For 15 months, I used to be displaced from my house in northern Gaza. For 15 lengthy months that felt like 15 years, I felt like a stranger in my very own homeland. Not understanding when the exile would finish, I lived with an insufferable sense of loss, with recollections of a house frozen in time that I may see in my thoughts however couldn’t return to.
When the ceasefire was introduced, I didn’t imagine at first that it was truly occurring. We needed to wait per week earlier than the Israeli military allowed us to return north. On January 27, lastly, a whole bunch of hundreds of Palestinians launched into a journey again to their properties. Sadly, I used to be not amongst them.
I had damaged my leg throughout an incident final yr and it’s nonetheless not healed. I couldn’t make the 10km trek by means of the sand and mud of al-Rashid Avenue, whose asphalt the Israeli military had dug out. My household additionally couldn’t afford the exorbitant quantity personal automobiles had been charging to drive us through Salah al-Din Avenue. So my household and I made a decision to attend.
I spent the day footage and pictures of Palestinians strolling again on al-Rashid Avenue. Youngsters, men and women had been strolling with smiles on their faces, chanting “Allahu Akbar!” and “we’re again!”. Members of the family – having not seen one another for months, typically a yr – had been reuniting, hugging one another and crying. The scene was extra stunning than I had imagined it might be.
Seeing these photos, I couldn’t assist however take into consideration my grandfather and the a whole bunch of hundreds of different Palestinians who in 1948 arrived in Gaza and waited – identical to us – to be allowed to return house.
My grandfather Yahia was born in Yaffa to a household of farmers. He was only a youngster when Zionist forces expelled them from their house metropolis. They’d no time to pack up and go; they simply took the home keys and fled.
“They erased our streets, our properties, even our names. However they might by no means erase our proper to return,” my grandfather used to say with tears in his eyes.
He transferred his eager for his house to my mom. “My father used to explain the ocean of Yaffa,” she would say, “the way in which the waves kissed the shore, the scent of orange blossoms within the air. I’ve lived my complete life in exile, dreaming of a spot I’ve by no means seen. However perhaps sooner or later, I’ll. Perhaps sooner or later, I’ll stroll within the streets my father walked as a baby.”
My grandfather died in 2005 with out ever seeing his house once more. He by no means came upon what had occurred to it – whether or not it was demolished or taken over by settlers.
The photographs of a whole bunch of hundreds of Palestinians strolling on foot again to their properties made me marvel: what if my grandfather had additionally been allowed to stroll again house? What if the world had stood up for justice and upheld the Palestinians’ proper to return? Would we now have black-and-white pictures of smiling Palestinians strolling on dusty, crowded roads on the way in which again to their villages and cities?
Again then – like in the present day – the Zionist forces had made positive that Palestinians wouldn’t have something to return to. Greater than 500 Palestinian villages had been fully destroyed. Determined Palestinians stored making an attempt to return. The Israelis would name them “infiltrators” and shoot them. Palestinians who tried to return to the north earlier than the ceasefire had been additionally shot.
On February 2, my household and I lastly travelled north by automotive.
There was pleasure, after all: the enjoyment of reuniting with our family, of seeing the faces of cousins who survived even after dropping a few of their family members, of respiratory acquainted air, of stepping onto the land the place we grew up.
However the pleasure was laced with agony. Though our house continues to be standing, it has suffered injury from close by bombings. We now not recognise the streets of our neighbourhood. It’s now a disfigured wasteland.
All the things that when made this place habitable is gone. There isn’t a water, no meals. The scent of dying continues to be lingering within the air. It appears to be like extra like a graveyard than our house. We nonetheless determined to remain.
The world calls the motion of Palestinians again to the north a “return”, however to us, it feels extra like an extension of our exile.
The phrase “return” ought to carry with it a way of triumph, of long-awaited justice, however we don’t really feel triumphant. We didn’t return to what we as soon as knew.
I think about that that is what would have been the destiny of many Palestinians returning to their destroyed and burned villages after the Nakba of 1948. They, too, would have most likely felt the shock and despair we really feel now on the sight of mountains of rubble.
I additionally think about that they’d have labored exhausting to rebuild their properties, having skilled the hardship of displacement. Historical past would have been rewritten with tales of resilience somewhat than never-ending exile.
My grandfather would have run again to his house, keys in his palms. My mom would have seen the ocean of Yaffa she had a lot longed for. And I might not have grown up with the generational trauma of exile.
Most of all, a return again then would have most likely meant that the endless cycles of Palestinian dispossession, lands stolen and houses bulldozed or exploded would by no means have occurred. The Nakba would have ended.
Nevertheless it didn’t. Our ancestors weren’t allowed again and now we stay the implications of justice being denied. We now have been allowed to return, however solely to see wholesale destruction, to start out over from nothing, with no ensures that we’ll not be displaced once more and that what we construct is not going to be destroyed once more. Our return is just not the top of exile.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
