adam still calls his family every two to three days, and he said his mother misses him deeply. Still, he doesn’t plan on staying. “It will be a challenge. It will not be easy. But I think I have to do it for my future.”
Adam has kept up with the news back home, despite being half a world away. “The mood of my day sometimes depends on what is happening in Gaza,” he said. It’s easier than ever to see images of the war’s destruction, though Adam believes the effects of social media has not stopped the fighting: “It is the same as what happened 70 years ago, but it was without Instagram and without videos and without stories.”
“It will be very, very hard to go back and see everything. It’s broken, and I don’t have any job now,” Adam said. He doesn’t believe he can ever go back to working in Israel after the war. “We think I can just close my eyes and just go to my job, and come back. But our souls need more,” he remarked. “My soul cannot really live there.”
“As a Palestinian, when I was kid, moving from city to city – it was a big plan, like a big, big difficult thing,” he stated. “It would take three hours just to cross 10 kilometers [6.2 miles].” Now, he’s crossing entire continents. “The trigger for me to travel more and discover more: I felt I could move from here and there – to feel free.”
“We don’t want really big things. We just need the basic needs of any human in the world. We just need freedom. Freedom to move, to go somewhere, to live. We’re fighting for our basic rights,” said Adam. He doesn’t know where he’ll go next.