When home is no longer home

“On whatever side of the Separation Wall we lived, we paid the price, every day, for not being Jewish.”

STRANGER IN MY OWN LAND
Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home
by Fida Jiryis
392 pp., Hurst (2022), $29.95

This is one book that I wish never had to be written or reviewed, despite my personal friendship with its author and many of its main characters.

Among the extensive literature on Palestine and Israel, this book is uniquely positioned from an educational standpoint to afford the reader a valuable and rarely accessible perspective. The author, Fida Jiryis, was born to Palestinian parents from Fassouta, a Christian village in the Upper Galilee, near the Lebanese border of what today is Israel. She was born in exile in Lebanon. As a child, she lived through the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon War and then relocated with her family to Cyprus. She is one of a handful of Palestinians who actualized her right to return home, only to find that home was no longer home. She ended up studying in Scotland, living in Canada, and ultimately returning to Palestine: to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Ms. Jiryis eloquently guides us through her journey over the decades. First, though, she provides crucial context — including an account of her family’s trials, and traumas, in the aftermath of the creation of Israel by force and of their choice to stay on in Palestine rather than flee. Their story is the story of the entire Palestinian people.

This book is a family memoir intertwined with Palestinian history and the Palestinian struggle for emancipation, in Israel as well as in the occupied Palestinian territory. The story of this one family illumines the human dimensions of the Palestinian’s historic plight, by turns experiencing dispossession, living under military rule, resisting, emigrating, struggling, dealing with loss and with dispersion, and ultimately returning home.

A rare glimpse

Everyone interested in the Middle East knows that 1948 was a pivotal year, yet only infrequently encounters an authentic insider account of how Palestinians who stayed in Israel thereafter dealt with their newly imposed Israeli citizenship. Few observers are aware of the breadth of the legitimate and nonviolent attempts by Palestinian citizens of Israel to challenge their inferior status under Israel’s political system, openly and directly, with little success, until resort to violence began to seem the only option not yet tried. In her account of this evolution, Ms. Jiryis describes what she encountered when she entered the landscape of this complex reality: “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 it happens, the author’s father, the renowned Sabri Jiryis, was at the forefront of this challenge and his story is a pillar of the family memoir. I have spent considerable time in his company and feel comfortable in saying that to fully appreciate Sabri Jiryis without knowing him personally would certainly be very difficult. Although one of the first Palestinian political activists inside Israel, a PLO operative for decades, and a trusted confidant of Yasser Arafat, Mr. Jiryis remains true to this day to his core as an Israeli-licensed attorney, a researcher, and an independent political thinker. I have visited Sabri Jiryis in his village of Fassouta (see: The Galilee First, if the world is serious about Israel and Palestine!). I’m glad to report that Ms. Jiryis has done an amazing job in providing her readers with a very thorough appreciation of this one-of-a-kind man, from multiple angles.

As a central character in this book, Ms. Jiryis’ father is by no means the only compelling figure you will meet there. Her late mother was no less impressive, as is her paternal uncle — also now back in Fassouta — whose story as an armed resister to Israel’s creation takes the reader into the turbulent dynamics of Palestinian resistance as rarely portrayed.

One too-often overlooked dynamic is that of the Palestinian citizens in Israel. This group, nearly 20% of the state’s population, is a thriving community with the same needs as any other. The sociopolitical and legal structures in the state of Israel, however, impose a discriminatory system of governance that hinders Palestinian citizens individually and collectively from full participation and equal access to advancement in Israeli society.  Of her experience in working next to Jewish Israeli immigrants in Israel’s much-touted high-tech sector, Ms. Jiryis writes: “They had taken not just the country, but everything else, too.”

A people fragmented, by design

The author’s unique, multilayered vantage point is a product of her having lived during different periods in distinctly different fragments of Palestinian existence — as an exile, and in the Palestinian diaspora, and as a Palestinian citizen inside Israel, and also in Occupied Palestine. This equips her as a writer to take her readers into territory that is most likely new to them in some way. The book offers more than just a personal glimpse into each of these very distinct realities. It viscerally evokes the flavor of each modality, each moment, wedding the historical facts to the writer’s own impassioned feelings and unfettered impressions. 

