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

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

Yet, the world sat silently while Israel took Palestine, gently and covertly, starting in 1897 when Zionism was declared in Basel by Herzl, and more forcefully from 1948 to the present. Zionists did not come to Palestine to become part of the fabric of the land. They came with one goal in mind, and one goal only—to create a Jewish state for Jews with the help of the British and other colonial powers. But how can you create a Jewish state when most of the population is non-Jewish? You encourage massive immigration of Jews into the country; you take land, homes, and jobs; you place restrictions on the indigenous population; you box them into Bantustans, fence them in, herd them like cattle at checkpoints until their lives become a daily nightmare. It’s a plunder of the land and its people. 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. The Palestinians who have chosen to remain hold on with their fingernails to their land, to their culture and society.