Israeli forces are preparing for a possible ground invasion of Rafah, a tightly packed city of 1.5 million people in the southern Gaza Strip, according to international news outlets.
Officials warn the move could displace hundreds of thousands more Palestinians. Many are already trying to cross the western border to Egypt to find safety, for a steep price.
From his home near Detroit, Tariq Luthun has been getting reports from his mom, who’s in touch with extended family in Rafah. Luthun is worried about their safety, as he has been many times before.
“I remember one moment where we weren't sure where my aunt was and where her family was, and my mom asked for help,” Luthun said, describing efforts to reach people on the ground in Gaza to get information. “Nobody could do anything.”
Egyptian officials are comparing the potential displacement of Palestinians to the Nabka of 1948, when more than 700,000 people were violently forced to leave their homes by Zionist militias during the creation of the state of Israel.
The people displaced in 1948 and ever since have found themselves all over the world, many in the United States. Despite hopes and efforts to make their displacement temporary, many remained in the U.S. for decades.
Their children were born into what many call a “diaspora.” Tariq Luthun is one of those children. Nada Al-Hanooti is too. She was mostly raised in Dearborn, she said, with her parents’ and grandparents’ stories and feelings of loss deeply ingrained in her.
“I think what I'm scared of is us losing more, right? And the more people leave, the more we lose more [of Palestine],” Al-Hanooti said. “But I'm saying this living in the suburbs of Dearborn, where I'm safe.”
With Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege of Gaza dredging up that pain, she and other Palestinian-Americans are working out what home and identity mean to them.
Many are proudly owning their identities: They’re writing poetry about what it means to be Palestinian in this moment. They’re cooking the same food their families have for generations. They’re rocking keffiyehs in public.
Some are also leaning into the pain that crosses generations. It “solidifies” their identity, said Germine Awad, a professor of psychology, diversity and social transformation at the University of Michigan.
“When something terrible happens to your family like that, you don't forget it and you pass it down,” Awad said. “It contributes to intergenerational trauma. It's the storytelling of who you are in your life, and it's sort of a way of keeping your Palestinian identity alive, even when people are trying to take it away from you.”
Becoming visible
In a lot of ways, Arabs — Palestinians, especially — are made invisible outside of spaces like Dearborn. People are given or choose white-passing names, they shed their Arabic language fluency, and avoid traditional clothing styles.
That invisibility manifests in data, too. The U.S. does not officially recognize Palestinian statehood, so its people appear as “unknown” or “stateless” in official immigration data.
And the U.S. Census historically didn’t count people of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) ethnicity separately; they were just counted as white.
Still, those Census numbers are the best data available. They show there are thousands of Arabs and Palestinians in Michigan, scattered beyond Dearborn.
Christian Geoghegan found it really hard to grab hold of their Palestinian identity in the predominantly white communities they grew up in.
Geoghegan’s maternal grandparents fled Palestine in 1948 and eventually landed in Livonia. Despite Arabs and Palestinians being a very small minority in Livonia, Geoghegan’s family found community there through their Antiochian Christian faith.
The community outside of the mostly-Arab church was less welcoming.
“My mom describes how when they were growing up in Detroit during the race riots and the bussing, like the absolute fear of people finding out that they were Arab or Palestinian,” Geoghegan said.
And it got harder for the family, Geoghegan said, as they moved away from Livonia and lost touch with that insular church community.
![Christian Geoghegan’s mother is the baby in this 1961 photo, being held by Geoghegan’s grandmother, Suham Ghannam. His late grandfather and uncles are in the front. ”My mom is named Cindy because [my grandparents] didn't want her to stick out and get attacked and have that anxiety they had growing up,” Christian said. “And that breaks my heart because that's just because of a white supremacist, aggressive culture that succeeds on diluting and draining heritage.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/e8f24eb/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1214x748+0+374/resize/880x542!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F1d%2Ffd%2Fcd54c5654da480bfe9bb63035bc9%2Fimg-20240305-135052.jpg)
Geoghegan is now reclaiming their identity in Traverse City, where they co-own a restaurant called Hexenbelle Cafe.
They serve up Palestinian dishes, hang a Palestinian flag in their open kitchen, play Arabic music, and organize protests and fundraisers for Gaza — an effort to clearly define themselves in a place where customers often say things like, “You guys don't have any normal breakfast?”
As Geoghegan has worked to become more “unapologetically” Arab, Palestinian and Muslim (they converted a few years ago), and as they’ve watched the death toll balloon in Gaza, they’ve felt more disconnected from the U.S.
“I wish this country loved me back. And it's like, that's how I felt like years ago. Now I'm at the point where it's like, oh, I know it never will,” said Geoghegan. “We'll never have a seat at the table. Like, Dearborn has Narcan vending machines and is still called the ‘Jihad Capital of America.’”
