The Palestinian Exile: Why notions of Palestinian refuge are finally shifting.

Words by Nisreen Bajis, edited by Dalia Al-Dujaili

When I read a viral tweet that nine Palestinian families had been wiped off the population registry, my first thought was, it is a blessing that they all died together. This is how I would want to die.

If bombs rained overhead and the possibility of death was so imminent, I would want us to all die together, my husband and my two children, huddled in a cosy pile, to be met in an instant, with the full force of falling concrete - hopefully a swift and painless death. My children would not be orphaned and we would not have to bury either, or both of them. Otherwise, the pain for the surviving family member would be too unbearable. None of us would be able to go on. My emotions of grief and anger at the innocent loss of life, is then replaced by feelings of immense shame and guilt. Guilt and shame I had not felt since Palestinians were gunned down in Gaza in 2018, during the Great March of Return and before that in 2014, when 142 Palestinian families were completely erased from the Palestinian population registry, after Israel obliterated Gaza in an attack that lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 people.

My guilt does not resemble that of a survivor for I have not survived a life-threatening situation. I did not live while my neighbour died. I am, after all, a Palestinian of the diaspora. A carrier of a western passport - a liberty ticket, supposedly. My trauma is of a different kind. It is intertwined with the pain of absence. A severing from homeland, a disconnect from culture, people and history. It is a feeling that reverberates and is echoed by the more than six million diaspora Palestinians living out their existential displacement.

With every atrocity that is committed against the Palestinian people, my sense of displacement is reinvigorated and I am taken to a question recently posed by a journalist friend of mine; “What is life like as a Palestinian living in exile?”

Life as a Palestinian in exile is the sound of my high school teacher mispronouncing my name, “Liz-reen is it?”; her corrective tongue instructing me, “don’t you mean Israel?”, her white gaze casting pity on me and my classmates staring with a cautious curiosity and then thinking it would be fun to call me a sand monkey during recess. I was the only ‘brown girl’ in my class, so of course where I came from had to be a place full of sand and dust.

Life as a Palestinian in exile is my migrant and pediatrician dad coming home after an interview at the children’s hospital with the look of immediate shock still on his face and my mum asking him, “how did it go?”, to which he responds, “they asked me whether I am a supporter of Hamas?” It’s my dad responding with a resounding “no” and then never hearing back from them.

It is the suspicious looks from strangers that shakes my understanding, makes me question my memory, followed by the realisation that my memories are not actually mine, but those passed down to me from parents and grandparents. Memories inherited from songs and folklore and photos held on to by my grandma, who can’t remember whether she took her blood pressure medication today, but she remembers the moment she was forced to leave her home in Palestine. Life in exile is wishing that those memories were my own, of a homeland I long to know. Life in exile is realising that for the past thirty something years, I have been relying on the memory of my parents and the parents of strangers, who told us stories of land that until recently, only existed in my imagination.

It’s meeting a fellow Palestinian for the first time and asking them, “to which period of forced expulsion do you belong, 1948 or 1967?”

It is seeing photos of Haifa (the birthplace of my father) and Akka and thinking, my god, this could be Italy, it’s as beautiful as Italy, even more beautiful than Italy and then being overcome by anger, because that could have been the view from my bedroom, those could have been the rocks from which my siblings and I, fearlessly launched ourselves into the Mediterranean Sea.

Life in Exile is driving from Abu Dhabi to Dubai during yet another round of Israeli aggression against my people and sitting with a Gazan artist in his beachside studio. It is the act of staring wondrously at his work and asking where is this place that he’s so beautifully depicted in that frame. It is him responding with “this is Mar Saba, it is your country” and me sinking back in my chair, ashamed that I did not know about this ancient monastery, nestled in the mountains of my homeland and devastated that I may never be able to go there.

The worst feeling of all however, is the one that tells me that I am not quite Palestinian enough. Not Palestinian enough because I do not have to live through the humiliation of military checkpoints, the trauma of arbitrary arrests, the horror of state sanctioned house demolitions and the injustice of a forced expulsion from my home.

The events of the past few weeks have done something different to this notion of exile. The power of the unified voices of Palestinians everywhere, from Gaza, to Haifa, to Jerusalem all the way to Sydney, has reinvigorated my sense of displacement. However this time it is happening live, with millions upon millions of diaspora Palestinians and Arabs expressing their outrage and lighting up the internet. Our collective exile has been galvanized and our movement is being broadcast as one voice, across the globe. This movement, made possible by the power of social media, would not have been as potent, had it not been for young activists like Mohammad and Muna El Kurd. The twins and Jerusalem natives shifted the world’s attention to their neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah and the world responded. In their fight against their forced expulsion and in their call for action, they have inadvertently replaced a corrupt and geriatric Palestinian Authority and have given the movement, a sophisticated, young and articulate voice . A voice that has given all Palestinians, inside historic Palestine and the Occupied Territories, an unprecedented sense of power and hope. Likewise, exiled Palestinians of the diaspora have heard Mohammad and Muna’s chants for a unified Palestine; and they have responded.

All along, this reliance on collective memory, whether real or imagined, has been the embroidery that binds all Palestinians together. No matter where we are in the world, we all long for the same sense of belonging, the same breath of air on the same piece of land that belonged to us, but was promised to someone else, by everyone else. Our exile is a collective one and we are no longer willing to live in it.