It Could Happen Here - Nakba Stories

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Dana El Kurd shares her family’s Nakba stories, the process of discovering an Israeli connection, and what she takes away from understanding intergenerational trauma.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard's, but they're open.

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from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here. My name is Donna El-Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. I'm recording this on May 19th, 2026,

and this past weekend, May 15th, was Nakba Day. Nekba is the Arabic word for catastrophe. And Nakba Day commemorates when close to a million Palestinians were expelled in 1948 with the founding of the Israel. Israeli state, so the Palestinian catastrophe. Hundreds of villages and towns were destroyed, and many Palestinians were made refugees in camps around the new state, in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and farther afield. Within Israel, Palestinians who somehow managed to remain were put under a military rule. As the past few years have demonstrated, and as many Palestinians will tell you,

this Nekba never ended. Usually I use this podcast to discuss current events or to interview someone who is an expert on a dynamic I'm interested in, and I think is useful for people to hear. But today I'm going to be doing something a little different and outside my comfort zone. I'm going to share my personal family history and our Nakhba story. I'm a Palestinian from Jerusalem. Both sides, my mom and my dad are from Jerusalem, and I was born there. Usually when people ask me where I'm from, and I say that, they just assume East Jerusalem

because that's where Palestinians have been sequestered today. They were driven out of West Jerusalem in 1948. But actually, some of my family were from the western side of the city. My paternal grandmother and her family lost their home in West Jerusalem in 1948. My grandmother ended up spending three years in Ahqabid-Jabarabar refugee camp outside of Jericho because my great-grandfather had been wounded trying to defend the city, and they were waiting to see if they could return. My grandmother has told me details about this time. She talked about the makeshift school in the camp that only went up to the eighth grade. So my grandmother repeated the year a couple of times and then eventually dropped out of school because she couldn't continue past the eighth grade.

Now, the rest of her siblings, especially upon their return to Jerusalem, were all fully educated. as adults, many of them held advanced degrees. My grandmother was the only one as the eldest who had paid the price of displacement in this way. She was trained as a seamstress later on, but always lamented that she had to leave school early. She also told me about her house in Ba'a, which is in West Jerusalem, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem, before it was taken during the Nakhba. This was a newer neighborhood with nice views of the city where middle-class Palestinian families were expanding their homes as their families. families expanded. My grandmother's family had only moved into this house two months prior to the

Nakaba. And she used to tell me how the house had been newly painted and it was made of beautiful stones. Before she passed away, she would often cry over this house as if it had just been taken. That house, by the way, still stands in West Jerusalem. The last time I visited Palestine, my grandmother's younger siblings showed me pictures of themselves posing in front of their house, now occupied by Israelis. Now my grandmother's story is very typical. but also very lucky because her and her family, they did become refugees, yes, but they found their way back to the city. Most Palestinians were never able to return back to their hometowns. They were lucky in that sense that they had property and family in other parts of the city on the

eastern side and they were able to continue. We were able to continue. That's how I was born in Jerusalem myself because of that luck. Now on my maternal side, I don't know as much about them and their Nakhba story. I left Palestine when I was a child. I don't have a close relationship with my mother's side of the family. And they harbor a lot of secrets. I never knew much about their histories and their dramas. My maternal grandmother is divorced, and the family had fractured in particular ways. So there was a lot of touchiness.

Many parts of the family were estranged from each other. One thing I did eventually find out when I was a teenager was that my mother's grandmother, so my great-grandmother, was actually, is really a very-grandmother. was actually Israeli. This was my mother's paternal grandmother, her dad that she no longer had a relationship with because of her parents' divorce. And I didn't have much information beyond that. I knew her name, Rachel, but nobody really wanted to talk about this Israeli great-grandmother. It was also an uncomfortable finding for me at the time, because I'm a Palestinian from Jerusalem. The only Israelis I had ever engaged with at that point were soldiers. So I didn't press the subject.

It was just another family secret we didn't talk about. When I got older, I got more curious about this, and I asked for more information. And I asked my dad to confirm whether this was true, that my mother did in fact have an Israeli grandmother. Like, this wasn't just a rumor. And he said he had met her himself. In fact, he had met her while I was a toddler, apparently, and I had met her. So, of course, I had no recollection.

