A Love Letter To Palestinian Woman

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am to have been born Palestinian. This identity comes with unending grief, but it also comes with the pride of being part of a lineage of the most steadfast people on the planet. More than that, I feel blessed to be a Palestinian woman. Part of the lifeblood of our community, part of a legacy of historians, caregivers, and storytellers.

Whenever I go back to Jordan to visit my mother’s family, I’m reminded that I was raised in a community of strong Arab women who taught me the meaning of strength. I have six aunts and countless cousins, but I am the youngest girl in the family. My cousins Rand, Shayma, and Lujain were my best friends during my childhood and into adulthood. We spent hours in the street playing football, running to our local market for ice cream, and bothering our grandparents with SpaceToon on the TV. For a great deal of our lives, being Palestinian didn’t feel like a political identity; it was simply part of our history.

As we grew older and learned the history of our family’s Nakba story (the displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland), we began donning our thobes and map necklaces. When the genocide started in 2023, I watched with pride as Rand and Shaimaa went to weekly protests in Jordan, keffiyehs wrapped around their hijabs and megaphones in their hands. Every Friday, immediately after Jummah prayer, they would take to the streets with the thousands of other Palestinians in exile. They have taught me what it means to fight for a cause amid personal grief and what true solidarity means in a time when people would rather stay home.

My sister Sarah has been my role model for as long as I can remember—I stole a lot from her growing up: music, clothes, and, yes, admittedly, a good chunk of her personality (as younger sisters do). Even in periods when we bickered, a bond between sisters, especially sisters bound by a sense of survivor’s guilt, can never be broken. I was a teenager when she started going to therapy. I cannot stress how stigmatized this is in our culture. If you have a problem, prayer is the answer. But throughout high school, college, and post-grad, she fought not just for herself to be heard but for other young Arab and Muslim women to seek out mental health help. She researched gaps in the system that overlook the generational trauma we experience and fought to stop the stigma of asking for help.

I will never forget, during the depths of my depression during this genocide, the way she showed up for me every day. She reminded me that it’s not that I don’t want to live at all, but instead, I don’t want to live in a world that treats us like this. That I needed better care, and that I deserved it. Maybe this isn’t revolutionary for others, but it was a breakthrough in allowing me to seek trauma-centered therapy that I wouldn’t have sought out otherwise. She taught me the meaning of protecting ourselves as Palestinian women while never looking away from the pain of our people. In her eyes, these two concepts can and should coexist.

I am lucky that throughout this genocide, I cultivated connections with some of the kindest, most perseverant Palestinian women I have ever met. “Community” is a word that often feels overused, but what else describes the love present when sitting around, eating molokhia, and sharing the stories of our grandmothers? What other word describes the warmth in one’s chest when we realize we are all distant relatives, that our ancestral lands are fifteen minutes apart? What else can encapsulate the grief of realizing we could have had a very different life had we been born where our great-grandparents were, in a land free of occupation? The nights I spent with my best friend Jude, whose name means generosity in Arabic, will forever be a source of comfort. Something as simple as laying my head on her shoulder as we both cry watching Al Jazeera, trying to hunt down the best qatayef in Queens, or laying on the fifth floor of Pulitzer Hall at Columbia, exhausted from a full day of reporting on the encampments—those moments replay in my mind constantly. Maintaining community is not always easy, it comes with disagreements and frustration, but that is the work that goes into creating something beautiful. It has been a gift to learn the meaning and feeling of unconditional love from my Palestinian friends.

I know I would not be writing this had it not been for the generations of brave Palestinian women journalists who sacrificed everything to have their voices heard. The older journalists I’ve met in the diaspora who made sure to carve a place for me, and the journalists my age on the ground, like my beautiful friend Eman in Gaza, who writes every day about our people’s cause. When I feel exhausted or burned out by the state of this industry, all it takes is one look at what these other women have overcome, and I remember what real strength, creativity, and resolve look like. To Salam Mema, Salma Mkhaimer, Duaa Sharaf, Ayat Khadoura, Farah Omar, Shaima El-Gazzar, Ola Atallah, Duaa Jabbour, Haneen Kashtan, Heba Al-Abadla, Alaa Al-Hams, Ola Al Dahdouh, Wafaa Abu Dabaan, Wafa Al-Udaini, Nadia Emad Al Sayed, Haneen Baroud, Zahraa Abu Skheil, and the dozens of other Palestinian women journalists martyred since the start of this genocide: I owe everything to you. I will remember your names and faces for as long as I live. May you all rest in eternal paradise.

My mother is the person I most aspire to be like. Born in Kuwait, she was displaced from the moment she took her first breath. She should have been raised in Tulkarem, like her mother and her mother before her. But the 1967 war made that impossible. In the 90s, when she was around my age, she survived yet another war, the invasion of Kuwait, and her family was displaced once again to a land they didn’t know: Jordan. She spent her entire life feeling like a guest in someone else’s land. Her greatest wish has always been to go back home. In her cupboard, she still has a handful of soil from the first and last time she was able to visit her grandparent’s home in Deir Al-Ghusun, in the occupied West Bank. It is her single most prized possession. My mother dreamed of being a journalist but never had the money nor the opportunity, given the constant instability in the region, to learn the skills necessary to become one. But her voice is ever-present in my writing. Her lyrical Arabic melded into my English, and now, every word I write is influenced by her. She knows what it means to honor a person’s story by remembering it. Every person she speaks about, whether a family member or a martyred Palestinian she never met, lives on because she insists on keeping their stories alive in our home. I am a storyteller because she was one first.

There is no one I owe more to, however, than my grandmother, my Sito. She taught me everything I know about preserving Indigenous history. She was the village historian back in Palestine, and despite her Alzheimer’s, she still remembers the three families that lived in her community. Sito was orphaned at a young age and was raised by her grandparents. After they also passed, she was left with only her sister. She would steal fruits, hiding them under her arms, to surprise her older sister. They were best friends. When her sister passed away, both of them being in exile by that point, I think a piece of my grandmother died, too. Who else would she laugh with? Who else would remember the cracks in the tiles of their home? Who would she cross-stitch with?

As I got older, I was determined to be that person for her, even as she started to forget who I was. I learned the craft of tatreez (Palestinian cross-stitching), how to roll grape leaves, and meticulously noted all the details of her village so that one day, God-willing, I could go there and see it for myself.