Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home

A look at the history of Palestinian literature shows us that there have been very few books that have collected stories of the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”) between 1948 and the 1990s, the first four decades after the Nakba. After 1967, the PLO shaped the memory of the Nakba, and for years, primarily ideological literature has been written about it, using it as a recruitment tool for the national struggle and as a source of encouragement to carry on the armed struggle. The personal and familial stories of the Nakba, rooted in psychological trauma, remained virtually untold.1A new era of Palestinian literature began in the 1990s, particularly after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the new possibility for a Palestinian state. The new era brought to light biographies and personal accounts of refugees in which they described their struggles coping with trauma associated with the 1948 Nakba. Two decades later, in the 2010s, when it became clear that the Oslo Accords had been a political failure, leading to the PLO’s decline as the representatives of the Palestinian people, another wave of new literary works appeared, primarily written by female Palestinian writers and poets born to refugee families, most of whom lived in the diaspora. They wrote about the hardships and struggles that their families and their people faced in 1948, and their works grew to be well known and widely published. Autobiographies of this kind have also been written in recent years by Palestinians living in the West Bank.These literary works express the growing need of Palestinians in the diaspora and in the homeland to express their voice and to write their own, independent narrative and those of their families and their people. They are trying to prove their survival and their grasp on life to themselves and to the world and to demonstrate their cohesion as individuals and as a collective. Fida Jiryis, the author of Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home, is one of them. She was born in 1973 in Beirut to a family that emigrated from Israel and returned in 1995 following the Oslo Accords. She wrote an autobiography describing the national struggle of Palestinians while weaving in the story of her family and personal experiences.Unlike the others, the author is not a member of a family of refugees from 1948 or displaced persons from 1967, but she is the only one who experienced years of life in exile, in Israel and the West Bank. Her biography, as one who was born in exile and stepped on Israeli soil for the first time only at age twenty-two, is soaked in disappointment in the realities of life and the difficulty of adjusting to a new place, saturated in the futile chase for a home, identity, and a sense of belonging. Upon her arrival, she discovered that the homeland “Palestine,” which she had envisioned through the rose-colored lenses of exile, was lost and indeed entirely under Israeli control. She soon came to the conclusion that Israel was to blame for her situation, and in her writing throughout the book, she expresses deep, unforgiving anger toward Israel.The author tells her story in the first person. It begins in the 1940s, in the Christian village Fassuta nested in the mountains of the Western Galilee close to the border with Lebanon, where her parents were born. Her father, Sabri Jiryis, born in 1938, was witness to the Nakba as a child, when he saw families passing through his grandmother’s house, receiving light provisions, water, and a loaf of bread, on their way north toward Lebanon, toward exile. As a young adult, he studied law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then became a lawyer and a political activist with a developed Arab-nationalist consciousness. Arrests and restrictions on freedom of movement and action, imposed on him by the Israeli military government, led him to voluntarily emigrate to Lebanon in 1970, together with his wife. Sabri joined the ranks of Fatah and managed the PLO’s research center for years. He was designated to be “in charge of Israeli affairs” in the office of Chairman Yasser Arafat, served as his political advisor, and held secret meetings on his behalf with Israeli and Jewish officials, including Nahum Goldman, and influenced the development of pragmatic political thought within the PLO leadership in the 1970s and 1980s.2In her writing, the author fulfills her desire to tell the world her family’s story and her own. The book is a combination of a revealing, detailed, and candid personal story, accompanied by historical and political research of the ongoing conflict with Israel. The use of the first person indicates that the author is not overly committed to the social, religious, and moral prohibitions that characterize the conservative society from which she comes, and therefore she does not censor her self-expression throughout the story—a phenomenon that characterizes writers at the beginning of their journey.The author relies on in-depth interviews she conducted with her family members, particularly with her father, from whom she gleaned a great deal of information about her family history and the Palestinian national struggle. Along with the interviews, she diligently studied the historical developments in the conflict using a variety of primary and secondary sources. The unfolding of the conflict’s history is presented from a one-sided Palestinian point of view, while ignoring the Israeli point of view. This one-sidedness clouds the historical credibility of her work through factual inaccuracies, unbalanced descriptions, and lack of context. For example, the principled and absolute rejection by the Palestinians and the Arab countries of the partition plan into two states (Resolution 181), which was accepted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, is not mentioned at all as contextual background nor as the direct reason for the war of 1948. Another example is the administrative separation of Jordan from the West Bank in the summer of 1988 as a result of the first Intifada, which is a major historical