My dad says that during her visit to my mother's family, so this was a child. would be Rachel's grandchildren and then her daughter-in-law. There had been some argument, and they had harangued her over the actions of her state and her state's military. And according to my dad, she replied that it had nothing to do with her, because she came during the British Mandate era. She was classified as a Palestinian Jew. And he told me as much of the story as he had been told.

Rachel was a Polish-Jewish-Wish woman. She came to Palestine. She married my great-grandfather, who, by my father's description was kind of a wealthy Palestinian playboy type. They had two children, and in 1948, when Israel was founded, and Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather split up. What my dad understood to have happened was Rachel left her children, joined her new countrymen, and that was that. So, as I said, Jerusalem was split up. The western side was cleared of its Palestinians. There was an armistice line.

where actually the newfound Israeli state housed recent Arab Jewish migrants, sort of as cannon fodder, one of those neighborhoods where Arab Jews were placed later birthed the Israeli Black Panthers. And then the western side was under Israeli rule, and Palestinians on the eastern side of the city fell under Jordanian rule. So the story goes that my great-grandmother left, and my great-grandfather put his children in an orphanage. my dad says he heard they were often mistreated, possibly because their mother was Israeli. And later when Israel occupied the rest of Jerusalem and the city was unified, my great-grandmother did go looking for her children, but my grandfather didn't connect with her, so her son, and moved to Jordan.

Now, from my mother, I also pressed for more information. She had never told me any of the story. But this year, literally a few weeks ago, she finally gave me Rachel's last name. I dug around to see what I could find out about her. I asked online, I got the help of people who had expertise in Jewish genealogy. And what I found was a much more complicated picture. First, I found an academic article about a, quote, nonpartisan Zionist youth group in Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s. I don't speak Hebrew, so I'm going to mispronounce this.

I think it's called Zeer Ha'am, getting their members ready to make the journey to Palestine. That's what this article was about. they were nonpartisan in the sense that they included a lot of different strains of Zionism, so right-wing Zionism, left-wing Zionism among the members. But the Zionism itself, of course, was taken as a given. Now, the article included quotes from former members of this group and kind of grainy black-and-white photos, of which the name Rachel appeared in the captions with her last name. And when I first saw the woman identified as Rachel in this group photo, I knew instinctively,

that I had found her because she looked like a blonde version of my mother. My intuition was very quickly confirmed because Rachel was identified by her married Palestinian name in the footnotes where she was quoted. So I found her. Here she was. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.

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I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band. Before Jonas Brothers was... This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast,

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The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

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If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I wanted to know more about what had happened to her after these pictures in Belgium were taken. The article states that she immigrated to Palestine in the early 1930s at the encouragement of her quote, Zionist mother. But what had led her between 1933 and 1948 to marry and then leave a Palestinian. And then why was she visiting her grandchildren

and apparently me in the 1990s? The second big piece of information I got was because of a blue sky account, P-Y-M-U-N-D genealogy. This is a person who works on Jewish genealogy has an interest in it, and he helped find an article that had been written about my great-grandmother

in the Israeli magazine Ma'arov. So shout-out to this guy. Now, this article was dated June 12, 1987. It's a three-page spread. And in this interview that Rachel gives, she talks about her childhood in Antwerp, her immigration to Palestine as a young woman, and her marriage. So apparently after her civil ceremony with my great-grandfather in 1935, they had traveled across Europe for a whole year,

even meeting the extended family in Poland, where Rachel's family was originally from. Her new husband was honored by her uncle, who was an important rabbi. Now, for reasons she does not outline, Rachel discusses leaving her husband, maybe assuming the separation would be temporary in 1948. But unlike the story that my father had heard and I had been told, she had not left her children. And in fact, there had been four of them. She left two of them with their father and took the eldest and the baby that she was pregnant with to West Jerusalem.

She kept her married name and she never officially divorced. I can only assume that she didn't guess the city would be the city. divided or maybe didn't understand for how long. Now, when Israel took the rest of the city in 1967, she not only reconnected with her, I guess, Palestinian children, but it seems from this article had warm relationships with them until the end. Rachel had assisted my grandfather, her son, in marrying my grandmother, compiling the diary. The children who had been raised Israeli had reconnected with their family to varying degrees. Some of the Palestinian children visited the Israeli children in Tel Aviv, according to this interview.

