It didn’t occur to me that I did that, until I got frustrated one of the many times I couldn’t find it. Palestine. Filling out applications, you usually need to enter your country. Currently living in the US, I would often resort to that, but it doesn’t always work. If it asks for the country of birth or nationality, then I have to look through the list.

I start with looking at the P’s hoping to find “Palestine”, “Palestinian Territories” or some variation of that. Once I finish with Portugal, passing Pakistan, the Phillipines and all the legitimate P’s, I go to the O’s.

“O”? you might wonder. Occupied Palestinian Territories; which is one of the other names you might be able to find my country. It’s loaded, I would say. This one is usually a short glance at “Oman” and no other “O” in sight for me to move on.

My last resort, the “W”. Will “West Bank” at least make it to the list? More often than not, it doesn’t. I think about my next steps. “I’m going to email somebody so they can add Palestine to the list. Where can I find their contact information? What do I even say? Do I ask them to add Palestine, Palestinian Territories, or the O’s and W’s?

I overthink this. I look at the application one more time and I think “do I really wanna work with these people if they don’t acknowledge Palestine?” And yes, I know it’s just the application, they probably had nothing to do with the way it’s set up. But internally, I just want a plausible reason to let them go. And I eventually just close it out.