Captured Israeli soldiers at the beginning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (social media sites)
Let me first express my regret that in a previous article I made a mistake that I will never forget when I extracted part of the words translated into Arabic from an article that was falsely attributed to a British writer, which was said to have been published in a British newspaper. It turned out to be incorrect, and I made a mistake when I cited it in the article. I was in a hurry because I trusted the person who sent it to me without researching and I made a mistake. I can only apologize and learn. There is no shame in this, and I hope to obtain forgiveness from God first and permission from you.
Perhaps I find no justification or explanation for a mistake committed by someone who has worked in journalism for decades in a row, other than haste and excessive trust in the source. He committed such a mistake, knowing that what comes on social media is not reliable and should be verified, but we - human beings - We must make mistakes, because it is impossible for us to reach the level of perfection, as it belongs to God alone. He created us this way so that we continue to work for advancement, mastery, and benevolence, which are the highest levels of human work.
Correcting the curriculum
This is how our lives are stations from which we learn, even when we make mistakes. As our lives extend and each one of us looks back on what has passed, he wishes he had not done some things, but that is far from the case. What matters is changing the path and correcting the approach when its owner strays from the truth, so that he can convey his experience faithfully to those who come after him.
Al-Abdullah is from the generation of the Nakba. He was born a year or more after it. He lived through its pain and suffered from its pain as a child, a young man, and a young man. Even in his mid-eighties, he still squirms as he sees an entire nation not lifting a finger to help Gaza and Palestine. How severe this pain is! Only those who have lived their lives without knowing the meaning of an independent homeland will know it.
After the mid-fifties, I became a boy who used to go to the pastures with his friends, driving young goats and sheep to the valleys and to the tops of the hills and mountains. On a clear day at the top of Mount Al-Mazar, north of our village, we could see the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. If we ascended one day before sunset, the sun’s light would reflect yellow off the water. I was looking closely and trying to imagine the beach and the sea, but I had never seen a sea before, nor had I stood at a beach.
All I knew and heard about that sea and those beaches in Palestine were a few phrases and eye testimonies that my grandfather used to tell, and he used to graze sheep on the Spring Hill before its name in Hebrew became Tel Aviv, and Aviv is the Arabicized pronunciation of the Hebrew word Aviv, and it means spring, if you want to translate it.
The boy grows up, and the more his knowledge of the “lost homeland” expands in school, as we are accustomed to describing it, the horizons of his imagination and the images within it expand. About Jaffa and its beaches, about Acre and its walls, about Tiberias and the clarity of its waters, about Lod and its airport, about Haifa and its port, about the mountains of Galilee and its heights, about Ibn Amer’s meadow and its fertility, about the coastal plain and its splendor, about Gaza and its glory, about the Negev and its tribes, about Umm al-Rashrash and its warmth, and about The orchards and their oranges, from the entire plundered country since I was born!
How I wished that I could one day drive my flock of sheep and care for them over the spring hill, and sleep where my grandfather slept. How I wished I could master swimming in the sea, so I could float in the waters in which Jaffa washes its soles. How I wished I could climb to the top of the Jarmaq Mountains, which we learned is the highest in Palestine. How I wished I could see Carmel and the famous port of Haifa. How I wished and dreamed, then I woke up in June 1967 as a young man, and all my dreams had been destroyed and the entire country had been plundered.
Bitter reality
After a few months, I was able to see what I had hoped to see. I took one of their buses and went. We passed through Kafr Qasim, Ras al-Ain, Lod, and Ramla, as far as Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
Did my dreams come true? Or I wish it had remained hidden in the imagination, for a hidden and hopeful dream is more merciful than the bitter reality. On the beaches there are people who deny that even the sand cries out for help from the footsteps of their feet. On Spring Hill, where my grandfather grazed his sheep, there is a strange urbanism on the land and on history.
The orange orchards disappeared, the Lod market disappeared, and thousands of camels and heads of cattle were brought to it from all over the island and the Fertile Crescent. Hundreds of villages disappeared, so that you could hardly see anything left of them. The headband, the qambaz, and the Sartli doll disappeared from the Levant and Aleppo. The beautiful traditional women’s costumes disappeared, the ululations and the takbirs from the minarets fell silent, and the cries fell silent. Sellers and shoppers.
Have any of my first dreams come true? no! This is not how dreams come true, and neither I nor my generation are among those who can say they have achieved them.
The days passed as God intended for them to pass, and we could not stop them. The rebellious young man left the village, the pastures, and the Shuwaihat that he loved, and he still longs for its bleating, and behind him disappeared the mountain of shrine, the fig and olive groves, and the threshing floors. I missed the sight of my mother weaving dishes from straw in our garden and painting them with the most beautiful dyes. I missed the palm of my father’s rough hand, gripping the plow’s shaft, and I missed the sound of the rattle of the scythes during the harvest seasons.
The lowing of our cows, the braying of our donkeys, the howling of our neighborhood dogs, the chirping of our chickens, and the smoke of the oven (taboun) filling the space were absent.
Abu Mahmoud’s whispers were absent on the rababa in the Diwan on summer nights. We missed the Eid, its takbirs, and its sacrifices. We visited the graves of my grandfather, my grandmother, and my brother after prayer. How abundant and abundant goodness the shark was during Eid, which we eagerly awaited.
Confused questions
Many things have disappeared and have become mere images that are stored in the memory, while ancient dreams remain hidden, and their owner is afraid to reveal them while abroad and does not allow them in the world of expatriation, and even when he returns home in the summer, to burn as they did in his youth, before the homeland was completely taken away. The occupation was pressing to obliterate it with its barriers, prisons, investigations, and the dirty actions of its agents. The failures of the revolutionaries and their symbols were often more severe than those dreams, and may push their dreamers to despair and despair.
Dreams revived when the first intifada broke out in 1987, but they quickly declined when the symbolic leaders entered the field and spoiled everything with money. With the darkness of Oslo, one of us could no longer see the way.
This was not my case alone, but rather the case of generations and generations who must ask themselves today: Why did we, the people of the earth, fail in the first place? Why did the nation around us fail? How do we get out of our rut and what do we do?
These questions remained perplexing until Gaza was illuminated by the light of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” on October 7. The Al-Yassin missile carrier told us that the answer is simple, direct and clear: resistance. A child from Gaza who memorized the Book of God told us: identity. A mother from Gaza told us: Trust in God. Gaza told us: Enter the door on them, and it is jihad, victory or martyrdom.
These are the generations that have the right to say, “Here we are beginning to achieve our dreams,” the generations of the flood.