On Yom Kippur, Remember My Palestinian Mother
That question weighs heavy on my mother’s mind this week, as she and I recall two decades of failed U.S. attempts to help end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—a conflict that has defined all but four years of my mother’s life.
She was still in her 40s when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin
shook hands on the White House lawn. But two decades on, as
she approaches her 70s, my mother is beginning to reckon with
the possibility that she will live out her life in exile.
She is not alone, of course.
My mother is part of the last generation of Palestinians born
before 1948, when the creation of Israel displaced
three-fourths of the Holy Land’s indigenous population.
That inescapable tragedy—displacing one people to shelter
another—is the unhealed wound that sustains the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like any wound, it must
eventually be exposed. And if it is to truly heal,
Palestinians and Israelis must make of the scar a source of
succor, not fear.
After all, my mother, like others of her generation, is no
threat—not to those who know and love her and certainly not to
an entire nation. For Christmas, she knits Bethlehem-themed
ornaments and sells them at church bazaars. She stands at a
plastic table, this woman from the Holy Land, and regales
wide-eyed American children with tales of day trips to the Sea
of Galilee.
That life of more than six decades ago is too far-gone,
though. Like any person with more years lived than left, my
mother is too wise to inveigh against the inevitabilities of
time. Instead, like millions of her generation who remember a
land before loss, what she really wants is something more
elemental.
She wants the right to access those memories, on her own terms, as she looks back on a life in waning.
She wants the right to access those memories, on her own terms, as she looks back on a life in waning.
But to revisit them, like any person should have the right to
do, my mother needs permission—not from the quixotically named
Palestinian Authority, but from Israel. That cruel reality,
more than any other in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, adds
enduring insult to injury.
Still, my mother and I maintain hope that she can return
someday, without the indignities of interrogation. Much of
that hope, it must be said, derives from the Jewish
experience. After all, what nation knows better the injustice
of depriving a people of their history?
Some months ago, I gave a lift to an Israeli author whose
grandfather’s signature is affixed to Israel’s declaration of
independence. In the trunk of my car, where he had just put
his suitcase, there was a box sealed well before my years and,
in my mother’s scrawl, labeled: “History.”
My Israeli friend asked about the contents. But I couldn’t
answer. Whenever I asked my mother what her History held, she
demurred, saying only: “Keep it in a cool, dry place.”
I understood why when I opened it myself. In that box, I
found hundreds of faded, yellowing photographs—my mother’s
history, hidden all those years in sepia stills.
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| The author's mother and grandmother in Bethlehem. (Courtesy of Samer Badawi) |
There she was—tomboyish and slight—beside her mother, who was
stitching. And there were Solomon’s Pools, where my
grandfather drowned.
These were the Holy Land’s apocrypha, I thought, subsumed for
so long by another’s narrative. They told us: Ours was a land
without a people. Ours was a desert, and they made it bloom.
But history, the images showed, had been sullied. They showed
my mother, laughing on a terraced hill, land stitched with
olive trees. They showed the vine, made famous not by wine,
but by my grandmother’s stuffed grape leaves.
The lesson, I think, is this: the Holy Land holds histories
that, with time, can be taught to coexist. My mother’s is one
of them. As she navigates her own, inner peace process, I hope
that one day, in her lifetime, it leads home.
