Living the Nakba

In his memoir Going Home (2020), the Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh recalls taking a walk around Ramallah and standing outside the house where his father, Aziz Shehadeh, was murdered. “In my sixty-sixth year I’ve come back to visit where you last lived to tell you how much I miss knowing and befriending you,” he imagines telling him.

I used to think that you and I had such different temperaments we could never get along. Now I realize how fundamentally similar we were….

As I stand on the street below and look up at the glass balcony, how I wish I could climb the stairs and go in with you and sit there together in the sun.

The man he is addressing lived through the Palestinian struggle’s major milestones of the twentieth century. Aziz was born in Bethlehem in 1912, ten years before the League of Nations approved the British Mandate, which facilitated Zionist immigration to Palestine in increasing numbers. During the 1920s and 1930s successive waves of Jewish settlers arrived, purchased land, set up institutions such as the Histadrut (a trade union that hired and organized exclusively Jewish labor), armed themselves, and incrementally dispossessed Palestinians, particularly in rural areas, of land they had lived on and cultivated for generations.

In his twenties Aziz, who had graduated from law school in Jerusalem, founded a private law firm in the port city of Jaffa. In addition to its commercial work, the firm offered pro bono representation, including for Palestinian rebels accused of participating in the 1936–1939 Great Revolt against the mandate and Zionist immigration. In urban centers like Jaffa, Palestinian intellectuals paid close attention to the writings and speeches of Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, who in 1937 insisted that “our right to Palestine, all of it, is unassailable and eternal.” But those urbanites trusted that either British or Arab leaders would intervene and ultimately allow for Palestinian self-determination.

It was not to be. In 1948 Aziz became one of over 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homeland by Zionist militias, a historic rupture that decimated Palestine and came to be known as the Nakba (catastrophe). With his wife and daughter he fled Jaffa for his father-in-law’s summer house in the Ramallah hills, which by the end of the war had come under Jordanian rule. There Aziz strove to recover Palestinian land and property, lobbying Jordanian authorities and organizing for the implementation of UN Resolution 194, which passed in December 1948. “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours,” it stated, “should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

When Raja was a child in the 1950s, he tells us, he rebelled against Aziz and allied himself with his mother, Widad, a glamorous, proud woman who hailed from Jaffa’s upper class and felt she had lost Aziz to politics. Yet Aziz was still the center of his world. In his twenties Raja joined his father’s law firm, which by then was fighting on behalf of its Palestinian clients to challenge Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. In 1979 Raja cofounded al-Haq, the preeminent human rights organization documenting and resisting Israel’s systemic abuses of international humanitarian law. From an early age, he remembers, he saw his father not only as a political model but also as an embodiment of masculinity. “I remember how mystified I felt when as a young man I stood by the sink and watched him shave,” he writes in an earlier autobiography, Strangers in the House (2002). “The ritual symbolized the world of men and I yearned for him to take me along. But I waited in vain.”

Shehadeh’s family members were among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled in 1948 who came under Jordanian rule in the West Bank. Others ended up in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip. Thousands, like my family, fled to Lebanon; others to Jordan; still others to Syria; many went farther afield. Some, meanwhile, successfully resisted expulsion and stayed within the state that emerged where Palestine once stood, which called itself Israel. They came to be known as “48ers.”

About a quarter of the 48ers were internally displaced during the Nakba, their homes turned over to Jewish settlers, cordoned off by the military, or destroyed. They were considered “present absentees,” a euphemism that seemingly legalized the state’s takeover of their land and assets. In those exceptional instances when the Supreme Court of Israel allowed Palestinians to go back to their houses, the army often blew up the villages instead. In at least one instance, the writer Fida Jiryis recounts, the stones and rubble were used to pave roads.

Jiryis comes from a family who remained. As she shows in her memoir, Stranger in My Own Land, these Palestinians found themselves embedded in a Jewish community that had no idea about their plight. They were either rendered invisible or seen as alien enemies. Her father, Sabri Jiryis, was ten when he watched his parents and grandparents realize that village after village around their home in Fassouta, a predominantly Christian village in the Galilee, was falling to Zionists who were either shooting the inhabitants or trucking them to Lebanon, then looting their houses. Fassouta was captured by the Israeli army in October 1948 along with most of the surrounding villages, “but fate intervened,” Jiryis writes, and it was not depopulated like its immediate neighbors Dayr al-Qassi and Suhmata.

