Dana El-Kurd

I left Palestine when I was a child.

I don't have a close relationship with my mother's side of the family.

And they harbor a lot of secrets.

I never knew much about their histories and their dramas.

My maternal grandmother is divorced, and the family had fractured in particular ways, so there was a lot of touchiness.

Many parts of the family were estranged from each other.

One thing I did eventually find out when I was a teenager was that my mother's grandmother, so my great-grandmother, was actually Israeli.

This was my mother's paternal grandmother, her dad that she no longer had a relationship with because of her parents' divorce.

And I didn't have much information beyond that.

I knew her name, Rachel, but nobody really wanted to talk about this Israeli great-grandmother.

And I asked my dad to confirm whether this was true, that my mother did in fact had an Israeli grandmother, like this wasn't just a rumor.

And he said he had met her himself.

In fact, he had met her while I was a toddler, apparently, and I had met her.

Though, of course, I had no recollection.

My dad says that during her visit to my mother's family, so this would be Rachel's grandchildren and then her daughter-in-law, there had been some argument and they had harangued her over the actions of her state and her state's military.

She married my great-grandfather, who by my father's description was kind of a wealthy Palestinian playboy type.

They had two children.

So as I said, Jerusalem was split up.

The western side was cleared of its Palestinians.

There was an armistice line where actually a newfound Israeli state housed recent Arab Jewish migrants, sort of as cannon fodder.