event in the history of the Palestinian people but is not described in the book.As mentioned, the author was born in Beirut in the summer of 1973. She experienced the first decade of her life in the shadow of the protracted civil war in Lebanon and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In a shocking chapter of the book, “The Dark Hour,” she describes how she witnessed the sounds and sights of bombs from the air, sea, and land during the siege of West Beirut. She watched the extensive destruction of buildings and homes, soaked up the smell of gunpowder and burning tires, and saw the bodies of the dead Palestinians and Lebanese. She remembers life under fire and panicked escape attempts toward hiding places during the bombings in the absence of shelters.3In February 1983, ten-year-old Fida lost her mother in a car bomb that was placed under the building housing the PLO research center. At the age of ten, she was left an orphan, lacking the affection and loving embrace of a mother. Her father and his two children were among the last Palestinians to leave Lebanon, a year after PLO forces left, in the summer of 1982. With the move to Cyprus, where the PLO research center was reestablished and managed by her father, a new page turned in Fida’s life. Her father and stepmother (her mother’s sister) took care of her well-being and her needs and made sure to instill the Arab language and culture and Palestinian identity in her. At the age of eighteen, Fida was sent to England to acquire an academic education in the field of computer science. There she met Palestinian students, some of whom were from Ramallah, who were united by a common sense of national identity, solidarity, and a shared destiny.Thus, during the second decade of her life, Fida had the conditions for normal social and emotional development. At the same time, it seems that the horrific scenes of the wars she had experienced as a child in Beirut and the loss of her mother traumatized her and inevitably left their mark on her in her adult life, when she moved with her parents to live in their village in Israel.For Fida, who was born and raised in the diaspora, arriving in the homeland and her family’s village in the Galilee following the Oslo Accords was a sudden and shocking event. Nothing and no one prepared her for experiencing the homeland, which she had imagined since childhood. She didn’t know anything about Israeli society, and it seems that the distinction between “the homeland of Palestine” and “the State of Israel” was not clear to her either. The young Fida had not been prepared for encountering the rural society and its lifestyle. She imagined Palestine in her mind’s eye in rather rosy colors, and she had no idea what reality of life awaited her there. She experienced difficulty in acclimatizing socially and experienced recurring and varied manifestations of psychological distress, restlessness, and irritability.The meeting with the villagers in Fassuta was a cultural clash. Soon Fida noticed the deep cultural and social differences that existed between her, an individualistic young woman educated in the West, and them, as part of a patriarchal, traditional, and conservative society. In the first years after her arrival, she lived in the village but had difficulty adapting to society and to the environment. She suffered from feelings of otherness and alienation.Fida married a relative, a villager, out of desperate hope to gain a sense of belonging. She began working at high-tech companies in Galilee, while experiencing social discrimination firsthand. Among other things, she encountered rejection when she asked to rent an apartment in a Jewish settlement and struggled to find employment due to racism. A deep sense of alienation accompanied her in her daily life while in contact with Jews.After eight years in Fassuta, Fida wanted to open a new chapter in her life: to move away from rural society and Israel and emigrate with her husband to Canada. Feelings of despair and restlessness plagued her frequently in Canada, making it difficult for her to maintain a stable relationship, according to her testimony. There were also financial difficulties that eventually led to the dismantling of her marriage. Her family and the villagers, as Catholic Christians, had a hard time accepting her decision to divorce, even though it was done within a civil framework in Canada.After about six years in Canada, Fida returned to Israel but decided to settle in Ramallah. Her accumulated experiences with the occupied homeland and exposure to the reality of the lives of her people in Israel and the Palestinian Authority solidified her opinion that Palestinians live under Israeli apartheid rule: an existential situation resulting from the Nakba, which is bound to the continued seizure of Palestinian lands and results in daily harm to them. She came to believe that there is no difference between the Nakba of 1948 and the occupation of 1967 and that it is a continuous Israeli policy designed to deprive the Palestinians of their homeland in any possible way.Although the author is not a member of a refugee family and did not experience refugee life or deprivation in the diaspora, she came to the conclusion that she, too, was a victim of the Nakba, and that if it had not happened, her fate as the daughter of a family from an Arab village in Galilee, like the fate of all Palestinians as a people, would necessarily have been different and unmistakably better. Therefore, the identity crisis and the difficulties she encountered in her failed attempts to acclimate to her homeland and build her future there are, to her understanding, an inevitable result of the Nakba and the establishment of Israel, just as those events are also the root causes of the bleak state of the Palestinian people.In her mid-thirties, the author discovered her talent for writing. Short stories she wrote in Arabic about the life of the rural people in Galilee, their customs, and traditions were published in three books. Following this, the autobiography before us, on which the author worked for more than a decade, gave her the feeling that she had embarked on