A Land Carried in the Blood

For millions of Palestinians, home is a place they have never seen. It survives instead in an embroidered dress folded away in a drawer, in a grandmother’s method for flipping a pot of maqluba onto a waiting plate, in the cadence of a folk song sung a thousand miles from the coast where it was written. A people scattered across the world has held onto its homeland the only way exile allows—by carrying it inside.

That scattering is not new. Palestine has always been a crossroads, a bridge between Western Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Northeast Africa, and one of the places where human settlement, agriculture, and civilization first took root. The powers that ruled it are…