Video: Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family's Story of Home

This book talk is part of the RCPI Spring 2024 Book Series and featured Palestinian writer Fida Jiryis. “Stranger in My Own Land” is a memoir that chronicles a desperate, at times surreal, search for a homeland between the Galilee, the West Bank and the diaspora. The book is a tale of conflict, exodus, occupation, return, and search for belonging, narrated through Jiryis’s personal experience with displacement. Jiryis asks difficult questions about what the right of return would mean for the millions of Palestinians waiting to come ‘home’.

Featuring: Fida Jiryis, Palestinian writer and editor

Moderator: Sara Roy, Associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies

This event took place on April 8, 2024 and was co-sponsored by the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Stranger in My Own Land Palestine, Israel, and One Family's Story of Home. April 8, 2024.

SARA ROY: We're delighted you're here to join us for this, what will no doubt be a very fascinating presentation by our speaker Fida Jiryis. I'm extremely pleased to welcome her to the Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies. I only wish we could have held this event in person, but perhaps another time.

Fida Jiryis is a Palestinian writer and editor living in the Galilee. She has written on life as a Palestinian and Israel and the West Bank. Born in Lebanon, Ms. Jiryis lived there and in Cyprus before returning to Palestine after the Oslo Accords.

Her published works include Stranger In My Own Land, which is the subject of her presentation today, three collections of Arabic short stories, and a contribution to Kingdom of Olives and Ash, a Washington Post bestseller on 50 years of Israeli occupation. Fida's work was also featured in Amputated Tongue, a Hebrew language anthology of Palestinian literature.

Now, before we begin, I'd like to read a short summary of her book, Stranger in My Own Land, prepared for her talk at Princeton University last year. And here I quote. "After the 1993 Oslo Accords, a handful of Palestinians were allowed to return to their hometown in Israel. Fida Jiryis and her family were among them.

This beautifully written memoir tells the story of their journey, which is also the story of Palestine from the Nakba to the present. A 75-year tale of conflict, exodus, occupation return, and search for belonging seen through the eyes of one writer and her family.

Jiryis reveals how her father, Sabri, a PLO leader and advisor to Yasser Arafat, chose exile in 1970 because of his work. Her own childhood in Beirut was shaped by regional tensions, the Lebanese Civil War, and the 1982 Israeli invasion, which led to her mother's death.

13 years later, the family made an unexpected return to Fassouta, their village of origin in the Galilee. But Fida, 22 years old and full of love for her country, had no idea what she was getting into." Fida, thank you so much for being here and I'll turn it over to you.

FIDA JIRYIS: Thank you, Sara. I'm very happy to be here with you today. And thank you so much for hosting me for this presentation about my book. I will start by going back in time a little bit to my family's story to how this book came about.

As you so kindly read, now my parents are from a village called Fassouta. We're in the upper Galilee. On the Lebanese border, about 2 kilometers from South Lebanon. In 1948, when Nakba unfolded, my father was 10 years old.

And he saw people from neighboring villages [? through ?] Fassouta being displaced, being expelled from their villages, and crossing over into the Lebanese border, which as mentioned, is very near us. And it left a very deep impact on him as a young child. He really didn't understand what was happening.

And immediately afterwards, as soon as those first few months of the war were over, Israel clamped down on its remaining Palestinian population, which was only about 160,000 people at the time with a very harsh system of military rule. So he grew up under that system, as did his siblings.

And his earliest experiences of it was even when he tried to go to school, to high school in Nazareth, having to produce movement permits and being constantly watched and always feeling that every move that they wanted to make was under the approval of the military authorities.

At the same time, he watched what was happening to his village, the land seizures, the dispossessions of the villages around him, the friends of his father and his grandfather, who had disappeared, never to return. On his bus rides to come back to Fassouta from his school in Nazareth, he would pass by some of the remains of those villages and in Suhmata, which is a village near us.

He actually saw the bulldozers tearing down the houses. The new Israeli government proceeded to conduct a project, what it called cleaning up the Galilee, basically removing the remains of the Palestinian villages, both to prohibit their owners from returning, the owners of the houses, and also to create a new reality on the ground as though those villages had never existed.

