In 1948, at the age of seven, my jiddo (grandpa in arabic), his parents, and his six siblings were forced to flee from their home in Haifa, Palestine. A few years ago, my jiddo told me his memory of standing on a balcony, seeing naked dead neighbors in the streets, hearing screams in the distance, children “going crazy” because their family was gone. That morning, they ran for their lives to the Mediterranean.
My family was privileged and wealthy: They owned an olive oil mill and property in Palestine. So they had resources to flee and survive for some period of time.
When they got to Sur, Lebanon, my great grandmother, Badrieh Al Khamra, started to sell her jewelry to keep everyone fed. This kept my family alive for a while, but after five months, it was gone, and everyone started to starve.
So, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they got on a cattle train to Aleppo, Syria. The trip took a few days. Eventually, they arrived in Aleppo, where they stayed for six months, before settling in Damascus, Syria. What ultimately helped pull our family out of starvation and survive were two things: My great grandfather, Ahmed Izzat Taha, spoke English and also had a college degree.
From Jiddo: “Khmara Square Haifa, Palestine pre-1948 before the Zionists forced the eviction of Palestinians from the homeland in Palestine. Now it’s called Paris Square. Palestinians might forgive but we will never ever forget.”
It was incredibly hard for Palestinians to get jobs at the time, so having an education meant everything to my family. And for the Tahas, they experienced how a degree could mean the difference between having dinner and not. Over his life, my great grandfather published and translated 46 books, including The Oregon Trail and Cheaper by the Dozen.
In 1959, my jiddo Nabil was accepted to Purdue University with less than $20 to his name. He worked as a dishwasher making $0.80/hour to pay for school and housing. In 1964, while at a church event to get some food, he met my grandma: Sharon Elizabeth Hood, a young, white baptist, small town girl from Texas. Not long after that, on February 24, 1965, my mom Rhoda was born in Baytown, Texas to a white Baptist mom and Muslim Palestinian dad.
My grandma’s unexpected pregnancy forced both families to reckon with how they were going to integrate their lives — and so they did. My grandma not only supported my jiddo, the father of her child, in becoming a citizen, but numerous of his other siblings as well (writing Congress, filling out immigration paperwork, etc.). And on March 6, 1969, under the affirmation and witness of my maternal great grandparents, Earl Winfred Hood and Elaina Marie Hood, my jiddo was recognized as a United States Citizen by the District Court of the United States in Houston, Texas.
The wedding photo of Ahmad Izzat Taha and Badrieh Al Khamra, my great grandparents, 1931-32, Haifa Palestine
This narrative of a wealthy family, turned poverty stricken refugees, turned American Dream may seem like the inspiring story the colonizer propaganda machine wants us to hear. But, this story continues to be marked by tragedy.
With a darkness looming over him, I can hear my jiddo saying to me: “I am completely broken at this point.”
The impact of this apartheid, of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, continues to impact this generation and generations to come. Genocide carries itself in our bodies, beckoning us to tend to its healing and to honor the pain and devastation it has caused. Every few months, when Palestine is in a news cycle, we are forced to relive the trauma our family went through while watching other families continue to suffer. It’s incredibly painful to witness, and all people who come from Palestinian bloodlines are survivors of this tragedy. Regardless of what’s in the news, my jiddo, now nearly 85 years old, still gets night terrors.
Rhoda, senior school photo age 16, 1980
I called my mom the other day to let her know I was writing this piece and to check in with her about how she’s feeling about the news. She was struggling, talking about how her whole life she has felt so confused and hurt and disconnected from the struggles in her heart about Palestine. She told me when she read this essay that I put words to feelings she has long struggled to put words to. This is what she wrote to me after our conversation:
“In a world where colonization still draws painful borders around Indigenous lives, through silent echoes of the past and loud clamors of the present, the narrative of my dad’s shattered dream and unyielding survival stands as a testament. It is a soul-stirring reminder of the human spirit’s unyielding flame, burning fiercely amidst the chilling winds of conquest, illuminating the paths of resistance for generations to come.”
