Nora Lester Murad - The View From My Window in Palestine

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How to be a friend to a family at risk of demolition?

April 24, 2023 by Nora Lester Murad

Nurredin Amro has been my friend for more than a decade. For the last eight of those years, he has been fighting to protect his home in Jerusalem from demolition by the Israeli authorities.

The Markaz Review has published my photo essay about Nurredin’s experience. Read it here. Please share it widely.

I’ve started a GoFundMe campaign to help raise funds for Nurredin’s legal and other expenses associated with being at risk of demolition. Support it here. Please share it widely.

Also…

It’s extremely helpful if you would contact your own elected officials (in the US, your congresspeople and senators) expressing your outrage and asking them to investigate and report back to you about Nurredin’s case. If you or they need more information, let me know. You may blind copy me if you’re willing so I can keep track of numbers, and if you get any reply, I hope you’ll let me know at nora@noralestermurad.com.

Sample text for you to pull from is below.

To Whom It May Concern,

I’ve become aware that the home of Nurredin Amro and his family in East Jerusalem has been completely surrounded by a wall, severely impeding entry and exit by Nurredin and his brother, both of whom are blind, and inconveniencing the other eight members of their family. Moreover, this escalation comes after eight years of harassment that started when the Amro home was partially demolished in 2015. During that time, many homes on the land between the vegetable market and the valley below the Mount of Olives have been demolished, the residents forced out of the neighborhood, ostensibly so that the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority can build a park.

As a justice-loving global citizen, I am appalled by Israel’s blatant disregard for human rights and morality in this case, and many others in which Palestinians are being forced out of Jerusalem, despite their demonstrated relationship to the land going back generations. East Jerusalem is occupied and forcible transfer within the framework of occupation is a war crime! I therefore call upon you to cease all harassment against the Amro and other families in the Sawanna area and allow them to live in peace and security with dignity.

Please respond to me with confirmation of what you intend to do in Nurredin’s case. I plan to keep members of my community and my elected representatives informed.

Thank you so much. Your support makes a difference. I promise you.

Book Review: The Waiting Place by Dina Nayeri with photos by Anna Bosch Miralpeix

January 20, 2023 by Nora Lester Murad

I received this large, square, hardback book with an eye-catching cover from i’m your neighbor books as part of Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2023. The title, The Waiting Place, lays in bright, red, capital letters over a photo of a scene that one might drive on the way to somewhere else. There’s a child upside down in an impressive cartwheel, evoking childhood joy, next to the incongruous subtitle: “When home is lost and a new one not yet found.” To be honest, the cover and its implications made me want to look away; it took a while for me to open the book.

The Waiting Place is a 64-page book of stunning photographs with limited words. Marketed for 12-17 year olds, The Waiting Place is a must read for everyone, regardless of age. It is compelling and disturbing, as it should be.

There are 82.4 million forcibly displaced people, author Dina Nayeri notes in the afterword. Some of them will experience part of their childhood in refugee camps, as Dina did. They will grow up, become writers and doctors and teachers and programmers. They are our neighbors. This book shows a slice of the experience that some of them have lived.

Nayeri personifies the refugee camp, the waiting place, and it becomes a predator: “At first the Waiting Place welcomes you. It has heard of the wars, the famines and the bombs in your home; it is very sorry. It has been waiting for you.” Then: “Inside its gated mouth is a dreary, lazy encampment where there is nothing to do but drift. Children wait, let time slip away. They forget things: first their sums, street names, their best books. Then beloved faces, stories. The Waiting Place doesn’t mind. It wants more children and mothers and fathers. It doesn’t want you to visit the nearby lake, to hike the frosted mountain, to learn your new language, or to work or build or learn. It craves your hours, weeks, years.”

But Nayeri relieves the reader by interspersing the chilling text with the most mundane, familiar details of life. Brothers fight. Kids make artwork. Families cook. And the photos are not sad. There is adorable, five-year old Matin from Afghanistan making a monster face. His ten-year old sister, Mobina is shown lost in her thoughts, examining a flower, in a field of weeds. Kosar, a Hazara girl from Iran, jumps on her bed in her striped pajamas. The raw description of the place alongside pictures of children being children left me disquieted. I can’t stop staring at the photos, completely taken in by the spirit in these children’s eyes–the same spirit I see in my own children’s eyes. I suppose that’s the point.