All of this left a very deep impact on him and that generation really grew up a lot faster than normal than it should have. In high school, he was already reading newspapers and he became a nazirite at a young age. And he was really getting to know the political developments in the Arab world around him as much as he could from the newspapers that were allowed in that he could read at the time.

He resolved to try to become a lawyer because he knew that what was happening was something very, very wrong and a great injustice was taking place. And he somehow felt, even as a young man, that he wanted to be in the know, to do something about it, to be involved.

And sure enough, he was the first young man from Fassouta to go to the Hebrew University to study law, which itself was a very strange experience for him because the number of Palestinian students at the time was very, very small in the Israeli University and they were largely ignored by the mainstream Jewish Israeli students at the time.

Their problems were left for themselves to solve, their alienation in the country, the fact that they had to learn Hebrew, the constant web of movement permits and study permits and permits for pretty much everything that they had to have and their travels back to their villages and seeing their families and their friends humiliated on a regular basis in every aspect of life.

In the university, he joined, first of all, the Arab Students Union and then he became one of the founders of al-Ard. al-Ard was a very interesting experience. It was the first Palestinian political movement, you could say, to emerge in Israel after the Nakba.

And it campaigned for the return of the refugees for stopping the land plundering, for removing the military rule that was in effect, and of course, it was viciously fought by the authorities because of this. My father, along with the other founders, his friends of the movement endured periods of house arrest and administrative detention, and so on.

And this continued right up until the Israeli government finally declared the movement illegal and seized all the copies of the newspapers they had tried to print and so on and pretty much threatened long-term prison for anybody who would try to continue its activities.

After this, in the 1967 War, my father [INAUDIBLE] experienced change his efforts really to [INAUDIBLE] try to earn a Knesset elections in 1965 and the Israeli parliament elections. They hoped that if they could gain a seat, they could at least try to influence some of these policies from the inside.

But that was completely turned down and fought. And they were actually-- the four founders of the movement before the elections were expelled internally to places in Palestine that had no remaining Palestinian inhabitants. So the state really dealt with them very harshly.

And after the 1967 war, my father really understood that there was really no road to peace, that things were completely blocked, and also that Palestinians really had to start taking the reins on fighting their own battle and on realizing their rights because that war represented a major disappointment after the defeat of the Arab countries and the point at which the Palestinians understood that they were really on their own.

He continued, in the meantime, to practice his work in law. He worked with Hanna Naqara in Haifa. And Naqara was known as the land lawyer and they defended a lot of cases of land seizure by the state. They tried to rescue as much of the land as possible with peasants and people's ownership documents, the [INAUDIBLE], as it's referred to here. And he continued doing that.

But at the same time he began to make contacts with Fatah, which was emerging at the time and eventually he joined, Fatah but in secret until 1970, when my uncle, his younger brother, who had also joined the organization, was caught trying to transport arms from the Lebanese border to the West Bank.

He was caught in the car. He was ambushed. And the car that he was in with the person who was carrying out this operation with him they ran from the car and the police was shooting at them. They ran through the forest and they escaped to South Lebanon. My uncle was injured, shot in the leg. He escaped to South Lebanon and stayed there. He couldn't come back.

The authorities very soon found out who he was, the identity of the people who had done this. And my father was taken, again, to administrative detention, where he stayed for several months. After this in 1970, he finally chose voluntary exile. And he went with my late mother to Beirut.

They left to Greece. And from Greece they went to Beirut. And in Beirut he joined the PLO in an official capacity. In the beginning, he worked for the Institute of Palestine Studies for a year or two, and then he joined the PLO Research Center and eventually came to direct the center.

He worked [AUDIO OUT] Mahmoud Darwish also who was in his group [AUDIO OUT] and my [INAUDIBLE] years old or so.

And in 1982, Israel invaded with the aim of driving out the PLO. That I do have vivid memories from that period. I was nine years old at the time. And the sense of complete [AUDIO OUT] that children when all the world around us literally just collapsed. It completely just unfolded the bombing and the fear and the running from one place to another with my mother.

My father would disappear for long periods because during the invasion the Israeli army was looking for him and for other employees at the center. Beirut really turned into a hellhole. And this had come also on the back of the Lebanese Civil war, which was also complex and also very difficult to begin with.

