Driving to her house I was nervous. Not because I knew I was going to have to parallel park in her neighborhood, although that was still a concern, but because I was about to ask this person, whom I barely knew, to recant to me their life story. I anxiously peered at the bouquet of flowers and bag of chocolates I had bought her as a thank-you gift. I hoped they were enough.

I knew of Emily because of a vigil for Palestine that I had attended that had been put together by a mutual friend of ours. She had been one of the speakers, and had told bits of her life story and about the family she had lost through tears of sadness and frustration. Her words drew me in deeply, and I knew right away that I wanted to tell the world her story.

I needed to tell the world her story.

I explained my intrigue to our mutual friend — the one who had helped organize the event — and she told me that Emily was an incredibly kind person who would likely be willing to speak with me. She gave me Emily's email and I reached out. To my surprise, she agreed to let me write her story, and to my even bigger surprise, she invited me into her home to conduct the interview.

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She’s wearing a black t-shirt and black joggers when she opens the door. Her salt-and-pepper hair falls loosely around her shoulders, and she’s frantically speaking in Arabic to someone on the phone — I can tell that the situation is dire regardless of the language barrier. I later learn that she was speaking to a family member back in Gaza. She says that she checks in with her relatives nearly every day to make sure they’re still alive. A sense of helplessness overcomes my body when she says this.

The front door opens directly into the living room. The walls are painted in a unique stippled pattern in a dark shade of tangerine orange. Two iron crosses hang on either side of a large framed mirror. Two black armchairs sit below the crosses, and a matching black leather couch sits adjacent to those. A wooden coffee table in the direct center of the room holds a basket wrapped in a keffiyeh — a black-and-white scarf embroidered in a patternage associated with Palestine and now, its resistance movement. A large black rug underneath the entire setup of the living room is embroidered with silver depictions of flowers, horses, and an assortment of other decals in an Arabic pattern, although I don’t ask about its origin.

I set my flowers and chocolates next to the basket.

We go through introductions pretty quickly. I explain why I’m doing this story, who I am, why I’m interested, etc. Emily offers me tea amidst the conversation, a classic Middle Eastern gesture, and I accept, although I’m not the biggest tea drinker; refusing would be rude. She quickly ventures outside to pick some fresh mint from her garden as we wait for the water to boil.

When she returns, I begin the questioning.

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Emily was born in 1970 in Taybeh, Palestine. Taybeh is a small village in the West Bank, just Northeast of Jerusalem. Her fondest childhood memories centered around her grandfather’s olive lands, where her family would get together to harvest the olives in November so that her grandmother could use them in her cooking.

“I wish my kids could experience that. But unfortunately, it's very difficult to get to that village now,” she adds.

Growing up as a Christian, Emily explains that she was quick to realize even as a child the societal advantage that she had in the face of Israeli occupation.

“I felt that we had more privilege than our Muslim brothers and sisters. Sometimes we would wear the crosses, and it would be easier for us at checkpoints to just pass without our car being strip-searched. It's like we weren't a threat to them,” she says.

“We spoke to them in Arabic and to enter Bethlehem…all I [would] say is like, I'm Christian, and they'd let us in,” she continues, explaining that the durzi — the Durze ethnic minority in Israel — soldiers were easier to convince by being so obviously Christian. If a Russian soldier happened to be stationed at a checkpoint, however, Emily says that it was much harder. “There was segregation for sure,” she finishes.

But I knew that there was more to the checkpoint story based off of the bits I remembered from her speech at the vigil. A few moments later, she started speaking about the memory that she had told at that event — the memory that had shaken me to my core and solidified why I needed to tell her story.

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It was 1987, the year of the first Intifada — or uprising — against the Israeli occupation. Emily’s brother was 14 at the time, but was tall, and looked a little older than his age. This had caused issues in the past at checkpoints throughout Jerusalem and the Old City, where soldiers were suspicious at the fact that he didn’t have an ID on him, as they were given to those 16 and older. “When he would say, ‘I don't have an ID,’... they’d beat him up,” she says. The soldiers thought he was resisting.

