Editors-in-Chief Note: These two personal narratives (this article is accompanied by a companion piece written from a Jewish perspective) reflect intergenerational trauma, identity, and resilience shaped by histories of displacement and violence. One writer shares a story of Jewish heritage and mourning, while the other reflects on Palestinian uprootedness and the struggle to preserve memory across generations. Together, they represent deeply personal perspectives rooted in vastly different lived experiences.
Native to the land, my ancestors had beautiful homes and thriving businesses in the villages of Palestine. From the olive trees, whose silvery leaves whispered stories of centuries past, to the poppy fields that thrived under the sun, they nurtured their land and crops, building a prosperous nation rooted in communal care. The soil of Ar-Ramleh was more than dirt — it was a tapestry woven with the sweat of generations and the laughter of children playing beneath fig trees. With gusts of wind and tides of waves, many things took a rough turn, but the resilience and strength of the Palestinian people never hindered, and the keys to their homes remained around their necks — a symbol of the certainty of return, a dream passed through generations. Those rusted keys, now heirlooms, carry the weight of memory: the scent of Za’atar herbs drying on rooftops, the sound of my great-grandmother’s loom clacking rhythmically as she wove vibrant traditional thobes.
This devastation was not just something that I read from a dusty textbook, but rather extracted from the lived experiences of my ancestors and echoed in the heart-wrenching phone calls with my family. On May 15, 1948 — what is also known as the Nakba or Catastrophe in Arabic — my great-grandparents were exiled from their homes in Ar-Ramleh, forced to walk on foot for days on end, settling in a refugee camp in Gaza. My grandmother Azizeh, just a toddler then, recalls her father carrying her as smoke from burning groves scalded her lungs. “They stole the land, but not our stories,” she said, her voice trembling, yet defiant.
They not only left behind their lives and prized belongings, but their family members were brutally taken away from them as well. After being forced out of their homes, my family was harassed, and my great uncle was killed as a child in front of his parents and siblings. In the span of two days, my family was stripped of their basic human rights, land, belongings, and even their children. Imagine someone barging into your home, kicking you out, killing your siblings — and the world turning a blind eye. To this day, maps erase our villages, but we resurrect their names in songs, poems, and in our art.
After my family arrived in Gaza, they endured the struggle of a Palestinian being a refugee in their own country. They grew up stateless, their identity papers stamped “undefined,” yet they carried our history in their worn notebooks — ledgers of lost olive groves and the coordinates of our ancestral land. After coming to the United States for further education, he participated in humanitarian work for Palestinians in Gaza and was imprisoned for 15 years here in the U.S. for doing so. The discrimination did not end in 1948 in Palestine or in 2008 in America, because Palestinians are being both ethnically cleansed in their home country and targeted in the United States. A report from Doctors Without Borders in December of 2024 said there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing” in Gaza (nbc.com). My fellow Americans conflate Palestinian resistance with violence, oblivious to the irony of their freedoms built on stolen Indigenous land.
Being a Palestinian in diaspora is the farthest thing from ease, with constant worries for my family back home. Over the past two years, I have lost dozens of family members to bombardments, and my remaining family is barely surviving in tents with little to no food, water, and other necessities. On February 23, 2024, my great aunt died from the lack of access to medical resources to treat her chronic illness. Her death was preventable. She would still be with us today if the world understood that Palestinians are enduring horrific conditions, violations that circumvent international law. The United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all concluded that international law has been broken in Gaza (un.org, amnesty.org, hrw.org).
Amnesty International reports that 95 percent of Gaza’s water is undrinkable, and hospitals, once sanctuaries, now resemble morgues (amnesty.org). My family and I receive text messages of distress and photos of deceased family members far too often. My second cousin, who has a family with five kids, tells us, “I have not been able to feed my kids in days. We are struggling to survive off of bread and dirty water.” Last Ramadan, they broke their fast with scraps of stale bread — a sacred month of abundance reduced to mere survival. They went 15 months without eating any protein such as chicken or beef due to the blockades of humanitarian aid and food trucks. Yet, in their tent, my cousin’s daughter draws murals of our village with charcoal on torn cloth, her art a quiet rebellion against erasure.
Palestinians revolt in the beautiful ways of storytelling that uplift our stories when the world is trying so hard to forget us. We stitch our flags with Tatreez embroidery, recite Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, and share videos of Dabke dances in rubble — acts of joy we equate with resistance. Even now, as bombs fall, elders teach children the old folk songs, ensuring that the melody of return outlives the roar of war. Our existence is a revolution. Our stories, like olive roots, cannot be uprooted.