“These Are Our Homes”: Visiting West Jerusalem’s Neighborhoods with Huda Imam

Imam only was able to see her father’s house in Qatamon near the Greek Colony just after the 1967 War, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem where she was born and reopened the border between it and the area that became West Jerusalem for the first time since 1948. She recalls that this was soon after she discovered the German Colony in West Jerusalem. A student at Schmidt’s Girls College in East Jerusalem, she only became acquainted with West Jerusalem when she went to orchestra performances at the German Monastery.

Imam’s mother had also not known the house: She married Fareed, Huda’s father, five years after the Nakba, once the state was established and the house had been seized, so she was not even able to see the house he had built until after 1967 when the Israeli side of the city once again became accessible. Fareed was looking forward to living in the family home with his future family. But none of them were ever allowed to set foot inside that house.

In an article published in This Week in Palestine in August 2021,3 Imam recalls how her father had been eerily quiet during that first trip back to see his house in 1967, after the war. She was only an elementary school student at the time. Years later, she would understand that his silence was a coping mechanism beneath which he buried his deep pain and trauma. “Looking back, I now realize that my father didn’t want to burden us with the grief that he had kept inside himself all those years caused by the catastrophic events of 1948 when he lost his home, his city, and his country.”4

She described how the house itself “looked somber and heartbroken, exactly like my father.”5 His condition worsened when the Jewish woman who was occupying the house refused to let him in to show his family around.

For Imam, the stories of these Palestinian houses are quite personal. She knows the history of many well-established and prominent Jerusalemite families whose homes were similarly seized.

“Rather than keeping these stories to myself where they hurt my heart, I like to share them,” she states simply.

The volume of stories grows over time, because the forcible displacement of Jerusalemites continues to this day. An example she gives is Umm Kamel al-Kurd, whose husband died of a heart attack two weeks after they were forcibly expelled from their home in Sheikh Jarrah in 2008 and who stayed in a tent outside of their house to protest the family’s forcible removal. She was joined in the tent by international activists.

A group of activists decided to also set up a tent at the heart of Talbiyya, Huda tells the group. Umm Kamel had already been displaced once before from Talbiyya; her old house was seized, while the new one was about to be taken as well. Setting up the tent in West Jerusalem, in addition to Sheikh Jarrah, was thus a message that the story of Palestinian displacement today is a continuation of the story of the 1948 Nakba. “We had the tent for at least one hour,” she remembers the little moment of victory, before the Israeli police destroyed it. Since 2008, the Israeli settler-driven expulsions have led to the displacement of more than 60 Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, and at least 500 remain at risk of displacement.6

Listening to Imam speak of her father’s house, it is clear that the sense of injustice does not just fade with time.

She cannot forget the anguish and distress in her calm father’s face upon taking his family to see his house following the 1967 War. She says she is reminded of her father’s distress every time she and her son, Hani, walk through al-Baq‘a and pass by Qatamon’s Greek Colony. She remembers her late father staring at the askedunya (loquat) and lemon trees in the garden of his house, while lamenting that the water fountain had been left empty, causing the leaves to dry.

Huda herself feels connected to the askedunya trees. Palestinian Jerusalemites speak matter-of-factly about the special bond they have with the trees around their homes. The fruit’s name itself connotes a bittersweet reality; the Arabic term might have a Turkish component: Yeni meaning “new” in Turkish, and dunya meaning “world” in Arabic, later evolving into “askedunya,” which literally means “the tastiest world.” This superlative description for a fruit tree in the front yards of many homes is consistent with views Palestinians have of the homes they could not return to; they consider those homes, as Imam describes it, the ideal places to have been able to live out their lives.

Despite Imam’s rage that Israel denied her father’s house to her, she has not let that fact crush her spirit. She is full of life and remains untarnished despite the family trauma. She smiles at the thought that she has managed to reclaim parts of the house by snatching some of the Italian floor tiles from the Qatamon house during a renovation when they were put out on the street. “The floor tiles that I repossessed from my grandmother's house were pulled out by real estate agent Udi Kaplan to whom Keren Kayemet Le Israel sold the house for restoration and sale,” she recalls. “He had uprooted the tiles to sell them much like they stole the house itself.” Visit after visit, she would pick up pieces of the cherished tiles that had been brought all the way from Italy in the 1920s. “We are proud of these tiles,” she remarks. It is clear to her that the Israeli real estate agents were incapable of appreciating what the tiles with Islamic art designs added to the house.

They now are part of her home in Sheikh Jarrah.

Besides this little victory, Imam also makes sure to sip and share a cup of coffee, often with her son, Hani, under what for her will forever remain her family’s trees. 

“Not a week goes by when I don’t go with my son to stand outside the house,” she writes. “It’s a ritual that I have become accustomed to. We stand quietly side by side while our eyes fixate on the stately well-crafted, green-gated home with jasmine, lemon, pomegranate, and askedunya trees in the garden; we soak in the atmosphere. Memories of my father come flooding back.”7

For more than 20 years, Huda Imam has developed awareness about the stolen properties in Jerusalem. For her, it is crucial to share the lived memory and truth with the Palestinians themselves, many of whom have similar—if not even close to identical—stories of injustice.

Read Part 3 of this series here.