In the spring of 1992, I was born to a Muslim Lebanese dad and my mom. Today, 31 years later, and 75 years after my family escaped the Nakba, I live on Confederate Villages of Lisjan territory in Oakland, California. On Trans Day of Visibility this past year, I posted a photo of me after top surgery, talking about what it means to me to be trans. This is what my jiddo said: We see you and love you as you are.
My jiddo fled genocide by Israel in 1948, and I get to be free as a transgender person with access to things like gender affirming care and community in 2023. My jiddo always tells me he is proud of me for just being me, and I truly believe him when he says that. He has endured so much, and to see his grandchild live in such a loving and fulfilling way, is a dream come true for him.
A few months ago, when I asked my jiddo if he considered me a Palestinian, he said, “nothing would honor me more.”
That is why I’m sharing this story. I carry my Palestinian elders and ancestors in my heart and body everywhere I go. It is not a separate part of me; it is me. It is part of where I come from. I come from the land and people of Palestine. I am a transgender Palestinian.
A free Palestine means a freer world. Wall-shattering resistance from Palestinians is a direct result of 70+ years of colonization, land theft, occupation, and apartheid. It is the result of traumatized, imprisoned, and oppressed people fighting back.
Do not be silent. Have conversations with people in your life. Call and email your legislators and demand a ceasefire. It matters when you stand in solidarity with people as they fight against militarized and global forces that want them extinct, especially when those forces are backed by biased mainstream media.
I hold all oppressed people fighting for liberation in my heart. Black liberation, sex worker liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, transgender liberation, Palestinian liberation — it is all intertwined as we aim to decolonize and return home.
I read this piece to my jiddo before publishing, and I asked if there’s anything he wanted me to add. With a glimmer of hope in his eyes, this is what he said:
“We [Palestinians] are not going away. We’re in this world to stay, and the world is going to have to deal with us.”
Laila and their jiddo (Nabil) at an ice skating rink in New Jersey, 1997
This is a wonderful essay and so important.
Thank you for writing this!
I’m sorry for your family’s pain. It sounds very much like what my grandmother’s family went through immigrating to the United States from a shtetl in the Soviet Union, where things were unstable and unsafe. That is certainly very difficult.
Want to add a bit of historical context – would love to hear corrections if I get anything wrong, since I am trying to understand the history better. Control of Haifa turned over from the Ottomans to the British, and the British offered to give control to the Jews (some of whom had been in Haifa since the 1700s, but the vast majority of whom had come in more recent waves of immigration to the city). The Arab Muslims and Arab Christians were naturally uncomfortable with the influx of Jewish immigrants but in particular the Arab Higher Committee did not want the British to give governing power of the city to the Jewish leadership.
The resulting skirmishes in Haifa went back and forth. Jews killed 6 Arabs outside of the Consolidared Refineries. Arabs killed 39 Jews at the Oil Refinery. Jews killed 20-70 Arabs at balad al-shaykh where oil refinery workers lived…It was certainly a period of violence and unrest as governing power of the city switched hands from the British to the newly founded state of Israel.
If I were living there, I too would have fled the chaos. I can’t imagine how scary that must have been to live through. Can you imagine what it would be like if the American government just ceded control of the United States to the leadership of a particular group of American immigrants? That would lead to mass protests and chaos for sure. What it probably would not lead to is genocide. Because genocide is a completely different thing.
Genocide is about the purposeful killing of a particular group of people. Ethnic cleansing. The desire to exterminate. Genocide is not about power struggles on both sides during a government transition. There was not a genocide in Haifa. I have no desire to argue with anyone. I am only afraid that misunderstanding will lead to more violence, so I try to do my part in reaching a better mutual understanding.
The Arab Christians and Muslims who stayed in Haifa became known as “Israeli Arabs.” Today, Haifa is about 10% Israeli Arab.
I am sorry for the difficulties your family has experienced, and I am glad to hear you are personally thriving today. I hope the Palestinians get what they deserve: a peaceful government that represents them well, a state of their own, room to thrive and prosper.
Thanks for this context!
Hey Sarah, I can see you’re trying to understand and I do appreciate that. However, even saying things like arabs did this then jews did that, is problematic, erases context and misses the point. We are not talking about arabs v. jews, that is propaganda messaging from western media. We are talking about a zionist movement creating a militarized state with one of their expressed goals being extinguishing palestinian people. I know this might feel harsh in your body to read, and I hope you can be gentle with yourself and try to accept that what I’m saying might be true.
