For This Palestinian Family, No Place Is Quite Home

When May Rahal speaks animatedly -- as this vivacious young Palestinian woman often does, letting a flow of words transport her -- she has a tendency to fall into the Arabic dialect in which she feels most comfortable: Iraqi.

But May, a 21-year-old medical student, tries not to let that particular slip occur outside her home. It draws odd looks from fellow students, elicits a cool reaction at times from her professors and throws casual encounters with taxi drivers or vegetable sellers into confusion.

She is no stranger to this sense of dislocation. After all, it’s something of a family legacy.

“Sometimes I really don’t know where I belong,” said May, sitting in the living room of the Rahals’ simple but comfortable home in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, with a space heater hissing companionably and a freezing winter rain sluicing down outside. “I don’t know where I can really feel at home.” Then she laughed. “Except here -- in my own house, with my family!”

The theme of displacement runs like a brilliantly colored thread through the complex narrative of the Rahals, a far-flung yet close-knit Palestinian clan with branches in the West Bank, Jordan, Iraq and the United States. Now it is the turn of this delicate-featured, dark-haired young woman to weave her own piece of the family tapestry.

The Rahals are in many ways a microcosm of the soaring aspirations of the Palestinian people -- but they also reflect the wellsprings of anger and bitterness that time and again have helped to thwart peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.

The family’s continuing bonds of love also echo the larger and essentially familial yearning for Palestinian statehood. But that seems a distant dream these days, as hopes raised by an American-backed peace plan collide with ugly realities on the ground.

May, whose parents are Palestinian refugees born inside what is now Israel, spent her childhood in Baghdad, where her father was an exiled functionary of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. She passed her teenage years in Bethlehem, the hilly West Bank town where tradition holds that Jesus was born.

With her family wanting the best schooling possible for her, she returned to the Iraqi capital three years ago as a medical student. But last spring, with her two student brothers, she fled Baghdad’s postwar chaos and a climate now unfriendly to formerly privileged Palestinians.

The three returned to Bethlehem -- May’s home in name, but no longer a real hometown to her.

“Here’s how that shows: Her little sister gets 15 calls a day on her cellphone, friends calling to talk about this and that,” said her white-haired father, Hussein Rahal, looking at his eldest daughter with love and concern. “She might get one or two, and they are always about her studies.”

The return of the three eldest Rahal children to their Palestinian roots marks the end of a tumultuous year in which they, like many of their compatriots over the past half a century, have seemed to be on the wrong side of history.

May’s grandparents fled their ancestral home in 1948 during the fighting after Israel’s declaration of statehood, believing like countless others that the move was temporary and would last weeks at most.

But Israel’s war for independence and the creation of the Jewish state resulted in the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, whose claims to a homeland stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River are today perhaps the greatest obstacle to any enduring peace in the region.

The Rahal grandchildren, May’s generation, have never seen the family’s ancestral village of Artouf, west of Jerusalem. They hear dreamy tales of its bountiful orange and lemon groves, its stone-walled houses that were warm in winter and deliciously cool in summer, and its fragrant olive groves and groaning olive presses. But today it is a nondescript Israeli industrial town, with little remnant of the verdant landscape the family elders so vividly recall.

The Rahals also thought that the path of uprising against Israeli rule would hasten the way to statehood. Instead, they reluctantly acknowledge, the current conflict with Israel has heaped suffering on nearly every family living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including their own. Israelis, too, have felt the weight of grievous losses.

Most recently, the Rahals hoped that Saddam Hussein, who styled himself a champion of the Palestinian cause, would emerge victorious in his quixotic confrontation with the United States. Although many Palestinians felt as the Rahals did, the family had a more personal stake than most: May’s uncle Ahmed was a general in the Iraqi army, the only Palestinian to have achieved that rank.

Dreams of glorious victory for the Baathist regime died with the former Iraqi leader’s capture by U.S. troops in December. As footage of a disheveled Hussein was endlessly replayed, the Rahals could hardly bear to watch. They simply turned off the TV.

At the same time, tenuous hopes for any peace with Israel foundered. The U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan appears to be going nowhere, and few here expect diplomatic progress in the months remaining before the American elections.

The Rahals, like many Palestinians, have simply hunkered down, hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

May and her two brothers are trying, with limited success, to pick up their studies somewhere around the point where they were interrupted by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last March.

