When home is no longer home [Book Review]

Among the extensive literature on Palestine and Israel, Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home by Fida Jiryis provides a rare, and rarely accessible, perspective. The author was born to Palestinian parents from Fassouta, a Christian village in Upper Galilee, on the Israeli side of the Lebanese border. As a child, Jiryis lived through the horrors of the 1982 Lebanon war and then moved with her family to Cyprus. She is one of a handful of Palestinians who tried to exercise their right to return, only to find that home was no longer home. She ended up studying in Scotland, living in Canada, and ultimately returning to Palestine: to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Her book guides us through her journey. First, though, she provides crucial context — including an account of her family’s trials and traumas in the aftermath of the creation of Israel by force in 1948 and their decision to stay on in Palestine rather than flee. Their story is the story of the Palestinian people.

Hers is a family memoir intertwined with Palestinian history and the struggle for emancipation, in Israel as well as in occupied Palestinian territory. The family’s story illuminates the human dimensions of the Palestinians’ ongoing plight: dispossession, military rule, resistance, emigration, struggle, loss, dispersion, and ultimately…