A Gendered Return: Reflections of a Bint Qawiyyeh bila Latafa (Strong-Willed Girl without Gentleness)

I was born in Jerusalem, where my ancestors planted roots centuries ago. My family is from Shuʾfat, a village north of the Old City, where I spent the first few years of my life. My connection to Jerusalem has always been strong, even when my father moved our family to the United States to avoid the political problems of the region. He also did not want us to experience the poverty he endured as a child in post-Nakba Jerusalem, then under Jordan's jurisdiction. We left Palestine on a snowy, cold day at the end of 1987, just as the first intifada was brewing. In the United States, Palestine was always present in our new home. My parents spoke only Arabic at home, my father told us of his adventures in Jerusalem growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, my mother cooked the dishes she grew up with (i.e., makloobeh, warak dawali), and the iconic painting of the old man carrying Jerusalem on his back hung in our living room, along with a framed painting of the Dome of the Rock. My upbringing nurtured a deep longing for Palestine and a desire to return one day.

In 2002 I was finally able to return to Palestine when my mother's family bought me a ticket as a high school graduation gift. I spent six blissful weeks with my extended family, exploring the Old City, praying in al-Aqsa Mosque, shopping in Ramallah, and taking day trips all over historic Palestine. I left the country yearning for more. Over the years I made many trips back to the homeland, exploring and soaking up as much of it as I could before leaving again. Those trips were never enough for me. Finally in 2019 I moved to Jerusalem to begin my dissertation field-work and work on reestablishing my Israeli permanent residency.¹ Because I left Jerusalem as a child, the Israeli government revoked my residency and I had to apply to have it reinstated—a lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive process. I knew that I would encounter numerous difficulties moving to Jerusalem from the United States, mainly living under a military occupation with soldiers and guns everywhere, but also because of the cumbersome Israeli bureaucracy and my lack of Hebrew language skills. However, I was also worried about life in my ancestral village, surrounded by curious relatives wondering what inspired "the American," as they called me, to return to Palestine. For decades the Israeli settler-colonial project has worked to dispossess us of our homeland by any means possible: for example, by forcing someone like me—born in Jerusalem and able to trace my lineage in the region back centuries—to prove to Israeli airport workers that I am visiting my numerous family members and by limiting me to a three-month tourist visa. I viewed returning to Palestine and obtaining my residency as a prime example of sumood, or perseverance, essentially, staying on the land no matter the difficulties.

My encounters with the Israeli government went hand in hand with my experiences within my own community. I had come back to Shuʾfat as a full-fledged adult with meaningful experiences, mainly outside the Palestinian community, ready to jump into a new chapter of my life. However, I have been struck by how gendered the experience has been because of how people expect me to behave as a woman within specific notions of femininity, explaining my so-called discretions as a result of my upbringing abroad. Three main issues became apparent: first, as a young, single woman, I was not allowed to speak on my own behalf or solve my own problems; second, I was expected to exhibit notions of femininity in the face of direct bad behavior by young boys and men by being enduring and patient, quiet, accepting, and forgiving; and third, people blamed my upbringing in the United States for my inability to comply with their notion of what a woman is and treated me as an outsider. My community views me...