For Sabri Jiryis and Aziz Shehadeh, that initial episode of ethnic cleansing would shape the course of their lives, their political organizing, and their intellectual labor. Both of them treated the law as their entry point into political engagement. In the confused aftermath of the Nakba, Aziz sprang into action, fighting for justice for Palestinians in the West Bank. More than two decades his junior, Sabri eventually launched his political work from within Israel, challenging the military regime that had been imposed on the Palestinians who stayed. After the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, three years later, both men continued their political work, each in his own way contributing to the Palestinian revolution against Israeli domination.

Both of them likewise grieved as the Nakba continued to break their homes apart. Palestinians have long argued that the Nakba is not a finite event but an ongoing process of violent dispossession. Since Zionists started colonizing Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, our social fabric as Palestinians has been torn apart, our land occupied, our archives and communal knowledge erased, our loved ones murdered, exiled, or incarcerated, and our people dispersed from their homeland.

This violence is a kind of patrimony: it wedges itself into family life and forces silence within the home. Raja Shehadeh grew up knowing long absences but never the details of his father’s service to the cause; he saw only relentless work, a stern demeanor, moments of rage, and an unyielding cynicism that he could not quite place. Nor could he truly grapple with his mother’s perennial dissatisfaction. Their entire world was a product of the Nakba, and its violence persisted, unresolved, at the margins of their intimate lives. “For a long time I thought it was father’s politics that distanced me from him,” Shehadeh reflects in his latest memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. “Now I am aware that a more important reason was the politics within the family.”

Is it ever possible to separate the two? As we grow up we start seeing behind our parents’ façade of normalcy. When we discover the pain they live with, we want to assuage it and sometimes to avenge it—to fight for healing. It was an inherited “public spirit” and “sense of responsibility,” Shehadeh writes, that animated his work at al-Haq: “I had the illusion,” he tells his absent father in Going Home, “that it would be possible to achieve personal justice for you through the collective struggle.” How does a little boy watching his father shave one morning come to terms with such a burden? Shehadeh is far from the only Palestinian to have grown up with this dilemma. We inherit the tragedy of losing a just fight. We want to reverse that loss, to give our parents back what is theirs and reclaim what is ours. This is how we learn to love.

Aziz was murdered in 1985. His killer was a Palestinian man who had been squatting on land owned by the Anglican church near Hebron, and whom Aziz was evicting on behalf of his client. Shehadeh would later discover that the Israeli police had evidence against the culprit but declined to investigate him. (“This made me suspect,” he writes, “that the murderer was either collaborating with or under the protection of the Israeli authorities.”) Raja was thirty-four. In the decades since, he has written often about his relationship with his father, bitterly ruing the old silences between them. Apart from traveling, Aziz was often consumed by his own burdens. Even though they worked at the same practice, Shehadeh had never, he says in this memoir, fully understood the breadth of his father’s political contributions.

Then one day a friend gave Shehadeh a photocopy of the 1944 edition of the Palestinian telephone directory for Jaffa/Tel Aviv, including listings for his grandfather and for his father’s law firm. “Emotion overwhelmed me,” he writes. “All that history of their life in Jaffa has been denied.” He finally felt ready to read through his father’s archive.

These heavy folders of documents lie at the center of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, which doubles as a biography of a formidable Palestinian thinker and an account of Shehadeh’s effort to understand a man with whom he never fully connected in life. What the younger Raja was unable to say to Aziz he conveys by imagining the conversations they might have had, sharing his thinking on his father’s cases, comparing their approaches to the law—an arduous, humbling effort to document Aziz’s legacy.

In Ramallah, days turned to years as the Shehadeh family came to realize that they would be unable to return. “My father left Jaffa…certain that in the worst case, even if other parts of Palestine were lost to the Jewish state, Jaffa would return to Arab hands,” Shehadeh writes. It was, after all, designated to form part of the Palestinian state under the UN partition plan of 1947. But his hopes were quickly dashed as the scale of the Nakba became apparent; Jordan and Israel had colluded “to share between them the country that was Palestine and to prevent the refugees from returning to their former homes, making them settle permanently in an expanded Jordan instead.”

Aziz and others began plotting their return. In 1949, three months after UN Resolution 194 passed, he founded the Arab Refugee Congress along with eight hundred delegates elected from across the West Bank, representing around 300,000 refugees, excluding those in Gaza. Initially focused on emergency humanitarian relief, the organization soon began advocating for the UN to codify the dispossessed Palestinians’ right to return to their land. Armed with this international mandate, the group’s leaders could not concede the finality of their expulsion. “As you are aware,” one of their first letters to the UN Palestine Commission read, “the Arabs own about 150,000 dunums planted with citrus trees, the greater part [of which] is under Jewish control and presumably has not been watered last year.”

