The Palestine We Never Knew

I began browsing news websites to start writing about a topic related to Palestine, but I hadn’t been at it long before my attention was scattered among the headlines, and I found myself unsure which story was most urgent to write about and expand upon. They were all pressing, and they all spoke of the Palestinian tragedy, to the point where I sometimes no longer knew whether being Palestinian was something to be praised or condemned.

I paused for a long time over certain news items, then buried my face in my hands, letting my mind drift far away from this world. This time, I didn’t dwell on everything happening around me; instead, I pondered a different question: What would Palestine have been like if it had not been occupied?

What would its cities, villages, and ancient alleys have looked like? How would Acre, Jaffa, Nazareth, and Haifa appear today? Would their streets have buzzed with tourists, their cafes filled with people, and their homes occupied by their owners? Would we have known our cities as ordinary places, where we lived out our small daily details and created our memories without constantly questioning what it means to be Palestinian?

I wondered about the distance between Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Perhaps there were no distances at all; the journey from Jerusalem to Gaza could have been simply a trip, through which we would cross the country, observe the differences among its cities and the accents of its people, pass through villages and agricultural lands, and return home in the evening. Students could have chosen their universities in any city, families could have spent their weekends at the beaches of Jaffa or Gaza, and people could have traveled from one city to another without planning their trips as if they were adventures.

Perhaps our brothers from Arab and Gulf countries would have come to Palestine to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and we would have met them, taken them on tours through the old alleys of Jerusalem, the port of Jaffa, the streets of Haifa, and the neighborhoods of Acre. We would have sat with them at our tables, engaged in long conversations, debated, laughed, and then bid them farewell, hoping for a soon-to-come reunion.

Finally, as I moved through the details of this life we never lived, a sound crept into the room, pulling me back to where I sat. I lifted my head, looked around, and for a moment felt as though I were visiting a homeland I knew well, but which had not been granted to us as I had imagined. I had never envisioned Palestine as ideal; I had simply imagined it as an ordinary homeland, free of occupation, displacement, and bloodshed—the Palestine we never truly lived.