Rachel even reconnected with her husband, my great-grandfather, living with him until he passed in 1983. Rachel had also maintained a relationship with her daughter-in-law, my maternal grandmother, even after her son's divorce. In this article, I recognized the descriptions of my mother and my aunts. Rachel had kept visiting them until she died in the mid-1990s. So that explains the visit that my father had witnessed. I quickly realized that, of course, it had been easier for many members of my family to pretend

this had never happened, try to keep the truth of these relationships from their children. I suppose they preferred a needer story of clean breaks and solid national divisions. It's also not lost on me that much of this obfuscation relies on the common misogynistic trope of the negligent mother, which was apparently easy for everyone to believe. Now, I won't say that Israeli-Palestinian marriages are common, or that intimate relationships between the two groups are easy to find. But they aren't unheard of. Israeli political parties are certainly scared enough of this prospect. They often voice condemnations of inter-ethnic relationships of this kind.

So this phenomenon must exist at some level. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised either, because Palestine's most well-known poet, Mahmoud Darwish, was famous for his poetry. Among many of them, a poem he wrote to his. his Jewish girlfriend titled Rita. This was the same man that joined the PLO, lived through the Israeli siege of Beirut, and wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. Now, Rachel's story really boggled my mind in its contradictions because she had been part of a Zionist youth group. She had actively joined an effort to facilitate the migration of Europe's Jewish population to Palestine, eventually leading to the displacement of Palestinians. But she had married a Palestinian.

And in the interview for Marif, she describes running to the eastern part of the city when Israel occupied it in 1967 to see, quote, her friends. And she says she would marry my great-grandfather all over again if she could. You see, dear, it was a great love, she told her interviewer. Ironically, my parents and my maternal grandparents, all of which share national and religious identities, both ended up divorced. But Rachel and her Palestinian Muslim husband somehow stayed together. At the same time, Rachel turned a blind eye to many things, and she herself hid many things. For example, she doesn't reveal the details of her children raised as Israeli. The interviewer in the Ma'ar of magazine interview emphasizes that they wouldn't want their

information known, especially about their lineage. It seems that neither ever reconnected with their Palestinian father, and most tellingly for me in that interview, when my maternal grandmother, Rachel's daughter-in-law, complains of the Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood that she lived in, the interviewer reports that Rachel feigns deafness and returns the conversation to a discussion of the children. Now, Rachel isn't abnormal. Israeli society has turned a blind eye to many things. Many Israelis pretend that the Palestinians as a national group do not exist. They prefer to think of them, or prefer to think of us, as the reincarnation of Nazis or the modern-day manifestation of anti-Semitism.

Or at best, Palestinians are merely generic Arabs with easily severed ties to this particular land. The Israeli state even grows pine trees over-emptied and demolished Palestinian villages to ensure return is impossible and to hide the extent of what happened. In the latest war on Gaza, images and videos from Gaza are dismissed as AI fabrications. They call it Pollywood. It's just an effort by Pelleywood. Palestinians to put Israel in a bad light. And governments the world over seem to have taken this

position of turning a blind eye to the oppression Palestinians have faced and assuming Palestinians would live and die never having exercised their basic rights. All I can say is I'm living proof that these silences prolong the inevitable, that the truth eventually comes out. And the return is inevitable. The longer we wait to acknowledge the reality of the situation, the more people will suffer. and the more this kind of intergenerational trauma will continue. I recently finished Molly Crabapple's book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, on the Jewish Bund. She quotes a Jewish-Bundist Lievich Hodes,

saying that, quote, belief in mankind is not popular today. In these last years, we have all seen it become deeply debased, despoiled, and spat on. But if man is at heart a beast, no amount of running away will help, end quote. This really resonated with me. I firmly believe that we can't rely on silence to disappear our problems.

We can't run from each other. Let my family history be a testament to that. When we understand that, then the truth and the resolution and the return is only a matter of time. And maybe then the Nekba will end. Thank you for listening and hope you all stay safe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website. Coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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We created our own podcast called, Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it out. We get to ask other people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but, you know, tired and sick. Tired and sick.

Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel. help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yard. But they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to you. Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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