Photo from the first Intifada. Gaza, December 1987. (source: Socialist Worker)

It was at one of these checkpoints where her family was stopped by soldiers, a routine occurrence for those living in Palestine. Emily had even mentioned in her original speech at the vigil that there would be so many checkpoints between towns in the West Bank that a trip of 30 or 40 miles would take multiple hours to traverse. This was the life that Palestinians were subjected to under occupation.

At this stop, soldiers again thought her brother was resisting for not showing his ID. Her family pleaded with them, trying to explain that he was just 14, not yet old enough to have acquired official identification, but the soldiers didn’t believe them. They forced her little brother out of the car as her family sat helpless.

The soldiers manhandled her brother, demanding identification that he didn’t have.

“And at one [point], they like, just with the back of a machine gun, they clocked him on the head and he got a concussion. It was really bad [and] he was bleeding and he spent a few days in the hospital. You know, my mom...was having anxiety attacks because of it. And so we just moved to Nazareth because of that,” she states.

Eventually, she tells me that her little brother ended up dying at the age of 47 in 2020. Emily says that he died of a heart attack, likely due to the stress he faced trying to feed his family in COVID-stricken Palestine.

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We take a pause and decide to pursue a different course of questioning for the time being. She explains that her family back home is struggling financially, among emotional and physical stresses. The olive land that once brought her family together is now almost non-existent; some of it has been sold off to try and afford rent, food, or supplies. Some of it has been stolen by the Israeli government in order to make room for incoming settlers.

For her relatives, the onslaught of the genocide in Palestine has meant that many industries have shut down. “Especially now…, a lot of them have not worked because they work in tourism. They're tour guides with Christian churches, and they haven't had jobs. [And] now, it's even impossible to sell any part of the land for them to survive and feed their kids,” she states with anguish. She tries to give her family members money, but they often reject her offer.

“They refuse to take money. It's like, their dignity is so important to them… They don't want charity, they just want to survive and be left alone.”

I pause for a second, flipping through my reporter notepad. I had made an effort to write everything out instead of bringing my laptop to type in order for the conversation to be more personal — technology always gets in the way of intimate interviews. I decide to go back to questions about her childhood, just to make sure that I have the right idea of what her life was like growing up.

The earliest memory that she says she can remember is that of war. She says that she was three years old in 1973, and remembers waking up to sirens. She asks if I’m familiar with the war she’s referring to, and I shake my head no, ashamed that I don’t.

She doesn’t elaborate, but my own research after the interview uncovers that she was referring to the Yom Kippur War, which had taken place from Oct. 6 to Oct. 25, 1973. It was the fourth Arab-Israeli War out of seven. The other three were to occur in 1982, 1991, and 2006. Outside of war, however, Emily was to live with years more of discrimination, segregation, and dehumanization until she finally immigrated to the U.S. in 1990.

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I try to ask more about her childhood. In my mind, there had to be other memories aside from war and stolen olive land that made Emily who she was as a Palestinian and an activist today.

This time, she speaks earnestly about her life as a Christian in the birthplace of Jesus Christ, and how this filled her with so much pride and joy as a young Palestinian. “The most beautiful thing [to] experience as a Christian in Jerusalem was our Easter time,” she says, the memory illuminating her face. She gleams as she continues, “You have people who come from all over the world. And I knew that place was special because of that, because of the way the world celebrated with us.”

Emily’s gushing at this point. I take a moment to take in the weight of her memories, the meaning that they hold, and the importance they have to people who have never and will never experience the beauty of her home country.

“There was always the Saturday of the Lights celebration. And my uncle was the leader of the Scouts. So he was [in] the marching band,” she recounts. Her uncle would lead the march out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with thousands of eyes on them. Although she admits that she’s not really a religious person, she still proudly speaks of how those were the same streets that Jesus had walked.

Photo from Jerusalem's Holy Fire Ceremony, performed the Saturday before Orthodox Easter. (source: Britanica)

I again pivot the conversation slightly in order to orient it towards something of my own interest — Palestinian Jews. Emily explains that she had actually been able to pick up bits of Hebrew before moving to Nazareth because of local Palestinian Jews. She says that she spent ample time in the hospital as a young girl because of undiagnosed anxiety attacks, and that the hospital community coincidentally had a large Jewish presence, hence the Hebrew. Emily explains that through her interaction with Jewish people throughout the years, and later her job as a young adult, she managed to maintain her ability to at least read Hebrew, although she admits that her speaking and writing is a bit weak.

