In the late nineties, outside my childhood home, my mother planted a weeping willow. For years, I watched its frail branches swing with every weather fluctuation and tremor. She cared for it, and for all the subsequent trees and plants, each of which she nurtured as if it were her child. We no longer live there, and I’m unclear on what happened to the weeping willow. What I do know is that soil is a living archive cataloging the history of a people, one that is built and maintained by its Indigenous population. One that can be actively destroyed by settler colonialism for whom the archive is an existential threat making even the trees, an extension of “the enemy”. The trees have seen more than we ever will see, and their root systems are the keeper of a history that has outlived many apocalypses. 

Beirut, which sits on the intersection of three tectonic plates, is known for having been buried seven times in its thousands of years of history. But the earth need not shake for the city to fold on itself like a house of cards. My earliest memories of the Lebanese capital are of a city clearing the rubble of a fifteen year-long civil war, eager to pretend its past never passed. A mausoleum filled with ghosts haunting a population strong-armed by the Taif Accords into moving on. The war ended as abruptly as it began, leaving a trail of loose ends caught in the purgatory of a fragmented failed state trapped in endless proxy battles where the stench of corruption halos the air, and a hostile colonial entity on its southern border eager to annex more land. I came of age by the Mediterranean Sea, as did my ancestors. To come from a land that has been continuously inhabited for millennia means to sense the reverberations of each empire that has claimed it as they seep through the earth and into your bones. My anchor point has always been the vastness of that blue, the coastal highway lined with palm trees, and a corniche that would lead to my grandmother’s house where I spent most of my weekends and summer vacations.

My lineage consists of a tree whose branches scatter across the south and east Mediterranean, starting from Greece stretching through Syria, Lebanon, and all the way down to Palestine and Egypt. There are gaps I’ve never been able to fill. These have rendered me in many ways a stranger to myself, further estranged by a land I am deeply enmeshed in but always believed didn’t want me, or anything, including itself, back.

One of my branches stretches into Palestine. It was embodied by my great-grandmother, Teta Khayriyyeh, whom I got to share the earth with for ten years before she passed away. Née Safadi, she grew up in Akka, a city in northern Palestine that was ethnically cleansed of its Indigenous population in 1948, an event known as the Nakba. For the brief time that I knew her, she was an elusive figure. Reserved, quiet, but firmly tethered to her surroundings. She smelled of musk and tea, wore thick glasses, and spoke slowly. Teta Khayriyyeh married a Lebanese man, moved to Damascus, was widowed in her twenties, and left to raise three children on her own. First, she relocated to Jezzine, South Lebanon, where, in the absence of carved out borders, she would spend years commuting to Akka and back, trying to sort out property deeds, “something about family inheritance,” my mother tells me on the phone, stumbling through her fragmented recollections. 

Then came 1948. The Nakba torched the remains of my great-grandmother’s life and that of 700,000 others in Palestine who were forcefully expelled from their land. She would never again commute to Akka. Instead, that spring her extended family came to shelter with her in the south thinking their stay would be temporary. Soon after, the border hardened into an uncrossable line. Over the coming years, everyone would scatter between Damascus, Beirut, and for some, later, California. Teta Khayriyyeh would move to Beirut where she remained for the rest of her life watching time erode her home. Her past, reduced to ashes scattered by a zionist entity that has since renamed villages, streets, and cities and with the stewarding of Europe and the United States would bolster one of the most powerful and vicious armies in modern history. 

Teta Khayriyyeh passed away in Beirut in January of 2000, five months before the resistance would liberate the Lebanese South held captive along with its population for twenty-two years. From that moment onward, it was my grandmother who kept her mother alive in her stories. Teta Khayriyyeh became what I associate Palestine with: a rooted, grounded, pious matriarch who has navigated loss with unflinching faith. Though spending over sixty years of her life in Lebanon, she retained her Palestinian accent until her dying breath, and while all her descendants speak the Lebanese dialect, we all sprinkle turns of phrases and idioms from her into our Arabic. That, too, is faith or resistance. Ask me how you carry a homeland, and I’ll tell you, on your tongue.

**

The delineation of a territory implies its policing and militarization by a governing body whose job is to rank people’s freedom of movement based on criteria determined by geopolitical factors. No border can exist without segregation—however mild—of the inhabitants on either side. Borders are concave constructs; the first step in digging a mass grave. The story of the modern Levant is indissociable from that of European colonialism, and stands to this day as one of its many remaining bastions. The territory’s unraveling was a joint French-British venture, where the land was sliced up in what became known as the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement at the end of World War I. Then, came the Balfour Declaration in 1917 sealing Palestine’s fate as a nation slated for erasure in favor of creating a Zionist settler colony. 

When I look up Akka on Google maps, I see a city where streets follow a gridlike pattern similar to New York, each named after figures of the Zionist movement: Ben Ami St, Herzl St, etc. A city that retained its Roman ruins alongside structures put in place by the settlers. A city now known as “Ako,” in the same way that Yafa is now Tel Aviv, Be’er el Sabah is now Be’er Sheva, and Palestine was relegated to an imaginary past in favor of Israel and its founding lie: a land without a people for a people without a land. 

