Translated by Abdelrahman ElGendy

The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

Today, I won’t delve into the right of return for Palestinians as a legitimate entitlement enshrined by United Nations resolutions. This seems naive when the very right to life for Palestinians remains contested. Nor will I explore the concept of return through traditional historical methodologies; such theories and frameworks have crumbled, much like history itself, distorted in real-time, day by day, by all involved parties without exception.

I will speak of return as it has been imparted to me—from those who bear its legacy in their hearts, whose lives are interwoven with its essence, and from my own recollections and experiences.

Scholars and theorists, bear with my disarray as I weave this tale.

The return: I grasped it from those who endured the peak of the Nakba’s horrors in the bloom of their youth. It’s only a few days, a couple of weeks at worst, before you return to your homes. Don’t pack too much.

Trusting these reassurances, Palestinians fled, driven by distant and nearby battles, and the terror of massacres whose whispers arrived at their doorsteps, or the ones they witnessed firsthand. Massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds of their kin in neighboring villages and cities. In 1948, during the Nakba, return meant an imminent journey back to their homes, possessions, and lands. They left it all behind, carrying the hope of a swift homecoming.

Awaiting return, Palestinians clasped their house keys, keys to boxes containing their most treasured possessions and land deeds, relics they safeguarded in their refugee camps. They passed down these artifacts—symbols of hope and memory—to their children and grandchildren. The idea of return burned in their minds, its stories endlessly narrated, recounted to the younger generations. They memorized family names and neighborhoods, reminisced about fields, seasons, weddings, and the songs and dances. I still recall some of these traditions, and how they began to fade in the camps at the onset of the first Intifada—out of respect for the martyrs, weddings became clandestine, hurried affairs.

In the 1970s, my father, then in his seventies, often found himself possessed by a profound ache for a return to his land. With tender, longing fingers, he would retrieve a cloth bundle tucked away in the grapevine arbor at our Rafah camp house. Carefully unwrapping several layers of fabric, my father would disrobe a greased pair of grape scissors, admire them, testing the handle’s flexibility, before meticulously rewrapping them and returning the bundle to its safe place. For my father, returning to the grapevines in Barbara was an unwavering certainty; his greased scissors were always ready, poised for the day they would cut anew.

In the late sixties, after listening to a radio broadcast, my father sprang to his feet and urged my mother, “Amira, pack the kids’ essentials into a bundle and keep the land deeds handy. We’ll be returning any day now.”

Overwhelmed by the needs of her ten children, my mother replied, “I’ll pack when they tell us it’s time, Mokhtar.”

Pack it now! With his cane, my father scattered clothes from the closet onto the floor.

My mother complied, bundling the clothes. Days passed, and the return did not come. When we needed clothes and asked to unpack the bundle, she replied, torn between laughter and frustration, “This bundle stays packed until we’re in Barbara. I’m not doing this over and over.”

In 1973, during the October War, my parents, alongside my father’s first wife and the entire camp, braced for the return to their villages. They charted routes and devised methods for transporting their belongings back to their homeland, wholly convinced that the long-awaited return was upon them.

In the eighties, as the Israeli labor market opened for tens of thousands from the first and second generations of camp residents, those born in the fifties and sixties, the notion of return became both tangible and bittersweet. The idyllic visions from their parents’ nostalgic tales—lush farms, homes, and cactus-lined roads shaded by sycamore, fig, pomegranate, lemon, and olive trees—clashed with a harsh status quo, shattering their fantasies. Confronted with the reality of the world their fathers had longed for, they returned disillusioned; the dream of return was far more elusive than they had imagined. They turned the camp’s modest brick houses into permanent concrete structures, forging a future for themselves and their children within its confines.

In the early nineties, the fervor for return surged with the reestablishment of the Palestinian National Authority in Gaza, following the Oslo Accords. The term ‘returnees’ became prevalent, often eclipsing the longstanding refugees who had yet to make their journey back. Yet, most returnees did not return to their original towns like Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Jerusalem, Lod, and Jaffa. Instead, they arrived in Gaza and the refugee camps—some with return permits from the occupying authority, others with visit permits, some through tunnels linking Palestinian and Egyptian Rafah, and many without any official documents to verify their return.

After Hamas rose to power in Gaza, the Israeli occupation enforced stringent restrictions on crossings and movement, and the concept of return became even more ambiguous. In Gaza, “return” no longer exclusively signified going back to pre-1948 lands; it morphed into various interpretations: the return of authority, the return of security control, the return to jobs, and the return to the exiles from which returnees had come. These myriad interpretations, often contradictory, created a tangled narrative. Even the return of electricity became a critical concern for Gaza’s residents.

After each conflict over the past seventeen years, large or small, the longing to return to a semblance of pre-war normalcy consumed those whose homes and livelihoods had been shattered, whose lands were desecrated. The Great March of Return began as a beautiful, innocuous vision. Yet, as time passed, the marchers returned—if they returned at all—legless and broken. Thousands of young people came back on crutches and in wheelchairs. The March of Return transformed into a conduit for Qatari funds to flow into Gaza, facilitating the establishment of a hospital for prosthetics, a grim testament to the lost limbs.

The current war, Al-Aqsa Flood—the mother of all our wars—heralds a myriad of returns. Daily, under the relentless glare of the media, people plead for these returns, praying for their realization:

the return of the displaced from northern Gaza to their homes and camps,

of Khan Younis residents to their city from Rafah,

of Gaza’s people to their shelled-to-rubble homes.

The return of water, coursing through Gaza’s channels once more;

of markets, humming with life;

of children to their classrooms; and the return of students to clamor their university halls.

The return of sons to their parents,

parents to their children,

detainees to the embrace of Gaza,

the missing from their unknown fates,

the nameless to their identities,

the bodies under the rubble to their graves,

and the graves to their dead.

The return of stolen organs to bodies;

of eyes,

limbs,

burnt skin,

shorn hair,

lost voices;

and the birds to their nests.

A new chapter of return has unfolded in 2024, with burgeoning iterations on the horizon for 2025, 2026, and beyond. One that encompasses the return of the fourth and fifth generations since the Nakba of 1948—the return of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The grandchildren, who have weathered the horrors of war, find themselves uprooted, in limbo. Residing in Egypt or scattered across the globe, they ache for a return to Gaza, clinging to news reports with the same enthusiasm the original dreamers of return clung to their radios. Even a mere rumour of a truce, believed by the beleaguered in Gaza to have arrived, spurred my grandchildren in Cairo to dance, to clap. Salam exclaimed to his mother, “Mom, pack our things, we’re returning to Gaza.”

I was swept back to my father’s dreams of returning to Barbara. Could my grandson’s hopes share the same fate?

Will a return to Gaza ever be within our reach?

Has our saga of return been reduced to this?

Has our dream of return to Gaza dwindled to mere yearnings,

those of northern Gazans for their homes in Jabalia, Al-Shati Camp, Shuja‘iyya, and Beit Lahia?

Has the once grand vision of return shrunk

to the aspirations of the residents of Shabura camp in Rafah

longing to return

to their dwellings in Shabura camp in Rafah?

Cairo, June 12, 2024.