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

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

when she laced her fingers into mine like a pretzel, I felt safe. I would have walked with her to the ends of the earth.

After living for over forty years in Switzerland, she held a Swiss passport, which conveniently read, “Place of origin: Geneva,” rather than “Place of birth: Jerusalem.”

Maybe that’s why the Swiss passport is the most valued in the world—because you can easily erase all traces of your former identity and don the name of the country in which you have become naturalized.

“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.”

Papa was a hopeless romantic. He was totally devoted to his wife until the day she died when, upon hearing of her death, his knees buckled and he collapsed in my arms. We all knew Mama had been his spine.

“I live in Geneva.” That was all my mother said. I had anticipated a long tirade about the war of 1948, the loss of her home in Jerusalem and her stateless refugee status, but nothing came.

She was holding everything tightly sealed, almost as though living in Geneva was the beginning and the end of her identity.

Suddenly the young woman called out from the window with genuine pleasure, “Welcome to my country!”

the United Kingdom declared its British Mandate for Palestine, a form of colonial rule that lasted from 1922 to 1948.

In 1897, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist, founded the political form of Zionism, a movement to establish a Jewish homeland. Zionism arose in reaction to anti-Semitic and exclusionary nationalistic movements in Europe.

On November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration, a statement by the British government, announced support for the establishment of a national home for Jews in Palestine.

Little did British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour know then that his declaration would put into motion one of the world’s...

the United Kingdom was creating a head-on collision, promising both the Jews and the Arabs statehood in Palestine.

1948 was the colonial story; the Nakba, which in Arabic means “catastrophe,” is the contemporary conflict. For Israel, 1948 was the year of independence from the British; it was a culmination of years of struggles and persecution in Europe and Russia, but for the Palestinians, it was a catastrophe.

Over 700,000 other Palestinians were driven out from their homes and spilled into neighboring Arab countries to find refuge for what they thought would be a couple of weeks, or “until the situation calmed down”—a

a phrase used by many to describe their decision to leave. However, they were never allowed back home.

Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law that passed in 1950 was the main legal instrument used by Israel to take possession of the land belonging to Palestinians who w...

My name, pronounced Moonah in Arabic, is a poetic term that means “Desire of My Soul.” Whenever I hear my name called out, I am reminded that I am the fulfillment of my mother’s dream.

If I pressed my nose against the glass and inched myself close enough to the photograph, I could join the picnics my mother and her friends organized on weekends in Jaffa or Jericho,

The photos became the roadway to the past; they helped anchor me deeper into the reality of a foregone Palestinian life and whetted my appetite for more knowledge and understanding.

My mother and her contemporaries were the last vestiges of a lost civilization, with narratives that would never again be told in the first person after they died.

Summer of 1961. At age eleven, my idyllic childhood in Alexandria came to an abrupt end when President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized Egypt. We lost our home and became political refugees with only two suitcases to our name—one for the parents, one for the children.

Our suitcases were packed, bulging on all sides like the love handles on our cook, Ma’bulleh. We were about to embark on our annual summer vacation to Lebanon.

Rahma searched in her layered robes for her handkerchief. Then she spoke with deliberateness, like a high priestess, announcing an omen. “Ma’am, I have a strange feeling I’ll never see you again,” to which my mother quickly retorted, “But Rahma, for goodness’ sake, don’t be silly! We’ll be back before you know it.”

Subsequently, sitting in our hotel room in Lebanon, we learned that leaving Egypt after the borders were closed meant that my father was now blacklisted, and that if he were to return to Egypt he would be incarcerated for breaking the law.

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,”

To this day my early days as a refugee are a blur, except for the memory of my mother’s unremitting weeping, face down on her bed. She didn’t stop caring for us, or loving us, but she was miles away.

When I moved to the Western world, I dreaded opening my mouth in public, because within seconds, someone would ask, “Where do you come from?” and with that question, I was forced to face my “otherness.”

I wasn’t ashamed of being an Arab; on the contrary I was brought up to be proud of my origins. The problem was how to explain succinctly where I came from.

It was complicated to say I was a Palestinian, belonging to a country not represented on the world map;

His family had immigrated to the US from Amman, Jordan, where they had settled after losing their home in Jerusalem.

Meeting David was a meteorological miracle.

My mother’s strong bond with Palestine was a narrative of loss, an unyielding longing filled with melancholy. Maybe that’s why I was attracted to David, who also sang the same woeful song, as he, too, was a Palestinian refugee.

This time I was going to Jerusalem in search of a world that no longer existed, in search of ghosts and crumbling, haunted houses. I was preparing to spelunk deep into the past.

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?

Something that was especially hard to bear was the sight of the brightly colored neon lights posted everywhere in Jerusalem, showing stylized ramparts and a big four-zero.

The Israelis were celebrating their forty-year conquest and Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It seemed incongruous to be celebrating h...

But the Palestinian spirit is resolute. Against all odds the Palestinians have survived the Occupation, and over seventy year...

They line up for hours at Kalandia checkpoint in Ramallah, or Houara checkpoint in Nablus to be given permission to go about the daily business of living.

Not only have they survived the indignity and brutality of the Occupation, but they have also done it with dignity and pride. They will not surrender their struggle for Liberation.

It would be risky to rebel; the consequences are too great—imprisonments, house demolitions, collective punishments.

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.

What also made me angry at the checkpoints was the ignorance of the soldiers. I was bewildered by their youth and inexperience, combined with the inordinate amount of power at their disposal, including holding at all times one finger on the trigger of their M16 weapons.

I asked about the blue shutters. “Did you paint them blue? My mother had told me they used to be green.” The colors here are politically charged. Green is the color associated with Islam, and blue with the Israeli flag.

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.

Can I forgive, or forget, what was, and is still being done to the Palestinians? With work, forgiving is doable, but forgetting is unthinkable. I cannot and do not want to forget the tragedies that have shaped my family and my people’s lives.

After the war of 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, is believed to have said, referring to the Palestinians, “The old will die and the young will forget.”

Kalandia is an imposing Israeli military checkpoint, much like an international border crossing, where only foreigners with valid Israeli visas, Palestinians with Jerusalem IDs, or West Bank residents with special permits can leave Ramallah, or the West Bank, to enter Jerusalem and Israel for work, medical care, education, or religious reasons.

Without a permit Palestinians living in the West Bank are not allowed into Jerusalem, or anywhere else in Israel.