#I read this for a class and felt Abu-Lughods work is like... something folks need to read

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My father was a talker and a storyteller. Because of this, there was no time when we, his children, did not know we were Palestinian. The stories I remember about his boyhood in the 1930s and early 1940s were nostalgic, both comic and bitter. But there were more political stories that began to teach us what it had meant to be Palestinian under the British Mandate. According to my father, people were barely aware they were on the eve of disastrous events that would make them refugees. They did not realize that the Zionists, not the British, were their real adversaries. Yet, while I was growing up, I don’t recall hearing his stories of 1948, the last months before the fall of his hometown, Jaffa. Were we too young to be told? Did it not mean anything to children who had never seen Jaffa? What happened when my father returned to Palestine was that his memories now became the guide to a living history and a real place. And he told the stories to me and to anyone who would listen. Jaffa was the heart of my father’s Palestine. On the wall of his apartment in Ramallah when I came to stay in 2001 was a large sepia poster: a historic photograph of an Arab man staring wistfully out to sea with a large town in the background. At the top, in Arabic, it said, “Jaffa 1937.” On my first visit to Palestine to see him in 1993, I sensed the thrill he felt at having mastered the new situation. The good part was embracing and being embraced by the community he had found, whether in the West Bank or in various other parts of pre-1948 Palestine. The anxiety of being there was betrayed by his dry mouth and the beads of sweat on his forehead as he drove us around, approaching Israeli military checkpoints or getting lost because he couldn’t read Hebrew. For me, the landscape was familiar from Lebanon and Jordan, which I had known well growing up. The barren highways and the cities branded by Hebrew sounds and sights were menacing, though, especially when combined with the heavy presence of Israeli soldiers, reservists, and guns. He was eager to show me and my small family the whole of Palestine, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, Nablus to Nazareth, Jericho to ‘Akka. His tour of Jaffa, the same one, I was a little hurt to discover later, he gave to many others, was about claiming and reclaiming the city in which he had been born, the sea in which he had swum as a boy, and the home he had been forced to flee in 1948. On his own first visit in 1991, he’d asked friends to take him there. Initially he was disoriented. Most of the landmarks weren’t there. The neighborhood by the sea where he’d grown up had been razed by then, though twenty years earlier his brother had done what so many Palestinians have done and described: knocked on the door to find out which Jews—Russian, Moroccan, Yemeni, Polish—were now living in their old family homes. Suddenly, my father said he had spotted the Hasan Bek mosque where he had made the call to prayer as a boy. Bit by bit, circling more widely around the mosque, he began to find his way. It was a former student of his who had made him rethink his refusal to go back. She often traveled to Israel and the Occupied Territories. He recalled that she had told him once, “Ibrahim, Palestine is still there.” He was happy, he said, to find this true. There is an image in one of Doris Lessing’s African Stories (1981) that has never left me. A young girl, a white settler living in southern Africa, looks out over the savanna and acacia trees and sees the large gnarled oak trees of her English fairytales. My father did the opposite. Where I, who never knew anything else, could see only the deep gouges in green hillsides made for Israeli settlements with garish red tile roofs, or miles and miles of highways criss-crossing the rocky landscape and claiming it with modern green signs in Hebrew and English, or non-native evergreen forests to hide razed villages, my father saw beyond, between and behind them to the familiar landscapes of his youth.

– Return to Half-Ruins: Father's and Daughters Memory and History in Palestine by Leila Abu-Lughod.