In the wake of the ongoing war in Gaza, a Palestinian-Canadian recounts her grandfather’s journey as a Palestinian refugee in exile and the intergenerational effect this had on her own life in the diaspora.
The last time I saw my grandfather, August 2021 (Ribhi El-Nahhas left, myself on the right). Source: Author
By Leen Sawan
At the ripe old age of 97, Ribhi El-Nahhas resided alone in a senior care home facility in North Vancouver, thousands of miles away from home. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and though his short-term memory was impaired, his ability to recall events and memories from the distant past was astounding. Ribhi did not remember the faces of his grandchildren, or even the name of his youngest daughter. But he could recall, with surprising detail, exactly where he left the keys to his family’s house in his hometown of Al-Ramlah when he left as a Palestinian refugee in 1948. After all his memories had faded away, his love and yearning for his ancestral homeland remained.
Ribhi is my beloved jiddo, my grandfather. His story is emblematic of the thousands of Palestinians who have lived their lives in ghurba or exile. In the Palestinian dialect, ghurba invokes a sense of dispossession and displacement. It is a feeling that is familiar to both Palestinians who fled as refugees, like my grandfather, and those who grew up in the diaspora, like myself. It is a continuous reminder that we have been uprooted and left without a place to call home, our fate at the mercy of the policies of whichever foreign country we happened to reside in, never fully settled or assimilated in.
Jiddo’s story is a core part of my own and one that I constantly go back to while I navigate my hyphenated identity as a Palestinian-Canadian who was raised in Qatar. His story in exile is just one of many, but it is foundational for me. Like all Palestinians in the diaspora, my family and I have inherited this exile and the burden of the intergenerational trauma that comes with it. And like all Palestinians, we have found meaning and solace in exile by exchanging our stories and those of our ancestors’. At a time when Palestinian narratives are suppressed and history continues to inform current events, I believe it is all the more imperative to document and share these stories.
This is the story of my jiddo’s life as a Palestinian in exile.
Part 1: Life Under British Occupation:
Ribhi’s story begins in 1923, 25 years before the creation of the State of Israel, when Palestine was still governed by the British Mandate. Hailing from Al-Ramlah, a small town on the coastal plain of Palestine, Ribhi enjoyed a relatively ordinary childhood that was occasionally punctuated by the British occupation. He attended an all-boys boarding school run by American Quakers and spent his weekends learning football from British soldiers who carried rifles, sent to administer the towns and villages of Palestine.
Jiddo’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the town, and all of us in the family used to listen to jiddo tell stories about the El-Nahhas family’s properties. There were olive oil factories and flour mills, lime and orange trees, and swathes of land filled with olive groves and orchards that stretched as far as the eye could see.
“If this small point right here was the town of Al-Ramlah, then everything all around it for miles and miles was owned by your great-grandfather Yousef El-Nahhas” jiddo would say with pride, whenever we asked him about our family’s land and his upbringing in Palestine.
The way he spoke about his homeland made it seem like heaven on earth, and us grandkids would listen in awe, nostalgic for a place we could only visit in our imagination through jiddo’s storytelling.
Part 2: The First Displacement:
While jiddo’s life in Al-Ramlah began peacefully, occasional instances of violence flared as tensions grew among Palestinians who came to resent Britain’s imperial policy of Jewish resettlement to Palestine. The British soldiers would often search jiddo’s home, and his uncle was frequently taken away for questioning for his political activism at the time. But everything changed in 1948 upon the formation of the state of Israel, in what Palestinians call the “Nakba ” or the “Day of Catastrophe”.
Us grandkids all know the story of how jiddo and his family were forcibly displaced by British soldiers, who raided Palestinian villages and towns in preparation for Jewish settlers coming in from Europe. While the Nakba happened in May, jiddo and his family held on to their home as long as they could, until they were eventually forced to leave when the town of Al-Ramlah fell a few months later.
The British Army seized the El-Nahhas factories overnight, threatening the family at gunpoint and demanding they leave their home. They promised my great-grandfather that he could return in a few weeks. Scared for their lives, especially for the younger children, the family took what little they could carry on their backs, locked the doors to their home and their olive factories, and escaped in the middle of the night. Like the 700,000 other Palestinians displaced during the Nakba, they began to walk.
There is a running joke amongst Palestinians which says that your fate is entirely determined by two things: God, and the direction your grandparents ran towards during the Nakba.
Alongside thousands of others, jiddo and his family headed towards Egypt. They walked for days, armed with a single rifle that my great-grandfather carried. Jiddo carried his newborn sister, swaddled against his chest with a blanket. At some point during the journey, he looked down only to find that little Mona was no longer there. Amidst the chaos of a hundred bodies marching and bumping into each other, the blanket had unraveled and she had slipped from him, unnoticed. In a state of panic, jiddo ran back, frantically looking for his sister until he found her on the ground miles away from where they were, miraculously unscathed.
Jiddo and his family trudged through the desert, where they were eventually met by soldiers from the Jordanian Army who had come to guide Palestinian refugees along the way to Egypt. When night time fell, they continued in the darkness, occasionally stumbling on the bodies of their fellow exiles who had fallen, some dead, others too exhausted to continue.
The vastness of the desert was harrowing, but there was nothing they could do except march onwards.
