For 15 months, it was displaced from my house in northern Gaza. For 15 months, I felt as if I was 15 years old, I felt as if I was a stranger in my country. I do not know when the exile will end, I lived with an unbearable feeling of loss, with the memories of a freezing house at the appropriate time that I can see in my mind but I could not return to it.

When the ceasefire was announced, I didn’t think at first it was already happening. We had to wait a week before the Israeli army allowed us to return north. On January 27, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began a trip to their homes. Unfortunately, I was not among them.

I had broken my legs during the accident last year and still is not healing. I could not take a 10 -kilometer trip through the sands and dust of Al -Rashid Street, which dug the Israeli army. My family also could also bear the cost of private cars that were paid by private cars to drive us via Salah al -Din Street. So my family and I decided to wait.

Today I spent looking at footage and pictures of the Palestinians walking on Al -Rashid Street. Children, women and men were walking with smiles on their faces, chanting “God is great!” And “we have returned!” Family members – who have not seen each other for several months, are sometimes two years – did not reunite them and embrace each other and cry. The scene was more beautiful than I imagined.

When seeing these pictures, I could only think about my grandfather and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who in 1948 arrived in Gaza and waited – just like us – to allow them to return home.

My grandfather was born in Jaffa to a family of farmers. It was just a child when the Zionist forces expelled them from their mother city. They had no time to be packed and going. They took the keys to the house and fled.

“Our streets, our homes, and even our names are erased. But they were unable to erase our right to return,” my grandfather used to say tears in his eyes.

He moved his longing to my mother. “My father used to describe the Jaffa Sea,” she used to say, “The way I accepted the beach waves, the smell of orange flowers in the air. I lived my whole life in exile, and I dreamed of a place that I have not seen before. But perhaps one day, I will do. Maybe in One day, I will walk in the streets that my father walked as a child. “

My grandfather died in 2005 without seeing his home again. He has never discovered what happened to him – whether he was demolished or captured by settlers.

Pictures of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians walk on foot to their homes made me wonder: What if my grandfather also allowed to stand at home? What if the world has stood for justice and pushes the right of the Palestinians to return? Will we now have black and white pictures of the smiling Palestinians who walk on the crowded dusty roads on the way back to their villages and towns?

At that time – like today – the Zionist forces have confirmed that the Palestinians will not have anything to return to. More than 500 Palestinian villages were completely destroyed. The desperate Palestinians have been trying to return. The Israelis will be called “infiltrators” and shoot them. The Palestinians who tried to return to the north were shot before the ceasefire.

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

There was joy, of course: the joy of reunification with our relatives, and seeing the faces of the cousins ​​who survived even after losing some of their loved ones, from the familiar breathing, from moving to the land in which we grew up.

But joy was however with torment. Although our house is still existing, it suffered from damage from the nearby bombings. We no longer get to know the streets of our region. It is now a distorted barren land.

All that made this place is suitable for living. There is no water, no food. The smell of death is still in the air. It looks like a cemetery more than our house. We still decided to stay.

The world describes the Palestinians movement by returning to the north as “a return”, but for us, it seems to be an extension of our negation.

The word “return” must carry a sense of victory, from the long -awaited justice, but we do not feel victory. We did not return to what we knew once.

I imagine that this was what would have been the fate of many Palestinians who return to their destroyed and burnt villages after Nakba in 1948. They may also felt the shock and despair that we are now feeling in the sight of the Mountains of Aquam.

I also imagine that they would have been working hard to rebuild their homes, after they suffered from the hardship of displacement. It was possible to rewrite history with flexibility stories instead of exile.

My grandfather was running to his home, keys in his hands. My mother had seen the Jaffa Sea to which she was longing. I had not arose with the shock of negation.

The most important of all is that returning back may most likely mean that the endless courses of the Palestinian transition, the stolen lands and homes that have not exploded or exploded will never happen. Nakba has ended.

But she did not. Our ancestors are not allowed to return and now we live the consequences of justice. We were allowed to return, but only to see the sentence destroy, to start again from nothing, without any guarantees that we will not explain again and that what we build will not be destroyed again. Our return is not the end of exile.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.