*Editor’s Note: Elephant Journal articles represent the personal views of the authors, and can not possibly reflect Elephant Journal as a whole. Disagree with an Op-Ed or opinion? We’re happy to share your experience here.

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A land that never called me as a child.

I recently watched an incredible documentary called “How to Erase a People” by uncivilised on YouTube.

It was twenty minutes long and filled with not only the Palestinian struggles during the Nakba but also the Native Americans.

The documentary highlighted what it means to be Indigenous, to be so connected to a land, to its trees, to its soil, to the ancestry buried within each grain of dirt.

How, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land in 1948, they took with them their keys—determined to return one day.

This was something I was never told about, growing up in the Jewish religion, which was really Zionism teachings. I was told that Israel was our homeland. A land without people for us, the people—and we are what made the desert bloom.

However, even as child, I never felt that any more than just words. I never felt a stirring within me that made me feel like it was my land. That made me want to go there. I was never told stories of how Jewish people planted olive trees and sat under them as they grew. I was never told about the soil that my ancestors held in their hands as they planted their first seed. I never saw my parents faces light up with recognition as they spoke about a land that was meant to be ours.

I never felt a connection that made me want to learn more. More than just teachings by Rabbis, more than just words, more than the books about Israel that filled my father’s bookshelf, more than what I was told God’s words were—given to us because we were “chosen.”

Chosen for what? I used to think. Why aren’t we in Israel? Is it staying empty for us? I used to question as a child.

The answers never left a stirring within my heart. They never left a longing that I have seen on Palestinian and Indigenous faces as they describe their grandmothers’ gardens, filled with buttercups, tulips, daisies, marigolds, and the scent of chamomile. The smiles on their faces as they share what it would feel like to “one day return home.”

If we were living in Australia, why did we talk so much about Israel? Wouldn’t our longing for a land that we belong to make us return home straight away? Why wait? No one could answer these questions that I never dared to ask, in fear of their ostracized responses.

Today, the answers to these questions are as clear as day to me, as I see that it was never our land, and it never will be. Whilst we are told about our history, it is not felt in our bones, in our spirit, in the silent winds of occupied Palestine. Today, I know the truth about this land that calls for its people all over to return home.

I never felt connected to Israel, because it isn’t my land. It isn’t filled with family memories or stories. I was told it was a holiday destination, a place for fun. It was a place where my grandfather, a holocaust survivor, fought in the 1948 war, in the colonisation of Palestine. However this was never told me to as a child, and I’ve had to learn these hard truths over the past 16 months as I discovered photos of my grandfather in soldiers’ uniforms, holding weapons and sadly, planting trees over what would have been Palestinian villages.

I don’t see this as a Jewish person. I’ve never seen this growing up in Australia in cities, where food and all resources are provided even though we live in a place of plenty. Where people are disconnected, governments adored, and the land never spoken about, this seemed but a dream as a child. In fact, so that I grew up wanting to be a farmer (and a fashion designer, but that is for another day) without understanding why.

Now that I live in the country, learning how to grow our own food and herbs, connecting and hearing the land, feeling the dirt under my fingernails, I understand what it feels like to be in a place that belongs, that feels like home.

Israel was never my home, my land, because it was never meant to be, and as a child I had a knowing that something or someone else was meant to be there instead, even though Palestine was hidden from me during my upbringing.

I knew because when it is your home, the land calls you, and it never once called me.

It never called me as a child, at my Bat Mitzvah, as a teenager, as a young adult, when I went travelling, and not even now.

Because it was always calling for the Palestinians, and one day they will return home with their keys in a Free Palestine, where the olive trees will once again grow in abundance, and the desert this time really will bloom.

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