Diaspora and Exile  2 min Not from here - About loss, home and Gaza

What does it mean to be a second-generation Palestinian in the diaspora? Two years after the start of the war in Gaza, German-Palestinian Neveen Issa (pseudonym) recalls, in a very personal story, the loss of her father and everything he represented: security, home, and the roots in which she was never able to grow up.

TRIGGER WARNING: POST CONTAINS GRIEF AND ACCOUNTS FROM VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE

“I am from there. 
I am from here. 
I am not there and I am not here. 
I have two names, which meet and part, 
and I have two languages. 
I forget which of them I dream in.” 

Mahmoud Darwish

When my father died, I chose this poem by Mahmoud Darwish.

In Germany, it's traditional for friends and acquaintances to write a card to express their condolences when someone dies. The poem was part of my response cards to the condolences. Parts of the poem were also part of my father's obituary in the newspaper.

I felt that Darwish's words aptly described my father's life. Born in Palestine in 1946, fled to Gaza as a toddler in 1948, and remained in the diaspora in Germany.

Home lost, sought, and found?

My dear father.

I had to be strong when I saw him lying in the intensive care unit. I was the one who had to tell everyone.

I had to be strong when I told my siblings that our father had suffered a heart attack and was now in the intensive care unit.

I had to be strong when I asked friends for help and told them I didn't want to stay home that night while my father was in intensive care, and I was the only person I could contact at the hospital.

I had to be strong when the policewoman told me he had collapsed in the city that morning, was resuscitated, and was now in a hospital.

We are not weak.

My dear father.

After two days in an artificial coma, my father woke up.

Everyone was already there. My mother was back, my brothers, my sister, and friends.

But after 10 days, his heart gave out completely.

Everyone said his heart broke when he saw

what happened in Gaza. Whenever someone said that,

I was angry. No, my father doesn't have a weak heart. He isn't weak.

We don't have a weak heart. We aren't weak.

But eventually, I accepted it.

The blonde doll.

My dear father. I still remember traveling to Gaza with just my mother during the summer holidays. It must have been the late 1980s. I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. At that time, I didn't know what this war meant. I didn't know any political background.

I was standing in my uncle's living room in Gaza while I talked to my father on the phone. He often stayed in Jordan and didn't travel with us. It worried me that we were leaving him alone and at the same time were in a military zone. I started to cry, but I pulled myself together for the conversation. "Dad, I want a doll," I said to him. When we returned to Germany, he immediately handed me the doll. I still remember exactly what it looked like. I loved it. It was from a well-known brand, had long blond hair, was wearing a white and pink outfit, and had a watch on its wrist. You could record your own voice on the watch and press the repeat button. Then you could hear your own voice. After being so worried about my father, the doll was a comfort to me.

Home.

My sister once sent my father a questionnaire with 100 questions for him to answer.

One question was:
"Which dream have you already said goodbye to?"

My father's answer was:
"Home"

Can that be true, I thought.

Really?

Have we given up on that dream?

Tears.

The last weeks of his life were difficult. He feared ill fortunes for his family in Gaza. My mother collapsed. My father was already old and weak and knew he couldn't help her. And I felt bad because I couldn't protect them either. Neither from my mother's collapse nor from my father's feeling of powerlessness and helplessness. Yet he had been a doer, a helper, and by no means helpless his entire life.

I remember the day the Tagesschau broadcast a report about Gaza. It was probably in October 2023, and it was one of the first reports to address the destruction. It was very difficult for me not to be able to protect him from this news. But I limited myself to watching over my children and taking them out of the room. I was overwhelmed. For a brief moment, I thought that maybe it would be better if my mother were with her brother in Cairo. He was stranded there because he couldn't return to Gaza when the war broke out. I said to my father, "We'll just book a flight for Mom." Then she'll be with her brother. At first, he didn't say anything, but a few days later, when I was alone with my father, he burst into tears. I felt so sorry for him, and I said, "It's all become too much for you. I know." Then he said, "Book a flight for your mother. Maybe things will be better if she's with him in Cairo."

I kept thinking about that moment.

My father's tears made me incredibly sad.

And my mother's tears?

They've accompanied me my entire life.

My tears? I stopped hiding them. They were always there. Before work, at work, after work. Mornings and evenings. Sometimes I cried alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with my mother, sometimes before school in front of other parents. Everyone knew my tears.

Running away.

I booked the flight for my mother. Maybe things would get better then, I thought. Even though it still felt strange. I was running away from death. I stopped looking at social media. It's better this way, I thought. If someone in my family died, I wouldn't have to break the news to my parents. When my mother wasn't there anymore, I thought it was better this way.

But no matter how much I ran away from death, it caught up with me.

"Your father collapsed downtown this morning. He was resuscitated by passersby and is now in the hospital. If you'd like, we can call there together now." She called the hospital and told me the ward where he was. At the end, she said, "If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know."

The next days, weeks, months, and now years passed like a movie. A movie that began long before, when our friends called and told us about their losses, when the news repeated the numbers 7 and 10 over and over again. Gaza. Again and again, every morning: on the radio, on our cell phones, on television. On the phone and in conversations. Friends whose cousins, uncles, brothers died; people who survived full-body burns. Young mothers who lost their children, pregnant women who died with the embryo in their wombs. My grandmother, who was on the run for the second time in her life. It's a truly terrible movie, I keep thinking. Who will finally pull the plug? When will all this finally be over?

My dear father.

Could you have endured it?

October 2025