In 2007, while researching her family history, Jasmine Donahaye stumbled upon the collusion of her grandparents' in the displacement of Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s – an early ethnic cleansing in which villages were erased to prevent the return of Palestinians. She set out to uncover a piece of Israel's OP history, and a part of family's story unknown to her. What she found challenged everything she thought she knew about the country and her family, and transformed her understanding of the place, and of herself.

Jasmine Donahaye's publications include poetry, cultural criticism, fiction and creative non-fiction. Her poetry collection, Misappropriations (Parthian, 2006), was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh first collection prize, and Self-Portrait as Ruth (Salt, 2009) was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Her monograph Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine was published in 2012 by the University of Wales Press. She is a creative writing lecturer at Swansea University, specialising in creative non-fiction and poetry.