Shehadeh sees a “failure of imagination” in his father’s inability to recognize that Palestine had been all but emptied of its inhabitants to make room for strangers, a political reality that no UN resolution could overturn. And yet “how can I be surprised by this failure on the previous generation’s part,” he continues, “when I, who lived through the settlement-building project, never imagined that Israel would get away with this systematic illegal scheme?” The Nakba “must have felt just as incredible to him…as the changes that I was witnessing under Israeli law seemed to me.”

This insight healed earlier frustrations. Shehadeh recalls that his own human rights work, even after he founded al-Haq, inspired little enthusiasm from his father—a response he at first attributed to patriarchal disapproval or competitiveness. Going through his father’s papers, Raja understands that Aziz had been bitterly disappointed by the limitations of their work. As a younger man Raja spent endless hours writing documents that proved Israeli violations “as if everything rested upon it,” he writes. “But none of it really mattered, neither the papers nor the resolutions. They were read by no one and ended up gathering dust on the shelves of the UN. My father knew this but spared me the revelation.”

Some of Aziz’s legal campaigns met with more success. Between 1949 and 1950 the Israeli state moved to seize accounts that Palestinians had held at local branches of foreign banks, cutting off refugees from their savings. British courts, overseeing a case that involved the London-based bank Barclays, ruled in favor of Israel, but in 1954 Aziz took on a Palestinian client seeking her deposit in Jaffa and lodged a case against Barclays in a Jordanian court. Jordan had by then annexed the West Bank, but unlike Britain, it did not formally recognize Israel; under Jordanian law, Jaffa remained occupied territory.

To the chagrin of the “haughty and overbearing” British lawyer representing the bank, Shehadeh writes, the Jordanian court ruled in favor of Aziz’s client, bringing the young lawyer much fame. Before long the Jordanian regime would target him for his high-profile advocacy on behalf of Palestinians: four years later, after a coup in Iraq overthrew King Faisal II, who was related to the Jordanian ruling family, the Hashemite regime rounded up nationalists, antimonarchists, and other politically active people and placed some, including Aziz, in the al-Jafr prison in the Jordanian desert. He stayed there for two months.

While Aziz Shehadeh was advocating from Ramallah for the right of return, Sabri Jiryis was living as a second-class citizen in his own country. In 1945 the British, who had ruled Palestine since 1920, enacted a set of what they called Defence (Emergency) Regulations, which permitted them to establish military tribunals for trying and detaining civilians, demolish homes, impose curfews, and initiate expansive search and seizure operations. When the young Israeli state set down its laws, it carried over many of these regulations, which it used to impose a military regime on all Palestinians who had become Israeli citizens. The country’s leaders justified the move on security grounds. But as Shehadeh notes, a long-hidden document from a 1956 committee report made clear that the military government existed for another reason: to “ensure, directly and indirectly,” that Palestinian lands not yet occupied by Jewish settlers were “not lost to the state.”

Even as Israel extended citizenship and nominal suffrage to the 48ers, its military regime systematically disenfranchised them, subjecting them to restrictions on movement, employment, and education and preventing them from leaving their villages or pursuing everyday activities without military permits.¹ The result was the confinement of Palestinian life to urban centers or villages—an early instance of enclosure tactics that the state would later use to put Gaza under siege and transform the West Bank into an archipelago of Palestinian islands in a sea of Jewish settlement.

In 1957 Jiryis resolved to study law, his daughter writes, and became one of fewer than fifty Palestinians admitted to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Two years later, during his legal studies, he cofounded a group called al-Ard (The Land) along with a few friends, including a teacher and poet from Fassouta and a merchant from Nazareth. Al-Ard was in a difficult position. It had to advocate for Palestinians within the confines of the Zionist state even as it recognized that the broader Palestinian predicament was defined by statelessness. In its first publications, the group “stressed the right of the Palestinians to their own state, and the belonging of this state to the greater Arab nation,” Jiryis writes. It also called on Israel to give Palestinians equal rights by dismantling military rule and letting refugees return.

The Israeli authorities did not take kindly to these demands. At first the organization’s applications for a license to publish went unanswered. When al-Ard printed leaflets anyway and started gathering a readership, the state intervened, blocking publication, issuing fines and arrest warrants, placing the founders under house arrest, and denying them movement permits.

