The Palestinians in the diaspora are the beating heart of Palestine, مخيم عين الحلوة
Ain Al-Hilwe Camp
https://youtube.com/shorts/NE5Nl7-d_wI?feature=share
In summer 2021, while visiting family in Lebanon, I recorded a video of a Palestinian wedding in one of the narrow alleyways of Ain Al‑Hilweh, the Safhuriyya neighbourhood, my neighbourhood. You can see clearly the exposed electrical wires, the tight passageways, and the density of a refugee camp that has carried generations of displacement. And yet, even in that space, you see life, joy, and a culture that refuses to die.
Most of the people you see in this video at that wedding are from Saffuriyya, the village of Saint Mary, Miriam, a place rich in history, tradition, and dignity. This is how our camp organised each neighbourhood, named after the village or city they were displaced from. These people still carry their customs, their songs, their stories, and their longing for return. Nothing about exile erased who they are.
And then you hear people lecturing us about “coexistence.”
As if decades of poverty, statelessness, persecution and massacres in Lebanon should somehow make us grateful to “stand side by side” with the very system that displaced us, destroyed our villages, murdered us in Palestine, and is still committing massacres against us in the diaspora and the occupied Palestine.
I grew up a Nakba survivor without a nationality, without rights, while the colonial project that expelled my grandparents continues to expand, continues to dispossess, continues to justify violence against Palestinians, with the “promised land “ story.
Some people even romanticise the idea that European settlers were “refugees” themselves, unwanted in Europe, and that Palestine was simply where they were placed. But that narrative erases the truth: their presence was part of a deliberate colonial strategy, one which required our removal to make space for a new political order, and they were used because they are the most disliked.
So, yes, it’s insulting when people speak to us in this shallow, patronising, white-saviour tone about “living together.”
We’ve endured displacement, siege, poverty, and erasure for generations.
And still, we hold on to our identity, our culture, and our right to return to Saffuriyya.
I reject any version of “coexistence” that demands Palestinians Nakba survivors in the diaspora forget their history or accept their own dispossession.
If that offends people, that’s their problem, not mine.