A Palestinian American writer's final, devastating argument with her dying father over the siege of Gaza continues to haunt her, exposing the deep chasms of exile, identity, and generational trauma. The clash occurred on a May night in 2021, on the eve of her father's first chemotherapy treatment for stage four prostate cancer, coinciding with a previous intense Israeli military assault on Gaza that destroyed 40 schools and four hospitals.
The Desert Confrontation
The family was living together in a rented ranch house in Arizona's Sonoran Desert—a landscape her father, Sami Abdul-Fattah Al-Assadi, loved with fierce devotion after fleeing bankruptcy in New York during the early 1990s. Having lived in Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, and Italy, he found solace in the dramatic western vistas, while his daughter yearned for her New York City home.
Under one roof were her parents, her partner J, and their one-year-old daughter—a temporary arrangement born from financial strain, pandemic childbirth, job loss, and her father's cancer diagnosis. She had promised to build a life in the desert to support him, but after just four months, tensions reached a breaking point.
The Unforgotten News
Her father was perpetually consumed by news from the Middle East, watching Arabic broadcasts from morning until night. "Consuming the news, particularly from the Middle East, possessed him, enraged him, ate him alive," she writes. On that fateful night, as they smoked on the patio discussing Gaza yet again, she glanced at her phone and remarked casually, "Looks like people finally believe Palestinian lives matter."
Her father's face transformed as if stabbed. "That's not funny," he finally said. She explained exasperatedly that she was referencing the George Floyd protests of the previous year, recalling how she had once shared comparative images of an IDF soldier kneeling on a Palestinian's neck and Derek Chauvin murdering Floyd. But her father misunderstood profoundly.
"You talk like you've forgotten you're a Palestinian, too. Perhaps you have," he told her.The Frank Leone Persona
Her father often used the pseudonym Frank Leone—an Italian name reflecting his time studying engineering in Florence before the 1967 war cut off his father's funds. As Frank Leone, he wrote daily enraged letters to the New York Times and introduced himself as Roman in certain Phoenix neighborhoods. This alter ego represented a temporary escape from his Palestinian identity, which defined his entire existence since the Nakba of 1948, when at age five he fled Safad on foot, never to see his ancestral home again.
The argument escalated quickly. Her mother had to restrain her frail, dying father as harsh words were exchanged. "He was disowning me and I was disowning him," she recalls, seeing an opportunity to escape back to New York with her family. They packed hastily, woke their crying daughter, and caught the first flight out, without saying goodbye.
The Haunting Realization
Only later did she understand her father's perspective. "People didn't believe Palestinian lives mattered then. And people still don't believe Palestinian lives matter now," she reflects. "If they did, why would people rather debate the use of the word genocide than acknowledge an actual genocide of a people, including thousands and thousands of its children?"
Her father had always encouraged her to present as a "real American," even ceasing to speak Arabic to her as a child to improve her English. "And what an American I had become," she writes, believing she could simply fly away from the desert and his dying days without consequence. Yet the memory continues to haunt her like an iceberg collision, sinking her emotional ship repeatedly.
Though they reconciled weeks later and never fought again before his death, that night remains the pinnacle of her remorse. She compares herself to the narrator in Amy Hempel's story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," who flees her dying friend expecting liberation but finds only perpetual haunting.
Her father witnessed that 2021 Gaza siege—his last—before enduring a chemo journey that brought unbearable suffering, spreading pain from his back to his jaw until he could neither eat nor speak. Instead of comforting him, she fled to New York in springtime, to smells and music she loved. "Unlike my father, I could go home," she acknowledges, while he remained eternally exiled.
The experience inspired her novel Paradiso 17, originally titled Frank Leone, exploring these themes of exile, identity, and inheritance. She concludes with the painful realization that "nothing we ever do stays buried," especially not the wounds of displacement and the difficult love between a dying Palestinian father and his American daughter.
