On July 9, 1998, a small house in Anata, a village northeast of Jerusalem, was destroyed for the first time. Home to the Shawamrehs, a Palestinian family of nine, the house was built four years earlier in a part of the West Bank over which Israel has military control. House demolitions occur routinely in this territory, where Palestinians like Arabiya and Salim Shawamreh are denied building permits on land that they have purchased and rightfully own.
This house became a target for repeated demolitions because the family refused to leave. Each time Israeli authorities razed it, the family rebuilt it, alongside volunteers from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. Now known as Beit Arabiya, the house has become a symbol of resilience.
This family’s story exemplifies the precarious nature of life as a Palestinian, whether residing in the homeland or abroad in the diaspora. When I visited Beit Arabiya in 2012 to celebrate its fifth reconstruction, I was fully aware that yet another destruction could be around the corner. As history repeats itself yet again when it comes to displacing Palestinians from their homes en masse, one thing remains clear to me: Although a house can be temporary, the home is permanent.
My definition of “home” is a complex one. Despite the nostalgia I feel whenever I visit my birthplace — Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington — or any of the American cities I have lived in as an adult, they are not places I ever called home. When someone asks me where I am from, I say I am from Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is where I grew up, from about the age of 5 until I graduated from high school. It is where my mother was born, where her parents and grandparents were born and where my most formative memories reside. Jerusalem, with its simultaneous precariousness and stability, is where I learned that physical space shapes who we are. It taught me to understand the material world as a place of perpetual flux, which is fundamental to my work as an architect and educator today.
As a child, I loved wandering around Jerusalem with members of my family, listening to them narrate the city’s storied landscape. An abandoned building abutting an Israeli courthouse used to be a cinema they frequented as teens. An Israeli-owned restaurant stood in what was unmistakably the old home of a Palestinian family. An Israeli highway split neighborhoods that were once connected, severing the West Bank in half and providing a de facto fault line along which illegal settlements were created and expanded. Over several years, I witnessed one of these settlements gradually emerge across my neighborhood. Conversations involved a lot of saying “this used to be” and “that was once.” I spent my childhood conjuring alternate versions of Jerusalem, living between past and present.
Ironically, the city where I feel I most belong is the one place that can never function as my home again. I enjoy more rights and live a more dignified life in New York than I would as a Palestinian of my status in Jerusalem. Israel effectively denies me the right to earn a living, own or rent a house or even drive a car in Jerusalem. This discriminatory treatment does not apply to other U.S. citizens. Despite my American citizenship, my identity as a Palestinian casts me as exceptional.
Nonetheless, Jerusalem will never be displaced from my personhood; my family still lives there, and I visit often. When I think back to being asked by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints about my reasons for being in Jerusalem, once part of my morning routine to get to school, the answer to that question today feels more existential than practical.
Even when I lived in Jerusalem, I was considered a visitor, not a legal resident. As West Bank ID holders, my father, two brothers and I had to get visitor permits approved by Israeli authorities every three months so that we could continue to live in the city with my mother, who, unlike us, is a native Jerusalemite — an unofficial term used to identify Palestinians born in Jerusalem. (Israel claims jurisdiction over East Jerusalem despite the fact that it falls squarely within the West Bank under internationally recognized borders; this allows Israel to restrict West Bank ID holders’ movement in and access to any part of the city.)
The expulsion and forced displacement of scores of Palestinians first from their houses and eventually from their homeland — in the nakba of 1948, when Israel was founded; in 1967, when even more territory was lost; and in subsequent rounds of violence, including the current war — has created a scattered global refugee population of about six million people. I like to think that our home exists within each of us, no matter where we are. But this systematic displacement is, at its core, deeply tragic.
In Gaza, an estimated 70 percent of occupied housing units have been destroyed or severely damaged since Oct. 7, internally displacing about 85 percent of its people. This mass destruction of dwellings, what has been commonly referred to as domicide, renders entire swaths of land uninhabitable. It is estimated that in the West Bank over 1,395 structures were bulldozed last year, joining around 60,000 others that were demolished in recent decades in the occupied territories.
Israel justifies many of these demolitions as legal under its zoning regulations, which classify about 72 percent of the West Bank as agricultural land or as national parks, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. (This was the case with Beit Arabiya; the Shawamrehs’ first application for a building permit was turned down because their land fell into that classification, although by their estimates, it was too rocky to be farmed.) This zoning is done under the guise of environmental protection but effectively bars Palestinian construction on the land, which the U.N. and international organizations have considered occupied since 1967.
It can be almost impossible for Palestinians to rid themselves of a looming sense of transience, whether they live in the diaspora or are struggling to hold on to their homes in the occupied territories. Imagine what it feels like to be a refugee in your own homeland.
It feels strange to be from a place that almost everyone has an opinion about. Sometimes, the four words I dread hearing the most are “Where are you from?” The conversation that ensues is never straightforward and rarely comfortable.
“Palestine” is rarely an option on a form to indicate nationality. My home country in my official college profile was left blank because my country of origin did not exist. I often think about what it means to be Palestinian without an internationally recognized Palestine. Even this form of geopolitical erasure is painful.
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish captures the essence of our plight in the internal dialogue of his self-elegy, “In the Presence of Absence.” He writes:
You ask: What is the meaning of “refugee”?
They will say: One who is uprooted from his homeland.
You ask: What is the meaning of “homeland”?
They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread and the first sky.
You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?
In November 2012, Beit Arabiya was destroyed for the sixth and last time. Against all odds, the Shawamrehs outlived the repeated, traumatic destruction and reconstruction of their house. Their story of perseverance is quintessentially Palestinian: Time and again, Israel tried to uproot them from their land, but they remained — if not in their original house, then in another one not too far away.
Among the seemingly infinite uncertainties facing Palestinians today, one eternal truth that we have come to know all too well is that you can destroy a house, but you can never take away a home.
Iman Fayyad is an assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University and a principal of a design and research practice.
Source photograph courtesy of Jeff Halper.
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