For 15 months, I was moved from my house in the north of Gaza. For 15 long months that looked like 15, I felt like a stranger in my own homeland. Not knowing when exile would end, I lived with an unbearable feeling of loss, with memories of a house frozen in the time I could see in my mind but that I could not come back.
When the ceasefire was announced, I did not believe at first that it happened. We had to wait a week before the Israeli army allowed us to return north. Finally, on January 27, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians embarked on a trip home. Unfortunately, I was not among them.
I broke my leg during an incident last year and he is still not cured. I could not hike 10 km through the sand and dust on Al-Rashid Street, whose asphalt that the Israeli army had dug. Nor could my family afford to afford the exorbitant amount that private cars billed to drive us via Salah al-Din Street. So my family and I decided to wait.
I spent the day watching images and images of Palestinians by returning to Al-Rashid Street. Children, women and men were walking with smiles on their faces, singing “Allahu Akbar!” And “We are back!”. Family members – have not been seen for months, sometimes a year – gathered, hugged and cried. The scene was more beautiful than I imagined.
Seeing these images, I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather and the hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who, in 1948, arrived in Gaza and waited – just like us – to be allowed to return with them.
My grandfather Yahia was born in Yaffa to a family of farmers. He was only a child when the Zionist forces expelled them from their hometown. They did not have time to pack your suitcases and go there; They just took the keys to the house and fled.
“They have erased our streets, our houses, even our names. But they could never erase our right to come back, ”said my grandfather with tears in their eyes.
He transferred his desire for his house to my mother. “My father described the sea of Yaffa,” she said, “the way the waves kissed the shore, the smell of orange flowers in the air. I lived all my life in exile, dreaming of a place that I have never seen. But maybe one day, I will do it. Maybe one day, I’m going to walk in the streets my father walked when I was a child.
My grandfather died in 2005 without ever seeing her house again. He never discovered what had happened to him – that he was demolished or taken care of by settlers.
The images of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who go back on foot wondering: what happens if my grandfather had also been authorized to go home? What if the world had defended justice and maintained the right of the Palestinians to return? Would we now have black and white photos of smiling Palestinians walking on dusty and crowded roads on the way back to their villages and cities?
At the time – like today – the Zionist forces had assured that the Palestinians would have nothing to come back. More than 500 Palestinian villages have been completely destroyed. The desperate Palestinians kept trying to go back. The Israelis would call them “infiltrators” and shot them. The Palestinians who tried to return to the north before the ceasefire were also slaughtered.
On February 2, my family and I finally traveled north by car.
There was joy, of course: the joy of meeting with our loved ones, to see the faces of cousins who survived even after losing some of their loved ones, to breathe familiar air, to get on the country where we grew up.
But the joy was lacked in agony. Although our house is still standing, it has suffered damage caused by the nearby attacks. We no longer recognize the streets of our neighborhood. It is now a disfigured wasteland.
Everything that made this living place has disappeared. There is no water, no food. The smell of death still persists in the air. It looks more like a cemetery than our house. We have always decided to stay.
The world recalls the Palestinian movement in the north a “return”, but for us, it is more like an extension of our exile.
The word “return” should carry with him a feeling of triumph, long -awaited justice, but we do not feel triumphant. We did not come back to what we once knew.
I imagine that this is what would have been the fate of many Palestinians who return to their villages destroyed and burned after the Nakba of 1948. They would also have felt the shock and the despair that we now feel at the sight of the mountains of the rubble .
I also imagine that they would have worked hard to rebuild their houses, having experienced the difficulties of travel. The story would have been rewritten with stories of resilience rather than endless exile.
My grandfather would have returned home, keys to his hands. My mother would have seen Yaffa’s Sea that she had sucked so much. And I wouldn’t have grown up with the generational trauma of exile.
Above all, a return to the time would probably have indicated that the endless cycles of Palestinian dispossession, stolen land and bulldozer or exploded houses would never have occurred. The Nakba would have ended.
But this is not the case. Our ancestors were not allowed to return and now we live the consequences of the refusal of justice. We were allowed to come back, but only to see the destruction wholesale, not to do anything, without guarantee that we will no longer be moved and that what we build will no longer be destroyed. Our return is not the end of exile.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.