When you start to deny that there is and was genocide and ethnic cleansing of palestinians by zionist/israeli foreces, happening as far back as the Nakba, and a plan for establishing a zionist state in Palestine dating back to the 1800s, it is dangerous to oppressed people everywhere, including queer and trans folks. If you are truly looking to understand, I hope you will take what I am saying seriously and start to shift your orientation to this issue.
Hi Laila, thanks for your reply. Could you share some context/references for the Zionists having a goal of “extinguishing palestinian people” in the creation of Israel?
I appreciated you taking the time to respond to my thread. No pressure to continue, but I’m happy to read any resource that someone points me to. I would really appreciate it if someone can point me to a history piece rather than an opinion piece/op-ed on the subject of genocide (only because I am trying to understand the facts so I can reach my own opinions).
Thank you!
Whola lotta nothing to just wish Palestinians “a peaceful government” which is code for either you work according to our whims or piss off
Ever thought that ummm maybe there should never have been an occupation of Palestinian lands? And a Palestinian government that israeli ever so generously approve of will never benefit palestinians because Israeli and israeli will never rest till every land is a settlement for some bum in Brooklyn.
Like it or not, this is ethic cleansing, genocide, cultural cleaning too! let’s not act like Palestinian culture and cuisine hasn’t been hijacked in the process as well.
Hi Juju,
I’m so sorry for the pain you are feeling. It is horrific what the Palestinian people are going though right now. And it is horrific what the Israelis went through during the Hamas attacks. There are so many innocent people, children, babies, suffering. I am hurting too. If you have family in Gaza, I hope they are able to find refuge. This is all terrifying.
Thank you so much for your measured, generous, thoughtful comment and responses to these comments, Sarah.
@Juju: “Israeli and israeli will never rest till every land is a settlement for some bum in Brooklyn”
…so Jews are trying to take over “every land?” cool cool cool. Autostraddle mod team, care to step in?
See? blatantly misconstruing what I wrote, I said Israelissss, and last I recall Israelisssss like to push the multicultural society lie being a mix of jews arabs druze ethiopians etc.
Why is it suddenly not the case? why is it suddenly just jews? and yes ISRAELIS are settling on the land that isn’t theirs, argue with facts and history if you’d like
@Jude Alkeraishan (I assume you posted initially as JuJu?) — You specify that you meant Israelis rather than Jews, but then call the idea that Israel is a multicultural society a lie. Which is it?
There have been Jews in Israel for 2000 years. Half of the Jews in Israel are Mizrahim. All Jews trace their lineage to Jerusalem. I am not arguing that Palestinians were violently displaced and continue to be the victims of grotesque atrocities at the hands of Israel’s ultra-nationalist government. But traditional settler-colonizer narratives do not apply to a historically oppressed people either continuing to exist in or returning to their ancestral homeland.
* that should have read “I’m not arguing that Palestinians WEREN’T”
I can’t remember if it was On Point or Fresh Air, but the scholar was discussing how claiming indigenous rights to land and regress for wrongs can be very complex in places as old as the middle east. Some Palestinians call 1947 a catastrophe, but somehow the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the British and French in 1918 wasn’t. Up till then all Jews and (Arab) Christians had extra taxes on them since they weren’t Muslims, plus great restrictions on trades and ownership. There is also the whole Shiite vs Sunni violence spectrum. Not exactly a multi cultural nirvana. Not that many liked the Turks either ruling from Constantinople. But they had been in the area since before the 1400s too after migrating from central Asia. Many of the locals considered The Battle of Yarmouk in 636 as a catastrophic event as some Arabs swept in to subject them to a new government, religion, alphabet/language, and laws.
Areas such as the Levant and Mesopotamia have countless waves of human movement. We could go into the forced dispossession of land in the area by Assyria, Persia, Egyptians, Italian Romans, Greeks, Hittites, and long lost pre-writing and agriculture groups. He pointed out we have plenty of evidence of pre-Homo Sapians humans were there too before our species moved out of Africa displacing them longer ago. The other problem is, what is to be done about it? That said, the current Israeli government has plenty to answer for. As does Hamas. Lots of pain and horrible to go around.
