Listening to Palestinian Pain — La Converse Dialogues

On a dreary November night, six Palestinians gather in the warmly lit studio to open up to La Converse. 

We’ve arranged floor cushions in a circle, with chairs for those whose knees have walked too many kilometers to sit on the ground. 

Imad, Nafisa, Fouad, Neda, Arwa and Asma all grew up a little differently. Collectively, they span three generations and have lived in a dozen countries. While their experiences, personalities and opinions differ, common threads run through their stories. 

All ended up in Canada, but hope to eventually return to Palestine.

All share a frustration with the neglect of their pain. 

All are deeply affected by the ongoing violence in their homeland. 

One thing they all agree on: Palestinian voices need to be heard. This is why, despite some fears of ramifications, they have shown up today. For their children, for other Palestinians, for the world at large — and for themselves. 

We start off with asking people to introduce themselves, but their stories flow out almost immediately. 

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Nafisa’s Story

“My home is there, why am I not there?”

Nafisa is a 78-year-old Palestinian woman who speaks animatedly and smiles often, especially when she talks fondly of her grandchildren and her work as a translator. She tells us about how her family was forced to leave their multi-generational home in Ramallah during the Nakba of 1948.

“The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. (...) The Nakba had a profound impact on the Palestinian people, who lost their homes, their land, and their way of life,” the United Nations website summarizes.

The finer details of her Nakba story are vivid — the hard barrel of a gun pressing into her grandfather’s chest, then turned on her mother when she tried to go back to the house for some money, Israeli soldiers shooting olive trees, their branches to falling onto her family’s heads as they fled… Nafisa was three years old at the time. 

“This is my mom's story,” she explains, “She was telling it day and night, every day.” 

She and her siblings were shuffled around Palestine, the family scattered and put back together, until they ended up in Egypt. All the while, her parents held onto hope that they would one day return to their homeland. 

“My mom and dad passed away, hoping one day they will go back to Ramallah.” - Nafisa

When Nafisa’s sister got engaged to an Egyptian man, she says her father deplored: “Oh, how can I give her to an Egyptian? We’ll go back to Palestine, and leave her here! No!” Nafisa recalls that people told him he was delusional to think he would return to his homeland. 

“My mom and dad passed away, hoping one day they will go back to Ramallah,” Nafisa says.

Nafisa did manage to return back to Ramallah about a decade ago with her children and husband. People told her it was a wonderful experience. But for her, returning to the childhood home she would never live in again was deeply painful.

“When we reached [my childhood home], we saw a Jew living in our house. My husband said, ‘Let's knock at the door. Maybe he would allow us to go inside.’ And when he said these words, I collapsed. I fell on the floor, and I was crying and crying. So he put me in the car and we went to downtown Ramallah, and we saw the places where [the rest of] my family used to live. They were all taken by Israelis,” Nafisa says.

Nafisa’s normally beaming face falls into sadness at the memory. 

“It’s like all the feelings that were stored [away] came back… My home is there, why am I not there?!”

Living in other countries never gave Nafisa a sense of home.

“It's not only in the West, if you are a stateless person in Egypt or in Saudi Arabia, you feel alone … when you live as a stateless person with no embassy for you, with no one to support you, you feel like you're nothing,” says Nafisa.

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She says her education was her saving grace to find success in countries where she was considered a foreigner, but still felt like an outsider living in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, eventually, Canada. 

“When you are a university graduate, you are a rare currency as a girl,” Nafisa recalls of her young adulthood in the Middle East. “So you are educated. You are doing very well. You're working very hard. But nobody engages you as a first-class person,” deplores Nafisa.

Fouad’s Story

“Seeing the children of Gaza, running in the streets, being bombarded has recreated my trauma, because we are children of war.”

Fouad, seated next to her, also lived through the Nakba of 1948 at four years old. The older man speaks with authority and pulls from his extensive knowledge of history and political events that he has lived through, citing legislative bills and politicians off the top of his head, attaching a bibliography to his personal history, his beliefs, and his feelings. 

He was born in Haifa, a town that is now part of Israel, in a home on a street bearing his family’s name: Sahyoun Street. Initially, his grandfather, who was the vice-mayor of Haifa for over a decade, told his family not to worry about the rising tensions in the region. But one day, the violence arrived at their doorstep.

“When the cousin of my mother came to bring us some food one day, he was shot, and he died in front of our house. That was the trigger point where my grandfather told his children [to flee]” says Fouad. 

Fouad’s father drove him and his one-year-old brother to his grandparents’ house in Beirut. On the way, his father ran to the bank — to withdraw money to pay a loan. 

