Ahmed Shihab El-Din was born in California, raised in Kuwait, schooled in Egypt and Austria, and educated at Columbia. He is Palestinian. He is also many other things at once — and for most of his life, that multiplicity felt more like a wound than a gift.
"Part of what I feel rather than think or know about my ancestry is that it does feel very fragmented," he shared on the SuperHumanizer podcast. "When part of your history is so presently about erasure, it's also about a lot of other things as a consequence — resilience and all these other things."
His story is not unusual among Palestinians. It is, in many ways, the Palestinian story.
The numbers behind Palestinian displacement are staggering. More than 9.17 million Palestinians are displaced worldwide, according to the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. [1] Another 5.9 million are registered as refugees with UNRWA, the UN agency created specifically to serve them. [2] This mass displacement traces back to the 1948 Nakba — the Arabic word for "catastrophe" — when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and more than 400 villages were destroyed to establish the state of Israel. [3]
Ahmed's own family carries this history in their bones. His father left in 1948. His mother left in 1967. By the time Ahmed was born, displacement was not a historical event — it was a family inheritance.
When the Gulf War broke out, Ahmed's family was living in Kuwait. He found himself suddenly enrolled in a California public school, trying to explain to American classmates who he was and where he came from.
"I'm Palestinian," he would say.
"Oh, is that where there's war?"
"Yeah."
"Is it the war in Kuwait?"
"No, that's another war."
This moment — a child navigating geopolitical complexity in a school cafeteria — became the foundation of his career. He realized early that he had a gift for making complicated things understandable. And he understood, even then, that the stories of his people were not being told by his people.
Research confirms that this gap persists today. A 2025 survey by the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association found that 60% of MENA journalists in US newsrooms believe they are underrepresented in leadership positions. [4] Arab and Middle Eastern reporters increasingly report heightened scrutiny and self-censorship since the Gaza conflict began. [5]
Ahmed did not choose journalism strategically. He stumbled into it because he could not stop asking questions and could not stop telling stories. His father, he jokes, had a lot of answers — "because he was quite [something], to say the least."
But beneath the humor is something profound. For Palestinians in the diaspora, storytelling is not just a profession. It is a way of resisting erasure. It is how a people who have been scattered across 40 million individuals worldwide [6] maintain a thread back to who they are.
"I chose to become a storyteller," Ahmed said, "not just to do the obvious, which is to inform people about things, but also to remind people about things that are deliberately forgotten."
That instinct — to remember, to remind, to refuse erasure — is what drives him. It is what drives Palestinian journalists and artists across the diaspora. And it is what makes his voice, fragmented and found, so necessary right now.
Listen to the full episode of SuperHumanizer featuring Ahmed Shihab El-Din wherever you get your podcasts.
[1] IMEU — Quick Facts: Palestinian Refugees
https://imeu.org/resources/resources/quick-facts-palestinian-refugees/149
[2] UN News — UN marks 75 years since displacement of 700,000 Palestinians
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136662
[3] IMEU — Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe )
https://imeu.org/resources/resources/quick-facts-the-palestinian-nakba-catastrophe/142
[4] Columbia Journalism Review — Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Notice a Troubling Change
[5] Al Mayadeen — MENA journalists in US report heightened scrutiny since Gaza
[6] All4Palestine — Number of Diaspora Palestinians Worldwide Surpasses 40 Million
https://www.all4palestine.org/page.aspx?page_key=number_of_diaspora_palestinians
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