Refusing complicity: Why I left the United States for the Middle East

“Are you Egyptian?”

“No, I’m Lebanese,” I responded with a wide grin. It was one of the first phrases I mastered in Arabic.

I was confused, then, why it took a second officer to study my passport.

“Come with me,” he instructed. I was interrogated for the next five hours.

The office was next to the winding customs lines. I watched waves of passengers enter Lebanon smoothly through its glassless window like a television show. I locked eyes with people waiting for their turn to get the stamp I never received.

Each round of questioning led back to one: “Why were you in Palestine? Do you know that it is a crime to go to the occupied territories if you have Lebanese roots?”

I racked my brain: The Israeli government doesn’t stamp passports, so how did they know I went to Palestine?

I remembered then, in 2022, a different customs line. My hands shook when an Israeli soldier asked me the origin of my name. She demanded my father’s name, grandfather’s name, and great-grandfather’s name. Her response: a small white barcode on the back of my passport that directed me to a different security line. I almost missed my flight home.

If I had only known to remove that tiny sticker, if I had just spoken in English, if I had told them I was an American, I wouldn’t have been in this mess.

Two hours later, a Syrian man, Ali, offered me his cinnamon Smints. We started talking. He told me that he fled to Lebanon from the Alawite massacres in Tartous a few months ago.

“Why do you want to be here in Lebanon?” Ali asked. “Why don’t you want to live in America? Do you know how much I love America?”

Anything I could think to say at that moment — about my roots, the language, or seeking society rooted in community rather than hyper-individualism — felt stupid. How could I tell him that I wanted to distance myself from America when my American passport is what would eventually get me out of this situation? Ali had already been in the airport for four days after returning from a trip to Iran.

“I don’t understand why anyone would choose war over America,” he continued. “We don’t want to be here.”

An officer shouted my name, interrupting us. I stood up and followed a camouflage-clad man who repeated alterations of the same empty assurances, assurances Ali would not hear: “Don’t worry, everything will be fine. You’ll leave soon.”

Some of the officers laughed at my Lululemon plane outfit and my broken Jordanian Arabic. At one point, they started singing an old Lebanese children’s song that goes, “Laila, Laila, why are you crying?” They cackled as I shrunk deeper into the torn seat cushion. I wasn’t crying before, but I wanted to then.

If I were a Lebanese citizen, they wouldn’t have been laughing—I would have been arrested. Instead, they let me go.

How could I explain to Ali that this is not what I would remember most from my trip to Lebanon this summer? Maybe it is with the reassurance of my American side that I tether myself to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Palestine, and now to Egypt.

I did not grow up as a first, or even second, generation Arab-American. We did not speak Arabic at home. I did not go to Lebanon in the summer. I visited the country once before my father died when I was 10-years-old. My second visit was his funeral. I returned as an adult, ten years later, to prove to myself that I was Lebanese. On that trip, in April three years ago, I called my mother on the balcony of my friend’s apartment in Mar Mikhael to tell her that it wasn’t enough to visit. I needed to live here.

I spent the next two weeks in Lebanon romanticizing every coffee, every conversation, and every commute in and around the country my father called home. I gushed over the most mediocre view; where others saw the construction in the skyline, I saw the endless water and rolling mountains of Beirut’s coastline.

I am ashamed of the privilege America has granted me in a region it has wrought irreversible havoc upon, and I am ashamed of being ashamed when so many around me would trade their passport for mine.

My world was taking shape. The blueprint for my Arabness that I had sought after my whole life was being drawn by new friends and favorite cafes and knowing things like a doudou shot and Mashrou’ Leila and Ras Beirut’s Sporting Club.

I mistook that trip three years ago as a homecoming, but I was not coming back to anything I had ever known. It was the beginning of a journey that I am still on—defining what it means to be Arab in the Arab world itself, the nucleus of my diasporic existence.

Inheriting expatriation

I often shun the latter half of my Arab-American identity to validate the former. I forget that my expat life is made possible because of the gold eagle on my passport and not in spite of it. My Americanness has always been an exit ticket. I am ashamed of the privilege America has granted me in a region it has wrought irreversible havoc upon, and I am ashamed of being ashamed when so many around me would trade their passport for mine.

After graduating in 2023, I moved to the West Bank to teach English through a Fulbright Scholarship. It was my second trip to Palestine — I spent the summer of 2022 in the West Bank on a journalism fellowship. I was determined not only to return, but to move to Palestine and stay in the region for as long as I could. I wanted to join the ranks of inspirational expats I met who had left their American lives behind.

It was Palestine that brought color to what I could never conceptualize in books or articles or lectures. I learned more from my 10-minute commute home from work in the afternoon — paying a few shekels for a shared taxi up the hill as an Israeli settlement expanded to my right — than I did in any Middle Eastern studies class.

I was in Palestine for nearly two months before I was evacuated to Amman shortly after October 7th, the city I ended up calling home for the next year. Now, in my third year out of school, I am beginning my next chapter in Cairo as a journalist. My job is to tell stories full-time, not only from the Levant, but every interconnected corner of the Arab world.

Each country I live in teaches me a book’s worth of lessons about what it means to be Arab as I develop a routine to its unique rhythm. And, as always, the people make the place. The friends, mentors, and communities I have found abroad make every moment of discomfort worth it. But at any given time, someone is getting ready to leave, expat or not, for work, for education, for opportunities they can’t find here.