Al-Ard appealed these decisions, but as long as it lacked an official permit its activities would be considered illegal. Attempts by the group to register its activities in different forms, including as an LLC or as a political party called the Socialist List, came to naught. On six occasions the resulting legal battles went to the Supreme Court, which in one ruling noted that the organization was “an absolute and utter condemnation of the existence of the State of Israel.” Finally, in 1965, the court argued that even though it could find nothing against al-Ard that would merit blocking the group from running candidates, its mandate required it to deviate from the law to maintain “defensive democracy.” One of the justices compared the group’s proposal to “someone who wants to throw a bomb in the Knesset.” In the end more than 150 of al-Ard’s members and supporters were imprisoned in administrative detention.

By following such cases, Palestinians in Israel quickly came to understand that Israeli democracy and justice applied only to Jews. Most Palestinians worked to adapt to their new reality, and Jiryis notes that some went so far as collaborating with the regime to track down their politically active compatriots. Sabri fretted about traveling from Haifa, where he was living, to visit his family in Fassouta: he knew that he was under surveillance and suspected his neighbors would report him if he traveled without a permit. When Sabri asked Hanneh, Jiryis’s mother, for her hand in marriage, his future mother-in-law asked her, “Why do you want this one?… His work is bothersome, he’s in politics and he’s in and out of prison! Do you really want this life?”

Israel ended its domestic military rule in 1966, but politically active Palestinians remained under surveillance and were frequently placed under house arrest and curfews, restricting them to their towns or cities of residence. Among them was Sabri, who months earlier had published his first book, The Arabs in Israel, a study of the mechanics of Israel’s internal colonization and military rule. His findings would become still more urgent a year later, when Israel started transposing the same structures of domination onto the newly occupied territories.

After Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war, Aziz Shehadeh found himself for the first time under the direct rule of the regime he had thus far opposed from the outside. At the start of the occupation, feeling betrayed that the Arab regimes had failed the Palestinians, Aziz decided “that there was no longer any time for wavering or concealing their true wishes: the Palestinians had to take the initiative.” He began to argue that the only way to safeguard Palestinian rights was to concede the loss of most of historic Palestine, recognize the state of Israel, and lobby for the creation of a Palestinian state.

This was a controversial position. Palestinians had consistently stood against the partitioning of their land, and the PLO called for armed resistance for the full liberation of Palestine. Aziz was not categorically opposed to the PLO, but he worried that Arab governments like Jordan’s remained too subservient to Western powers and did not have the Palestinians’ best interests at heart; he was also unconvinced that a military solution would succeed and weary of the notion that Israel could be dismantled. Without a state, he feared, Palestinians would always be muzzled on the international stage or have others speak on their behalf: “By God, how can there be honorable living when the right to think and speak is denied?” Building on the 1947 partition plan, he started advocating for a plan to accept partition and achieve Palestinian self-determination in the occupied territories. He took his proposal to Israelis, American Jews, Palestinians, and other interested parties.

The backlash was swift. Palestinian leaders within the PLO and others in Jordan and the broader diaspora saw Aziz’s readiness to partition Palestine as treasonous. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, called the establishment of a Palestinian state on a portion of their homeland “a joke.” The Jordanian regime, which wanted to retain its power to represent Palestinians while advancing its own agenda of controlling the West Bank, felt threatened. In a conference held in Jordan to debate the future path of the struggle in 1970, Emile Ghoury, the secretary-general of the Arab Higher Committee (and my great-uncle), called the advocacy for a “so-called Palestinian state” a “travesty.”

The debate was shut down at a time when it might have been worth engaging with various strategic alternatives. In Shehadeh’s view, “the obedient officials and lackeys” who opposed Aziz’s proposals played—knowingly or otherwise—into Jordan’s hands. Two decades later the PLO would indeed compromise and accept partition. Shehadeh imagines telling his father that history has proved him wrong, that even after the Palestinians conceded, they remain stateless and bereft, that the occupier has won. “Do you really believe,” he imagines Aziz answering, “it was inevitable that history should have taken that course and that it couldn’t have been otherwise?”

