Reconstructing an imaginary of existence

Following the October 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, we should have entered the "day after" phase of Israel's war against Gaza. As far as the average Israeli is concerned, that war is over. But anyone paying attention to the images and testimonies coming from Palestinians in the Strip can clearly see that, even if large-scale bombings have decreased, dispossession, expulsion, and erasure continue in other forms, with policies that amount to a perennial Nakba.

In these conditions, while Palestinians are not free to return home or rebuild their lives in any way, the language of "Gaza reconstruction" seems detached, even deliberately so. Yet, in liberal discourse both within Israel and the rest of the world, conversations about reconstruction proceed as if it were a neutral and technical project -with little attention to the rights and needs of Gaza's inhabitants- rather than something bound by political decisions.

The history of these attempts is not encouraging. "One of the things the history of the so-called reconstruction in Gaza teaches us is that it is not possible under a policy of siege and closure," explains Dotan Halevy, a historian of Gaza at Tel Aviv University. Halevy cites the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, established after the 2014 Israeli attack on the enclave, which subjected construction materials to rigorous monitoring and coordination between Israel, Hamas, and the United Nations. The result was predictable: "Instead of allowing the normal arrival of materials, everything remained stuck in a slow and controlled process," Halevy continues. "The population entered the current war living among the rubble of 2014."

So, if reconstruction is impossible without ending the siege, what exactly is being proposed for Gaza's more than two million residents, many of whom are displaced, orphaned, wounded, and grieving? In much of Israeli public opinion, the response euphemistically presented as "voluntary emigration" -a gentler expression for ethnic cleansing- has gained alarming ground. Yet neither indefinite isolation under siege nor expulsion elsewhere, both serious crimes, can guarantee anything but a future of further violence and destruction. If an alternative exists, it likely begins with a rethinking of the assumptions we have internalized about Gaza itself.

As Halevy states, "there is a Gaza beyond the Gaza Strip," meaning that piece of land whose borders were shaped by the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe, when Palestinians were driven from their homes following the birth of Israel in 1948) and the 1967 Israeli occupation. "Historically, Gaza existed as part of a wider and connected space. The 'Gaza Strip' is an imposed and anomalous condition, a sort of cage that isolates it from its context and its possibilities." Taking the idea of moving beyond the conceptual grip of the "Gaza Strip" seriously means considering political possibilities often dismissed a priori, including the right of return: not only allowing Palestinians to return to their destroyed homes within Gaza, but also to their original homes in what is now Israel, along with the descendants of all 750,000 Palestinians expelled in the Nakba (which is commemorated every May 15).

Us or Them

For Omar al Ghubari, a Palestinian educator at Zochrot (a non-profit organization operating within Israeli society to promote awareness and the need to redress the Nakba) return is based on two principles: "Full support for the right of return, meaning that any refugee who chooses to return has the right to do so. At the same time, return should not involve the mass expulsion of others, even if they are your colonizers."

Nearly eighty years after the founding of Israel, the landscape has been transformed. Many of the more than five hundred Palestinian villages depopulated during the Nakba have been completely destroyed, while new centers have been built over others. "The refugees who have no longer been here since 1948 would not recognize the places," Al Ghubari explains. "Israeli colonialism has succeeded in building so many cities, settlements, and institutions here, and in almost totally erasing Palestinian life and space."

This erasure (and the difficulty it creates in imagining the return) serves Israel in refusing to substantially discuss the Palestinian right of return. Practical objections often mask political refusal: the claim that "they have no place to return to" is based on the assumption that the transformation of the territory makes return impossible.

But that assumption can be challenged. Salman Abu Sitta is an engineer and academic who has spent decades mapping historical Palestine with the goal of planning the return of refugees. In 1948, when he was ten years old, he was forcibly displaced from his village of Ma’in Abu Sitta (now the Kerem Shalom area). Abu Sitta states that most of the territory of the destroyed Palestinian villages remains unbuilt.