When I stayed for a second year in Jordan, I felt like I was proving to myself and to my friends that my life in Amman wasn’t just a semester abroad for me. It was the first place in the Arab world that I truly lived in. It was where I finally learned Arabic. It’s where I proved to myself that I could call myself an Arab.

My father had been on a similar journey back to the Middle East in his early 20s. He also didn’t speak Arabic growing up — he learned the language in Cairo through the same program I did in Jordan 30 years later. He spent his entire career covering the region as a journalist, fueled by his duty as an Arab-American to tell the stories of people where war dominated the headlines, especially after 9/11.

We are from the southern Lebanese town of Jdeidet, Marjayoun. At the end of the July War in 2006, my father returned to a half-exploded Israeli rocket launched into the second-story of our family’s home, destroying part of the wall before bursting into flames. That marked the beginning of his quixotic mission to rebuild the home that his grandmother was born in, physically rooting himself, and his children, to Lebanon.

After he died in 2012 of an asthma attack while reporting in Syria for the New York Times, there was nowhere else he would be buried. I picture his grave in the garden of his grandmother’s home with every report of an Israeli airstrike.

Living outside of America’s wars

It is in this decisive moment that choosing to live abroad also feels like a personal act of resistance — my refusal to contribute to a country actively funding a genocide. Palestine has always been the moral litmus test, and, after October 7th, I could no longer live in a place that asks me to stay silent for my own good. I would be betraying myself, my Arab communities, and my commitment to a journalism that does not manufacture consent for genocide.

The danger we face for speaking out about Palestine in the U.S. only solidified why I decided to move abroad in the first place. My friend recounts how her hands went numb in cuffs slapped on her wrists by the NYPD and the night she spent in jail with other protestors from the NYU encampment. My professors’ faces are now plastered on Canary Mission, a doxxing site the United States’ government is now using to identify and deport students. My friends who work in corporate jobs tell me that they would risk their job by posting about Gaza on social media.

After October 7th, I could no longer live in a place that asks me to stay silent for my own good.

In June, I spoke in front of a crowd of around 200 hundred people in downtown Boston rallying against starvation in Gaza. We moved purposefully through Boston Commons and Newbury Street, banging on pots and pans, screaming “shame!” at the top of our lungs. To our left and right, I watched couples clink wine glasses and squeeze lemon on their oysters, I watched teenage girls swing Zara and Alo shopping bags.

I recalled my Instagram feed the night before, a video of a headless baby in a pool of blood. Her parents’ limbs piled in a corner. It was very likely that my taxes funded what I was watching, a drop in the bucket of the billions of dollars the US spends on Israeli missiles, ammunition, and precision-guided bombs.

My head pounded with cognitive dissonance. 

Back to a new home

Since high school, I understood that Palestine represented a commitment to equality and justice everywhere. We all had a responsibility to Palestinians — especially in our financial and ideological complicity in Israeli occupation as Americans. My Arabness was a tool I used to legitimize my activism, but this solidarity also grounded me deeper in my Arab identity itself.

I could get arrested for the same activism in the Arab world; not all Arab governments are created equally and not every Arab sees themselves in Palestine. But here, I do not have to question that the status quo is solidarity with Palestine. This is where I feel most aligned with my identity as an Arab and my values as a human being.

I cannot reject my American side when it saves my life. However hypocritical, I can use its imperial leverage to seek the alignment and rootedness I cannot find in the home I was raised in.

Right before my trip to Lebanon, my friend Talia and I traveled to Tunis. I had never been, but after three weeks in the U.S., I was relieved to be back in the Arab world.

I cannot reject my American side when it saves my life. However hypocritical, I can use its imperial leverage to seek the alignment and rootedness I cannot find in the home I was raised in.

Tunisia is a well-kept secret from American tourists. The city’s bustle along turquoise water ends with idyllic sunsets. Its white walls deflect the heat and its doors blue to repel mosquitos, remnants of a colonial tradition that stuck, much like its French-infused Arabic.

Tunisia was the birth of the Arab Spring in 2010, when street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire in front of a government building. A final, harrowing act of protest, which Aaron Bushnell echoed years later under a different kind of authoritarian rule. Little did Bouazizi know those flames would ignite a blaze that spread across North Africa, leapt into the Levant, and swept through the Gulf.

I stuck my head out of taxi windows to study the murals that covered underpasses and walls along highways where the Palestinian flag morphed into the Tunisian flag, fingers held peace signs, and Free Palestine! spanned the concrete in vibrant letters. Nearly every person we spoke to asked where we were from, confused by our Jordanian-Palestinian accented Arabic. I am Lebanese-American, I would explain, but I learned Arabic in Jordan. Next to me, Talia would reveal her Palestinian-American identity.

“You are Palestinian?!” they squealed, calling their friends over to introduce them to her. “We love Palestine. We are with Palestine.”

At dinner one night, the waiter handed us the bill.

"تحية لفلسطين الحبيبة" it read on a blank piece of paper. “Greetings to beloved Palestine.”

He pointed to the table next to us. “We couldn’t let anyone from Palestine pay for their meal,” the group said when we thanked them, holding their hands over their hearts.

Talia was stunned. She had grown up in the West Coast, where she learned from an early age that being Palestinian was something to hide.

In Tunisia, like in Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, I could expect that solidarity as a given.

“Why do you want to be here in Lebanon?” Ali had asked me a few weeks later.

“To be exactly where I am right now,” I should have responded in that dimly lit room. “To live in a place that forces me to confront myself.”