In Israel, we’re home

I don’t know who needs to hear this right now.

Right now, as haters try to talk away our roots and history. Right now, as popular narratives write us out of our own land’s tale.

But let me say this clearly and simply: we are not colonialists. We are not crusaders or invaders or Europeans.

Our roots are here, in the land that shaped our language, our beliefs, our history, our names, our metaphors, our everything.

The ancient paving stones our children walk on? Our ancestors were the ones who placed them on the ground.

We were forcefully torn from this land and exiled to many countries. These countries left their mark on us, and we have left our mark on them. The skin you see when you look at our bodies was colored by them. The languages we speak, the perspectives we adopted, were shaped by them. But throughout our years in exile, we never stopped yearning for our homeland. The same ancestors who have paved the physical pathways of this land left us a spiritual pathway made of words to live by. We walked upon it, dreaming of the land, for millennia.

And now, after years and years of loss and longing, these pathways can finally converge.

We’re home.

The stones we place upon the ground, the homes we build, the wars we fight – they’re but a chapter in a story that started very long ago. We are rebuilding the land that we have lost and yearned for, the land we prayed and fought for, this land of roots and dreams

The European skin you see on my body? It’s a scar, a remnant and testament to our catastrophe of exile, the fruit of the journey that was forced on us so very long ago.
To deny us our roots is to compound the historical injustice of that exile. It is to side with the empires that had uprooted us. It is to ignore the truths and stones that were left here by our people’s past.

We are the people of Israel, and we are home.