"We discovered that 88 percent of Jews in Israel live on just 12 percent of Israeli territory, or even less," he says. "They are concentrated in three cantons: the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, West Jerusalem, and Haifa." Much of the remaining territory is divided between the kibbutzim, many founded after 1948 on the sites of Palestinian villages, and military zones.

Furthermore, according to him and others, about 80 percent of the territory of the destroyed villages is uninhabited. "These are open areas, mainly JNF-Jewish National Fund parks or agricultural land," explains Moran Barir, a long-time activist, facilitator of Jewish-Palestinian dialogue groups, and member of the board of directors of Zochrot.

These data challenge a common hypothesis. "It is not the usual stereotype of us or them. People ask: 'Will I leave my home so that Palestinian refugees can live here?'. Yes, there might be a few cases where people will have to move. And I am not saying that agricultural land is not important, but that the issue is much more open to negotiation."

The kind of negotiations Barir has in mind seems far-fetched in the current Israeli political reality. But if we want to build a future that is not dictated by the past, or defined by the horrors of the present, we must exercise political imagination. "I completely reject the idea that 'it's all terrible, we can't even think about the future, we just have to deal with what's happening now'," says Sari Bashi, a human rights lawyer and co-founder of the Gaza-focused legal center Gisha, as well as current director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. "Anyone who has enough to eat, anyone who doesn't lose their home under bombardment, has the privilege and the responsibility to imagine a future."

To those who dismiss return as unrealistic, she asks: "And is what is happening now realistic? Or completely absurd?". For years, she observes, the settler right has spoken of repopulating Gaza by expelling all Palestinians using terms that sounded "absurd, even messianic." "Today it is actually happening." The lesson to be drawn, she suggests, is as strategic as it is moral: "We can use the same method, but with the opposite goal."

For her, married to a Palestinian from Gaza with whom she now lives in the West Bank, the issue is not abstract. Her husband's family, displaced several times, remains in the Al Shati refugee camp. Her mother-in-law, who managed to leave about two years ago for Egypt through the Rafah crossing before it was closed, was first displaced as a child from Isdud (near what is now the Israeli city of Ashdod) and has been repeatedly uprooted since then. Certainly, Bashi says, her mother-in-law wants to return to Gaza when the situation permits, and asking her if she would choose to return to Isdud if she could seems a bit superfluous in the face of the anguish she is experiencing because of the Israeli genocide. "She is much more worried about her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who are all in danger," Bashi explains.

But the fact that at the moment Gazans may be concentrated almost solely on survival does not make the question of return irrelevant, she insists: "We have the responsibility to think, imagine, and make return concrete, not limited to theory. Gaza is in ruins and all refugees, including members of my own family, have the right to return to their homes in Gaza. And they also have the right to return to the places from which they were expelled in 1948."

For others, return is not theoretical at all. Some internally displaced Palestinians in Israel live just a few kilometers, or even meters, from their original homes. "How much I wish my grandmother would return to old Jaffa, and I want to be there too," says Yara Shahine Gharablé, an activist and doctoral student in Middle Eastern history at Oxford University. She grew up in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, where her grandmother currently lives and where the Palestinians who remained in the city were ghettoized after the Nakba. It is just a few steps from the old city of Jaffa, which today resembles an artists' colony for wealthy Israelis. "It is not just a material idea, like claiming a property," she says. "I think it is something much deeper. It is about understanding how to recognize this injustice, how to truly see it, and how justice can take a real and concrete form, not just exist as an abstract slogan."

If political imagination is needed, how can it be put into practice? For some, this work begins in small spaces specifically created for study and collective thought. About a year ago, Sari Bashi joined one of these groups organized by Zochrot, in which participants began to reflect on the physical landscape.

