A Life That Wasn't Granted to Us at All..?!!

We have often asked ourselves, in moments of great fracture: when will life return to normal? But, with everything we are living through, the real question seems harsher and more honest: was our life ever normal?

In the Palestinian case, this question does not seem philosophical as much as it is an accurate description of reality. We are not going through a temporary crisis that can be contained; rather, we are living in a prolonged state of instability, where exceptions become the rule, and life is redefined merely as the ability to survive, not to live.

Before the war, and before this immense explosion of pain, life was neither easy nor stable. We were living under compounded constraints: an occupation controlling land and resources, a fragile economy, and a political division that deepened the wounds. Yet, we clung to the illusion of 'normalcy', seeking a daily rhythm that gave us a false sense of stability.

Then the war came, not to create the tragedy but to reveal it.

In Gaza, the question is no longer how to live, but how to endure. There, the simplest details of life turn into daily battles. Water is no longer a self-evident right but a grueling journey fraught with humiliation. Bread is not just food but an achievement snatched after hours of waiting. Electricity, if available, is an exception not to be relied upon.

In northern Gaza, where geography has mixed with rubble, homes are no longer homes, but layers of collapsed memory. Buildings have fallen on top of each other, streets lack features, and bodies move through this scene as if searching for meaning to continue. A man searching for a "diver" for a well of water that was once an ordinary commodity, but is now an expensive dream. A young man holding a broken solar panel, as if carrying what’s left of the light. A child dragging a gallon of water heavier than his age, not to learn, but to survive.

Is this life?

In another place, a child stands in line for bread for hours only to be turned away for being "too small." Dignity is reduced to a fleeting detail, and obtaining a loaf of bread becomes a daily test of patience. In the water queues, voices mix with screams, and need turns into struggle, where there is no place for calm or order, only the capacity to endure.

As for the night, it is not a space for rest but an extension of exhaustion. A tent without privacy, a room without a door, and darkness that cannot be extinguished. Even human relationships, in their most intimate forms, erode under the weight of fatigue. A person becomes unable to love as they are unable to rest, as if the war does not only steal the place but also saps the internal ability to feel.

But the Palestinian tragedy is not confined to Gaza alone. In the West Bank, life is not a direct death, but it is not a full life either. Checkpoints, settlers, burning homes, killing livestock, and a postponed future. The land is eroding, space is narrowing, and a person lives in an area they do not completely own. It is a suspended life, between the possible and the permissible.

In Jerusalem, existence turns into a fragile legal state, threatened at any moment. And within the Palestinian interior, the battle of identity continues within a reality that imposes another definition of belonging. Meanwhile, in exile, the story is more complicated: belonging without land, and a memory searching for geography.

We are faced with a people living in four different realities, but under a single experience: the absence of normal life. What complicates the scene further is that this 'abnormal' has ceased to be shocking as it once was, but has begun to quietly seep into our collective consciousness as something bearable. Here lies the real danger: when the sensitivity to pain erodes, and familiarity with oppression becomes a form of adaptation. The Palestinian who successfully secures water and bread daily may appear resilient on the surface, but deep down is pushed to redefine the bare minimum of life, where rights become achievements, and dignity becomes a postponed detail.

In contrast, the world stands as a bystander, watching this dysfunctional life as if it were a manageable situation rather than one in need of repair. International institutions produce reports, and the tragedy is rephrased with numbers, while the essential moral question is absent: how is a whole people left outside the definition of normal life, without real accountability for the system that enforces this? Reducing the issue to its human dimension alone, without its political roots, is not neutrality, but another form of entrenching the crisis.

But more dangerously, a part of the world lives in a completely different layer of reality, far from these daily details. Some observe the scene as if it were passing news, or an image from a distant place unrelated to them. They live a complete normal life in another world, where water is available, bread is not awaited, and night is not feared but restful. This moral detachment from human pain creates a massive gap between those living under fire and those watching it from behind screens, as if humanity itself were not distributed equally.

Indeed, some political and media discourses treat this reality as if it were a file to be managed or a number in a news bulletin, not as complete human lives collapsing before the world. This distance not only creates misunderstanding, but deepens the feeling that the Palestinian lives outside the attention of the world, outside its justice, and even outside its true empathy.

And despite all this, life continues. Not because it is normal, but because the Palestinian refuses to stop. In the rubble, there is an attempt to rebuild. In the queues, there is a determination to persist. In the tent, there is the idea of a home. This is not adaptation; it is an act of resistance, a resistance against the idea that what we live can become ordinary.

The problem is not only in the cruelty of reality but in the danger of living with it as a normality. When obtaining water becomes an achievement, and survival a sufficient goal, we are nearing the most dangerous stages of the crisis: normalizing the abnormal.

Thus, the question we should ask today is not when will life return, but how do we redefine it. How do we restore its human meaning, where living is not a privilege, but a right. Where a day is not measured by how many times we survived, but by how much we lived.

Because the undeniable truth is:
We are not searching for a return to the past... but for a chance at a life that was never granted to us.