I listen intently, quite impressed with her language skills — English, Arabic, German, and now Hebrew. She continues explaining her experience living and working side-by-side with different religions.

Emily states that right before immigrating to the U.S., she worked for a business selling diamonds. Because of her ability to speak so many different languages, especially ones widely spoken in Europe like English and German, she managed to keep her job — the only Palestinian working amongst 200 Israelis.

But there’s a much eerier reason as to why European tourists often frequented Israel, she says.

Skin and organ banks. It’s as awful as it sounds.

I had heard about them loosely before, but in all seriousness had passed them off as rumors or horror stories. But the look in Emily’s eyes attested that these were not just rumors. And her distant relative, Khader Tarazi, had been a victim of this horrific crime.

Outsiders looking for a cheap skin graft or reconstructive surgery would come to Israel for a procedure, she says. And the skin they would use would sometimes be from Palestinians that had been killed by occupation forces. The skin of the killed individual, typically young, healthy adults, would be surgically removed and preserved, waiting for an unsuspecting, or all-knowing, customer to pay for the surgery.

Again during the 1987 Intifada, she says Tarazi, originally from Gaza, was attending university in Jerusalem. Protests broke out on campus, and he was arrested. Emily says her family has always thought that he was too timid to have protested, and that he would not have risked his scholarship by engaging in disruption. Regardless, he was arrested as a healthy, young college student.

His body was returned to his family some time later.

Emily states that she didn’t go to the funeral, but that her mother did. She says that she remembers devastating discussions about how Tarazi was missing organs, veins, his eyes, and parts of his skin.

He had been tortured and mutilated. While the soldiers responsible were brought to Israeli military court after pressure from human rights groups, they were acquitted of all charges.

A still image taken from home video footage of Khader Tarazi. (source: family archive)

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By this point, the aforementioned water set to boil had been steaming for a while. Emily asks if I would take mint in my tea — she has some in her garden outside — I say of course, gracious for her kindness. I watch as she quickly scampers out the front door to retrieve the herb, her stories still rattling in my head. We ramble through some small talk, about my internship, her kids. She seeps the tea, adds the mint, and hands it to me. I set it down on the coffee table in the middle of the room, which is just out of arm's reach. I wait for it to cool down.

I ask about her experience immigrating to America.

With no more than a partial high school education and no money, the odds were stacked against her. Without offering too many details, she says that she managed to get herself to Los Angeles in 1990, intent on completing her higher education. She attended Los Angeles Community College — LACC — because it was the only thing she could afford. She was given a job under the table, and would routinely wake up at 5 a.m. to open the café she worked at before heading off to classes around 10. She was never able to finish her degree because of the need to work overriding the time needed to complete her education.

Education aside, Emily states that she was met with rather high levels of prejudice, harassment, or generally strange behavior from outsiders.

“They would call me a half-breed,” she says, referring to the farming community she lived amongst in the short time that she spent in Washington state with her aunt. “I’ve heard sand-nigger. I’ve heard all kinds of slurs.” She chuckles a bit and jokingly shakes it off. “I was like, ‘Okay, just means I’m exotic looking, thank you.’”

Strangely, she also explains that there’s been a strange phenomenon of strangers touching her hair. This shocks me, as her hair, while it does look more ethnic than European Americans’, doesn’t seem to me that out of the ordinary — but maybe that’s because I’m Middle Eastern myself and have grown up around people with similar physical attributes. Her hair is beautiful and thick and voluminous, and the salt and pepper streaks do wonders in contrasting its natural black undertones. It suits her olive skin and her warm eyes.

I wonder what she would have looked like if she had stayed in Palestine, in either Jerusalem or Nazareth or even Taybeh. I wonder about what her life would have looked like if her family’s olive lands weren’t forced into the hands of Israeli forces, or if her family members hadn’t been picked off one by one by the occupation.

