In My Mother's Footsteps: A Palestinian Refugee Returns Home

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

Years ago, I had dreamed of being guided by Mama down the souqs of the Old City and the leafy streets of her neighborhood. I wanted to glide on ice with her again and feel her decisive and confident stride.

Every building, every alley, every church anchored me to Jerusalem, to my genealogy, as though my past was imprinted on the stones. I wasn’t born there; I never lived there, but I was from there.

For years, she had vehemently refused to accompany me to Jerusalem, too paralyzed by the thought of facing her grief.

“I like being an old lady,” she had once told me, “because I can say anything I want and people don’t dare argue with me. I’ve earned this honor with age.”

am happy it has changed so much,” she said. “If it looks so different, then I don’t have to miss it as much. I am somewhere else, not in Falastin.”

The Ottoman Empire, which lasted from 1300 to 1922, was multinational, multilingual, and controlled most of Southeast Europe, parts of Central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, and North Africa.

In 1897, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist, founded the political form of Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish homeland.

It’s not a conflict about ancient hatred, or religion, as it is a modern struggle over land and who gets to live on that land.

War is war and you do what you need to do to be safe.

At my mother’s breast, I suckled both milk and sorrow.

We did miss our dolls, so my mother made us little sock dolls, which we’ve kept to this day—a reminder of our years of loss and resilience.

One morning, shortly after we were exiled from our place of birth, my seven-year-old sister was the one who found the words to articulate our loss. “I used to be a princess,” she said wistfully,

was good at naming geographic places of origin, but they didn’t reflect who I truly was. It was complicated to say I was a Palestinian, belonging to a country not represented on the world map; a Syrian via my paternal lineage; and finally, an Egyptian, because my name was printed on my Egyptian birth certificate.

that identity is where your heart lies.

The early residents who had settled in the Old City chose to remain close to their places of worship—the Christian population surrounded the Holy Sepulchre, the Muslims lived around the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Jews lived near the Ramban Synagogue, and the Armenians lived near St. James’s Cathedral. Thus, four quarters based on the population’s religious affiliations divided the Old City into four distinct areas. Despite the names assigned to each quarter, there was no governing principle of ethnic segregation.

Jerusalem was known to be one of the most tolerant places in the world, where different cultures and religions lived side by side, and respected one another, living in balance and harmony.

How could it be easier for a US passport holder to travel around this land, than someone whose whole family has lived here for generations?

The things we take for granted in America are things Palestinians have to fight for every day of their lives.

But Palestinians are strong and tough, like sabir, the cactus plant growing in their indigenous land, and which also means “patience” and “endurance” in Arabic.

“I have finally figured out why so many people here have become more religious.” She was eager to hear my reasoning. “Because no one can control the degree of devotion they have to their faith. No one can stop them from believing, or from practicing their faith. It is the most intimate relationship there is. No checkpoint, and no Wall, can come in the way of your relationship with God. It is personal; it is private; it is intimate. And Israel certainly cannot control it.”

I’d like to believe they’re banking on long-term self-preservation, rather than short-term self-expression. It’s a form of non-violent resistance.

I saw how living under these conditions could either turn you into a sacrificial lamb or a bully.

I had appropriated her memories and had made them my own. Is that what children of refugees do?

I wondered what it takes to belong to a place—citizenship? Falling in love with a place? Getting married? Residency? Genealogy? Owning property? With my colorfully international background, I was clueless.

That house was our house, too. We loved it, like a member of our family.

As we walked up the street George told me he wished more Palestinian children carried the internal image of their parents’ homes. I was grateful, too.

In 1948 when the Zionists drove my mother and her family away and took their home, it was plunder, it was assault, it was rape. To this day I look back and wonder how I was able, on such a momentous occasion, to be so polite with this couple.

“The old will die and the young will forget.”

How insane that this young Israeli soldier of European descent has the power of letting me in or denying me entry into my own country, my ancestors’ homeland!

Did they know that their roads are laced with blood and tears? Did they know that every inch of Palestinian land has a story to tell, a story that is conveniently muted, or erased?

I’ve never been nationalistic, except that when your people have been denied their legitimate rights to nationality for over seventy years, you yearn for it.

Of course, normalcy was just an illusion. After all, I was living in a Palestinian city that had been militarily occupied by Israel since 1967.

I felt drawn to this land the way birds migrate with an internal compass and an instinct that defies scientific explanation.

They were special, my parents. They were not satisfied with just being housewife at home making soup, and husband coming home after work for dinner. That’s how most people were living then.

My father taught us to see the value in every person. This was his greatest gift.

My initial observation of the students led me to believe that many of them were impulsive and had difficulty remaining focused in class, a telltale sign of stress. They also displayed signs of dysregulation—aggression, constant chatter, hyperactive behavior, and an obsessive need to tell me about themselves.

responsibility, to talk to the offender, and try, on their own, to resolve their conflicts in a non-violent manner. If they learned how to do this, then as adults they could possibly bring about positive changes in this war-torn region. They could solve problems through negotiations with dignity and integrity. Palestinians need real leaders with a vision—an honorable, decent, moral vision—and these leaders are being formed in elementary school, where peaceful communication could be practiced and could begin to sprout.

I always thought of my mother opening the curtains in the morning, and saying to me as a child, “khallina nishuf wijh rabna” (“Let’s see God’s face”).

Maybe when they couldn’t count on a responsive, predictable world, they became too afraid to grow up. I would have anticipated the opposite. I always assumed that children experiencing trauma and military violence grow up too fast.

Children in war zones play out the violence they see around them; they’re impulsive and cannot access critical thinking skills because they’re in the “fight or flight” mode, too busy fending off their fears and anxieties.

When you know you can count on your mother or father’s presence and unconditional love, you grow up able to function in the world with a sense of confidence and security.

I am who I am today because she was capable of transcending her own trauma to create a stable, loving, and responsive home for me.

For Palestinian parents, protecting their children—the one thing all parents in the world feel driven to do as part of their job description—is an impossible task.

How can you trust you’ll be all right or that you can take care of yourself when you see fear in your parents’ faces?

Research suggests that people do not change in isolation, that in fact they need their community to believe in them in order to change. I always prefer it when a student chooses to take on a self-governing contract, because it empowers the child to change and to feel respected by the adults and community around them.

When I tried to contradict him with the blatant evidence that the tower was old and Ottoman in design he replied as he walked away that everything is old in Israel. I stood there wondering: were Israelis duped into believing that every monument, every building was for them or about them? Was the Arab presence, its population, art form, and monuments, to be wiped out to make way for a new version of Israeli history?

On the boardwalk a poster, hung from a lamppost, listed the chronological history of the town. Not once did it mention that Jaffa has been an Arab city. Erasure is a form of oppression.

After we ordered our grilled fish, the waiter served us twenty-two small dishes of mazzeh—hummus, tabbuleh, mitabal, grilled cauliflower, potato salad, eggplant salad, and hot, wavy, whole wheat tabun bread.

“David,” I called out, “smell the air. This is Palestine.”

In Palestine, the cactus, sabir, stands for patience and resilience.