My father was one of 10 siblings from a rural village in the West Bank. As a 6-year-old, he hid with his family in a cave during the Six-Day War, the start of 16 years spent under military occupation. Once, when my father was passing through a checkpoint as an undergraduate, a soldier noticed an astrophysics textbook under his arm. He told my father that Arabs were too stupid for the subject, but that only hardened his resolve to keep learning. By the time he met my English mother, he was in America studying for a Ph.D. I grew up between two worlds, spending most of my life in England, and most of my summers immersed in Palestinian culture with my family in California. In my father’s home, we ate maqluba, a cinnamon-infused upside-down chicken, vegetable, and rice dish. We drank Arabic coffee—thick and black and mixed with cardamom. We talked in a jumbled hybrid of Arabic and English, starting a sentence in one language and finishing in the other. I read Mahmoud Darwish and …