Note (1/15/20): This is fictional, but not entirely. My own experiences during and after a trip to Israel-Palestine in January 2019 played a big hand in this, in addition to my own family background. I cannot possibly — and would not try to — speak to the true lived experiences of Palestinians, this is just my attempt at an empathetic response.
On the day of my birth, I am told, the thump-thumps of distant mortar shells punctured the prickly-dry air with almost a comic rhythm, their steady tempo muffling my wails. I wore a pea suit that morning, dainty toes and chubby fingers peeking out from cloth sowed with little green shoots; a picture of newness, revival, of life.
I’m told too that on the drive from downtown Bethlehem General to our outskirted home, the radio man’s austerity masked the hysteria of his message: yet another suicide bombing by car in the West Bank, his flowing Arabic tongued, ribbons of burning rubber and flesh curling over yet another cobblestone street.
But these are things you may not, at this point, understand, so I must not get ahead of myself. And therefore I must, in turn, tell you a story.
We’ll start off here, I suppose, with the beginnings of all that I’ve known in my brief eighteen years. My family, and life, are much like yours — at least on the surface. I have a speckled cat you’d call Toffee; my mom plays down her delicious cooking (“Your grandmother is so much better…”); not an evening goes by without musky-sweet applewood pipe smoke twining above Grandpa’s leather armchair. Yes, in our too-small apartment in our too-cramped neighborhood in our too-populated city, my grandparents live with us, which is how it’s been since… well, I’ll explain.
This apartment is secondhand, just not to me. Though our modest furniture is ours, my parents’ signatures are on the legal papers, and I’ve never known another set of walls, my family does not consider this place home. You see, our home is not Bethlehem, our home is Haifa. Our history was born, and will forever be embedded, in the coast: in sea foam spraying off azure Mediterranean waters, and briny gusts rolling up craggy bluffs.
The year is 1988, yet we — my country, my people — are not free.
Ceaseless threats of violence make communal fear palpable, pulpy, all but moistening the leaves of the potted herbs on the kitchen windowsill. It’s an undercurrent, a state of being, a reality. Yet we strive for regularity how we can. The ancient Victrola on the corner shelf — relic of apartment dweller’s past — is empathetic to this, warbling out soft, traditional melodies that Grandma hums to absentmindedly as she knits.
The collective wounds of the past are still pink to the touch, you see, and never a careless scratch away from spurting once more. That’s the nature of things, we Palestinians suppose, when but 40 years ago our rights, history, and future were fiercely uprooted. Mere decades offer little time for a reconciliation that has yet to come.
You’ve heard about this conflict, yes. In all certainty, your Western schools, media, and governments paint Israel-Palestine relations in broad brush strokes. But have you ever been forced to confront the real human toll of it? The full truth of it? Have you considered our perspective, a long-oppressed people whose leaders are branded “terrorists” and civilians stateless refugees? Are we even a people in your eyes?
Because here are some details you surely have missed: that on my seventh birthday, a blackout curtain order issued across a crouched Bethlehem, tears welled in Mom’s eyes when she had no answer for “why people must be bad,” yet she steadily set my favorite fruitcake on the candlelit table. That by age 11, I come to associate the rustle of the paper or sharp click of the radio knob with a deep contouring of Dad’s forehead, hardening like armor in anticipation of harder news. And that even now, when I’m all washed and my knees sink to the carpet, I pray and pray and pray for little but a return to the normalcy my people so deserve.
Today, though, is a different kind of day. You see, not unlike young adults the world over — all bundles of nerves, expectations, and dreams — today I head off to college. In the midst of the turmoil and tragedy still gripping our fragmented sliver of the world, education remains a guiding force; a “beacon in the fog,” as my parents phrase it.
I’m the only child of a family of storytellers. Grandpa was a schoolteacher in Haifa, patiently instructing Arabic language classes for legions of kids. Grandma, an aspiring fiction writer and stay-at-home caretaker of my mother. And my parents, both former journalists, for a local Haifan newspaper that is no longer — he a photographer and she a reporter, once-young professionals who stumbled into love.
