Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

I really wanted to enjoy this more. As one of the runners-up for the 2021 CBC Short Fiction Prize, Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi didn’t leave much of an impression on me, though I am still curious to read the rest of his collection. It’s rare that I come across any Palestinian short-story writers and maybe that’s on me for not looking hard enough. Given how the social and political crisis in Palestine has escalated in recent years, especially with the ongoing genocide, any story that centers Palestinian identity risks becoming heavy-handed or overly didactic. That’s unfortunately the case here and while that alone doesn’t bother me too much, it becomes an issue when there isn’t a particularly strong or compelling story underneath it all.

As the title story of Teebi’s debut collection, the plot follows a Palestinian-Canadian narrator whose girlfriend is a lawyer with little knowledge of Palestinian history. He begins educating her, and before long she becomes deeply invested in Palestinian activism and liberation. So much so that she travels to the West Bank as a humanitarian volunteer. She eventually joins a legal team representing a Palestinian man, and her growing fixation on "fighting the good fight" causes their relationship to slowly (and quite literally) drift apart. What’s really at stake here isn’t just political commitment, but competing ideas of what it means to be Palestinian. Her activism seems to gravitate toward a purist, almost idealized notion of identity rooted in proximity to the struggle, while his experience as a Canadian immigrant places him in the uncomfortable space of the diaspora as a Palestinian, slightly removed. The narrator’s conclusion that he is not a true Palestinian in her eyes gestures toward a real and painful tension within Palestinian identity, where displacement, exile and inherited trauma complicate any single definition of belonging. That idea is compelling enough, but it could have used more nuance. The story hints at this crisis of legitimacy and belonging without fully unpacking how arbitrary and damaging these internal hierarchies can be, especially when they begin to fracture intimate relationships.

The subject matter is undeniably important and it genuinely is refreshing to read a Palestinian short-story writer. Unfortunately, the story feels frustratingly surface-level. It gestures toward the enormity and moral urgency of the Israel-Palestine conflict but never really grapples with it in a meaningful or challenging way. The politics are carefully sanded down, the emotional stakes remain muted and the narrative seems hesitant to take any real risks. Instead of unsettling the reader or offering a sharper, more personal perspective, the story opts for a safe, broadly palatable approach. Moreover, it acknowledges injustice without interrogating it deeply. In the end, it feels less like a story that confronts the conflict head-on and more like one that circles it cautiously, afraid to push too hard or say too much.

You can read this story HERE.