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

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

do.Suddenly I noticed the first star in the heavens. It was enchanting, like finding a gold nugget in the darkened sky. I didn’t wonder whether it belonged to the Israelis or the Palestinians. I knew it belonged to everyone.

Palestinians viewed Jewish nationalism as precluding their independence, equality, and freedom in their own homeland. Tragically, they were prophetic.

They took away one precious hour from our day at the zoo and all that for nothing, nothing but a bureaucratic noose tightened around our necks.

was like falling through a crack in a cobblestone street alley of the Old City and finding myself back in British Mandate Jerusalem.

They seemed to have been bottled up for a long time as they spewed out their grievances—the desks were too small, the uniforms too hot, this wasn’t right, that wasn’t good. I remembered wondering early on whether this was a symptom of the Occupation, a long tirade of things that were going wrong, or merely a sign of adolescent disgruntlement—a restless, helpless, irritated group of twelve-year-olds wanting to criticize everything around them.

From these aggrieved messages she understood that the students were learning how to formulate their problems and ask for help—essential elements in the development of problem solving, democratic values, and personal empowerment.

“It’s so good to feel gratitude tonight because it’s really very hard to be grateful in Palestine when there’s so much injustice around us.”

We like to believe we are higher beings, moral humans, who know what is right and what is wrong, yet we are no better than certain animals. Did you know that some types of sparrows forcibly eject martins from their nests and then occupy them?

The Greeks came—so did the Italians, British, French, Swedes, and Germans—and all established educational institutions and hospitals. This influx of different people and cultures helped create a diversity of thought, religion, and nationality.

The Zionists may not have intended to create such a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but it has become a slow sociocide, which leaves my people with very few choices: one, emigrate to another Arab country or to the Western world because staying is a slow death; two, fight back and end up murdered by Israeli soldiers, or stuck indefinitely in the overcrowded Israeli detention centers and prisons.

I’ve never had a problem with Jews having a homeland where they can live in peace and security and have equal rights, but I do have a problem when they deny the same to others.

Every time a Palestinian elder dies a little bit of Palestinian history dies as well.

My fear is that with the influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews into Jerusalem this magical city will lose its international flavor and become a narrow bastion of fundamentalism.

It was a long and windy road, but I enjoyed the shepherds and their goats dotting the desert hills. A biblical landscape.

I gazed up at the moon in the heavens, so perfectly etched, round and huge and silvery. It was hard to fathom in that moment that I was in the ancient city where Christ was born and simultaneously in a modern Palestinian city under Israeli Occupation.

We were not what most people in the world think of us. We were educated, accomplished, modern, and cosmopolitan.

It felt like a disconnected world, a silent world.

life in the US was too quiet and homogenized for me; it came too easily. There was nothing to fight for, nothing to feel passionate about, and nothing in need of change.

Hundreds of commodities needed for maintaining daily life are not allowed into Gaza by orders of the government of Israel—building

I’m a peaceful person with values that are based on saving lives, not destroying them; yet, what would I do if I were threatened personally? What would I do if I had to protect my children from imminent threat? I’ve never been placed in this situation and I hope I never will be, yet I was disturbed by these thoughts.

When do you stop trying to resolve things peacefully and use force instead? What makes a person cross that line? I was conflicted.

“People are stronger than walls.”

How nice to live in the dark without setting eyes on the ugly scars Israel has inflicted on you, not to have to subjugate ourselves over and over again to occupiers on our land.

The official ending of the British Mandate was to take place on May 15, 1948, and both the Arabs and Jews had the same ambitions in mind—to create their own state. It was like we were heading towards a head-on collision. We knew it was going to be a huge disaster, but it was inevitable.

The British could not protect us from the Zionist forces, and because we were not allowed by the British to bear arms, and the British were too busy pulling out of Palestine, we were defenseless and vulnerable.

What I had believed was a mutual friendship had its limits. That night I came home heartbroken and cynical.

These sixth-graders, who never took anything seriously, who used sarcasm and put-downs to cover their true feelings, and who challenged the authority of their teachers, were surprisingly candid and articulate in revealing missing older siblings who went away to college, grandparents who had passed away, and Farid, their classmate, who had died last year in a terrible chemical explosion.

Is that how you topple a bully? Israel popped into my mind. What measures were needed to force it to release its grip on Palestine?

There are no Child Protective Services in Palestine to counsel families whose children have been exposed to violence in various aspects of their lives. Violence begets violence. How can we break the cycle?

This was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I couldn’t fight; I didn’t have the right to fight for my country. If I had left my country after a battle, then perhaps I would have been able to accept it.

When you’ve lost your country, when you’ve experienced being a refugee, suitcases mean you have left a little piece of yourself behind and you can never be whole again.

I held in my mind a map of the city pre-1948, which I superimposed on today’s city. It was like being bilingual, when you can hold a thought in your mind in one language and speak it simultaneously in another language.

That was how the Old City was designed, with little enclaves that housed several families, all centered around the same courtyard. This configuration provided the residents with safety and neighborly connections.

Each one of us carried away a few pieces—perfumed oranges with bright, green leaves—a piece of home. Later I sectioned the fruit and brought back to California some of the seeds, which I planted in my garden. They have grown into big bushes now, but have not yet borne any fruit. Perhaps like all refugees, they struggle to blossom and bear fruit in a foreign land. I call them my Peace Grove.

But interestingly, she too, like me, had held back on this trip. She didn’t lash out in the shuttle bus or argue with Amos. Was it due to her advanced age, or was it because she had lived with Jews in Palestine all her life? They were never the “other” to her. They were Palestinians, too, Palestinians who happened to practice a different faith.

Israel might have stolen my home, but it wasn’t going to steal my soul.

stoic? In some ways, I wish they had all cried their hearts out and gotten over their sorrow.

Instead, for eighty years my mother carried in her heart a terrible unprocessed loss, which with time and age became too big to comprehend, and which congealed with her loss of Palestine into an unspoken calamity.

“You know I had friends on the YMCA team, the Christian Orthodox team, and the Jewish team, and they all competed so nicely together as friends and opponents. None of this political stuff. How simple life used to be, how easy it was to bridge the gap.”

Mona, I don’t need tombstones to visit. It’s better to bury your loved ones in your heart, because that way, they’re always with you wherever you go.

With infinite grace, she’d compartmentalized her two homes. Before coming to Jerusalem, she had feared this journey would reawaken the dormant loss she had tried so hard to keep at bay all her life, but it did just the opposite. It reawakened the joy.

Maybe we defy the traditional definition of time and space, and can live simultaneously in the past, present, and future.”

They asked me, “When did you convert?” I always have my answer ready, “We never converted. You did. We’re the original Christians. Where was Christ born after all?”

The value was not in the books or jewels themselves; it was about the memories attached to them—as a little girl dusting my Papa’s books or playing with Mama’s gold bracelets while around her wrists.

All of my life I wanted to bury those sad memories, because it was too much to relive them.

I felt invisible, like all Palestinians on this land. It was as though I hadn’t been “invited to the table.”

“What about your jewelry?” “Oh, you will laugh. I hid it with my mother’s jewelry in a secret drawer in my dresser. An unsuspecting Jew must have enjoyed the surprise,” she added bitterly.

The richness and vibrancy of Palestinian society was evident in all the photographs on display.

What strikes me as unique about this photograph is that it is a rare shot of the Nakba of the Palestinian middle-class.

But 50,000 Palestinians from West Jerusalem’s middle-class neighborhoods also lost their homes—doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and businessmen, who had created an established multi-ethnic, intellectual, and urban society.