“This is an indication to show you the state of mind that they never thought that they would not be allowed to go back. Then now all my uncles were making fun of my father,”  recounts Fouad, finding humour in the grim situation. 

“You came to invade a very peaceful country where Jews, Christians and Muslims were living very peacefully together. You came with arms instead of buying property, you kicked people out.” - Fouad 

His family eventually settled in Egypt in March of 1948.

“Obviously we were never able to go back, until we became Canadian citizens,” says Fouad.

He and his wife and children became Canadian citizens in 1994, and went back to Palestine in the late 1990s. A 2011 documentary entitled Fouad’s Dream depicted one of Fouad’s trips to Palestine where he returns to his childhood home and reflects on the history of the region. 

Fouad attended the dialogue night with a message to the Canadian public:

“The partitioning of Palestine was a historical mistake. It was a historical mistake in the context of British Empire colonial time, the French and the English separating the whole world… You came to invade a very peaceful country where Jews, Christians and Muslims were living very peacefully together. You came with arms instead of buying property, you kicked people out,” says Fouad.

“It's not a one-year-old story. And these are truths that we have to express and tell the people, and we have the means to do it. For me personally, seeing the children of Gaza running in the streets, being bombarded has recreated my trauma, because we are children of war,” falters Fouad, his presentational demeanor fading as his voice cracks with emotion.

Imad’s Story

“I and my generation and my kids are still seeing these letdowns by Arab armies, by Arab regimes, by the international community, by the United Nations, by human rights. It's a series of disappointments.”

Imad is a generation younger than Fouad and Nafisa, but their stories have common threads of displacement, the futile hope for return, and a jarring exposure to violence at a young age. He also shares Fouad’s propensity to cite academics and politicians as he tells his story in a soft but intense tone. 

Imad’s parents lived through the Nakba of 1948, leading him to spend his childhood in a refugee camp in Lebanon. 

“As a kid, you don't really have an awareness of the real problems. You just play and go to school. I went to an UNRWA school. I guess my first shock, my first coming of age, so to speak, was the 1967 war. I must have been in grade three at that time, and they let us out early because of the war going on in Lebanon. Everybody was huddled around the radio listening to the news, thinking, oh, we're ready to go back to Palestine,” says Imad.

He says inaccurate Arab media coverage following the start of the 1967 war made it seem like the war would liberate Palestine. Imad saw Palestinian refugees in Lebanon packing their bags and excitedly sharing plans to return to their homeland. But days later, it became clear that Israel had annexed more territory and had defeated Arab forces. 

“That was the first letdown, I suppose, in my memory at least. But my parents had seen much more, and I and my generation and my kids are still seeing these letdowns by Arab armies, by Arab regimes, by the international community, by the United Nations, by human rights. It's a series of disappointments,” says Imad.

Imad says his “perception of pain” as a Palestinian formed when the civil war erupted in Lebanon. 

“The Palestinians were a central part of that war,” says Imad. 

“I lost my first friend. I was 16. He was 16. We were playing cards in the evening, and the next day we were burying him because shells fell on their home and killed him, ” recalls Imad, his eyes downcast.

“I lost so many friends over the years. This is at the personal level. But even as a Palestinian who's growing up to the politics of the problem, just seeing Israel encroaching on Lebanon, on areas inhabited by Palestinians, assassinating, shelling from airplanes, I mean, this was a story of our life. The pain continues until today,” he says. 

Neda’s Story

“We need to raise our voice. Nobody will do it for us.”

Neda, who is married to Imad, has a similar story. Her parents, from Jenin, in the West Bank, left Palestine “after the ‘48,” she says. They moved to Jordan, hoping to return to Palestine eventually. While her parents were never able to return, Neda was able to travel to Palestine with her own children and Imad in 2019 to visit a friend who lived in the Negev.

“The minute I touched the ground on Palestine land, it felt different. I felt like going back to my mom,” she says.

“The thing that I regret that I didn't visit, it's Gaza. Gaza was just a 15-20 minute drive [away]. And I asked my friend, ‘Can we go there?’ And she said, ‘Unfortunately, it's under siege. You cannot go there.’

“She talked about the people, the nice people there, the food, the beach. And I dreamt of going there. I couldn't. Now I regret it because all the good things, it's… it's all destroyed,” says Neda, choking up.

At this statement, the room is subdued, some sniffling, some wiping away tears, some crying outright. 

Neda says she has to speak up to set an example for her children:

“We need to raise our voice. Nobody will do it for us. As Palestinians, we need to talk about our stories. We don't want anybody else to explain what we are suffering. I owe it to my kids. Also, to tell them that we did not hide. We did not disappear.”