I wonder what she would have looked like where she was meant to be, a Palestinian in Palestine.

I meet her eyes and ask if she’s been back since leaving all those decades ago. I know from our small talk that she has two sons and a husband and a life here, but I see the yearning in her eyes and in her advocacy work that scream that pieces of her are still scattered along the roads of her home country, of her Palestine.

She again mentions the ID system, and how because of her privilege as a Christian born with a blue ID, she has significantly more freedom of movement than her other relatives. But this doesn’t mean complete freedom of movement or freedom from interrogation and search.

“The minute I show up at the airport in Israel, they look at my U.S. passport, and they’re like, ‘Where's your Israeli passport?’ And if you have not been to Israel in 10 years, they will not renew your Israeli passport…They don't let you back in.”

I ask what she means by “back in,” whether this means back into occupied territory or the entirety of Israel itself. She replies, clarifying that if you do not come back to Israel at least once every 10 years, your passport will not be renewed, regardless of ethnicity or nationality.

I think to myself about how this system keeps people coming back to Israel, further establishing its presence as an occupying state.

She says that her kids were born in Santa Monica, and that she has made sure not to register them as Israelis.

“[Airport officials] would interrogate me about why my kids are not registered as Israelis, because they want them to serve in the army. So I refuse to register them…If the mother is Israeli, then automatically the kids are Israeli. So I refuse to register them because I don’t want them to serve in the army.”

She says that she intentionally married her husband — who is Jewish — in a church to have as little affiliation to the state of Israel as possible in order to clear her children.

The overbearingness of occupation forces infiltrate every point of her life, even thousands of miles away.

She says that she’s been back to her home country several times, most recently in October 2022 to pay respects to her grandmother, who had passed away, and to help out with paperwork regarding her grandparents’ land. She explains, “My mom is from Jerusalem, and my father's from [what is now] Israel… and nobody in Palestine can sell land through the Israeli authorities, it's really complicated.” Another hurdle put in place by the occupation, the origin of her parents and the associated family lineage makes it difficult for even direct descendants to handle inherited items.

Emily goes on to explain the extremely complicated process to me about the distinction of the occupation’s land versus what her family is allowed to own. I sit and listen and try to take notes, knowing that I’ll have to sift back through my recording in order to further analyze the process.

From what I gather, and thanks to Emily’s simplification, the land that her family has been on for decades now has been declared as Israeli property. The only asset that her family owns is the house that sits on it. As expansionist, settler movements in the West Bank — which are illegal under international law — continue onwards, she says that if one day Israel decides that they want her family’s house too, they’ll take it or destroy it in the blink of an eye, as they have been doing for decades.

Along the line of land, I quickly ask about the Nakba — or catastrophe — and whether or not her parents or grandparents talked about it when she was young. She says that while her mother had stories of the Turkish and British armies in the early parts of the 20th century, their occupation paled in comparison to the atrocities inflicted by that of Israel. “I would take the Turkish army any day over the Israelis, trust me,” she says reassuringly, seeing how I had hung my head in shame at the mention of yet another colonial excursion carried out by the Turks — my people.

Her kindness takes me aback once again.

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I prepare to enter my final round of questions, one that I know will cause painful memories and emotions from Emily, as well as myself. At the vigil where I had initially caught wind of her, she had spoken of the family she had lost since Oct. 7. I wanted to know more about them.

I prepare to enter my final round of questions, one that I know will cause painful memories and emotions from Emily, as well as myself. At the vigil where I had initially caught wind of her, she had spoken of the family she had lost since Oct. 7. I wanted to know more about them.

We fall down a rabbit hole of offshoot conversations. I talk about my experience as a student at USC, about how my life turned on its head after realizing how bias existed in every corner of every media publication that had sworn they were unbiased or even more left-leaning, like CNN or the New York Times, and how campus administration had made it a point to ignore the trials and tribulations of muslim, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students on campus while upholding the sentiments of Zionists who intended to do us harm. Emily speaks briefly about her husband’s experience with similar issues, dealing with onslaughts of anti-muslim and anti-Palestinian hate in his workplace, as he works in media.

