Published by Eyewitness Palestine in June 2026, Expelled and Displaced from Jerusalem: A Tour of Kufr ‘Aqab follows Palestinian Jerusalemite and cultural heritage practitioner Dana Abbas through Kufr ‘Aqab, the Jerusalem neighborhood where she has lived since 2011. Much of the film unfolds from the road: Dana drives through the neighborhood, pointing to what surrounds her and using its buildings, streets, barriers, and surviving historic spaces to tell a larger story about what it means to live in a Jerusalem area that has been physically separated from the city by a looming cement wall.
Kufr ‘Aqab is a place built around contradictions. It lies within Jerusalem’s Israeli-defined municipal boundaries but on the other side of the Separation Wall. Palestinians with Israeli permanent-resident IDs live alongside Palestinians holding Palestinian Authority (PA) IDs (see Precarious Status), while Qalandiya checkpoint regulates movement into the rest of Jerusalem (see Closure and Access to Jerusalem). Dana herself moved there because she holds an Israeli permanent-resident ID, while her husband holds a PA ID. Thus, Kufr ‘Aqab offered a rare space where they could build a life together without her relinquishing the legal status that allows her to remain a Jerusalemite.
Driving through its dense high rises, Dana describes Kufr ‘Aqab as a kind of refugee camp, not because it resembles the refugee camps Palestinians are accustomed to seeing, but because of the condition of displacement and uncertainty that underlies life there. People may arrive believing that their stay will be temporary, only to find themselves remaining for decades. Her description raises a difficult question: What does displacement look like when you have not left your city, but your relationship with that city has progressively been made harder to sustain?
That distance is not only geographic. Dana’s uncle Manaf calls it emotional isolation. He remembers looking from his balcony toward Jerusalem across the Separation Wall. Years of checkpoints and difficult journeys eventually reduced his visits to necessities. Now, when he walks through Jerusalem, he sometimes feels like a tourist in the city to which he belongs. There is something particularly unsettling in that transformation: Separation does not necessarily have to remove someone from a place altogether. It can gradually alter their relationship with it until what was once ordinary—visiting family, moving through familiar streets, and simply being in one’s city—becomes exceptional, almost unthinkable.
Yet Dana ultimately returns to hope, and not an easy or sentimental version of it. In the political reality in which Palestinians live, she says, hope itself requires effort. As Israeli control over Palestinian movement, residency, land, and daily life grows increasingly restrictive, maintaining hope becomes something that must be worked at consciously and deliberately.
Perhaps this is also what makes hope inseparable from staying. If there were no belief in a future here, Dana asks, in effect, why continue struggling to remain? Why go through the exhausting process of maintaining Jerusalem residency? Why restore Kufr ‘Aqab’s historic center, organize apartment buildings, raise children, or continue insisting that this place is home?
The answer she offers is remarkably simple: There is no other home. Palestinians who leave and build lives abroad may find safety or opportunity, but, as Dana observes, they also know the difficulty of living as strangers and refugees. Palestine remains home, despite everything that makes living in it difficult.
Perhaps hope, in Kufr ‘Aqab, is not simply the expectation of better days. It is the difficult work of preserving the possibility of a Palestinian future in the place that Palestinians call home. To remain, to maintain one’s connection to Jerusalem, to build, restore, raise children, and continue belonging are ways of refusing to let that possibility disappear. If hope requires effort, as Dana believes, then perhaps the question is not only what Palestinians hope for, but what they are trying to preserve through that hope: the possibility that they, and the generations after them, will still be able to call this place home.