For 15 months, I was displaced from my home in northern Gaza. For 15 long months that felt like 15 years, I felt like a stranger in my own homeland. I lived in an intolerable sense of loss, with memories of a past that I could see but couldn’t return to because I had no idea when the exile would end.
When the ceasefire was announced, I did not believe at first that it was actually happening. Before the Israeli army let us return north, we had to wait a week. Hunderte of thousands of Palestinians finally made the journey back to their homes on January 27. Sadly, I was not among them.
My leg was broken in a collision last year, and it is still unrecoverable. I was unable to make the 10-kilometer trek through al-Rashid Street’s asphalt, which the Israeli army had dug out. Additionally, my family was unable to afford the exorbitant cost of renting a car to take us through Salah al-Din Street. So we made the decision to wait, my family and I.
I spent the day examining photos and videos of Palestinians returning from al-Rashid Street. Children, women and men were walking with smiles on their faces, chanting “Allahu Akbar”! and “we are back”!. Family members – having not seen each other for months, sometimes a year – were reuniting, hugging each other and crying. The scene had more beauty than I had anticipated.
In light of those images, I couldn’t help but think about my grandfather and the tens of thousands of other Palestinians who had arrived in Gaza in 1948 and waited for their return home, just like we did.
Yahia, the grandfather of my grandfather, was a farmer’s family in Yaffa. When Zionist forces drove them out of their hometown, he was just a child. They simply took the house keys and fled with no time to pack up and leave.
“They erased our streets, our homes, even our names. My grandfather grinned in disbelief, “But they could never erase our right to return,” he said in agony.
He told my mother that he was desperate for a home. She would say that “the way the waves kissed the shore and the smell of orange blossoms in the air are typical of the sea of Yaffa.” I’ve spent the majority of my life in exile, having never seen anything there. But maybe one day, I will. I’m going to walk the streets that my father used to do when he was a child.
My grandfather passed away in 2005 without ever returning home. He never learned what had happened, whether it had been destroyed or simply settled.
What if my grandfather had been permitted to walk back home as well as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were walking on foot back to their homes? What if the world had fought for justice and supported the Palestinians’ right to return? Would there now be black-and-white images of smiling Palestinians returning to their villages and towns on crowded, dusty roads?
The Zionist forces had ensured that Palestinians would not have anything to return to in the past, just like they do today. More than 500 Palestinian villages were completely destroyed. Palestinians who were desperate tried to flee. The Israelis would call them “infiltrators” and shoot them. Before the ceasefire, prisoners who attempted to return to the north were also shot.
My family and I finally took the car to the north on February 2.
Of course, there was joy in reuniting with our relatives, seeing cousins’ faces who had survived even after losing some of their loved ones, breathing familiar air, and entering the country where we were raised.
But the joy was laced with agony. Although our home is still standing, it has suffered damage from nearby bombings. We no longer recognise the streets of our neighbourhood. It is now a disfigured wasteland.
Everything that made this place once livable is gone. There is no water, no food. Death is still evoking the air. It resembles our home more than our graveyard.  , We still decided to stay.
The Palestinians’ return to the north is referred to as a “return,” but for us, it resembles our exile more.
The word “return” should carry with it a sense of triumph, of long-awaited justice, but we do not feel triumphant. We were unable to regain our former selves.
Many Palestinians who had returned to their destroyed and burned villages after the Nakba of 1948 would likely have experienced this fate. They too would have likely experienced the shock and desperation experienced by the sight of rubble-covered mountains.
After going through the upheaval of displacement, I can also imagine that they would have put in extra effort to rebuild their homes. Instead of ending in exile, the history would have been rewritten with tales of resilience.
With his keys in his hands, my grandfather would have returned home. My mother would have seen the Yaffa sea that she had long desired. And I wouldn’t have endured generational trauma from exile.
Most importantly, a return to that time would have likely prevented the never-ending cycles of Palestinian eviction, sabotage, and home destruction. The Nakba would have ended.
But it didn’t. Our ancestors were denied access to justice, and today we experience this. Without any guarantees that we won’t be displaced again or that what we build won’t be destroyed once more, we have been allowed to return. All we can see is total destruction starting from scratch. Our exile is not over, though.
Source: Aljazeera
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