She talks about a plethora of experiences that she and her family have lived through recently, both since Oct. 7 and years before, as Zionist rhetoric has expanded under the ever-forgiving, appeasement-based governance style of Western nations, most notably the U.S.

Emily speaks about the terror that Israeli forces, like the IOF — the Israeli Occupation Forces — and settlers impose on her family and friends still back home. “My cousins live outside of Bethlehem, and they're so scared to [leave] their homes, there's been so many attacks, where they just will invade,” she says, a worried and angry look on her face. “And other things they do is…big bulldozers will come in and they'll just dig out the whole street. So now people can't drive their cars and can't go to work the next day, or they're spraying them with sewage water.”

I try to bring back the conversation to my original conclusionary line of questioning: about her family killed since Oct. 7.

“My cousin, who lives in Gaza,… married this wonderful, lovely person who's an architect.” She provides more context about this part of her family, how in the 90s, before Israel closed all access to and from Gaza, she was able to see the beauty of this part of Palestine, with its shops and restaurants and historical monuments. She says that her cousin’s daughter, at 13 years old, had already been through four wars, although bombardments in the area were usually strategic and surgical. “If you Google it, you will see a building and only the ninth floor is taken out. But the whole building is still there. So they have the precision to do it,” she explains.

While the fear was persistent in Gaza during times pre-Oct. 7, there seemed to be an understanding that nothing bad would happen to ordinary citizens, as Israel had pledged to attack Hamas only. Whenever attacks would occur, she says, her family would take shelter in nearby churches, as those were usually left untouched — Israel had no need to destroy them.

But now, she says, Israel’s not doing surgical extractions. “They’re carpet bombing,” she says.

The Tarazi family, the same as the martyred Khader Tarazi, was one of the few remaining Gazan-Christian families in all of the Paletsine. This part of her family has been targeted time and time again. She’s lost several relatives.

Marwan Tarazi was an extremely famous historian in the area that had been tracking Emily’s family’s lineage back centuries. He had been nicknamed “The Guardian of Gaza’s Memories” because of his mission to archive and save as much historical information as possible about the Palestinian people and their existence in the region. He was killed with his wife and six-month-old granddaughter on October 20, 2023 while sheltering in the historic Greek Orthodox Church.

Pictures of the four family members that Emily has lost since Oct. 7.
top row: Marwan Tarazi and his wife; bottom left: Dr. Haytham Tarazi; bottom right: Dr. Tarazi's 6-month-old daughter. (source: family archive)

“The granddaughter was six months old. She was baptized in that church. And to die in that church is just heartbreaking for all of us. A baby I'll never get to meet,” she says with devastation.

Emily says that she is convinced that the church was targeted because they knew that the Tarazi family frequented and took refuge there. Destroying the work and life of a famous historian was one more step in erasing the centuries of history that Palestinans hold in their beloved country.

Dr. Haytham Tarazi, her cousin’s brother-in-law, she explains, died not from bombing or white phosphorus or starvation, she says, but from lack of medicine.

“He's a doctor,” she says. “He has a PhD in medical engineering. Because remember, these people need… every resource possible. So they go to Romania, Hungary, to study and then come back to Gaza and rebuild, because they keep getting attacked, and they have to keep rebuilding.”

While her cousin worked with expectant mothers and children with special needs, her husband worked closely as a doctor. They helped their community so much through their selfless work. She says while her cousin was born in Jerusalem, her children and husband are from Gaza. While she can leave, the rest of her immediate family cannot.

Her cousin’s husband has lost almost everyone — his aunts, his brother, his uncle, his father’s cousins — Emily says. An entire generation, an entire family, is being wiped out bomb after bomb and as disease and starvation creep in.

“These are people I've seen at weddings, these are people that I've grown up with, until the 90s,” she says. I know from my own experiences that extended families are much closer in the Middle East than they are in the Western world. Big, expansive weddings mean that you meet everyone from every corner of your lineage — a familial archive of its own.

Emily speaks about the stark, calamitous difference that she’s forced to live with being in America, “Then you see all these privileged kids here … And it's dystopian, you know. I'm like, ‘What world am I in here?’”

I ask myself the same question.