Arwa’s Story

“I lost a lot of my family there, and friends. We had a lot of memories. So the rest of them, I want them to know that we are aware of them, that we haven’t forgotten them.”

After people collect themselves, Neda passes the microphone to Arwa, a young mother attending university who also works with community organizations. 

Her parents are Palestinian, but she was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. She got her Palestinian citizenship in 2000. After that, she was able to go to Palestine for the first time. 

“Once I got there, everything changed in my life. I felt like myself. I felt like I had an identity,” she says. 

She says that the Palestinian plight did not begin on Oct. 7, 2023. 

“It's been a lot of years and a lot of suffering and a lot of stories and history behind why 7th of October happened,” says Arwa.

“I'm here, because I have a lot of like all my extended family are [in Palestine]. They are under attack now, but sometimes when they get to the internet, they see our stories. They see what we posted and what we are doing. They need hope that we are listening and that we are acting and that we are thinking about them,” says Arwa tearfully. 

“I lost a lot of my family there, and friends. We had a lot of memories. So the rest of them, I want them to know that we are aware of them, that we haven’t forgotten them” says Arwa. 

Asma’s Story

“I do think that there is something fundamentally misunderstood here about the Palestinian experience, which is that if you were born in this situation, you would do the same things. “

The last person in the circle is Asma. She starts off by admitting “I don’t know what just happened, but I’m really overwhelmed.”

After taking a moment to collect herself, she tells us she was born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother in Beirut, during the Israeli invasion.

“There was bombing around our house. My parents used to go into the corner and cover me with their bodies. That's my story of how I came into this world,” Asma says.

She also saw the effects of war volunteering at a refugee camp in Lebanon when she was 18. 

“I worked with children, and, of course you notice the garbage, and you notice that it's very, very cramped, and there's the mass grave… but you don't really see what is so catastrophic about the situation in the camp, which is that at some point the children become youth and they realize, 'I have no future.'”

Asma has never been to Palestine, but she wants to go.

“It's my dream to… I really hope one day... I can't even say the sentence, but it's my dream to go [to Palestine] with my father,” Asma says haltingly, fighting tears. 

Asma says there is a wide diversity in Palestinian experiences and backgrounds, some of which were represented at this dialogue night.

“Our experience is so diverse in that sense, in the sense of how the Nakba has shaped our lives. But that experience, like the sort of the breadth of that, the detail of that, is not represented here [in the media]. We're really made to fit into a box,” says Asma.

She says part of the reason she came to La Converse to share her story was because people need to see the humanity of Palestinians. 

“The war in Gaza is not just our problem. It should be something that you look at and see yourself in. It should scare you that this is what warfare looks like right now. If more people understood that we're not an exception… I think that [the war] would be represented differently,” says Asma.

“I do think that there is something fundamentally misunderstood here about the Palestinian experience, which is that if you were born in this situation, you would do the same things. [Palestinians] are not exceptionally violent. We're not exceptionally angry. We're not exceptionally stubborn. Our experiences have forged us as a people. I think that very basic understanding — that on a fundamental level, we are exactly like [non-Palestinians], like our experiences are different, our cultures are different, of course, (...). I think that very basic understanding is missing here. Just like everybody else was saying, I'm here to humanize us,” she concludes.

PALESTINIAN PAIN

We ask our guests, “What pains you the most right now?”

“I think It’s very simple, what’s paining us right now, immediately is the genocide. Genocide unfolding before our eyes on TV screens. The Israelis are bombing hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities. They dug up cemeteries. Why is this? They want to cut every connection between the people and the land,” says Imad.

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“When I eat my food, I feel guilty. When I go to sleep in my bed. I feel guilty.” - Nafisa

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“The other painful part is the neglect... What's fresh in people's minds is the Western response to what happened in Ukraine. The difference [in response ] is huge,” says Imad.

“Anybody who denies the Palestinian pain, (...) it says something more about them then it says about us and our pain. If you deny all this pain, something is wrong with your vision and your insight and your whole human structure. Honestly, I mean, how can you?” says Imad.

For Nafisa, much of her pain comes from the sense of helplessness and the guilt that she is safe in Canada while her loved ones suffer.

“I am in touch with my in-laws [in Palestine] every day. The minute they have internet, they contact us and they tell us about the horrible things that's happening there every day. Some of them already died. All of them, their homes were taken down. Rubble, you see rubble everywhere. Even if you have money, you do not find anything to buy. They are hungry, they are dying because of hunger also.  