So as young children, we just watched all of this happening. We had no idea what was going on. And will always remember at that time the terror, the instability we felt. There was no school. There was no water. There was no electricity. There was no food. There was no medicine. There was the smell of burning tires everywhere in the city, the smell of burning garbage as well because the garbage service has stopped.

And as I describe this now [INAUDIBLE] I'll interject a bit to say that what we've been seeing the last few months in Gaza has returned me right to that point. So I have been having flashbacks. Every time I read or see the news, I have been having flashbacks.

And a friend pointed out who had been in Sabra and Shatila during the time of the Israeli invasion, she said that here we are 40 years later, but the mood of the Israeli army, the mode of operation remains largely the same besieging the population, cutting off all vital amenities, all services, everything and basically conducting a war from the land, from the sea, from the air, and also starving them and depriving them of medicine and of gas and of everything needed to live.

So I'm really having-- now when I describe it, I could be talking about what is happening in Gaza right now. And therefore, as somebody who has lived that and knows that even after it's over, the psychological effects that we continue for a very, very long time into all our life. That period ended very traumatically for me. September 1982, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, we were not in the camps, thankfully.

But a few months later, in February 1983, Israel was really intent on expelling any remaining parts of the PLO from Lebanon. And the Research Center was the only Palestinian institution left. Before Arafat had left Beirut, he and my father had agreed that the research would stay in order to help out the families of the fighters who had been expelled the summer before, the PLO fighters from Lebanon.

But in February 1983, there was a car laden with dynamite planted outside the center by Lebanese agents of Israel. And it killed eight employees, including my mother and several passers by and injured more than 100 people. The scale of the explosion was horrific even by the standards of Beirut at the time.

Again, I'll interject here to say that whenever I've done these presentations and whenever I've spoken about my mother to share something personal and so painful is always fraught with the [AUDIO OUT] of extreme pain and also disbelief. She's not here at the house. You become accustomed to it. It's a loss that you suffer with for all your life.

So again, here I'll interject to say that basically as I follow Gaza, it's another source of massive heartbreak to know how many children have been orphaned, to know how many mothers have been lost, and to know what these children will go through for the rest of their lives, the loss of a mother, the loss of every source of love, and care pretty much like nobody else will ever love you after that.

And three months after this, we packed up. We were really among the last PLO-affiliated, let's say, Palestinians to leave Beirut. And we went to Cyprus. And so really we try to lick our wounds.

My father went to the research center in a smaller scale, back to his work in the center with his publications and research. And eventually he married my mother's younger sister. She came from the Galilee to be with us and he married her.

We lived in Cyprus, went to school there and then went to university in England. And all the time I grew up with this notion of Palestine. It was always it was in our house, it was in my father's work, it was in my mother's loss, it was in the friends we made, our history, what my parents told us about our village.

Eventually also in Cyprus, our relatives could come and visit us from Fassouta, which they could not do when we were in Lebanon, obviously. So a picture started forming in my mind of this place, of this country that was exiled from technically and that I never imagined I would be able to go back to. We understood that there was no way to go back. If we did go back, my father would be imprisoned or worse.

And it was a place that you dreamed about, but that you could never really picture or imagine yourself going back to in concrete terms until the Oslo Accords happened. And they fell on me personally really like a bolt of lightning. I was back home from university on summer break and I was staring at the handshake, the historic handshake.

And I turned around on TV, obviously, and I turned around and asked my father, what does this mean? Can we go home? And it's interesting that referred to it at the time as home. Can we go home? Though I'd never been to this place, that's how deeply we felt destiny here, how deeply we felt that we belonged to a place that we had been forcibly removed from.

And my father, I remember, he shook his head. And then there was a slow smile. And then he said, yes, probably yes. There was a tiny, tiny clause in the Oslo Accords that allowed us to back. The clause roughly was that members of the PLO who had held Israeli citizenship before leaving, in other words, they were not refugees.

My father and Mahmoud Darwish and so on could apply on a case by case basis to return to their villages. And this is what my father did. And so in what for me at the time was a complete miracle. In 1994, in Christmas, I found myself coming back for a visit and it was probably the most emotional two weeks of my entire life.

