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

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

Being hopeful and resourceful came for me from having lived freely in a democratic state.

Should I have been angry? No, I simply wasn’t. I never expected her to be my political ally, only my sleuthing companion.

Before the Nakba, Palestine, particularly Jerusalem, kept its doors open to people of all ethnic groups and creeds who wanted to pray or settle here. We Palestinians are proud to be part of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. We are here to stay, we, the survivors of the Palestinian Nakba.

It had been my personal pilgrimage, and today it became my political act.

I gazed at my ravaged Falastin and marveled at its beauty.

“When you arrive in Palestine, kiss the ground, stroke the olive trees, smell the air. Do it for us.” I didn’t know then what they had meant. But now I knew.

While in Palestine, when someone asked me where I came from, I never hesitated: “Jerusalem,” I would say with pride, and I didn’t have to explain a thing. They understood. In the Western world I have to explain myself, bring in the geography maps, the historical and political facts. I have to gauge their faces and decipher their expressions. I have to fear their reactions—their rejection, their fear, their confusion.

For me—a Palestinian in the Diaspora, whose mother has been denied the right to return to her home lost in 1948—my coming back and living in Palestine was a way of reinstating my connection to the land of my mother and grandparents.

I wanted to be whole. I didn’t want to be a citizen of the world. I wanted to be someone from somewhere.

Most people here, like me, came from somewhere else. Yet now I felt polarized in California, my home of more than forty years, unable to integrate Palestine into my everyday life. I felt stretched and predetermined, like a clematis vine on a trellis fastened with twine.

“Thank you, Monmon. You have given me the best present. You have given me a lost part of myself.”

I used to think that being sick was the toughest part of illness, but during this journey I began to see that “recovering” was a lot harder, because it pits the person you used to be with the one you’re becoming.

“Your story is our story. We have lost our homes, too.” She said it in an authoritative tone, almost combative. And in that moment, I felt myself shut down with anger. Do we always have to have parity with Israelis when talking about our loss? Why can’t our Palestinian story of loss and displacement stand alone?

I didn’t interpret her comment as a bridge of empathy that linked my story to hers; on the contrary, it felt like a justification, an excuse for Israel’s actions against the Palestinians, and a competition between two suffering people.

I’m usually assertive, but I sometimes allow myself to be voiceless in order to make do or gain something in return.

In the war of 1948, many Palestinians had locked their houses and taken their keys with them when they rushed out the door seeking refuge away from the bombing. And the key has since become the Palestinian symbol of return, of unflinching determination, even if today very few of those keys would fit inside the substituted modern locks.

As I walked up the road with Yosef, I reflected on how lucky I was that Mama’s house was almost intact, that it contained many Ottoman touches, that it wasn’t torn down or converted into a banquet hall like Mimi’s house, or a synagogue like my friend Laila’s house in Qatamon.

Humans need to hang onto mementos from their past, objects that conjure up a foregone time, because memories alone are not enough.