It is an impossible question to answer, and Shehadeh does not try to. It’s unlikely, however, that Aziz’s desire for a negotiated peace would have been met. He himself acknowledged that Israel was “deliberately pursuing a strategy of procrastination” in the newly occupied territories, buying itself time to colonize the land without formally annexing it. Aziz had hoped to use Israel’s demographic challenge—millions more Palestinians had just fallen under its control in 1967—as leverage to negotiate for statehood. Yet the Israeli state upholds Jewish supremacy even now that Palestinians constitute a majority of the people living under its control.² It does so by separating Palestinians from one another, confining them in fragmented urban clusters, and stratifying their rights using a range of legal categories inferior to those assigned to Israeli Jews. Palestinians will, the promise goes, achieve statehood one day—a day that never arrives.

By the end of 1970, after suffering more than a decade of persecution at home and realizing the limits of his work within the Israeli system, Sabri Jiryis had joined the Palestinian nationalist movement Fatah and self-exiled to Beirut, where in 1978 he became the director of the organization’s Palestine Research Center. Moving to Lebanon, seeing the sprawling refugee camps, and engaging with the vast Palestinian diaspora, “he began, for the first time, to grasp the true dimensions of Palestinian dispersion,” his daughter writes. It was a time of revolutionary fervor, and Sabri joined the likes of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, the writer Imad Shaqqour, and the historian Elias Shoufani to form the intellectual heart of the PLO in Beirut.

“From his study of Zionism and knowledge of Israel’s inner workings,” Jiryis writes of her father, “he believed that the state wanted neither peace nor negotiations to achieve it.” And yet Sabri, like Aziz, nonetheless maintained the pragmatic line that Palestinians might one day have to recognize the state of Israel and accept partition. He held on to this position from within the PLO, believing that its revolutionary pressure might shift the balance of forces and coerce Israel into negotiations.

He was walking a fine line. “Realism may require recognition of the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine and that this fact be taken into account in seeking a settlement,” Sabri wrote in 1977, shortly after the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, broke ranks with other Arab governments and visited Israel. “But this can never mean approving the expansionist and exclusivist tendencies of Zionism.” How, though, could one recognize Israel as a Jewish state without legitimating Zionism? Shoufani, for his part, insisted that Zionism’s expansionism could never be checked and held out against any kind of settlement. Sabri’s commitment to a negotiated peace was widely vilified; some of his comrades in the PLO called him “the Israeli.”

In the last years of the 1960s the PLO had operated out of Jordan. Then, in 1970, during what became known as “Black September,” the Hashemite government kicked out the Palestinian fighters, and the PLO relocated to Beirut. Various factions of the PLO expanded their armed activities throughout the 1970s, attacking Israeli targets in the state, the occupied territories, and abroad. In 1982 Israel responded by invading Lebanon, sending more than 40,000 troops into the country with the stated aim of dismantling the PLO and the unstated aim of working with Christian Phalangists to turn Lebanon into a client state.

The Israeli army subjected West Beirut to overwhelming saturation bombing and put it under a sixty-eight-day siege. “Beirut turned into a hellhole,” Jiryis writes. That August the PLO’s fighters, who numbered as many as 14,000, were forced out of the capital, leaving behind tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians; a month later between eight hundred and three thousand of them were massacred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Phalangists with Israeli oversight and American complicity. Jiryis relates that the IDF magazine BaMahane had quoted a Phalangist telling an Israeli officer, “The question we are putting to ourselves is—how to begin, by raping or killing?” In the first ten weeks of the invasion of Lebanon, 19,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

The Israeli army also targeted Palestinian history, culture, and knowledge. When its troops occupied the Palestine Research Center in September, they “loaded thirty-five trucks” with its archival holdings, Jiryis writes. In the process “they broke the remaining furniture and equipment, tore documents, left profane language on the walls, and defecated on the floors.” Five months later an Israeli-backed militant group set off a car bomb outside the research center, killing over a dozen civilians. Among them was Hanneh, Jiryis’s mother.

Born in Beirut in 1973, Fida Jiryis spent her early life in exile. Shortly after Hanneh’s murder, Sabri moved with his children to Cyprus, where they lived for a decade. Then, in the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo Accords, about ten of the Palestinian citizens of Israel who had joined the PLO were allowed to return, including Sabri. Fida and her brother joined him. “At twenty-two years old, I set foot in my country for the first time,” she remembers. “I wondered where the Arabic was, where the Palestinians were.” The years in exile “seemed to fade as memories of my mother came vividly to the surface.” Walking through the streets of Fassouta for the first time, “I felt connected to her, again, felt her almost by my side, holding my hand.”