Our relatives cried almost nonstop, as did we. The fact that my mother wasn't with us for this, my step stepmother was, obviously, but the fact that my mother wasn't with us on this visit that, she had left, hadn't seen her mother or her family for 13 years and then being killed. And 11 years after that, we'd been able to come back and she wasn't with us. It was very, very, very painful.

But meanwhile, was walking around the village, was retracing her steps, I was really in this trance of having come back home and I wanted desperately to move back for good and so it was. In six months after that June '95, we moved back. In my state of almost, romantic love, I could say, for Palestine, for everything it resembled for my village, I hadn't really come to terms certainly not when I was abroad with what it meant to come back to Israel as a Palestinian.

In a very bizarre way within short time, I got an Israeli citizenship from my father's, and soon I figured out the reality that I'm going to have to go and study Hebrew and apply to work in Israeli companies. I had graduated in computer science and this is what I did. And it was the beginning of a process of what later I called social schizophrenia.

I cannot begin to describe the feelings with my personal history, with everything we had gone through, to suddenly find myself working alongside Israelis who did the best they could to completely ignore the fact that I was an Arab. They would certainly not refer to me as a Palestinian. I was an Arab. They refer to all Palestinians inside Israel simply as Arabs.

And for many years I was really like a lone ship at sea. Gingerly, I tried to make some friends at work. Eventually, I opened up to one or two friends that I'd like to think that I was pretty close to at the time about my story and very soon after these friendships ended.

A few years later, we were at the Second Intifada and all hell broke loose in the country. And at that point, I decided I'm going to Canada. I don't want to be here anymore, which it was shocking that after seven or eight years only of being here, I would come to this conclusion.

I went to Canada. I was there for six years with my husband. I had gotten married at the time. I also got divorced in Canada. And in 2009, my stepmom here got sick and I returned, but I knew that I couldn't return to be back in Israel. It was just too much.

And by chance I had gone in Christmas to Ramallah to visit some friends and they told me, come here, you'll find a job. You'll be relatively close to your family. And this is what I did. I moved to Ramallah from 2009 and I lived there until a year ago. And about a year ago, I left and I came back to Fassouta.

It's a very long story with a lot of stations in it, but ultimately, it meant that I found myself in a somewhat unique position as a Palestinian who happened to experience pretty much the different facets of Palestinian life. In other words, I have lived now inside 48 Palestine or Israel in the West Bank and also in the diaspora.

And as I put all these threads together, I realized I had to write this story and I wrote the story for many reasons. But primarily, I wanted to explain the history of Palestine and Palestinians through my own family's story and history. And so I embarked on a process a long process of both research and interviews to produce this book.

As I was writing this book, it felt like I was living the history, certainly in the last parts. I was living the history, as well as writing it. My experiences in the West Bank, I mean, the Israeli army incursions, the constant fear, the constant humiliation, the insecurity, the deaths all the time, every other day, especially in the last few years, every other day you would wake up to somebody being randomly killed in a town, in a village, in a refugee camp.

The normalization of this all in the sense that it just became this is what life was about, the growing, encroaching settlements, the settler violence that had no end, the more and more and more horrific cycle of all this. I was living all that as I was writing about it.

I ended the book with the killing of my colleague in Al Jazeera. I worked in Al Jazeera for a while. Of my colleague Shireen Abu Akleh. And as I ended the book, I understood that this history that I was writing about would only continue.

When I finished the book and I published it, I had a feeling and I had had a feeling for several years that things were really going towards a very big explosion based on the daily reality that I had experienced in the West Bank for 14 years. And I was always talking about this with my friends, I said things are really going to blow up here. We could never have imagined the scale of what eventually transpired last October.

I mean, when I was thinking about it in my mind, most of us were thinking about a third intifada, about things in the country spiraling out of control again, in terms of the brutal Israeli response and how things would go from there and how the would be, what impact it would have on the PA and the fact that the PA was standing in the way as we felt, all these complex scenarios.

