NAKBA : An open wound

I kept asking myself, what language does the war speak? What translation do those who oppress understand? People born and raised in hatred, can they ever shed the past and sit with the loss of Palestinian? Is acceptance too much to ask for, is liberation not a birthright?

The history doesn't lie, it doesn't until it's made too. '48 Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, when almost two-thirds of the entire population was displaced, to make room for current Israeli residents. The very people who have nine generations buried in that land were made landless. Home addresses were ripped off of their existences. Those two-third, their grandchildren are the ones now waging a war for their rightful return. Meanwhile, a twisted ideology was so deeply engraved in current Israel, that no one is willing to have this conversation.

When the peace solution is offered for Palestinians when the so-called concerned parties jump in, and that too after thousands are mentally and physically scarred by a war they never wanted, they talk about compromise. They talk about the future. They forget the graveyard in the background, the fatherless children, the grief of so many, they forget the mourning and the pain. They forget the ones who were lost to the unwillingness of acknowledgement. The very people who aren't even part of the headlines when they are brutally murdered. So they talk about moving on, without even acknowledgement. Without holding Israel accountable for waging a war against humanity. Without courting it over the international laws it broke, the territories it crossed, the human loss it caused. Reparation without acceptance is nothing. 

Recognise the wrong, recognise what was done to establish a colonial state. An indigenous population was driven out of its land to make place for Israel’s so-called right to self-determination. It’s the blood of thousands it resides on, it’s the ancestral land of so many that it has stolen. 

Living on a land that was ruled by a colonial crown for more than 200 years, there are far worse repercussions. The forever dilemma, the cultural heritage lost over the period of time, the feeling of unworthiness, disregarding our own language, lack of understanding and more than that an abscess of acknowledgement. The absence of acceptance on the part of those who ripped us off of our resources robbed us of our riches and just left. Leaving us with unresolvable territorial disputes, without giving reparations or answers. 

Palestine is fighting to preserve their autonomy. It’s people’s right to return home. For a future where they aren’t forced to leave their homes, where they don’t find their loved ones dead in the wake of wreckage. To disregard past atrocities in the case of Palestine is brutal, more than that, it shows the lack of accountability. It disregards the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost. It weakens our stance or what’s left of it on humanity. Because make no mistake, those who give the two-state solution as a peace offering are diverting the attention from the real issue. Israel is a colonial state forced into being in 1948, on a land Palestinian has called home for centuries. When you overlook the historical background and try to set aside the past and ask the Palestinian to settle for a small piece out of their rightful land, you are letting Israel walk free of permanently displacing thousands of Palestinian from their home. You are letting them off the hook for ethnically cleaning an indigenous population for the sake of wrongful settlement. 

Palestine has seen more than its share of war, destruction and horror. The land has seen more blood than it can soak, it has seen its inhabitants leaving never to return. It has to bear the burden of oppression. It craves stability and peace. We must give it its right of freedom. We must fight for those forced out of it, those still being haunted by a colonial shadow in the 21st century. We must voice the past. We, all of us, should never let the world, especially those facilitating the perpetrators, forget that they’ll be held accountable if not today, then tomorrow. We are many, and we will prevail.