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

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

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 holding an entire population in bondage.

But the Palestinian spirit is resolute. Against all odds the Palestinians have survived the Occupation, and over seventy years of displacement and dispossession. They are not thriving, for who could thrive economically and emotionally when a twenty-five-foot concrete Wall is erected outside your window, separating you from your crops and your family, let alone blocking your share of sunlight? And who could thrive when turned back from a checkpoint to enter Jerusalem for medical treatment? And who could thrive when your home is demolished in the middle of the night and you are only given a half an hour’s notice to carry your sleeping children out of bed?

The things we take for granted in America are things Palestinians have to fight for every day of their lives. Yet they continue to battle the injustices inflicted upon them in non-violent ways, by getting up every morning to tend to their office jobs, their sheep, their olive trees, their students, their patients. 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. They stand quietly and obediently at checkpoints that divi...

I saw how living under these conditions could either turn you into a sacrificial lamb or a bully. Your good nature begins to slowly erode, and eventually you either give up or imitate your aggressor.

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.

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?

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.

Despite the Israeli Occupation, Palestinian children will grow up to become confident adults because their parents love them.

You can’t live a good life if you’re constantly hypervigilant. A little denial is not a bad thing.

I remembered from my readings that all communities that experienced “historical trauma”— a term describing how colonization and violence affect families and communities for generations—have long weathered anxiety and hyperactive vigilance. The parents attending the seminar were anxious and hypervigilant. They wore their hearts on their sleeves and trusted us with their most vulnerable selves.

Next I thought of my students in California, or most of the fifth-graders I knew, and how invincible most of them felt, how easy it was for most of them to separate from their parents for a sleepover or camping trip with a friend. Being ten in California means you’re starting to test your wings and fly out of the nest; but being ten in Ramallah means when you were five you experienced military curfews, military tanks in your driveways, and Israeli soldiers bashing at your door in the middle of the night and searching your house, only to lock you and your parents in one room for long hours. So how can you, as a Ramallah ten-year-old, begin...

Research suggests that people do not change in isolation, that in fact they need their community to believe in them in order to change.

Before 1948, Jaffa was the largest and most prosperous Arab city in Palestine with a population of around 70,000. After the UN Partition Plan of 1947, however, Zionist forces terrified Jaffa’s civilian population into fleeing. By May of 1948 only 3,650 Palestinians remained in Jaffa. Jewish immigrants moved into the vacated Palestinian homes and the remaining Palestinians are now boxed into the old ‘Ajami neighborhood. Most of Jaffa now stands derelict, unkempt, and in ruins.

The first landmark to greet us was the famous clock tower. A plaque in Hebrew hung on one side of the tower. I knew from my extensive readings that the tower had been built during the late Ottoman period to honor the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sultan Abdel Hamid II’s reign. I explained it to our friends. However, a young Israeli man, who was standing nearby, corrected me. No, he claimed, it was built in 1948 in the memory of the Israeli soldiers who were under attack. 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?

Thickets of prickly pear cacti, originally brought from Andalusia after 1492, were often planted by Palestinian farmers and herders as fences to keep their crops and animals safe. Even after the destruction and depopulation of more than 500 Palestinian villages by the Israeli forces during the war of 1948, the cactus plants keep sprouting again and again, encircling the ruins of Palestinian villages. In Palestine, the cactus, sabir, stands for patience and resilience.

On July 10, 1948, in a systematic campaign to depopulate the villages of Palestine to achieve the Zionist dream, Israeli armed forces drove out the villagers of Qula. In September of the same year the Israeli forces bulldozed the village, leaving it in ruins, and planted a forest of European pines to conceal its existence. That night in bed, safe in David’s arms, I told him about the screams I heard in Qula.

“The central issue” my grandfather referred to was that Palestinians were fighting against British colonialism, and they perceived European Jewish nationalism as part and parcel of that colonialism. Palestinians viewed Jewish nationalism as precluding their independence, equality, and freedom in their own homeland. Tragically, they were prophetic. Almost one hundred years after the Buraq Uprising, “the central issue” remains the same today, although the players have different names. The British have left, the Zionists have become Israelis, but the tensions which persist today are based on the same Palestinian fears that Israeli settlements will deprive them of their homeland and shatter their hopes for political liberation and equality.

