Palestine: a right for some, a memory for others

I am from here, there, and everywhere. My everywhere is a wound that refuses to scab over. Try explaining to someone why you can’t love the country that raised you. They look at you like you’ve insulted your own mother.

Is it the streets, dense with the rage of the overworked and the underpaid, all pushing and honking, cursing the sky as if God himself was responsible for traffic? Is it the exhaustion of living without pulse or spark, as if the city itself forgot how to dream? Or is it the suffocating math of it all: salaries that vanish mid-month, taxes that choke, laws that humiliate and press down like a boot on the neck? Perhaps it’s just the absence of a shoreline. Even the sea here is dead. The Dead Sea. A body of water too tired to wave back.

But why am I cataloguing grievances like a bureaucrat of grief? I was born in Jordan. I know this dust. I grew up with its flavors and moods and tempers. I have eaten its bread, absorbed its cynicism, carried its exhaustion like a second skin. I was never one of those who tried to escape into the arms of the West, never mocked the local tongue or masked my identity. And yet, every complaint makes me sound as though I’ve turned my back on the place that raised me, the bread that fed me, or the streets that held my laughter. Like I’m infected with the very disdain I swore I would never carry. Every complaint I make tastes foreign in my mouth. Like I’ve become the very thing our parents warned us about: ungrateful, disconnected, dangerously Westernized.

When friends from abroad visit, I list these grievances like war crimes. Look at this. Look at that. This is why I hate it here. This is why I don’t belong. They nod, half-amused, half-weary. “We’re Arabs too,” they say. “We know. None of this is new.” But what they don’t see, what I’m only now beginning to understand, is that I’m not rebelling against this country. I’m just mourning my homeland. I’m mourning Palestine.

But maybe that’s the root of it — not anger at Jordan, but grief for Palestine. Not rejection, but longing. I’m not fighting the dust of this place. I’m mourning the soil I was never allowed to touch. The bitterness I taste isn’t about where I am. It’s about where I’m not allowed to go. Because how do you love a land that was handed to you like a consolation prize? A land that welcomed you, yes, but only because your real one was stolen. You eat its food, repeat its sayings, carry its anger in your face, your shoulders, and your gait, but your soul is elsewhere. Mine is tangled across three countries, three passports, three tongues, three identities none of them fully claim. In Jordan, where I was born. In Lebanon and the U.S., where my family scattered. And in a home I’ve never seen, but have always belonged to. A home my grandfather described in fragments, in sighs, in stories that now live only in my throat. Tiberias.

Belonging isn’t mimicry. It isn’t earned. It isn’t about the number of years you have stayed or the taxes you have paid. Belonging is either a right or a theft. And mine was stolen.

And then I look at my friends again and say, “I’m originally Palestinian,” they pause, half-amused, half-weary — all too familiar with the script. “But you’ve never been there,” they say, as if geography trumps memory. As if the borders drawn by an illegal occupation are more real than the ache I carry in my chest.

How do I explain that I can’t go? That I have no right to return to my family’s home, not because I lack the money, the will, or the time, but because I lack the privilege. There is no border crossing I can appeal to, no paper I can produce to prove what I know in my bones. In this world, a Jewish person born in New York can land in Palestine and be handed citizenship, housing, protection. While I, born just an hour away, raised under the same hard sun, breathing the same air, speaking the same language, with no allergy to its pollen and no fear of its grief … cannot return.

How do I tell them that my only inheritance is memory? I’ve never stepped foot in Tiberias, but I know its streets from my grandfather’s stories. I’ve memorized the registry of Tiberias families — Yassin, Matar, Ouda, Abu Sitta, Aqel, Hammad — so that if I ever meet someone from there, I can light up and say, “You’re from Tiberias? So am I. Have you ever been?” And they always laugh. A laugh that’s part bitterness, part grief. “How the hell are we supposed to visit?” they say.

The stories died with my grandfather, but I keep reading his book like a scripture, afraid that if I forget one detail, one sentence, one image, then they’ll be proven right: “the old will die and the young will forget.” But I will not forget. I refuse to forget.

Even now, when the source of the stories is gone, when memory turns brittle with time, I reread his words every few months. I turn the pages slowly, like I’m handling something sacred. Because I know what this world demands of me. It wants my silence. My forgetfulness. My quiet assimilation. But I am not confused. I know where I am from.

I’m from a land I’ve never touched but ache for. From olive groves I have only known in dreams. From the waters of Lake Tiberias that were taken from us. From keys carried across borders that now open no doors. From the heavy silence between my grandfather’s pauses. From the legacy of the Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homeland. From everything they tried to erase. I am from Tiberias. Even if I never return, even if it no longer exists the way he remembered it … I am still from Tiberias.

And until then, I will keep looking out from Umm Qais only miles from a homeland I can’t return to. Each time, the ritual is the same: eyes scanning the horizon, voice soft with longing, “Can you see it? Can you see Lake Tiberias?” From Amman, it’s barely 160 kilometers. And on a clear day, if you climb high enough, the hills almost reveal themselves. But when you’re Palestinian, geography is a kind of cruelty. The land may be close enough to see, but never to touch.

I am from here, there, and everywhere — but most of all, from a place I’ve never seen. A place I still call home. And I will not forget.