CrossFireArabia
SHATI REFUGEE CAMP, GAZA – The sea here no longer separates life from ruin. They have come to share the same shore, walking side by side, as they have perhaps done since a time whose beginning we can no longer remember. Children approach the water. Women gather a fleeting moment from the day. Fishermen return to their boats. And a young man bends toward the waves as though listening for something ancient that has fallen from his memory, but not from the memory of the sea. Behind them, an entire city lies beneath the rubble.
Yet the sea does not change its face. For thousands of years, it has received the footsteps of those who pass, carried their voices, and allowed the waves to erase their footprints with the same quiet tenderness. Countless faces have passed this way. Harsh ages have come and gone. People built their homes and then lost them. They loved and then parted. They fought, and later sat together before the same water, searching for something that resembled peace.
Perhaps the sea alone knows that history is not an uninterrupted story of ruin. That the earth which has witnessed fear has also known quiet days. And that those who crossed these shores did not always carry weapons. Some carried bread. Some carried a child. Some simply sat beside the water and listened to the waves. And some reached out a hand to another whose name they did not know.
That is why we do not ask the sea what happened.
The waves know that the human being is older than his wounds, and that what breaks within us is not necessarily the last thing left within us. Perhaps life, from the very beginning, has always known its way toward the light, even through the smallest cracks.
Here, on this shore, we do not possess very much. Yet we still walk. We laugh when we can. We touch the water with our feet. And we leave a small window open for tomorrow.
Not because we have forgotten what happened, but because memory itself should not become a prison.
For the sea, which has witnessed all of this and still returns every morning, may be quietly reminding us of something we so easily forget: That beyond every long age of suffering, there was another age that knew stillness; that beyond every season of violence, there were people who simply lived, loved, shared, and dreamed.
And perhaps the world, no matter how long it remains troubled, was never created for war alone.