There are 2 sides to the debate of why and how Palestinians were removed from their land in 1948, which are explained in the wikipedia article: “Causes of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight”. It sounds like you support the mainstream Zionist opinion, and the author of this post supports the mainstream Palestinian/anti-Zionist opinion. I encourage anyone interested to read the wikipedia article and decide for yourself which side is correct.
You might also read the Amnesty International Report “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity” which explains how the Israeli government treats the Palestinians who live in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories today.
I would also just like to say that i loved the “colonist propaganda machine.”
So true. I have often wondered who wins when the people who pray for peace are fixated on news being pushed from any number of imperial powers with competing interests. As we become increasingly galvanized “for” and “against,” whose proxy wars are we fighting? Who is actually winning?
May Israel and Palestine both find peaceful representation and leadership.
thank you for telling this story and for sharing your family with us.
So glad to read this here. Free Palestine <3
and free LQBTQ+ Palestinians！
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_State_of_Palestine
. . .if it weren’t for whataboutism, some people wouldn’t have any points at all.
What’s wrong with wanting a better government for Palestinians? (This is not inherently a pro-Israel statement)
Then there’s this:
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2014-09-23/ty-article/.premium/idf-gays-who-help-blackmail-gays/0000017f-db58-db22-a17f-fff9c4650000
This is awful. We can also draw a distinction between the homophobic actions of individuals (including queer ones) and the homophobic laws and policies of actual governments. Both are terrible, but they are not equivalent.
Thank you so much for sharing your family and your experience. I am so sorry for what they had to go through.
Thank you so much for sharing your family’s experiences with us and for sharing so much of yourself, as well.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I’m sorry there are people in the comments trying to be pedantic and “well, actually…”-ing when you are sharing so vulnerably and beautifully about your family’s history.
I’m so grateful that you have such connection with them <3 grandparents are everything.
Hi. I’m guessing I am the one being perceived as pedantic. Not my intent. I am trying to understand the history, and I am not an expert in this area.
Clearly you have a deep empathy for people and value vulnerability and sharing raw beliefs, even if they are not in line with the norm of the group. Please be patient with my attempts to reach some deeper understanding of the dynamics at play.
Also, I think we all agree that grandparents are the best :)
Hey S, I can see you’re trying to understand and I do appreciate that. However, even saying things like arabs did this then jews did that, is problematic, erases context and misses the point. We are not talking about arabs v. jews, that is propaganda messaging from western media. We are talking about a zionist movement creating a militarized state with one of their expressed goals being extinguishing palestinian people. I know this might feel harsh in your body to read, and I hope you can be gentle with yourself and try to accept that what I’m saying might be true.
When you start to deny that there is and was genocide and ethnic cleansing of palestinians by zionist/israeli foreces, happening as far back as the Nakba, and a plan for establishing a zionist state in Palestine dating back to the 1800s, it is dangerous to oppressed people everywhere, including queer and trans folks. If you are truly looking to understand, I hope you will take what I am saying seriously and start to shift your orientation to this issue.
I’ve felt impotent with rage about the apartheid in Palestine since I learned about it as a teenager so I can only imagine how it is for actual Palestinians. I’m so sorry.
The power of personal narratives is its collective political violence.
Thanks for sharing <3
I waited for a long time this king of pieces from Autostraddle. I wish Autostraddle showed more solidarity with the Palestinians people and sooner, in fact against imperialism in general.
Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for your bravery. This article has proven to me that Autostraddle provides a voice to the oppressed and doesn’t shy away from the truth. You have gained a permanent supporter.
Beautiful sharing – thank you Laila/Laik. I love hearing our stories. Your Jiddo is inspiring and so are you xxx
Thank you for sharing this, your Jiddo sounds like a lovely man. The violence your family experienced will never be excusable.
This piece is so powerful and I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. I’m sharing it with all my cousins :)
My Teta also fled Haifa in 1948 and lived to age 90 in LA, where she came to give all our family a better life. As I get older and more sad and tired, I understand more how sad and tired she was, and I admire her strength to express joy with her shattered spirit.
Your Jiddo sounds like an incredible man — hug him and cherish him!