Nayeri doesn’t offer a sugar-coated ending because there isn’t one. We don’t know if these specific children are still at Katsikas camp in Greece, and if not, who are the children who might now be living in the lined-up shipping crates that they called home. From my own life advocating for Palestinian rights, I know the only way to process hard truths and still avoid despair is to take action. Candlewick Press offers a discussion guide and there are engagement ideas at https://imyourneighborbooks.org/waiting-place-engage/. 

But for engagement to be anything other than guilt-driven charity, readers of The Waiting Place will need to understand that while refugee camps may feel like perpetrators to children, it is people who continue to cause displacement through decisions that lead to war and other conditions that force people to run from their homes. And it is well-intentioned people like me who too often remain silent and let those bad leaders get away with it. As I recently posted in relation to Palestine, angst is not an act of solidarity. For me to live up to the expectation of this #MustRead book, I will have to take political action. I will have to do my part to influence my own government to stop creating the conditions that lead to the need for refugee camps that steal childhoods.

Later: I keep pondering this book! I’m thinking about Palestinian kids who are born, live and die in refugee camps just waiting. They go to school, waiting. They get married, waiting. They become grandparents, waiting. What’s it like when generations live without a home, without papers, without hope – waiting?

The Waiting Place

Dina Nayeri with photographs by Anna Bosch Miralpeix

Candlewick Press, 2022

978-1-5362-1362-1

“Ida in the Middle” Book Launch at Brookline Booksmith with Areen Bahour

November 23, 2022 by Nora Lester Murad

A lovely conversation with Areen Bahour at Brookline Booksmith on November 16, 2022. We talked about growing up #Palestinian, “Ida in the Middle” and the importance of books about Palestine for both Palestinian and non-Palestinian kids. (1:05)

“YA Arab American novels: Bringing Palestine into our fictional world” by Nada Elia

November 22, 2022 by Nora Lester Murad

This brilliant analysis of Palestinian children’s literature and teaching about Palestine includes a review of Ida in the Middle. It originally appeared in Middle East Eye.

One of the courses I regularly teach at my university is “Introduction to Arab American Studies”. Most students take it because it fulfills one of the university’s “diversity” requirements, not because they are invested in the topic. 

We get to read about the strong sense of community that sustains Palestinians as they navigate life in these extremely difficult circumstances

For me, the course is a window into mainstream America’s glaring lack of exposure to any Arab-American issues in the K-12 curriculum. It has been sobering to realise that most Americans can go through their entire school education without reading a single novel, or social studies chapter, about the diverse Arab American communities that are part of the fabric of broader American society. 

For most of my students, there are Arabs – swarthy foreigners living in inhospitable countries half a world away – but no Arab Americans; the doctors, teachers, cab drivers, grocery store owners and neighbours who may live next door to them. 

They have even less awareness of the effects of US foreign policy in the Middle East and the experiences and stories this policy shapes among immigrants from these communities.

What it means to belong

A new young adult novel, Ida in the Middle, by Nora Lester Murad, explores the deeply unsettling feeling that members of these communities’ experience, as they are told in both subtle and overt ways that they do not belong in the United States, even when it is the only country they have ever known.

In this debut novel for Murad, Ida, a bashful Palestinian American teenager, is dreading the final class project: discussing her “passion” with the rest of the class. 

Her anxiety skyrockets when the school principal informs her that she will be representing her school in this eighth-grade capstone for the entire region.

She is terrified at the thought that someone in the audience will shout out “terrorist” as she ascends to the stage, just as someone had scribbled that insult on her school desk. Home alone one afternoon, as she worries yet again about that presentation, she reaches for her comfort food, green olives sent by her aunt all the way from Palestine. 

Olives, as every Palestinian knows, are not just a savoury snack; they encapsulate our culture in each dense nugget. When they are cured by a favourite aunt, they can have magic powers. As she eats the olives, Ida is transported to her parents’ village, Busala, just outside Jerusalem, where she immediately feels at home. 

In this alternate reality, her parents have never left Palestine, and she has grown up with feelings of belonging amid kids who look like her, speak Arabic, and can pronounce her name correctly: ‘Aida, with an ‘ayn.

But life in Busala is also unpredictable, scary, and dangerous because of Israel’s occupation. Here, Murad skilfully weaves the narrative between Ida’s fantasy and the all-too-real events of life under occupation, as Ida has to brave Israeli military raids, curfews, and home demolitions. 