But life as each of them knew it, promising and rich and full of warmth, ground to a halt in the post-war years — the same story told in millions of iterations across old Palestine.
Their holy land, our homeland. Guided by the glorious promise of aliyah — of return — and galvanized by global sympathy following the Second World War, the Jewish population in Palestine would explode exponentially long before my birth, gnashing its teeth defiantly against international calls for an orderly and just integration.
Upon the turning of 1948, we were forced out of our home. Jewish Zionist military forces were gaining ground in escalating wartime conditions. My newly-wed parents — she 21, he 23 — were back in Mom’s childhood home with Grandma and Grandpa, and thrilled to move along in career and love. But one day soon, they received a terse knock, a manila envelope emblazoned with David’s Star, and four days to pack up and vacate the city. What we consider the Nakba — the catastrophe — had arrived on our doorstep.
Following the May 14th Israeli Declaration of Independence, the Palestinian exodus from our beloved Haifa would equal that of any other across the nation. With no organized resistance prepared to counter the well-funded mass colonizing, my family packed up boxes, gave a possible last longing gaze at the cream-colored stone house on the sea, and migrated away.
Though I’ll never know them due to their early passing, it was in fact my dad’s parents who offered us — offered me — a future. Already well-established community figures in Bethlehem, strings were pulled and my family managed to dodge the nightmarish flood into the populated hub. With nothing but a bit of furniture and whatever emotional heirlooms could be salvaged from their Haifan life, the four displaced Arabs stomached their sadness and settled in, years soon flashing by under a foreign roof that would become my lifelong home.
So on a day like this one, you must realize, I feel that curious mixture of pain and pride that ferments within Palestinian survivors ever more deeply. Our apartment fizzled with it this morning, as if these balled-up feelings radiated into the very air, uncontainable to skin and bones.
Ever the organizer of the family, Mom bustled around like a worker bee wired with her favorite Arabic coffee, having taken the day off from her secretarial job at the local labor bureau. Dad checked and rechecked, then checked once more “just to be sure,” the itinerary of move-in day at the university. Like Mom, he too could not continue his former career, just one of countless splices of past from present. He’s now an associate in our neighborhood repair shop, utilizing his technical photography background to patch everything from point-and-shoots to rotary phones.
Grandma and Grandpa, for their part, shuffled around in the kitchen, whipping up a celebratory shakshouka — my all-time favorite breakfast — to mark the emotional day. They bide their time quietly in Bethlehem, tending as they can to the family’s needs while savoring what local arts, religious gatherings, parks, and elderly freedoms have not yet been whisked away.
It’s not glamorous, and it’s certainly not the life they all dreamt of in the old city, but my family is resilient, strong-willed, and most of all, fiercely loving and protective of their own — a microcosm of new Palestine.
I’m proud to be their child, and I’m proud to be Palestinian. Ours is a history tracing the centuries, roots too tendriled to be ripped out and flung off like weeds. We belong here; groves of old-growth fig trees to Israel’s shallow plantations. That’s why our songs still vibrate from Grandma’s lips. Why my parents have pooled a modest education fund through years of toil at mediocre jobs. It’s what keeps the radio crackling and newspaper shhushing in the darkest of hours. And it’s what’s cycling through my mind as we pull through the slate-gray stone arches of Bethlehem University, the squat campus itself emanating steadfast auras.
At day’s end, after my family has wrenched away with a last tearful embrace and my eyes take in the pebbled dormitory ceiling awning this next chapter of life, I will have no way of knowing what the future will hold — for myself, my people, my world. I plan to pursue my parents’ past by studying journalism, which is perhaps why I’m writing this right now. Or maybe just, I’m a teller of stories… and ours is one to be told.
This is no epitaph, though. Despite it all — injustices mixed with uncertainty mixed with smoldering resolve — I remain hopeful. We fight for what we stand to lose, and Haifan dreams are never far away.
Jake Marble 
💛
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