On the day the war ended, I dreamt of an ancient land where I met a wondering people in a dessert. An old man with a long beard and a long stick asked me how to take away the home of another people.

Why do you ask? I said. They told me they had found a land to call home, but it is home to another.

Why do you need to take another’s? I asked, my eyes scanning the empty land all around.

Our home must be where the olives are, he said.

The old man handed me warm camel milk. Around me men sat around in a circle under a large date tree, and the women within eavesdrop by the tents. A breeze passed through now and then.

As quickly as I came to this place, I left. I am now standing on a fallen home in a landscape of desolation and destruction. I can hear a sparrow’s song coming from the top of a burnt olive tree. The stench of rotten corpses fills the air and hovers over the strip. Shadows of past people and children linger everywhere, and I can actually hear and see them still doing things. I hear the sound of bread being broken, and see their warm smiles as they pass the bread around. Everywhere I turn, I hear the echo of laughter, persistent, refusing to leave the last place their owners were, like a loyal dog still waiting for their master long after they are dead.

I am moving again, up and up over the wall to a few miles away. I am with a family chuckling at something on a screen. It is a baby covered with dried bits of flesh, sitting dazed on the floor after a bomb exploded near by.

I am jolted back to the ancient land.

Forty years, forty years! The old man’s fist rises in the air. I see in his eyes flickering images of his past, their past. I see long winding lines of old women and old men and young boys and young girls walking an endless desert, on their way to where the dessert meets the water. Just across is the promised land. It the a promise of freedom from bondage and the promise of heroes.

What is the answer? the old man presses me.

I reached for the milk, and drank the last of it. I had nothing to say.