We get to read about the strong sense of community that sustains Palestinians as they navigate life in these extremely difficult circumstances. We witness the immense courage of Palestinian children – including Ida herself – as they dodge the occupation forces; and we hear discussions about survival and resistance, including the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. 

There are some exhilarating moments, such as when Ida carries a terrified three-year-old boy to safety, telling him his name, Faris, means “knight,” and that he is their leader, while he explains that her name means “Returning,” and he knows she will not leave him behind, as she scouts their whereabouts for a safe path home. 

And there are heartbreaking moments, as when Ida watches Israeli bulldozers demolish her friend Layla’s family home. This experience transforms Ida and, after having eaten more green olives, she is transported back to Boston, where she gives an impassioned presentation about the hardships that Palestinians endure under Israel’s settler colonialism. 

A resource for educators

As I put down the novel, I went over to the website that accompanies it, and where Murad, a longtime educator, has compiled a wealth of useful teaching resources. Murad addresses questions that other educators may have as they teach a novel about Palestine, linking to dozens of websites categorised by who compiled them (e.g. librarians, the Institute for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, and many more). 

There are lesson plans, Palestine-centric resources, resources about the Middle East and Muslim issues, and more valuable information than any book review can do justice to, all superbly organised and easy to navigate. 

In his endorsement of the book, publisher Michel Moushabeck wrote: “I have been waiting for this YA novel to be written since I founded Interlink 35 years ago.”

As for me, I can enthusiastically say this is the resource website I’ve been waiting for. But please don’t take my word for it, explore it for yourselves. Whatever your level of knowledge about Palestine, there will be something for you there. 

A seasoned activist, Murad knows there will be pushback against her novel. Ida in the Middle reminded me of Ann Laurel Carter’s The Shepherd’s Granddaughter about a young girl whose family home near Hebron is being threatened by encroaching Jewish settlements. The book won eight awards, including the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children, and the Society of School Librarians International Best Book Award. 

But the Zionist advocacy group B’nai B’rith objected to what it described as its “anti-Israel propaganda”, and the novel has not been included in any Canadian school curriculum. 

Will Ida in the Middle suffer a similar fate because it mentions Israel’s demolitions of Palestinian homes – an absolute reality, yet one of Israel’s many crimes that are apparently taboo in American discourse? 

Pushing back

Murad was a speaker on the Boston Book Festival panel “Pushing Back Against the Pushback: Uplifting Marginalised Books for Young People in an Age of Censorship”, where she addressed the importance of assigning such novels in literature or social studies classes across the US, a topic she also discusses on the book’s website. 

On the FAQ page, the author addresses her identity as someone who was not born Palestinian. One of the questions she answers is: “You’re not Palestinian, shouldn’t people read books written by Palestinians?”

Her answer is an unequivocal “Yes”, and she lists some of the Palestinian authors she recommends: for children, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ibtisam Barakat, Ahlam Bsharat, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Sonia Nimr, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Wafa Shami, among others.

For adults, some prominent fiction and non-fiction writers available in English are Susan Abulhawa, Hala Alayan, Ghassan Kanafani, Sahar Khalifeh, Edward Said, Adania Shibli, among many, many others. 

Educators have no excuse not to assign the wonderful books available to them about young Arab Americans
 

Murad herself is married to a Palestinian, lived in Palestine for 14 years, and mothered three Palestinian girls. Her sensitive portrayal of Ida is certainly that of a loving parent, steeped in Palestinian culture not as a tourist, but as an engaged member of a Palestinian family. 

Given her background, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the protagonist in Murad’s novel, like Susan Muaddi Darraj’s fabulous series, Farah Rocks, and The Shepherd’s Granddaughter, is a young girl, rather than a boy. 

Certainly, girls need all the empowerment they can get in our exceedingly misogynist, patriarchal world, and these books offer that needed boost. However, my wish is for the next YA novel about a Palestinian American child to feature a boy, even as I fully appreciate the present offerings, and would welcome more.

But a lack of narratives around young boys being sensitive, caring, or protective of their friends and siblings could inadvertently risk perpetuating the myth that Palestinian girls are redeemable, while Palestinian boys are always dangerous. 

For now, however, educators have no excuse not to assign the wonderful books available to them about young Arab Americans. And with the holidays fast approaching, everyone can push back against censorship by gifting precisely those novels that artfully inject our cultural and political experiences into the broader American landscape. 

Nada Elia teaches in the American Cultural Studies Programme at Western Washington University, and is currently completing a book on Palestinian diaspora activism.

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.

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