During a tour in Jaffa, she recalls, they walked through the ruins of Al Manshiyya where Tel Aviv now stands, the remains of Ajami, the areas where Palestinian homes once stood, and they asked themselves a simple question: what if tents were set up there now for the people who currently have nowhere to go in Gaza? The point was not just to imagine; it was about training one's perception. "If you look closely, on those beautiful hills you can still find pieces of those houses. It is all still there, we just don't see it," says Bashi. "If the houses are located right under this well-manicured greenery, then even that landscape could return to being a residential settlement." Even proposals that seem disruptive -transforming parks or coastal areas into residential areas- are, in her view, less unlikely than they seem. "There are many public buildings in Jaffa. Take the Etzel Museum for example," she says, referring to the structure that commemorates the Zionist paramilitary group prior to the birth of Israel responsible for some of the worst crimes of the Nakba. "It could be transformed into a beautiful home, as it once was, or into a community center. So much can already be done with existing structures. Yes, we would also need to build, but there is no lack of space."

Much of the landscape, Bashi adds, was intentionally remodeled. "The Zionist regime used green spaces to erase the memory of Palestinian villages, first by demolishing the houses, then by covering the ground, planting trees on it." The care of these spaces, she argues, cannot happen "at the expense of the people who are denied the right of return." However, one of the most immediate obstacles to the idea of return has nothing to do with whether such an undertaking is feasible or not. It concerns the fear that the return of Palestinian refugees would cause the end of the Jewish-Israeli collectivity, the fear of giving up the privileges that Zionism has granted to Jews in this country, and the fear of revenge.

"These are understandable fears," says Barir. "As an Israeli, I understand them. I have felt them too." These fears are rooted partly in the historical trauma of the persecution of Jewish communities -especially in Europe- but also in the predominant political narrative of Israel, built around a zero-sum logic. "We hold onto this scheme tightly, to the idea of us or them," she continues. "And because it is the only system we know, we end up thinking it is the only way things can exist."

Shared Learning

What political imagination requires, therefore, is a deeper process of unlearning, recognizing that what often seems like an immutable reality is, instead, something constructed. As Barir says, it is about "returning to the narratives I grew up with and recognizing where they are distorted, where certain facts are used to tell a particular kind of story."

In this light, it is important to understand that history is not deterministic. "On the one hand, we say that this is the DNA of the Israeli Zionist state," Barir continues, "but on the other, we know that at any moment -at any turning point- things could have gone differently. This shift opens the possibility of moving from zero-sum thinking to models of collective responsibility for the crimes of the Nakba and the current genocide." For activists and organizers, this work has already begun to take a concrete form.

"The first groups to deal with the issue were born about ten years ago," Al Ghubari explains. "We began to address the practical meaning of return. One group focused on Jaffa and drafted a document available on our site titled 'The Jaffa Documents.' Another collaborated with a Palestinian organization in Bethlehem, Badil, and together we conducted discussions and a shared learning process."

Over time, these efforts have led to a nuanced understanding: not a single model, but rather multiple models of return. As Al Ghubari confirms: "It makes no sense to destroy an Israeli city to bring five Palestinian villages back to light." Instead, he says, each place must be addressed in its specificity.

In some cases, for example where land that was once Palestinian is now covered by forests, reconstruction on the original site could be simple. In others, such as Al Shaykh Muwannis, where Tel Aviv University and its dormitories stand -built over the cemetery- it might be necessary to build nearby, alongside reparations, recognition, and shared management. "There is enough land that once belonged to Al Shaykh Muwannis, stretching as far as Yarkon Park," Al Ghubari explains. "But the university will have to admit that it is built on the village's land. It will have to ask permission from the former Palestinian inhabitants to continue operating on their land and pay them rent." The goal, as he describes it, is "to be creative in achieving return, but without committing new crimes against people."

