All That Remains...Reflections on a rather sad day
5/31/26
After the death of my father-in-law (ay), his humble two-room home in the Kadoura Refugee Camp was torn down.
His family, like so many Palestinians, had been violently expelled from their homes and lands by Zionist forces in 1948 and forced into a life of exile and displacement.
Seven years later, in 2022, I took my grandson—his great-grandson—back to show him where his grandmother had grown up and to visit a place that I myself had always loved.
The house was gone.
The tiny garden that my father-in-law had tended with such tender loving care was buried beneath rubble. Yet among the destruction, something remarkable remained.
A magnificent grapevine once covered his patio, providing shade in the summer and producing the most exquisite grapes. As I stood there looking at the ruins, I noticed a small cluster of grapes protruding defiantly from the debris.
I took this photograph.
To some, it is merely a bunch of grapes growing from a collapsed structure.
To me, it is a symbol of Palestine itself.
Homes can be demolished. Walls can be reduced to rubble. Entire families can be scattered across the world. But roots run deep.
And sometimes, from beneath the wreckage, life emerges to remind us that memory, belonging, and hope refuse to die.
All that remains... and yet, somehow, it is enough to tell the whole story.
That image of grapes emerging from rubble carries a quiet symbolism that is difficult to ignore:
the house was destroyed, but the vine still remembered where it belonged.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10166091777606977&set=a.10150390714236977
photo & essay copyright Mike Hanini Odetalla 2026