None of us could have even remotely imagined what transpired last October and the events of the last few months. Last April, five, six months before this war started, I made a decision to leave Ramallah, and I came back to my village part. Part of the reason, the biggest part of the reason is that I just couldn't handle living in that environment anymore. I had really had it.

I was really absorbing all of this every day. There was really no outlet. In the last few years, I was really so terrified even of crossing the checkpoints, of coming in and out that for large periods of time, I suddenly discovered that I was more or less a voluntary prisoner.

I would even avoid trips to Jerusalem because I was sick of the trip to Jerusalem having to take four hours to get there and back for a distance of about 5 or 6 miles or 7 miles. And so I left all this and decided to come back to my village for a while to figure things out. And I'm working now on translating a book my father wrote a History of Zionism, which is very ironic to be doing in these circumstances.

But the flip side of that is I found myself here in my village on the Lebanese border and it pretty much from October 8. The shelling began from here into South Lebanon in return. Within the first few days after October 7, all the Jewish communities, all the members of the Jewish communities, the kibbutzim, the moshavim, and so on around us all cleared out. They all left.

They went to the center and to other places because of the shelling and because of their fear that they would be targeted. So they all left. So what happened was we got this very surreal feeling of comparison. My father pointed out to me and I hadn't thought about this, he said, it's very interesting. In 1948, they came and so many Palestinians left. And today, in this bizarre turn of events, we find ourselves staying while they are leaving.

All in all, it's been really, really surreal and bizarre and horrifying, obviously to watch what's going on in Gaza, but surreal and bizarre to be here as well because when I tried to put the picture together in my mind, I am a Palestinian living in my village inside 1948, inside Israel.

The Israeli army is in my village shelling into South Lebanon, where was born, incidentally. And it is taking upon itself the proclaimed task of defending me, or defending us or defending itself, or all of the above. And I have never really been able to get my head around it, but more so as it's the horrifying aspect of the fact that they are firing from our village and from other places as well.

So we get to hear the shells as they are being launched and then you get that horrifying, eerie whoosh sound as it's flying over the village and into South Lebanon. And you get this gut wrenching feeling that what you're hearing is most likely on its way to kill somebody.

I think it will take all of us a very long time after this to even try and piece together psychologically what is happening to us. What is happening here in no way compares to Gaza, in no way at all. I mean, I'm describing the shelling and so on.

Sometimes we get the sirens and we have to go to the shelters. But we're in a position where there is a warning system, where there are sirens and where there are shelters. And people in Gaza have no such luxury. There really isn't a comparison at all.

But I feel surrounded by it on all sides. I'm living a part of it and I'm watching the news every day with horror that everybody is feeling and experiencing and the sense of having our hands tied, really, because on top of everything else, we have really been completely unable to express ourselves here.

Within the first few weeks after October 7, several people were arrested from our village for simply posting something on Facebook like a piece on the souls of the martyrs or something like that, or peace now, or ceasefire now, or something like that. My cousins, my friends who work in hospitals, in public facilities, anywhere, they have said we cannot open our mouth at all, at all.

Any word that you say even about peace is considered as supporting terrorism and people have been losing their jobs all over the place. So really we are experiencing state terror on top of everything else. This forum where I'm speaking to you about this is the only way I can actually speak and I can express myself. It's by reaching out to people outside Israel-Palestine that I can speak freely.

But otherwise even in my village when you talk to people, people are terrified. We discuss what's going on in Gaza in hushed tones. People are very scared. And it's this feeling really of being clamped down on all sides. And I think I'll stop there, Sara, and I hope that out of all this, we will see some of end to Palestinian suffering and some resolution of everything that I've been speaking about. But right now, it's looking very, very, very grim.

SARA ROY: Well, Fida, thank you so much for a very poignant and very powerful presentation. Speaking from your personal experience and your family's experience is very important for us to hear. I'll start by asking you a question. You're living in Fassouta in the Galilee. We hear very little here about what is happening in the Galilee.

We hear, of course, understandably, about the terrible situation in Gaza. We hear less about the West Bank, although we hear something. But I would like you to tell us a little bit more about this dimension of life in the Galilee as a Palestinian, as a citizen of Israel, experiencing what you're experiencing there. And also if you could then speak to us a little bit more about what is happening in the West Bank from your point of view and what it means.

