Go Back To Where You Came From

"'I just want to live a respectable life here as a human; I just say, welcome us,' Ammar Mershed says in one of the most moving scenes in the new series of the award-winning Go Back to Where You Came From... Mershed is a Palestinian refugee from Iraq, encountered by some of the opinionated group early in the first episode. He's a deeply sincere but jolly and hospitable man now working as a teacher's aide. His family has settled in western Sydney's Bankstown, part of the world's 5 million stateless Palestinians." (The turnaround, First Watch, Graeme Blundell, Weekend Australian Review, 25/7/15)

Graeme Blundell's sympathetic sketch of Palestinian refugee Ammar Mershed is most unusual for a Murdoch rag. What a pity it isn't longer.

If I may take the liberty of adding the missing details:

Back in 1948, the Mershed family was driven out of their Palestinian homeland by the fanatical forces of Jewish State in the Levant (JSIL) and never allowed back. In those grim days, if any Palestinian refugees were caught by JSIL gunmen trying to return to their homes and lands, they were labelled 'infiltrators' and simply shot out of hand. (Ditto today, 67 years later.) The family found their way, somehow, to Iraq, where Ammar was born.

Then in 2003, Ammar, now with a family of his own, was displaced yet again after a cabal of JSIL-linked US neocons, having risen to giddy prominence in the administration of George W. Bush, persuaded that dumbarse and his cronies that Iraq should be next on his to-do list after Afghanistan. And so Ammar and his family found themselves once more on the run.

Somehow they ended up in Australia, where occasionally he'd encounter racist bogans who'd tell him to go back where he came from. But what could he do? He couldn't tell them that he came from Palestine and would give his right arm to go back there if he could, because he knew that the idea of a refugee actually wanting to go back to where he came from was simply too hard for these mental defectives to understand. They'd just think he was nuts, or trying to be funny, and get even more aggro. And anyway, some of them had actually taken to waving JSIL flags at Reclaim Australia rallies.

So whenever these grubs crossed his path and shot their mouths off, Ammar had little choice but to grin and bear it, retreat to the safety of his public housing digs in Bankstown, focus on the little map of Palestine, lovingly carved from the wood of an olive tree, which hung on his living room wall, and say to himself: Next year in Jerusalem.