Perspective: Our Roots in Jerusalem

Most people do not have to parade their history or dig up documents and photos just to prove a connection to the place they call home. But we Palestinians sometimes find ourselves contending with individuals and groups that feel comfortable delegitimizing our national identity and history as a way of promoting their own narrative and justifying the occupation and control of Palestine.

Sometimes it is done to curry favor with those making such claims. I recall a 2011 visit to Jerusalem by Newt Gingrich, at the time a Republican presidential candidate, who claimed that Palestinians did not exist but were simply nomads who made a stop in Palestine en route to some other place.

I was offended enough to write an essay, published in the New York Times,1 in which I talked about my family’s Palestinian heritage. Others have done that as well, putting on display family pictures, birth certificates, graduation documents, and other memorabilia, all with the simple goal of debunking these ridiculous claims and putting them to rest. I used my son’s research into 600 years of church records about our family lineage to illustrate our own roots in Jerusalem and Palestine.

I described how my father had to flee his home in Musrara in 1948 when armed Zionist gangs made it unsafe to stay and how his sister, my aunt Hoda, was made a widow when her husband was killed by a Jewish sniper, leaving her to raise seven young children alone. (One of them, Mubarak Awad, went on to become a well-respected advocate of nonviolent resistance and was deported by Israel, which deemed him a threat, in 1988. Another son, Bishara, established the Bethlehem Bible College and recently published a heart-wrenching account of what happened to his family because of the Nakba, titled Yet in the Dark Streets Shining.)

Space considerations prevented me from recounting more of my family’s Jerusalem history in that New York Times article. My dad, uncle, and grandmother fled before that tragedy and stayed in Zarqa, Jordan. My uncle Qustandi had boasted at the time that he double-locked the house. My grandmother, Tata Nazira Fatalleh, always boasted about the carpentry skills of her husband, my grandfather Musa Kuttab. She told us that he had built a wooden closet on the site of their house which she said no one would be able to remove from their small house in Musrara.

After Israel occupied East Jerusalem in June 1967, we walked over to Musrara with my dad to see what happened to their old home. Lo and behold, the Jewish settlers/tenants who were gifted my grandparents’ house by the state apparently needed the space more than they appreciated the beautifully crafted closet, and we saw remnants of the carved wood that used to be the closet strewn in the yard.

I thought it was telling that this document represented two Christian Jerusalemites guaranteeing the repair of a Muslim mosque and the building of a showcase in the mosque by Muslims. It was interesting to see that tenders were prevalent even then and that winners of tenders needed a trusted person to guarantee that they will perform the work.

While I was happy to read about my late grandfather’s role as a guarantor of competent carpentry, I was also upset that something as mundane as a tender and a guarantor would prove what should not have to be proven. Palestinians are not nomads or merely residents of Jerusalem (our current legal status according to the State of Israel), but the children of this land; living and prospering in Jerusalem and in Palestine are our birthrights. For us, Palestine is the name of the geographic area which encompasses all who live on this land without degrading or reducing the history and roots of all nations, ethnicities, and religions that have walked and lived here. Our narrative is an inclusive one.

History shows that those who have conquered Jerusalem and demanded for themselves exclusive control of it have not fared well.