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

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

“Refugees are like seeds that scatter in the wind, and land in different soils that become their reluctant homes.”

It was only years later that I came to understand that identity is where your heart lies. It is not the product of official documents, or genealogy. In my case, it was fashioned by love, by stories, by a sense of belonging, all inspired by my mother, who like the lonely loon paddling on the lake at night, sang her mournful song about Palestine from the day I was born.

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?

The things we take for granted in America are things Palestinians have to fight for every day of their lives.

Before 1948, we were all Palestinian nationals—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Palestinians. These streets would have been our streets, for all, regardless of religion or ethnicity.

It’s the spirits of all the past owners and not the tectonic plates that will one day make the earth rumble, because those spirits are alive in their houses, and are intertwined in the wrought-iron fences, cast in the stone wall and balconies.

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.

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.”

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?

Erasure is a form of oppression.

Israeli families now live in these Palestinian homes. I wonder how they have come to terms with the tragedies imprinted in the stone walls and ceramic tiles. At night what do they dream of? Can they make out the silent shadows on the walls, shadows of Palestinian families packing their suitcases in a hurry, children snatched from their beds, mothers weeping in silence?

I wondered how the present Israeli owners go past the initialed gates each day only to be reminded that their house belongs to someone else.

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?

However, when the Zionists came to this land their primary focus was to turn it into their own. From the start, theirs was a vision of displacing the local population, which was seen as backward, hostile, and alien, and replacing it with Jews from all over the world.

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.

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.

Why is fighting back in desperation when inhumane measures are inflicted upon you considered immoral?

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

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.

“Suitcases always open the floodgates,” my father said wisely. 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.

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.

Any property could be purchased, but did it make it morally a legitimate sale? Wasn’t the colonial ideology based on taking the land away from the native people to build a colonial empire? Was Elan using the point of purchasing land in Palestine for a kibbutz as a way to get around the ethical issue of taking someone else’s land, someone’s home, identity, and future?

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.

Did they fear that after living among Palestinians in my native land I’d return knowing what was truly happening on the ground?

What was truly ironic was that in Palestine where most Palestinians didn’t enjoy freedom was where I found it for myself.