The Traces of the Past

This emphasis on feasibility also extends to the details of planning. Within Zochrot, the mapping of neighborhoods and infrastructure has begun, identifying existing buildings capable of housing refugees and developing frameworks for how the return could take place without causing overcrowding or new inequalities. Others have imagined the transformation more broadly, not just within current borders, but throughout the entire region. An anonymous participant in the study group said they "think of Palestine in a broader regional context than Bilad al Sham," meaning the Levant, to "challenge the logic of Sykes-Picot and the entire subdivision of the modern Middle East," referring to the Anglo-French colonial agreement that drew the region's current borders. Another imagined the return like a film rewinding: "I see the refugee caravans of 1948 -no longer the same people, obviously, but the third generation- moving through open spaces, some of which have however become roads, highways, populated centers, and forests, and I think we must welcome them with open arms: 'You are home'."

For Yosef.a Mekayton, who lives in the city of Beersheva (formerly Bir al Saba’) in southern Israel, this sense of possibility is not based so much on abstract concepts as on the traces of the past visible in the present. "It doesn't even take much imagination," he says. In fact, physical traces of the city's Palestinian past remain in the form of buildings, streets, and even the railway station, where a sign still reads "Bir al Saba’."

What has been lost, for Mekayton, is not just memory, but urban planning logic. "During the late Ottoman period, this place was a central hub not only for Palestine, but for the entire region." Bir al Saba’, he continues, lost its logic with Zionism. It lost the ability to connect Hebron and Gaza. The task, he suggests, is simple to state, even if difficult to achieve: "Let's reconnect everything. Let's connect the dots." Many of the visions emerging from these exercises of imagination are surprisingly ordinary, such as shared schools, bilingual education, joint planning bodies, and the public recognition of past violence. "It is so simple and obvious that it seems almost ridiculous to have to say it," reflected one participant in a Zochrot group. At the same time, others point out that such a future would require deeper processes of transitional justice, mechanisms to address the damage caused, recognize the pain, and build new forms of coexistence.

Barir thinks that part of this future involves abandoning a fundamental assumption of the current system: the necessity of a permanent Jewish majority. "At some point we will probably become a minority, and I think that's okay," she says. "I understand the trauma of Jews being a persecuted minority, but a system can be created where all minorities are protected and equal. Why are we so convinced that one group must dominate and impose its identity?"

Bashi also places these questions in a broader historical framework. "We will live in a way not too different from how people lived in the Middle East before colonialism," she says: imperfect, but multilingual and multireligious. "At our house we speak three languages. At home we can be ourselves."

Patience and Openness

But such a future is by no means guaranteed. As Bashi observes, the current trajectory seems to be moving in the opposite direction. "We are destroying ourselves -physically, mentally, morally, from an infrastructure point of view. It will take decades to rebuild Gaza, even from an environmental standpoint, in terms of its capacity for sustenance."

Yet it is precisely in moments of collapse that space for transformation opens up. "I think we are in a critical moment," Bashi insists, "because there is a certain willingness to think that perhaps the problem lies not just in the current government or the last two and a half years, but in something intrinsic to the Zionist project that wants to maintain a Jewish majority in a territory where that is not possible without dispossession." This awareness, she says, offers an opportunity for discussion.

For activists, the task now is not to retreat into comfortable silos, but to meet those who are beginning to question the status quo. "We must start talking to people who are asking questions, with patience and an open spirit," Bashi concludes, "because something is happening. Something is changing here."

Sources: Final episode of the podcast Remembering and Returning, in Hebrew, published by the Israeli NGO Zochrot. Yahav Erez is an activist and podcast producer for Local Call (Sikha Mekomit), a Hebrew-language site that covers democracy, peace, equality, social justice, and the struggle against the occupation, and which often shares articles with +972 Magazine, where they appear in English. Erez is a member of Zochrot and the creator of Remembering and Returning.

Photographs: © 2026 UN Humanitarian, https://unocha.exposure.co/gaza-through-the-eyes-of-its-photographers 

edited: Gemma D. F.