Our ‘return’ to the northern Gaza is not the end of exile | Israel-Palestinian conflict

For 15 months I was displaced from a house in northern Gaza. In 15 long months that felt like 15 years, I felt like a stranger in my homeland. Not knowing when persecution ended, I lived with an unbearable sense of loss, with memories of the Frozen House in a time I could see in my head, but I couldn’t come back.

When the fire interruption was announced, at first I did not believe that this was actually happening. We had to wait a week before the Israeli army allowed us to return to the north. On January 27, finally, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians went back to their homes. Unfortunately, I was not among them.

I passed my leg during the incident last year and has not yet been cured. I couldn’t start 10 km through the sand and dust of Al-Rashid Street, whose asphalt of the Israeli army dug. My family also couldn’t afford an excessive amount of private cars that charged us to drive us through Salah al-Din Street. So my family and I decided to wait.

I spent the day watching the footage and pictures of Palestinians walk back on Al-Rashid Street. Children, women and men were walking with smiles on their face, singing “Allah Akbar!” and “We came back!” Family members – who have not seen each other for months, sometimes for a year – they have united again, hugging and crying. The scene was nicer than I imagined it would be.

Seeing these pictures, I couldn’t think of my grandfather and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who arrived in Gaza in 1948 and waited – just like us – to let go home.

My grandfather Yahia was born in Yafffi family of farmers. He was only a child when Zionist forces expelled them from their hometown. They didn’t have time to pack and go; They just took home keys and fled.

“They deleted our streets, our homes, even our names. But they could never delete our right to come back,” my grandfather said with tears in his eyes.

He conveyed a longing for his home with my mother. “My father described Yaffa More,” he would say, “the way the waves kissed the coast, the smell of orange flowers in the air. I lived all my life in exile, dreaming of a place I never saw. But maybe one day I will. Maybe I’ll. one day walking the streets that my father walked as a child. “

My grandfather died in 2005 without never seeing his home again. He never revealed what had happened to him – whether they had knocked him down or took over the settlers.

Pictures of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians walking on foot back to their homes made me wonder: what if my grandfather was also allowed to go home? What if the world was advocated for justice and supported the right of Palestinians to return? Now would we have black and white photos of smiling Palestinians walking dusty, full of roads on their way back to their villages and cities?

Then – as today – Zionist forces made sure that Palestinians would not return. More than 500 Palestinian villages have been completely destroyed. The desperate Palestinians were trying to return. The Israelis would call them “infiltors” and fired at them. Palestinians who tried to return to the north before receiving the fire.

On February 2, my family and I finally traveled north by car.

There were, of course, joy: the joy of reuniting with our relatives, when they saw the faces of the relatives who survived even after they lost some of their loved ones, breathed the famous air, stepping to the earth we grew up in.

But the joy was full of agony. Although our home still stands, it suffered damage from nearby bombing attacks. We no longer recognize the streets of our neighborhood. That’s a disgusting desolation now.

Everything that once did this place was gone. No water, no food. The smell of death still remains in the air. It looks more like a cemetery than our home. We still decided to stay.

The world calls the movement of the Palestinians back to the north “return”, but we feel more like an extension of our exile.

The word “return” should have a sense of triumph, long -awaited justice, but we do not feel triumphantly. We didn’t come back to what we used to know.

I imagine that this is what would be the fate of many Palestinians who return to their destroyed and burned villages after Nakba from 1948. And they would probably feel the shock and despair that we now feel like the form of the mountains of the ruins.

I also imagine that they would work hard to restore their homes, experiencing the difficulties of the shift. History would be transcribed with stories of resistance, not endless exile.

My grandfather would come home, the keys in his hands. My mother would see the sea of ​​yaffa she longed for. And I would not grow up with the generational trauma of exile.

Most of all, the return back would probably mean that the constant cycles of Palestinian alienated, stolen countries and homes bulldos or explode will never happen. Nakba would end.

But not. Our ancestors were not allowed back and now we live the consequences of justice that are denied. We are allowed to come back, but only to see wholesale destruction, to start from nothing, without a guarantee that we will no longer dispel ourselves and that what we build will no longer be destroyed. Our return is not the end of exile.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeere.