A Palestinian woman harvests olive trees Tribune Content Agency
I live in a constant heartache of homesickness, forced into exile at birth and remained so through apartheid. However, my story is far from unique.
Today, about 6 million Indigenous Palestinians are refugees exiled from their homeland.
In 1948 during the Nakba, about 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and became refugees during the genocide and ethnic cleansing of 531 villages, leading to the creation of the Isreali state with the help of the British.
Palestinians were promised they’d quickly be returned to their homes when they left for refuge, but their wait has dragged on 76 years as they still hold the keys to their homes in Palestine.
These refugees of 1948 have not returned since. Neither do their descendants since Israel has exiled generations from entering. This means, because my grandparents were refugees, I am not allowed to travel to my homeland to live in my ancestral home.
Exiled Palestinians are deprived of our ancestors’ land, olive trees, mountains, and seas. We are robbed of memories and freedoms that could have existed within our lifetimes and instead shrouded in grief and pain.
Our grandparents have grown old still hopeful of returning back to Palestine after being expelled as children. This is how the “key” necklace has developed into a symbol of resistance which has lasted generations – the key of the right of return of all refugees and descendants.
Millions of us are separated, spread out into different foreign countries, and finding ourselves on other Indigenous lands fighting against the same struggle of colonialism.
My grandparents were refugees from the village Al-Lydd, a once thriving village with train stations, its own airport, and about 19,000 people. However, after the Nakba, only 1,052 were allowed to remain in their village. They also experienced large massacres that killed hundreds, including inside mosques.
The Nakba led to the uprooting of 2/3 of the Indigenous Palestinian population, including a series of 70 massacres that killed 15,000.
Although my grandparents were able to flee before these massacres, it hasn’t stopped the trauma of not being able to reenter their historical village that has remained their tribe for generations. This trauma is then inherited by the next generation and so on as the determined cause of right of return has become our focus for almost a century.
Despite being exiled, Palestinians continue to resist through sheer existence and perseverance. We live through our culture, traditions, food, and history. We connect to our land through cooking traditional foods, singing folktale songs, wearing our traditional clothings, and tatreez (Palestinian embroidery).
Tatreez is a big factor in our culture. Before colonialism, we were able to identify which village a Palestinian came from due to the different embroidery patterns and colors on our thobes (traditional dress).
All of these are significant within any culture, but when you are Indigenous, simply existing is a form of resistance within itself. Our culture proves our history and becomes a part of our soul.
Historically, Palestinians have resisted with pen on paper. Whether through documenting stories of their own experience and what they’ve witnessed or by being journalists, writers, or poets – literature itself has been engraved into Palestinian culture.
Poetry has been a coping mechanism for many Palestinian writers – including my own.
In a snippet of one of my poems I wrote years ago called “My Beloved Palestine,” I write, “Forbidden from eating our figs and olives/Planted from our ancestral natives/Our connecting roots brought those buried veins in soil to life/In return feeding us, yet stolen from entering our mouths/A day will come when yearning children will return to their mothers/Grabbing their holy soil once again/And as the soil falls, souls fall through their fingers/Connecting the two once again.”
Many exiled Palestinans commonly feel “guilt” over being in the diaspora, as we don’t face the daily dehumanization of Israel’s military occupation, settler-colonization, apartheid wall and systems, home dispossessions, checkpoints, and many more violations to international law and basic human rights.
This also extends to being a Palestinian-American, as I live in the country that actively supports and funds these war crimes against my people and the continuation of the colonial ruling over my homeland. I’m forced to remain in exile by the country I was born into.
By understanding the struggle and fight against injustice, we need to hear stories by individuals directly impacted by these oppressional systems. This gives a better knowledge of why these movements exist and its determined cause.
It’s crucial to educate yourself on social injustices that are happening around the world, especially when our tax funds are directly making these crimes possible. By doing your part in helping the Free Palestine movement, we are able to break down these systems of oppression through the power of the people.
We are taught as Palestinians to always continue to celebrate life, as we have seen too many graphic massacres to not understand the meaning of death and its presence. So if you meet a Palestinian, there will always be a story that most likely they’d be willing to share about their own family’s history of the Nakba and Palestine.
Reach out and inform yourself of the histories and stories to understand the roots of our struggle – by becoming more involved in these conversations and communities, you can become more aware of the world around you and the impact you can make in the Palestinian fight for freedom and rights.
“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds” quoted by Dinos Christianopoulos resonates when describing the resilience of the Palestinian youths and our histories not to be forgotten.
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