Daniel Cohen: "I'm just an aguacatero..."

The Palestinian population in El Salvador is growing each day. Powerful in the areas of business, politics (President Tony Saca is of Palestinian descent), and culture, the Palestinian population that was once the target of racism and hatred is now regarded in a different light (sometimes better/sometimes worse).

A personal interest is whether the Israeli/Palestinian conflict equally affects populations abroad? If so, have tensions become worse since the election of the new Hamas led government? Does the Palestinian Christian Diaspora (like the community in El Salvador) feel isolated from the conflict? Daniel Cohen touches on the subject in this final excerpt.
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The business world here, your family business, does it ever come into play that you’re part of the Jewish community, that you’re Jewish?)

No. The thing about being Jewish here is that there’s a super-strong Palestinian community, so that all of a sudden you get a Palestinian plaza and then you get a Yasir Arafat plaza. Um, sometimes you truly feel like you’re a minority. You feel like—you feel like—or you hope like the situation over there doesn’t become the situation over here. You hope that the Palestinians here don’t try to recreate what’s going on over there. Or sometimes I hope they don’t try to get at the Jews here for what’s going on over there.

There’s so many Palestinians here that we’d be outnumbered. But in the business world, there are some Palestinians that may not like Jews, but most of them, —most of my colleagues that are Palestinian, I can call ‘em a cousin, joke around and be like, you know, “We’re cousins.” I’ve been in an association, on the board of directors of an association of importers of spare parts where the president is a Palestinian, and I’m vice president. We can joke around, when we disagree, you know, we can joke around and say, “This disagreement isn’t recent. It’s millions of years old.” (laughs) So we can joke around about that and we can talk and we can freely be president and vice president and have no problem.

(Do you sometimes feel like those conflicts are brought in from outside or that they do start here, like the Palestinian plaza? Or the Plaza Arafat?)

From the outside? Oh! I think it’s on their radar. I think wherever a Palestinian plaza pops up, they hear about it. Or wherever a Yasir Arafat plaza pops up, it beeps on their radar.

Towards the end of the interview, Danny and I started to talk about identity.

(When someone asks you where you’re from, what would you say?)

I’m from El Salvador.

(And you feel completely Salvadoran?)

No. I feel like I’m a aguacatero ,[Salvadoran slang for “mutt”]. I’m Salvadoran. Grew up in the U.S., grew up in New England. My father’s from North Africa. My mother’s from El Salvador. My grandparents are German. I was born here, but I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere in particular. If you ask me what culture I can relate to the most, I’d say American. I guess if you ask me what I am, I’d say I’m Jewish.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.