I feel bound to note that certain moments you will encounter in these pages will prove indelible. Consider Ms. Jiryis’s search for an apartment in Israel with her then-husband. Inquiring of Israelis about available apartments, she recounts, “[…] they told us openly that they did not rent to Arabs. There was no apology and it was said unabashedly, like a simple fact.” On one building near the beach in Nahariya, she recalls, “we were stunned to see a hand-written notice: ‘No dogs, no Arabs.’ We stood there, staring at it. It was not new. The ink had faded, and the cardboard was worn at the edges. It had been hanging there for some time, I thought.” One frayed cardboard sign provided a succinct view of the legacy of Israeli racism and its reality as evident today.

Fida Jiryis is a riveting storyteller. Every chapter gives the backstory for some historical moment, but not as a far-removed, superficial, third-hand account. Ms. Jiryis introduces you to the people who lived the story themselves and you see them living it and hear them processing it. This quality of vivid encounter distinguishes this account from so many other volumes in the literature about Palestine and Palestinians. 

A people’s story through one family

This book is not for the timid. When you pick it up to start reading, be prepared to have a hard time setting it down.

I would urge you not to skip the introduction, which offers an ultra-concise overview of 100 years of history and will provide invaluable context for understanding the rest of the book. It is very reader-friendly – starting with a helpful map of Palestine/Israel and the surrounding region, a family tree, and a glossary of common terms, and finishing with extensive and well-documented end notes to guide anyone ready for a deeper dive into any of the relevant historical narratives.

Be prepared for the many firsts in this book. You will meet the first in the family to attend university, the first Arab in Israel to enroll at the Hebrew University Law School, the first figure to mount a public challenge to the democratic character of the newly-born State of Israel, and one of the first Palestinians to actualize their right to return home.

Follow the family members and their activities, the geographic locations where the story unfolds, and the indispensable historic insights throughout. You will ultimately realize what an education this book was for you and you’ll be astonished that only today, seven decades of history later, are such stories finally being told in English. You will also be infuriated to realize that most aspects of the dispossession, oppression, and daily battering of the Palestinian people recounted in these pages are still ongoing, right now, today. 

Not to be ignored

In summary, this book is more than a memoir and more than a book of Palestinian history. It would more accurately be termed a handbook on the human tragedy that overcame the Palestinian people when Israel was created by force, and a guide to the Palestinian response and how that and why that evolved as it did.

I not only highly recommend this book but feel it should be required reading for many audiences: First, for Palestinians, especially but not only those living in the diaspora. Too often, the history from Israel’s creation in 1948 until Israel’s military occupation of the remaining part of Palestine in 1967 is skimmed over, at best, or overlooked entirely.

Jewish communities in Israel and around the world are another crucial audience for this book. Most will find it a difficult read, especially Jewish readers still trapped within a very deep communal indoctrination that Israel was and remains ‘a light unto the nations’. Their understanding of themselves will be shattered; their all-too-comfortable stereotypes about Palestinians will be demolished.

Every US elected official, and the entire Christian evangelical constituency, would certainly be well-advised to take the time and effort to read this book. They have a duty to understand the dimension of the human tragedy they continue to enable with their no-strings support for Israel, creating broad immunity for Israeli actions and policies while Palestinians continue to bury their dead and retain a last desperate strand of hope that one day they will be free.

In closing, Ms. Jiryis notes a simple truth: “On whatever side of the Separation Wall we lived, we paid the price, every day, for not being Jewish.” All of us have a duty to help bring down this wall and, with it, to reject the notion that someone’s identity is a justification for dehumanizing them. 

Publication is planned for the fall of 2022; pre-orders are now being accepted at Hurst and your preferred online bookstore. Meanwhile, you may want to explore Fida Jiryis’ past writings, including a chapter in Kingdom of Olives and Ash, a Washington Post bestseller on fifty years of Israeli occupation, and Amputated Tongue, a Hebrew-language anthology of Palestinian literature, in addition to several short stories in Arabic. This summer she had another Hebrew publication published, The Cage a selected anthology of her Arabic short stories: Our Small Lives (2010), The Khawaja (2014) and The Cage (2018).