Stranger in My Own Land

Palestine, Israel and One Family's Story of Home

By: Fida Jiryis

Narrated by: Dina Pearlman

After the 1993 Oslo Accords, a handful of Palestinians were allowed to return to their hometowns in Israel. Fida Jiryis and her family were among them.

This beautifully written memoir tells the story of their journey, which is also the story of Palestine, from the Nakba to the present—a seventy-five-year tale of conflict, exodus, occupation, return, and search for belonging, seen through the eyes of one writer and her family. Jiryis reveals how her father, Sabri, a PLO leader and advisor to Yasser Arafat, chose exile in 1970 because of his work. Her own childhood in Beirut was shaped by regional tensions, the Lebanese Civil War, and the 1982 Israeli invasion, which led to her mother's death. Thirteen years later, the family made an unexpected return to Fassouta, their village of origin in the Galilee. But Fida, twenty-two years old and full of love for her country, had no idea what she was getting into.

Stranger in My Own Land chronicles a desperate, at times surreal, search for a homeland between the Galilee, the West Bank, and the diaspora, asking difficult questions about what the right of return would mean for the millions of Palestinians waiting to come "home."

©2024 Fida Jiryis (P)2025 Tantor Media

Moving Palestinian testimony marred by historical ignorance about Israeli Jews

I am grateful to the author for showing me the difficult experience of educated Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. I cried upon the death in Beirut of the author’s mother. I empathized when the author suffered from the avowed hatred of Arabs by Israeli Jews where she worked and wished to live. I recognized the unfairness of administrative detention and the arbitrariness of the Israel justice system. But about Israelis motivations and culture she appears ignorant. It is false that Reform synagogues are illegal in Israel. She should research carefully where the Mizrahi immigrants come from. And to say flippantly in Chapter 2 that the Jews used “the Nazis” to justify the nakba, as if it was flimsy reasoning, comes close to denying the holocaust and fails to comprehend Jewish motivation.