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To my surprise, I'd almost finished the entirety of the tea that Emily had given me by the time our interview winds down. But unsurprisingly, her hospitality isn’t over.

We spend the next ten or twenty minutes going through a short tour of the collection of Palestinian memorabilia that she has strewn across the first level of her home. She talks briefly of her in-laws, and the prejudice she faced from them when marrying her Jewish husband. She shows me some of the ornaments she has tacked on her walls, like a framed piece of Arabic calligraphy from Morocco, or a small cloth ribbon depicting an early rendition of Mother Mary and baby Jesus with an evil eye dangling underneath, or a hand-sewn black tote bag from Palestine, adorned with patterns of colorful flowers and leaves.

She shows me bottles of wine and olive oil that she has sitting on a cabinet behind the couches in the living room. A bottle of white wine has a pale label that reads that it’s from Taybeh, the town where Emily was born. Another, red wine, has a label that touts that it’s from the Holy Land, Bethlehem. Interestingly, the labels on other bottles read in either Hebrew or English. The occupation has even taken over food production and exports.

I thank her again for the hospitality as I snap some final pictures of the entrance of her home. Her energy is back, and what stands before me is an incredibly kind and caring individual, invigorated by passion and distraught over tremendous loss. Her perseverance inspires me.

I tell her that we’ll keep in touch, and months later, we still do. She lets me know that she’s keeping up with all news USC-related; her only connection to the university is me.

A family photo of Emily in Palestine in the 80s. She sits in a pink dress at the bottom. (source: family archive)

She says that she has an event to go to soon, and I understand that as my cue to leave. I gather my belongings — just my phone, reporter’s notebook, and my bag — and thank her yet again. I could never tell her in words how much her time and words mean to me. We take a quick embrace, and I head out the door, her story still dancing inside my mind.

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In order to fully round out and encapsulate a profile on Emily, I realized that I needed some secondary sources to corroborate. The first choice in source was easy — it would be the person that connected us in the first place through the vigil: Michelle. The second choice, however, was a bit more tricky.

I’ve learned throughout my short stint as a profile writer at school that some of the best secondary sources come from friends and family. While Emily’s friends would be a great source of interest, most of them would have only known her for so long. I could interview her husband, but I didn’t want to impose on his career in the media — any connection to this story might hurt his prospects.

So, I decided to take a more nuanced approach. Rather than asking middle-aged adults, I wondered what it would be like to interview her son.

I posed the question to Emily, and she agreed to have her son answer some questions about their relationship and his experience as a Palestinian-American.

In order to protect his identity and sanctity as a student, his name has been omitted.

And just like that, I had my two secondary sources — one personal, and one professional.

Michelle says that Emily has been organizing in Long Beach, where the two are based, since she moved there some-odd years ago. When it came to organizing the vigil where I would fatefully meet Emily, Michelle had known that she was a necessity.

“When this idea of organizing the vigil came about, she was one of the folks that I thought of, because we wanted a mix of both…journalists and media personnel, but also Palestinians and people who have been directly impacted by the atrocity being enacted on Palestinians,” Michelle says.

She admits that Emily’s activism has had a profound impact on the way she chooses to pursue her own facets of pro-Palestinian spaces and in her career as a journalist. “Even just being in spaces with her where she would talk about her own family, and their experiences and their perspectives as non-Muslim Palestinians, was really impactful,” Michelle states. She says that Emily’s continuous vulnerability, emotion, and ability to be so personable is what makes her such an influential figure in the organizing world.

Emily’s son, still young, explains how he feels watching his mother fight so hard against so many within and around her community, her current country of residence, “I am inspired by her always fighting for people on social media, along with everything else she does.” He admits that he’s worried about his mom. “Watching my mother cry makes me feel so not in power. I just wish to do something.” While her son admits that the Arabic-English language barrier puts a hurdle between his ability to fully connect to his heritage, his travels to Palestine ignite his connection. Regarding his heritage, he states, “I can feel it in my blood.”

To summarize the sentiments surrounding this powerhouse of a person I’ve been ever so fortunate enough to meet and learn from, Michelle summarizes it best: “Emily is just like a force to be reckoned with.”

And with that, I couldn’t agree with more.