“When I eat my food, I feel guilty. When I go to sleep in my bed. I feel guilty. I compare myself to them. They are waiting for death every minute of their lives. This hurts a lot,” laments Nafisa.

“Injustice… I have never experienced injustice like this. It hurts me from the inside, outside, physically, mentally. I don’t think my life is ever going to be back before October 7 with what I have seen on social media or what I have heard from my relatives. It's overwhelming and I can't explain it. I wish I could, but it's too much. Sometimes I wish if I was there like I never left [Palestine|... At least I could feel like I could do something. It's very, very, harmful for human being, what I'm feeling,” confesses Arwa heavily. 

Asma feels the shockwaves of intergenerational trauma of her Palestinian and Lebanese relatives as that history bleeds into the present day conflict unfolding in the region. 

“The other day, I was sitting with my friends on the floor listening to the TV with the news on the background, and our kids were running around and I said, ‘Oh… we’ve become our parents.’ It really shook me, because all I remember from my parents is one war after the next, and them in front of the TV, and [as children], we know something’s wrong, but we don’t know exactly what. It's just generation after generation after generation of living one war after the next. It's too much,” says Asma, her eyes wide.

“What shakes me is the children, of course, and their parents, there’s nothing like it. For the first many months of this genocide, every night, when I put my son to sleep, I suffocated him with kisses,” Asma mimes cradling and kissing her son over and over again. 

“What terrifies me is the thought that they are going to make us disappear. I fear that all of this death is just going to get worse, and it’s all going to be for nothing,” she adds. 

In all this darkness, Asma makes sure to point out that Palestinians are more than their trauma.

“I think that clearly there's a lot of Palestinian pain, but I also want to say that that’s not what defines us. We’re very proud people. We’re proud of ourselves, of the people who came before us. Our experience is painful, but there’s also a lot of resilience.”

PALESTINIAN HOPE

After a long dialogue on what pains them, we ask what gives them hope.

Imad sees an end to the war in the near future.

“The Israeli project is a failure from its beginning. It can only survive with violence and more violence and creating more hate. Eventually, this hate will get to you. These people committing all these crimes, how can they go back to their families and homes? I don't understand it. I mean, violence doesn't just affect externally. It will get back to you,” says Imad.

Imad hopes the international attention on Palestine will help end the violence in the region.

“Finally, it's all about Palestine. Hopefully this will continue,” says Imad.  

Fouad points to the ability of Palestinians to create a new vision for the world. 

“The Palestinians have two very strong weapons. One, a very high level of education. Wherever we go, we can lose money, we can lose property, but we will never lose our mind. The second very strong weapon that we have is our tongue. Our tongue as being expressed with music, with poets, with writers, with philosophers, with visionaries and it has spread among non-Palestinian intellectuals as well. After the 7th of October, a very strong third weapon came in that we did not expect… The emergence of the young population in the streets, in the schools, in the universities have been phenomenal. It has forced the governments to take actions that they have never taken before. I'm very, very touched by the number of people who demonstrate, who have absolutely no Arab origin from all over the world,” explains Fouad.

Neda agrees that the popular support for Palestine can bring change.

“I always have hope, but what makes it even bigger is that the [students at] universities, my kids, they are all educated now about what's going on in Palestine. That gives me a lot of hope. My daughter told me, ‘Mom, we're going to liberate Palestine. It's our generation.’ They are more organized, they're doing things, and they're not scared.”

Nafisa’s face lights up as she delves into what she is grateful for amid her grief.

“It is in our culture, it is in our religion to be hopeful all the time, despite the difficulties and the wars that we went through. Look at me! I mean, in Canada, all my five children are well educated. They have wonderful jobs. I'm surviving. 78 years old, I'm still working and doing a wonderful job to feel useful in this world. One day, this hypocrite world will wake up on on such atrocities and genocide, and ask, ‘How could we allow this to happen?’ At the end of the tunnel, there is always a light coming,” says Nafisa. 

“Palestinians are a strong people,” she concludes. 

After a long two hours of revisiting trauma, moving through anger, sadness, indignation, fear and pain, people are exhausted. But as we gather in the brightly lit foyer of La Converse over a feast of traditional Palestinian food, made by a local 70-something-year-old Palestinian grandmother, energy comes back into the space, people’s eyes lighting up as they talk about their work, their families and their lives. For Imad, Nafisa, Fouad, Neda, Asma and Arwa, politics are personal — but their humanity is not up for debate. 

La Converse will be hosting a dialogue night on Jewish pain in the coming months. If you’d like to participate, please contact us at 

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