FIDA JIRYIS: Thank you, Sara. I think here the immediate aspect that we feel is being where we are, not everywhere in the Galilee is like this. But guess with our proximity to the border and all the shelling that's going on around us. I think the first and most impactful thing is the shelling that's taking place and is the drones that are flying overhead and you're feeling that you are very much in it.

This is very, very, very stressful to say the least, but it also sadly brings about the adaptation to it after a few months. Now, for example, we've learned to recognize incoming versus outgoing, the shelling. It really becomes a very bizarre situation to live in. And you think to yourself that trying to describe this to people outside is very difficult if you're not actually experiencing it.

But suffice to say that you feel you are in a war zone and you feel-- I think the worst part of this is the fact that you feel utterly and completely helpless to do anything to impact the situation, or to help the situation, or even to help yourself really. You are just a sitting duck where we are.

And when take the car and go to nearby villages for shopping, to do whatever, the tanks, the armored cars, they are on the way, they're everywhere. There's a checkpoint that has been put up at the entrance to my village, which made me think very bitterly about when I first saw it that I left Ramallah and I came here and here it is, it's following me.

The checkpoint is to prevent traffic going further north from us and then veering right towards what we call the finger of the Galilee. If you look at the geography of Palestine, there's the bit that protrudes. All the settlements up there are off limits at the moment.

So the army has this checkpoint in the road that forks left to my village or straight to keep going up that road to prevent traffic from there. If anybody does want to drive up there, they have to stop and they need to ask them where they're going and why.

As you're driving on the road, there will be sometimes shells falling by or whatever. I was once in this experience and it was terrifying. First, you think that you've had a flat tire because of the sound that you suddenly hear and then you begin to see all the cars around you driving at an extremely fast speed to try and get away because it's obviously falling somewhere around. And then it registers exactly what's happening and you begin to fly very, very-- really drive very fast with them.

What this does to us on a day-to-day, I mean, we're all completely stressed out. Even more so is the psychological aspect of it that you're trying to put it all in your head. These are the occupiers continuing to wage war on neighboring Lebanon when they really have no right to be in this land or to wage that war.

I mean, if you come down to our inner feelings, to how we feel, these strangers are here, stranger in my own land. They are strangers in this land and they are here and they are continuing to do this. The other thing that we feel is a loss of sense of personal safety, because a large number of Jewish Israeli citizens are asking for alms and to be armed.

And so you have this unnerving sensation of going to the supermarket, for example, and standing at the aisle to buy milk and you turn around and there's somebody right next to you with an M-16. And it's very, very unnerving. There are times when you are hesitant to speak in Arabic. The level of tension in the country is extremely high and extremely dangerous.

I mean, I've learned to-- when I go into public places, usually I don't make eye contact. I just do what I need to do, get in, get out as quickly as possible. It's all kinds of nuances that we are two people living on this land that are now completely-- there's been a complete breakdown of any means of even basic communication.

I used to think that this was just me maybe because of my history, maybe because of everything that I've seen and witnessed. But I'm also hearing this from friends and from relatives that the tension is really so high in their workplaces that things are really they're about to snap anytime you say anything.

This is our situation here. In addition, of course, to the fact that the local counsel keeps issuing things and saying install electric generators, if you can get them and make sure that you have amounts of water in the house and make sure you have extra foodstuffs and so on. We are in a state of war.

Now, on a personal level, I try to ignore that and just get on with my work. But living this day in, day out at the same time as watching what's going on in Gaza just really, really does-- there's an internal breakdown that you're not able to really put into words. Maybe this is the first time that I talk about it so openly.

In the West Bank the situation has really deteriorated beyond any fathomable ability, I think, to even really explain it. I mean, even from when I was there before this new wave also, the Israeli army comes in at all hours of the day and night.

They arrest people while they are sleeping in their homes. They arrest very young children. They torture everybody. They torture the families. Once they are taken to detention, the families go through hell and back to try and find out what's happened to them or to visit them.

The settler violence, the wrecking of people's fields and crops, the attacks on their personal property and their cars and the mosques and the churches and the fields and pretty much every single aspect of life. The horrible waiting times and infuriation and humiliation people have to go through just to travel from one city to another.