a new path that might grant her, at the end of her fifth decade of life, recognition as a Palestinian writer who represents the cause of the Palestinian people in the conflict with Israel.The author’s worldview regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally pessimistic. The message that emerges from her book is that there is and was no foundation, from the beginning, to imagine that peace could be achieved with Israel, since it is an undemocratic, fascist, and racist state, founded on lands that were stolen from the Palestinians. The optimistic point in her worldview lies in the resilience of the Palestinian people. She describes it as miraculous that Palestinians in their homeland and abroad continue to maintain their collective national identity, despite the Nakba and attempts to separate them from their land and suppress their spirit.It seems that the author’s choice to reveal her hardships is nothing but a reflection of her complete identification with the suffering of the Palestinian people. She blames Israel for this reality, and as a result, her writing lacks self-criticism both on the personal level and on the national level. This prevents her from introspecting and taking responsibility for her destiny and the reality of her life. Self-criticism might have allowed her to examine the weight and place of the traumatic events she experienced in exile as factors that influenced the shaping of her personality and her conduct in her adult life. This might have helped her escape the feeling of victimhood and opened the way for her to plan her life by setting goals and progressing toward achieving them.In the same way, there was room for a degree of self-criticism at the national level, regarding the strategic decisions of the leaders of the Palestinian national movement in their management of the armed and political struggle in the conflict with Israel. For example, the conduct of the PLO factions in Jordan between 1969 and 1971, which led to their deportation to Lebanon; Yasser Arafat siding with Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War (1990–1991), which caused considerable political and economic damage to the PLO; The PLO’s decisions in the Oslo Accords process, which worsened the situation of the Palestinian people; and the fact that the Palestinian arena is divided between a national authority supported by the West and moderate Arab states and an Islamic authority supported by Iran. The fact is that the Palestinian leadership failed in its attempt to lead the nation to realize its national aspirations. By solely blaming Israel with no self-criticism, she fails to recognize Palestinian strategic errors or propose possible changes for the future.It seems that the conflation made by the author between her sad personal story and the situation of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, as victims of the ongoing Nakba and oppressive apartheid rule, is out of place. The fact is that the Arabs in Israel have come to terms with being citizens of the state, and unlike the author, they even recognize its legitimacy to exist, even if they oppose its definition as a Jewish state. Furthermore, they are becoming more and more of a separate community from the rest of the Palestinian people and are constantly striving to receive recognition that they are an integral part of Israeli society. The PLO’s disregard for the Arabs in Israel during the formation of the Oslo Accords further deepened their economic, social, and cultural integration in Israel. As natives of the country, they do not want to live in the country as an inferior minority like their parents and demand to be part of the decision-making processes at the national level as well. Many of them have a hybrid Palestinian and Israeli identity.It may be worth considering whether this hybrid identity offers the possibility for young Arabs in Israel to break free from the traditional frameworks imposed on them by their parents’ generation. For example, Palestinian writers of the second and third generations, who grew up surrounded by a culture that was mobilized for the national struggle and dedicated to memories of the lost homeland, understood that the exclusive preoccupation with the conflict caused the degeneration of Palestinian creativity. These writers, unlike the author, are now determined to open a new chapter and refer to “life itself” in their writing. They seek to bring about a substantial change in the social and cultural structure and refer in their works to painful issues such as the status of women in patriarchal Palestinian society and homophobia.4 Even those who adhere to the national theme today offer a different view of the conflict. For example, the poet and writer Prof. Nidaa Khoury, who has been carrying the flag of the national struggle for decades, calls on the Israeli side and the Palestinian side to stop fighting over territory. She proposes adopting a manner of humanistic and universal thinking that will be adapted for the new era of humanity that operates in a virtual space without borders. Such thinking, she explains, may allow nations to free themselves from the traumas of the past, and the concept of victimhood, and focus on freeing humanity and society from the shackles of tradition and religion.5In conclusion, the author lived up to the challenging task she undertook, to present to the reader the story of her life and family history intertwined with the story of the Palestinian national struggle. The clear and fluent writing in eloquent English, interspersed with moving human stories brought to life with photographs, makes it easy for the reader to devour the hundreds of pages of the book. At the same time, the book perpetuates the image of the author as a victim worthy of compassion and does not contribute to her recovery from the traumas of the past. Also, due to its one-sidedness, the book appears to be a kind of indictment against Israel as an apartheid state and a manifesto detailing the Palestinian national narrative, more so than an autobiography that can be identified with its protagonists.

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