“You want to be American”
Ali Ramlawi does feel at home in the U.S., where he was born and raised.
“I've had a great life here in America. It's provided me with everything I got,” said Ramlawi, 48, of Ann Arbor. “But there's always a part of me that feels not quite 100% connected to the culture, the traditions, and the institutions. There is a part of me that still is back in Palestine.”
Ramlawi now owns Jerusalem Garden in Ann Arbor – the restaurant his father opened in the 1980s.
It has taken a lot of time and work for Ramlawi to begin to own his Palestinian identity. Growing up in Livonia, he said he felt like a “fish out of water.”
“You want to be American,” he said. “You want to eat the foods. You're kind of embarrassed when your parents are speaking Arabic in public.”
Those attempts at assimilation left Ramlawi feeling torn between worlds, he said, in search of belonging.
“Without having gone to Palestine, I really struggle with making a strong claim to that,” he said. “But I think it's very important these days for me to have that connection and to feel that we exist – because there are people trying to wipe us off the face of the earth.”
Ramlawi’s father was a young child in 1948 when his family was forced to flee Palestine. He relocated to Jordan before coming to the U.S. in his late 20s.
“He had to do what he had to do to exist and survive and provide for a better future for his kids and help his family,” Ramlawi said. “I feel like he was a martyr in that sense, where if he could do it all over again, I don't know if he would have come to America.”
Even though he’s never set foot in Palestine, Ramlawi still feels like part of himself got left behind there.
“There is a part of me that feels left undiscovered yet,” he said. “I feel like when I go back, I'm going to really feel a strong connection, a true sense of belonging.”
“Everything I do is for me to return”
There is a phrase Palestinians often use: “Existence is resistance.”
For many Palestinians like Geoghegan and Ramlawi, cooking and sharing food from their homeland is a form of resistance.
Nada Al-Hanooti, who comes from a family of activists and community organizers, expresses her resistance as a political consultant who helps organize movements.
“Being alive is offensive to a lot of folks in my Palestinian identity. And I feel like having more Palestinian children is a resistance to me. I mean, just seeing my nieces, coloring every day Palestinian flags and writing, ‘stop killing children,’” she said. “They don't want us to exist. They don't want us to keep fighting.”
A self-described “voting-rights nerd,” Al-Hanooti says it takes a broad coalition of people to fight oppression in Palestine and beyond.
“Everything I do is for me to return,” said Al-Hanooti, 32. “I will do everything in my power. Some people think that is a utopic dream. I say it's going to happen. It's in me. One day I'm going to seek justice for my ancestors and purchase a home right in my ancestral land.”
“Too many homes is like having none at all”
The word “home” can be a complicated idea for a lot of U.S.-born Palestinians, like many other children of diaspora.
For Tariq Luthun’s parents, “home is Palestine. Home is Gaza.”
Luthun is a 32-year-old data engineer and poet who grew up in Dearborn and now lives in metro Detroit. In the past few years, his parents bought a house in Gaza to make visits back home easier. He’s not sure if that building is still standing — but he knows the inside has been raided.
Luthun said his dad believes “half the world’s Palestinians would go back” if they could.
Luthun counts himself lucky to have been able to visit Gaza — traveling miles-long borders, getting guns pointed at him along the way — and felt a sense of home there.
“I haven't been back in about 16, 17 years now because there's no guarantee I can get in,” he said. “And, for that reason, I think I've had to be comfortable with the idea of cultivating new homes.”
When trying to make himself at home in a new place, Luthun said he works to ensure he is mindful of the people who were there before him.
“I understand the impetus behind what's happened in Palestine, with the Jewish people wanting a home and a haven for safety,” he said. “But the question becomes then, at what cost does one develop a home? I don't think it should be at the expense of others.”
Luthun said he doesn’t feel “torn” between Gaza and the other homes he’s found for himself.
“But I often think about how melancholy it is to have multiple homes,” he said. “I have a friend, a poet who once said sometimes having too many homes is like having none at all.”
Although Luthun grew up in an Arabic-speaking household, he’s lost some of that fluency in his years of English-based classes. And he’s not as traditionally faithful as he once was, which Luthun says makes his Palestine-born parents wonder if they made a mistake raising him here.
“I think for them, they look at it and maybe they say, oh, we failed. Like we weren't able to preserve our lineage or our culture,” he said. “But I would argue that culture and heritage are ever flowing.”
Correction: The caption in the photo of Christian Geoghegan's family has been changed to reflect that Geoghegan's grandfather has passed, not their grandmother. Ali Ramlawi's age was also corrected, he is 48 not 41.