Now, since October 7, I hear from a lot of my friends that they simply stopped in between villages and cities. A lot of people aren't able to visit their families or in some cases, they've lost their jobs. A lot of work has started to be done online because people are simply too scared to be on the roads.

And even in Ramallah, I'm hearing from my friends there's a general sense of a subdued life. The shops are closing. I don't know now, I wasn't there in the last month or so. But certainly, my friend was telling me it's very, very subdued. Even the shop owners tend to close up and go home early because of this constant violence.

So it really feels like the whole country has just completely disintegrated in terms of social order. And the little that I've been hearing from Israelis when I've gone to public places or I've heard snippets of conversations, sometimes even in hospital or somewhere, where the nurse will begin to talk to you or other places where you can feel that the person wants to talk and engage, I'm feeling that they are just as lost as we are. And I'm talking about the average citizen.

I read something interesting yesterday that said that they've done a recent poll and that a large majority of Israelis understand they don't want Israeli control over Gaza. They understand that they can't do that anymore. Now, whether all of this will eventually lead to some reckoning, to some sanity, eventually coming upon this country is anyone's guess. But speaking now from inside it, it doesn't feel like anyone is drawing any sane conclusions anytime soon.

SARA ROY: OK, thank you, Fida. We have a couple questions here. The first one is, "Has your village been targeted from Lebanon?"

FIDA JIRYIS: No, not directly and this is also the reason that our community stays in addition to the fact that we have not been given approval from the government to go elsewhere and for the government to subsidize that the way it does with the Jewish community. So this is something else also.

Our local counsel has been fighting to get us into the list of communities that are allowed to evacuate and to receive subsidies for housing and so on. And that hasn't happened, which is also another indication of how the Israeli government views its so-called Arab citizens.

And for the second question, yes, partly the IDF, I think, is here. They did the same in 2006 in the war with South Lebanon at the time. I think part of it is that so that the return fire comes back here although thankfully that hasn't happened. And the other part is simply by virtue of our location that we are so close and we are also fairly high up where more than 700 meters high up. So it's strategically or militarily.

It's not just in the village. We have several military installment's locations around us. And these have been shelled by Hezbollah quite heavily. What has happened in the village a couple of times is that the Iron Dome will intercept a rocket that's coming in and will explode it. And sometimes remnants of it will fall at certain areas in the village. But so far, we haven't had a direct hit.

Having said that, almost every night before we go to bed, I think to myself, you start having these really bizarre thoughts like if a rocket does fall, if it falls on the other side of the house and my dad is there and my brother is there, if it falls on my side and I'm here, what if it falls on the neighbors? You're really think we're just sitting in the middle of this and it's really, really quite crazy.

And the first few weeks when it started people would be hesitant to take showers, they would keep the doors open to be able to run out very quickly. And then, as I said, it's sad, but you eventually you adapt to it. You realize that this is just going to go on and on.

SARA ROY: I'm just curious within your village, is there any communication or interaction, I should say, between Palestinians and Israeli Jews living in the general area? And if so, what is the nature of that interaction, I mean, positive interaction?

FIDA JIRYIS: Yeah, even before the war, Sara, interaction was very, very minimal inside the village itself. We have a couple of Jewish communities around us who's entrance to their communities is always gated. This is something I talk about in the book as well.

And sometimes they do come to the village to see the doctor, or to use the pharmacy, or one of the supermarkets, and so on. There are the smaller communities around us, but it's very much a service relationship. There's very, very, very little visiting or mingling and this was even before the war.

And now, I mean, the only Israelis really, that you'll see in our village are the army. From what I see, there's really virtually no communication between it and the residents. I think people are just nervous when they see them. I am certainly very nervous when their Jeeps are around. I try to just steer stay out of the way.

But as I said, this just brings home even further the fact that two people can be physically in the same space or in close proximity and yet be completely unable to even engage in some form of communication.

SARA ROY: Tell me, I think I probably know the answer to this, but I'm not sure. What would you want all of us listening to you to walk away with? What is the main message you would like to convey to the people on this webinar?

