I think the first time I really felt that I was Palestinian was a time when I was trying to go back to school with my father at night and there was a curfew for Palestinians. My father said, "I will walk first, but you have to understand, the police will not let me go... So keep moving and don't look at me and don't look back."

I think the first time I really felt that I was Palestinian was a time when I was trying to go back to school with my father at night and there was a curfew for Palestinians. My father said, "I will walk first, but you have to understand, the police will not let me go... So keep moving and don't look at me and don't look back."

My whole childhood was about being in the garden. It wasn't really a religious place to me. The love I felt there... was in contradiction with what I saw in the streets. It was a different world.

My first memory as a child growing up is of playing in the gardens, the mosque is really a gigantic garden, probably the biggest in all of East Jerusalem. Our house was about 100 meters from the mosque.

What I love most about New York is that I can walk in the street and nobody is looking at me as if I'm different. In my country and in Italy, you have to choose sides. I was a famous journalist and I was also an immigrant and ultimately I never stopped feeling like I was a guest.

There's something that scares me. It's the way media in the United States presents the rest of the world. I feel like people in America are getting a completely different picture of what's going on in other countries than what is reality.

As a woman, you don't have really much freedom of choice in the Middle East - very often, by the time they are 13 or 14, girls get married.