Returning to her homeland, Jiryis saw the facts of her dispossession everywhere. In Haifa, where she worked on Ha’Atzmaut (Independence) Road, fewer than four thousand of the original 70,000 Palestinian inhabitants remained after 1948. “This fact sat on my chest like a boulder every morning as I got off the bus,” she writes. Everywhere around her were whispers of loss; it was like “being in a huge graveyard while everyone else ignored the tombstones.”

Palestinians, she observed, were becoming accustomed to living as outsiders in their workplaces, schools, social settings, and homes. Poverty was rampant, and people struggled to access a proper education: their schoolteachers, appointed with approval from the secret service, could not teach them their own language or history, including that of the Nakba. The Palestinian writer Anton Shammas, also from Fassouta, wrote in 1983 that “the system of Arab education in Israel, at least in my time, produced tongueless people…without a cultural past and without a future. There is only a makeshift present and attenuated personality.” Because most Palestinians do not serve in the army, a condition for professional mobility in Israeli society, those who graduated were only able to get menial service jobs: Jiryis writes that “the Hebrew term ‘avoda aravit,’ Arab work, was commonly used to denote work of poor or slapdash quality—despite the sad irony that most of the State of Israel was built by Palestinian hands.”

Jiryis relates that when she and her then husband were looking for an apartment, landlords openly refused to rent to them; one neighborhood had a sign reading NO DOGS, NO ARABS. At work she found herself dumbfounded by casual racism: “You’re not like other Arabs, eh? You’ve made something of yourself.” When she invites a colleague for dinner at her place, the evening is strained: “Lisa apologized, telling me that her husband had served in a high-ranking position in the Israeli army and was uncomfortable visiting an Arab home.”

Many Palestinians in Israel cope with these humiliations by acquiescing to the silences around them. “People in Fassouta reacted either with bewildered silence or acute discomfort when I mentioned Palestine,” Jiryis writes. She, however, could see Palestine all around her. The traces of destroyed villages were still visible. “Evergreen trees were chosen over indigenous ones,” she writes, “because they concealed the rubble, year-round.”

Palestinians are still living the Nakba, now accelerated into unthinkable horror with the genocide in Gaza. The rate of the killing of civilians is one of the highest this century, with over 40,000 Palestinians killed in ten months. The UN records that more than 10,000 of the identified victims have been children, while local authorities and regional media, such as Al Jazeera, report that the figure is over 16,500, with many more thousands yet to be identified.³ Schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, graveyards, universities, libraries, cultural institutions, bakeries, and entire neighborhoods have been obliterated.

In Gaza, the Zionist effort to erase Palestine is at its starkest. It is excruciating to witness, even as we know that the Nakba is not confined to these moments of spectacular violence. It persists in the relentless grind of colonization, in our mundane everyday routines, and in the ghosts that haunt our domestic lives. Many of us find that we can only get along by sharing our collective grief; Palestine becomes a story recounted down the generations, a bedtime tale told, a special dish prepared. We feel helpless to do anything beyond keeping the memory of Palestine alive. Others among us have an overwhelming urge to act, a need to do something not only to end injustice but also to secure familial validation—to affirm our parents and grandparents and be affirmed in return. We come to see ourselves as part of a multigenerational struggle for a homeland, a struggle that stretches beyond any of our lifetimes but still shapes our own search for belonging, our most intimate sense of self.

My own father died suddenly at the end of 2022, and I was left reeling. In the weeks and months after his death I clung to the thought that I had been midway through a conversation with him about home, belonging, and return. I could not fathom how he could have left before it was over, when there was so much left unsaid. His mother, my grandmother, had told me that before the Nakba she commuted weekly from Haifa to Beirut, the city to which she was exiled and in which she died. When my father was growing up in Beirut, the promise of that return journey was seared into his imagination as he looked south toward the city his parents had fled, just down the coast but entirely unreachable.

He rarely spoke about that loss, but it animated his entire being and, by extension, his family’s. One day, a few years before he died, I left London, where I was living, and moved to Palestine. I was walking steps that should have been his, living dreams that were not entirely my own. Ultimately, like Shehadeh, I failed to bring my father justice before time ran out.

Without a land to call our own, our roots in the diaspora are in the spirit of Palestine, which lives in the memories of our elders. As survivors of the first Nakba and their descendants die, we risk losing contact with that spirit. But there is some comfort to be found in these books. They remind us that we can strive to be worthy custodians of the precious inheritance our forebears have passed on to succeeding generations, until the day that justice can be claimed on their behalf.