FIDA JIRYIS: The main message is my feeling and the feeling of many people watching this. If we can distance ourselves just a little bit although it's very difficult from the scenes of daily horror because we're mired in what's happening, if we take a step back and we look at it, my feeling is certainly that the state of Israel in its current form in its content make makeup can no longer be allowed to continue.

I feel that there is some unraveling in process of the Zionist project. And I know it may probably sound more like a fantasy to say this, but there is an unraveling. And I feel that, this is my personal feeling that the degree of viciousness or brutality that has been carried out is a reflection of the fact that think Israel is in a place where for the first time it feels a real existential fear.

And I think it is beginning to dawn on Israelis-- also I follow Haaretz. I'm reading quite a bit here. It is beginning to dawn on many of them that we cannot go on like this. We cannot go on occupying and suppressing millions of people forever and expect no fallout.

The message that I would like to give to people is that it's very, very, very important to continue work to pressure the American government to change its stance and its policies towards Israel. As long as Israel-- and we all know this, as long as Israel has that unequivocal support, it has no brakes. It will just keep on doing what it's doing.

Israel needs to really start finally and conclusively to be held accountable by the international community in order for it to start its painful transition towards some normal entity that can exist with others. I'm not going to sit here and talk about vertices and returning history and returning and so on.

But I mean, at the moment, all we can hope for is a proper ceasefire, is just the chance proper humanitarian aid to Gaza, a chance to think of where on earth we're going to go to after this and how we're going to get there. But the message for people is certainly the work that people are doing in putting pressure is extremely important and it needs to continue.

SARA ROY: Thank you. All right, we have a couple more questions. Let me give you this one. "I've heard that the Israelis are not seeing the atrocities in Gaza on the news that they are either denied or ignored. Are you finding this as well despite the unraveling you mentioned?"

FIDA JIRYIS: Yes, I am. In fact, the ones who are writing these articles and things that I'm reading appear to really be in the know. They obviously follow. They have their own websites and places that they look at, but the general Israeli public don't really think is aware to what extent to exactly what's going on.

And also, a lot of them have been mired in the concept of revenge and victimhood and so on which they're used to. I mean, this is the normal tune of things here in Israel, the fact of victimhood, that they are under attack, that the world hates them, and so on.

I'm not sure those segments of people have really progressed at all. In fact, they may have gone the other way in terms of being even more shuttered in on themselves. I do know that for many Israelis there was a writer. I read something for recently and he said we were shocked really by the level of hatred that we felt by the Palestinians who carried out what they did.

And that made me pause. It really made me pause because it's infuriating to us the fact that they can be genuinely puzzled at this without having an inkling of what the context is, what the situation is, what has been happening to the Palestinians.

Sure, the writers, the intellectuals, they know. But the general Israeli public, I mean, sadly, many, many of them certainly not on Israeli media. And you have to really look elsewhere in the Israeli media to really see what's going on and most of them don't.

In fact, some in our area-- I mean, my cousin's husband has a shop, a food shop, a hummus and falafel shop and one of his Israeli customers told somebody else that I'm not going to him anymore because he has Al Jazeera on TV. There's a denial there as well they don't want to see.

SARA ROY: Thank you. Another question is, "Is life in your village segregated along the lines of religion?"

FIDA JIRYIS: Actually, that happens all to be Catholic. We have about 3,000 inhabitants here and they are all the same religion. So it's us and another village called Mi'ilya about 20 minutes from us and the other villages around us are mixed. You'll find Christian, Muslim or Christian and Jews. But there's a general sense of calm coexistence between religions and our part of the country. It's never really been an issue.

SARA ROY: Well, I don't see any more questions. So I'll end this by thanking you profoundly for a very moving presentation, Fida. And we wish you the very best and hope for the best as you so aptly described.

FIDA JIRYIS: Thank you so much, Sara. Thank you for giving me this chance, this forum. And I do hope, yes, we speak in better times. Thank you so much for your time [INAUDIBLE].

FIDA JIRYIS: [INAUDIBLE]

FIDA JIRYIS: And in-person next time, hopefully. Thank you very, very much.

SARA ROY: Thank you. And thank you all for attending. Bye.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Religion and Public Life's Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative, and the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

[MUSIC PLAYING]