The august Assyrian-Palestinian writer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, made an observation some may regard as a provocation, and was probably among the first to note it in print. As a result of what Palestinians call Al-Nakba (The Catastrophe), where around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were driven off, evicted and dispossessed of their land and property by the infant Israeli state and subsequently denied their right of return, “the wandering Palestinians have replaced the wandering Jew”. Jabra here noted a sombre irony, seeing as those who pushed Palestinians into their wandering existence were of the very same people who endured a similar fate for so long, and did so in the name of ending their own ‘wandering existence’. “This was what exile looked like!” is how S. Yizhar described this ironic uprooting in his lyrical novella on the 1948 war, Khirbet Khizeh.
In the Palestinian national story, Al-Nakba, of course, is central. It isn’t simply about coming to grips with the fact of dispossession, but an existential meditation on alienation from one’s homeland, on being a nation without a country, on being a homeless people longing for their land. The Palestinian dream of returning to one’s land to restore one’s roots and achieve the sovereignty necessary to enable Palestinian self-rule is an enduring one. Wadi Assaf, the protagonist of Jabra’s masterful novel, The Ship, gives voice to this need for a firm, material foundation for Palestinian national rectification:
This is the crux. Land, land, that is everything. We return to it bringing our discoveries, but as long as we hang onto the racing clouds, we remain in this fools’ paradise. We are continually escaping, but now we must go back to the land, even if we are forced later to start off again. we must have terra firma under our feet.
Yet, at the same time, few are familiar with the experiences, of those Palestinians who managed to avoid expulsion and remained in Israel after 1948 (behind the Green Line), or those who have managed to make the return to historic Palestine. This is what makes Stranger in My Own Land, wonderfully authored by Fida Jiryis, a unique and valuable perspective. She was part of a select few Palestinian families, stipulated by the Oslo agreement, who were actually able to exercise their cherished right of return to the villages and towns of origin, inside Israel (Fassouta, an Arab Christian village near the Lebanese border), making reality of a dream that for many Palestinians exiled in diaspora still exists in the imaginary.
What is in store is an astute, yet emotionally potent chronicle of Fida’s odyssey, combining family memoir with national struggle for emancipation. She recounts living through the horrors of the Lebanon war in 1982 as child, moving with her family to the “home away from home” in Cyprus (she notices a parallel history between Cyprus and Israel/Palestine that includes a cocktail of colonial legacies, military occupation, partition, displacement, decades of failed negotiations, producing a seemingly protracted, unresolvable conflict), studying in Britain, residing briefly in Canada, before returning to her homeland, only to find that home was no longer home. Allowing her to firmly and unashamedly, through her own family, retell the struggles of the Palestinians, yet with nuance and intricacy, as the ‘Palestinian experience’ itself is.
From her esteemed father, Sabri Jiryis, who survived the 1948 war as a boy, and whose family managed to remain in their original village, one is educated on the Palestinians of Israel (often labelled ‘Israeli Arabs’), whose history aren’t always incorporated into the canon of the ‘Palestinian experience’. Despite being granted citizenship on paper, in reality they were treated as subjects of the Israeli state, ruled under a domineering, semi-totalitarian military regime. Travel permits restricting freedom of movement, curfews, arrest and imprisonment without trials and expulsions were par the course, entrenching inequality and enabling the state to expropriate Arab owned land to be reserved for Jews. The notorious Absentee Property Law of 1950 allowed the state to expropriate the property of Palestinians who fled or were expelled to other countries.
Sabri was part of Al-Ard, with close co-operation with communists, that campaigned for the end of military rule, asserting the self-determination of the Palestinians and resolution to the conflict based on full rights for all. Even with the end of martial law, Sabri continued to resist the racist, discriminatory regime Palestinian Arabs in Israel had to endure. This quickly led to him being put under house arrest several times. Soon after, with the climate becoming unbearable, he was allowed to leave Israel, moving to Beirut, where he became director of the Palestine Research Centre, and became much closer with the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat.
Sabri’s intimate knowledge of Israeli society and fluency of Hebrew, would be an incredibly valuable asset for the PLO, most of whose leadership lived outside of Palestine and were often quite ignorant about the inner dynamics of Israeli society. The notorious Fatah guerrilla commander, Khalil al-Wazir (known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad), once disclosed to Sabris that he “did not know there was a difference between the head of state and the Prime Minister in Israel”. It must partially explain why Sabri touted a potential two-state solution, at a time when Israel officially refused to recognise the Palestinians as a distinct national group deserving of national rights, knowing that it would infuriate the indurated rejectionists within the movement. Any resolution, whatever form it took, would necessarily entail living and sharing the land of historic Palestine with Israelis. This point wasn’t always taken to be a contretemps among comrades. Said Hammani, the London representative of the PLO, for instance, was assassinated in 1978 in London by Abu Nidal’s breakaway faction for voicing a similar compromise in the name of peace and co-existence.
This is the peculiar situation Palestinian citizens of Israel find themselves. Roughly 20% of the state’s population, they are a minority, but a large enough one not to be ignored and be the piñata for every demographically obsessed, racist Israeli demagogue who neighs about the ‘Jewish majority’ and ‘Jewish character’ of Israel being in danger of dissipating. They are in, but not of Israel, whose state exclusively defines itself as Jewish. Compared to their compatriots in Gaza & the West Bank, they are freer and relatively more ‘privileged’, but often treated as de facto second-class citizens. Touted as a ‘bridge’ between the Jewish state and the wider Arab world, yet in some ways isolated from that Arab world. Straddling two languages and cultures: the dominant Hebrew culture of the Jewish majority and their native Palestinian Arab identity. Inevitably, some commingling and intercourse between these two cultures will occur, which adds a different, even interesting dimension to their experience, as Fida observed on her return to Fassouta: “Our identity was a warped mutation between Palestinian and Israeli; we were a minority struggling to survive, while trying to hold on to its own fabric.”
As is often the case with those who cross the frontier that separates diaspora from homeland, Fida initially returned her homeland as a young, idealistic patriot who “wanted a country and belonging, not to feel like a foreigner anymore” Until the unsettling reality hit her: this wasn’t the Palestine esteemed in her imagination. Her repatriation to her ancestral homeland was ironically just another migration to a foreign country and culture, which she had to adjust to. She lived an alienated parallel existence to Israeli society, which she interacted with in only fleeting and transactional ways, experiencing personally the racism and scorn her compatriots put up with. More interesting, there was also alienation with her ‘own community’, recounting how difficult she found fitting into the rigid, conservative culture of her fellow Palestinian Arabs and the quixotic expectations placed upon women. She tried marrying for “belonging”, perhaps even to assimilate into being a native and no longer be a rootless exilee, but it doesn’t work out. It is telling that the only she felt less alienated and more “free” and “equal” was Toronto where she lived among other immigrants.
More than a memoir or a history, Stranger in My Own Land is a dignified account of a remarkable Palestinian family, bravely dealing with the tragedies and tribulations before them. It deftly demystifies the romanticism of what ‘return’ for a Palestinian would entail, confronting the illusions, disappointments and that will necessarily occur, without abnegating the dream of return altogether. As Fida closes: “The Nakba continues. It has not ended”. Palestinians are still deprived of their national rights subject to racism, occupation, dispossession, exile and humiliation. They are still routinely imprisoned, killed and brutalised. The prospect of any sovereign Palestinian state emerging, or of the masses instead of an exiguous few actualising their right of return is dim to put it lightly. And yet, the Palestinian dream of return will not fade anytime soon either.