As I marched back home from Talbiyyeh, I thought that even though my mother, like the rest of the Talbiyyeh Arab residents, lost her Jerusalem home, she was lucky enough to have been able to recover from her loss and build a new life for herself. Rural Palestinians, whose whole villages were destroyed, had been less fortunate and were now living in crowded, impoverished refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, waiting to return home, waiting for justice to prevail.

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.

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.

I remembered how one time a Jewish woman in my writers’ group had written a piece glorifying the Israelis. I contacted her the following week and asked her if we could meet for coffee to discuss her piece. She knew I was Palestinian but had no idea how her piece had affected me. When we sat down to talk, I shared my story and my hurt, but she blasted me with all the misdeeds the Arabs had committed against the Israelis. It was a one-sided conversation, a one-sided victimhood. My reality and the reality of my people were never acknowledged. I had made her uncomfortable with my story and I paid the price for it.

For all those years, since 1948, the Palestinians have been holding on to their house keys as proof of their ownership, of their right of return, of the massive home robbery inflicted upon them. And yet how ironic that even though I have the legitimate symbolic keys to Jerusalem it was Ariela, my Israeli friend, who opened the doors for me.

Back in California, I was struck by how orderly life was. Traffic lights worked and were respected; pedestrians walked on sidewalks and not in the middle of the streets; people in shops waited in line for their turn to be served, and the world was quieter. No tooting horns; no church bells; no calls for prayer. It felt like a disconnected world, a silent world. Even though I like structure and order, 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. I felt satiated and indulged all the time, like having a full tummy after Christmas dinner.

Israel has been controlling and restricting the entry of Palestinians into Israel and has claimed that the blockade on Gaza is in retaliation for the rockets fired on the residents of Sderot, an Israeli city less than a mile away from Gaza. Yet, the world’s major human rights and aid groups have denounced Israel’s stringent siege of Gaza, which has plunged the population into a serious humanitarian crisis. The blockade was a form of punishment imposed on a million and a half civilians.

In light of the work I do with children in schools, and conflict resolution, I believe in using peaceful and non-violent communication to resolve interpersonal conflicts. Yet how would I react if I were marginalized, threatened, disenfranchised, brutalized? In all worthwhile humanitarian causes there is a place for differing methods of accomplishment. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t alone in creating the civil rights movement. He also needed Malcolm X, who used other means—violent means—to help fight the same battle and to achieve the same end. When do you stop trying to resolve things peacefully and use force instead? What makes a person cross that line? I was conflicted.

I am ashamed to be living in a country that advocates justice, democracy, and human rights, yet has been spineless, and even colluding, with the injustices inflicted on the people of Palestine.

During that time, we didn’t have a full picture of what was happening. We didn’t understand that we were systematically being driven out of our neighborhoods in order for the Zionists to incorporate West Jerusalem, which had been part of Palestine per the UN Partition Plan into Israel. Every day more houses in the neighborhood were attacked and bombed—the houses of the Shahines, Anabtawis, Campbell-Browns, Budeiris, and Freijs, to name a few. Every day brought another casualty and more fear for the remaining of us. Were we going to be next?

Now, there was no one to protect our homes, you see. The vehicle drove for hours until it finally stopped in Akka, near Haifa, where Daoud and the other men were locked up in the former British prison fortress. After a few weeks, the men were driven to Atlit, an old British Mandate detention camp, now turned into a labor camp, on the coast south of Haifa, where they remained prisoners for almost a year.

With her chin jutted out and her eyes twinkling with keenness, she asked, “Amos, where do you come from?” When he answered, “Tel Aviv,” she didn’t let him get away with it. “But before that, where did your family come from?” He reluctantly offered that his father came from Germany and his mother from Russia. Mama didn’t make a comment, but I knew what she was thinking—“You come from Germany and Russia, and you claim this is home! Give me a break!”

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. As for me, I’ve always lived my life not wanting to grant my aggressors the power of destroying who I am because I know that hatred corrodes the container it’s in. Israel might have stolen my home, but it wasn’t going to steal my soul.

“Certain plants that grow in this park, such as the dark-purple iris (Iris atropurpurea), are endemic to this area. Wildlife in the park includes fox, badger, porcupine, bee-eater, and songbirds.” Palestinians were also once endemic to the region, but unlike the dark-purple iris, the fox, the badger, the porcupine, the bee-eater, and songbirds, they were not protected but uprooted and discarded.