Part 3: The Second Displacement:
Jiddo and his family eventually made it to the Egyptian border crossing of Raffah, where they were granted entry into Egypt as Palestinian refugees. They lost everything they had overnight, going from one of the wealthiest families of Al-Ramlah, to being labeled as “Palestinian refugees” with almost nothing left to their name. Their assets were gone, abandoned in Al-Ramlah, and to make ends meet jiddo and his father opened a small dukaneh (a mini market) on the corner of a bustling street in Cairo. Gone were the days of the El-Nahhas wealth. Without a higher degree, this was the only way for jiddo to support his family and his siblings’ education. To this day, jiddo’s siblings, nephews and nieces all attribute their success to his sacrifice during those difficult years, working hard to educate his 10 brothers and sisters.
Jiddo remained in Egypt for another 8 years, until he moved to Kuwait in 1956 where he married my grandmother and raised his four daughters. He lived there for 34 years, but was never granted citizenship and had no passport. It has been a long-standing policy for Gulf countries to deny long-term residents and non-nationals citizenship. The only travel document he had was the watheeqa, a flimsy piece of paper issued by the Egyptian government when he entered Egypt as a refugee. But the watheeqa was useless, barring his entry into most countries – including Egypt after he left. Every year, jiddo would renew his residency permit, anxiously awaiting to see if he could remain in Kuwait for just one more year. If it was declined, there was nowhere in the world he could go to, and once he retired, he could no longer stay.
This state of uncertainty would haunt him for many years, but he never expected to be displaced for a second time during his life.
It was midnight when jiddo received a phone call from one of his daughters on August 2, 1990.
He was in Rhode Island for the summer with my grandmother and my mother, visiting one of his daughters. The unthinkable had happened. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and once again, jiddo had no place to turn to. He was stateless.
“There were talks then of a military invasion in Kuwait… so from a safety perspective he could not go back…and because of the watheeqa he also could not go to Palestine, he needed permission which he could not get either,” said Heba Nahhas, my mother.
As the second month of Saddam’s occupation dragged on, jiddo was running out of options. His U.S tourist visa was on the brink of expiry, and he could not risk his family being deported back to a war zone. With their illegitimate travel documents, there was only one place they could turn to. One of his daughters had moved to Vancouver a few years earlier to pursue her university studies there. They could not fly into Canada because they were unable to secure visas on their watheeqas, but they could at least try to gain entry through land.
In a leap of faith, jiddo took a plane with his family from Rhode Island to Seattle, where they would then attempt to cross the land border into Vancouver and claim asylum.
They were denied entry twice by the border agent, until finally, after many negotiations between senior border officers and my aunt in Vancouver, they were allowed to enter.
As soon as they crossed the border, jiddo knelt on the floor and prayed. It was time for him to start from scratch all over again.
Part 4: Inheriting Exile:
Jiddo would spend the remainder of his days in Vancouver, Canada. I remember that he was always grateful for the haven that this new foreign country was, but he always regretted his inability to visit his precious homeland. Canada provided him with protection and safety, but it was not his home, and never would be.
As his granddaughter, I inherited this exile from him, and the yearning for a homeland that comes with it. Growing up, I struggled to make sense of my identity, and fumbled whenever I was asked the simple question of “where I was from”, often resorting to long-winded answers that left me more confused than the person asking.
But jiddo’s story has always reminded me that my answer should simply be “Palestine”.
When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and moved to a senior care home facility, my family would make the long trip to Vancouver from Doha, Orlando, Paris, Amman and Montreal. Our family was scattered across the world, a legacy of jiddo’s displacement.
He would always greet me with a smile, but as time passed, familiarity turned to confusion, as he slowly forgot my face and voice.
But somehow, he could still narrate with
precision his journey of displacement.
Until the very last moment, he never forgot his roots in Palestine.
“Up until he was 90 years old, when he still had some of his memories, dad always said he kept the keys to the El-Nahhas olive factory with one of his relatives, and that he would go back home and re-open the olive factories … but he never had the opportunity to go back again,” my mother said.
I had hoped to one day make the trip to Palestine myself, and show him pictures of the olive groves that he used to run among when he was younger. But I have not yet had the opportunity to do so, and jiddo peacefully passed away a few weeks ago.
I regret not listening more carefully to his stories of Palestine. His memory and these stories are the only real connection I have to my homeland.
Jiddo’s Last Journey:
At jiddo’s funeral, I watched as my brother lowered our grandfather’s body into the 6-foot-deep grave. It was cold and gloomy, classic Vancouver style. My brother’s black and white kuffiyeh fluttered in the wind, the only reminder of jiddo’s birthplace and homeland of Palestine. I wondered how different it would have been, had he been buried amidst the olive trees he grew up with, instead of among the Canadian maple trees, bright red against the grey backdrop of the cemetery. I remembered how much he yearned to return to Palestine one day. I left the cemetery with a heavy feeling in my chest, knowing that his dreams to spend the last of his days in his homeland never came true. These dreams probably would not come true for any of his daughters, nor would they come true for me. And they would certainly not come true for the generations of Palestinians living across the diaspora today.
Jiddo had spent exactly 75 years displaced from his homeland, hoping and waiting for the day he could return. That day never came.
And that is what it means to be a Palestinian in exile.