There are 71 miles between Beirut and Akka. In another world, you could have taken a train from Beirut to nearby Haifa and either transferred to another line or carried on by car to Akka. The Ottoman Empire, which had originally conceived of this railway in the late nineteenth century, collapsed before it could ever build it.

In this new world, there would be no railway, no open borders, no sovereign Palestine. You could drive your car all the way to Naqoura and pass through Sidon and Tyre, until the Blue Line forced you to stop, mere meters away from a Palestine that has been occupied for over seventy-six years. Only two things cross that line: animals and the MK drones that Israel routinely flies over the territory in violation of countless UN resolutions.

**

Throughout the formative years of my life, the Lebanese south was a phantom limb held hostage by a Zionist occupation co-administered by the IDF and collaborationists in the South Lebanon Army, led by Antoine Lahad from 1978 to 2000. In those years, Jezzine, which had been home for part of my family, existed purely as a fictitious town in a fabled land far far away. Access to the territory required special “permits” that were nearly impossible to obtain. For years, families were separated—much like in Palestine where this continues to be the case. Dissidents were sent to the infamous Khiam prison where they were held in abysmal conditions, and often tortured.

From 2015 to 2017, on my yearly trips back during the holidays, a friend and I made a ritual out of driving down from Beirut to the southern border. The drive is a pilgrimage that never reaches its destination. We know from the onset that neither the vehicle nor our bodies will reach Palestine, and so I turn to photography to record the land. Each photograph is a testimony, and an attempt to rescue a memory. Within each image, is an opportunity to break the linearity of time and gaze into the foundations of a world waiting to be built.

On the road from Beirut, the Mediterranean trails us for a while before we gradually move further inland, and I remember cranking open the window to smell the salt in the air in the mild chill of what we call winter there. There, the palm trees with their leaves flickering in the wind, waving at us as we drive by. There, banana trees telling us we have entered the south. Soon, photos of resistance fighters begin to dress electricity poles. People who died with the struggle for liberation as their legacy. At the Lebanese Army checkpoint by the Litani River, we are asked to produce our papers before we can proceed. It’s “Lebanese only” past this point, with the exception of foreigners who are able to secure a permit from local authorities.

We arrive at the Fatima Gate. A long concrete wall echoing the one in the West Bank lines this border. On the other side are Israeli settlements. The wall stands as a tyrannical obstruction, a physical manifestation of the performative aspect of colonialism: a castrated imagination, the product of a system that cannot conceive of a world devoid of compartments. Palestine is a crummy few meters away, but distance is its own language here. Acres run as wide as light-years and maps are silent obituaries archiving dispossession.

As we pass through the border villages of Aitaroun, Bint Jbeil, Ain Ebel, Rmaych, Ayta ash Shab, Palestine trails us like a severed limb. The roads we drive on always find themselves on the front lines of armed confrontation—including the most recent one that started on October 7 and led to the use of white phosphorus bombs that not only destroy infrastructure, but render the land uninhabitable. 

We make it to Naqoura, the furthest point south accessible to civilians. Somewhere along that coast, we find cut off train tracks that used to run along the sea. A quick Google search tells us these are likely part of the now defunct Beirut-Damascus train line that passed through southern towns. Standing on the shore looking south, I imagine the ghosts of my ancestors standing on the shores of Akka looking back at me across the unbridgeable distance. There are 14 miles between us that might as well be 1,000. What we mourn on these journeys are the lives that could have been, the world we could have had had it not been for the occupation.

My whole life, Palestine has existed as a specter, an unfulfilled promise, and a center of gravity. When I lived in Beirut, the keychain that held together my house keys was a silver rendition of Handala and the outline of the Palestinian land on which the word “فلسطين” (Palestine) was carved. I appreciated the metaphor that came with the gesture of leaving and coming home each day knowing that my access to the house was contingent on acknowledging the Palestinian struggle. In a cruel twist of fate, the year before my grandmother passed away, I inexplicably lost my house keys on a night out, abruptly ending the ten-year journey of my Handala keychain. 

Sometime in March, in the middle of yet another doom scrolling session, I saw the surname Safadi spray painted on the rubble of a bombed out building in Gaza that apparently housed a family by that name. I froze and wondered for a moment if these were relatives of mine I didn’t know existed, or simply people who shared my great-grandmother’s—arguably, fairly common—last name. I doubt I’ll ever find out.

 I often think of the clip of a Palestinian farmer begging the occupation army not to cut his olive tree. In the video, he’s crying, screaming: “Please kill me. Don’t kill the tree. I grew it with my bare hands. Kill me, instead.” To uproot a tree is to propagate a network of pain that stretches from the tree’s soil to the hands that seeded it and nurtured its growth. I understand each of us to be a seed in such a complex root system. We are all, collectively, the keyholders of our liberation, the ones who get to decide the terms by which our freedom is achieved. To fight for liberation means to acknowledge the land’s yearning for itself. There are no insignificant roles in this struggle. No room for failure in the discourse of liberation. Not in a world where we are told every day in a variety of ways that humanity is a tiered system, and that our place in it is contingent on the accident of our birth. Liberation in our lifetimes. We owe this to both generations past and those yet to be born.