Bethlehem, spread out over steep terraced hills that look much as they probably did in biblical times, seems cramped and provincial in comparison with the sophisticated Iraqi capital they had considered home.

Here, they confront the daily travails of life under occupation: checkpoints and roadblocks at every turn, tight military curfews when the situation grows tense, and an Israeli-built barrier in the West Bank whose presence looms larger every day.

In Baghdad, May and her brothers were students at the prestigious Mustansiriya University, whose image appears on Iraq’s newly minted 1,000-dinar bills. May and her 23-year-old brother, Amr, are now enrolled at the medical school at Al Quds University in the dusty West Bank town of Abu Dis.

It is considered one of the premier Palestinian institutions of higher learning, but in their view, it is sadly limited in both its facilities and academic scope.

Particularly infuriating to May and Amr is the fact that they have to repeat their third year of medical studies, even though they believe that their Baghdad schooling placed them well ahead of Palestinian counterparts.

“We don’t even have our own teaching hospital!” May burst out. “Baghdad is the mother of sciences,” Amr said glumly, referring to the city’s status in medieval times as a beacon of learning and culture in the Arab world. “Not Abu Dis.”

Mohammed, the youngest of the three returning Rahal siblings, has enrolled as a freshman at Birzeit University outside Ramallah, the leading university in the West Bank. But Birzeit would not accept his two years of engineering credits from Mustansiriya, so he had to start over again.

“I wish sometimes that Bush had waited another two years to invade Iraq,” said Mohammed, a gangly 20-year-old with a wan smile. “Then I would have had my Mustansiriya degree.”

Sharing the family’s day-to-day life in Bethlehem, the elder Rahal siblings have also come to conclude that neither the Israeli nor Palestinian leadership can find its way out of the blind alley of violence.

All three had spent most of the current intifada away from home, visiting occasionally. With fear and anxiety, they would watch scenes of tanks in downtown Bethlehem on the Arabic-language satellite channel Al Jazeera -- just as their parents and siblings in Bethlehem, with equal measures of apprehension, watched the U.S. bombardment of Baghdad, knowing their children were in harm’s way. Now, back home with their parents and younger brother and sister, May and her brothers wonder how long life can go on like this.

“It’s unbearable,” father Hussein said. “Women are giving birth at checkpoints. Can anyone even fathom the humiliation?”

“It’s very depressing,” May said. “You feel people’s desperation.”

But Hussein added sadly, as his children nodded in agreement: “The real trouble is, there’s no Palestinian Karzai” -- referring to the struggling but well-regarded Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, installed with U.S. blessing.

“There’s no one like that in Palestine,” he said.

May and her brothers wrestle, too, with the degree of personal affiliation they feel for the Palestinian cause, and the tug of other loyalties. “In some ways, I can maybe identify more with the Iraqi people and what they are going through in the American occupation,” May said. “But what is happening here seems very similar to me, so in a way I can relate to it even more closely.”

May’s sentiments toward the West, like those of her siblings, are a welter of contradictions.

In one breath, she says that Iraqi insurgents ought to be able to inflict greater casualties on U.S. forces, yet a moment later talks of her wish to continue her studies in the United States.

She is considering a specialty in oncology, like her uncle Khadar Hussein, who is a successful cancer specialist in Oklahoma.

This year’s festival of Eid al-Adha, the most important in the Islamic calendar, was once again a poignant reminder of enduring family ties tested by political circumstances.

Khadar traveled from the United States to Jordan to be with his 90-year-old father, the family patriarch, and other relatives for the holiday this week. May and brothers Amr and Mohammed also made the trip.

But her father, Hussein, cannot get a travel permit to cross into Jordan. Khadar will not set foot in the West Bank, which he regards as a reminder of the family’s exile. And May’s other uncle, Ahmed, tried to win permission to travel to Amman from Baghdad, but he was turned away at the Jordanian border because of his former association with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

So the Rahals celebrated this holiday as they have on so many family occasions: separated from one another, exchanging heartfelt wishes for luck and health in static-filled telephone calls.

“At times like this, our feelings fluctuate so strongly between happiness and sadness,” Hussein Rahal said.

“Our sadness is in our situation, and in the way it has not changed for the better. But our happiness is in our children, and our hopes for them.”

May, listening to her father, averted her eyes. They were glistening with tears.

“From no matter how far away,” she said, “we in this family will always love one another.”