Leila Nabulsi is a 57 year old Palestinian refugee who lives in Somerville, near Porter Square

Losing one’s home is one thing, but for us it was compounded by the loss of family connections, linguistic/cultural heritage, wealth of the nation as that enhances or detracts from our community or personal wealth, and the connections to our ancestral lands and history that span millennia.

To understand that you have to imagine my family, like most refugees, still holding on to the key of the home in our land of Palestine, from which we were driven.

Whether we Palestinians lived in the refugee camps in Jordan, Syria or Lebanon or in the camps in the West Bank or Gaza, we raised our children and grandchildren on the hope of going home to the one place we felt the connection to our ancestral lands and ancestors. 

Like other native and indigenous peoples, Palestinians place a high value on this ancestral connection. 

My aunts Jamila and Farida showed us the keys and talked about the houses, the personal belongings, the orange groves and the smell of the sea in Yaffa. 

In 1948 the Haganah regulars in the British army joined the terrorist gangs of the Stern and Irgun and forcibly removed the majority of the people in the Palestinian countryside using both fear and aggression.   

Some of my family members were shot when they attempted to return after the aggression subsided. Sometimes people were prevented from returning from a distance of only a few thousand feet, where they had been hiding during the fighting.

The new military state of Israel instituted the Law of Return, which allows Jews from all over the world—whether from New York, Russia or any other country—to enter and acquire our lands and properties.

At the same time we, as native Palestinians with roots in the land, are denied the Right of Return. But my uncles held onto the deeds or tax records to their properties and businesses in Haifa and Lidda.

Palestinians experienced this process again in 1967, when the military, settlers and government of Israel confiscated lands, movable property, natural resources, cash and valuables from my family and many people in the West Bank and Gaza. 

The land that I inherited from my father is today in the hands of a Jew from Brooklyn. He has demolished most structures and removed the orange and lemon groves to farm it as a large agribusiness with other farms he was given by the military governor.

Right of return is not a remote notion about past losses and aggression. The theft and aggression continues till today.

To understand how this has whole process has worked, you need to look at the Palestinians who live inside the Green Line. The Green Line marks Israel’s border before the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The condition of Palestinians there has continued to deteriorate, as they are subjects of a state that does not recognize them as full citizens, because they are not Jewish. That is so, even if they are descendants of the original Canaanites, Hebrews and Aramaics, who have lived in Palestine for thousands of years. 

Palestinians inside the Green Line cannot serve in the army, and as such are denied the benefits of work in a state that relies heavily on the military and on governmental jobs.  Two of my friends there are psychologists. They cannot work in any school or clinic.  In order to borrow money you need to have a military certificate; and thus many Palestinian homes have not been repaired in over 57 years.

Palestinians in Israel pay taxes, but their towns get a small fraction of the revenues Jewish towns get for water, sewer, roads, schools and other public works. 

Palestinians in Israel are denied permits to buy or lease any of their lands. The state transfers ownership to the Jewish Agency, which only allows Jews to use the land.

Many Palestinians are displaced internally under the Absentee Property Law. Anyone who was not at home when the Israelis came—maybe the owner was in the fields or in the next town over—is declared an absentee and the property goes to the Absentee Property Bureau.  This is one of the cleverest ways to take property away from Palestinians.

Another way is the closed military area.  The army declares an area closed, then confiscates the land and turns it over for Jewish settlement. Mind you, this is against people who hold Israeli passports, but are fourth class citizens in this archaic, racist state.

Over 50 villages of internally displaced persons that were started after 1948 are unrecognized, get no services and are in constant danger of being built over whenever a new Jewish settlement is planned or to make room for parks “for Jews only.”

Bedouins are removed from their pastures under similar excuses by the military for land to be turned over for Jewish use only. Remember this is not in the so-called occupied territories of West Bank or Gaza, but inside the so-called democratic state of Israel.

It’s all about the basic question of the Right of Return. If we ever give up this right, we give up our legal status to reclaim our homes and our rights to be full citizens of our own land. 

I hope that you will agree that these actions perpetrated against us are illegal and unjust. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was introduced to prevent actions like these.