Exiles

Prologue: Al-Nihaya

"This is where it ends." Ahmed Odeh ran out of the hookah store and into the streets of East Jerusalem, warning others that "this is the end" and attempting to save their lives. The nuclear arsenal of Israel, the most powerful nation on Earth, has the power to wipe out an entire nation, and that would include their neighbor and #1 enemy, Palestine. "Wait, come over here!" A woman and her toddler son rushed into the mosque nearby the store and hid under the altar, hoping that they would survive. Ahmed recognized her screams a few meters away, and tried to help her. "Madam I'm sorry I-" "What is it? Haven't you listened? We're all going to die!" "I understand, but-" "But what?" "I know, and I'm trying to tell you that it's safer if we hide near the tunnels, OK?" "What do you mean tunnels? Did you know they were created by Hamas?!" "No, they were created in the late 1970's." "So? They're old!" Ahmed tried his best to calm the woman, and her young son, down. The little 2-year old was crying, and very loudly, and with the sounds of alarms and bombs, it seemed that his message wasn't really working with most Palestinians. Ahmed grew up in a small town in Germany. He was ridiculed for his deep brown skin, and the fact that he was a devout Muslim, the only Arab in his school. He moved to Palestine to escape the xenophobia he had faced, but by then, a far-right Zionist was elected the Prime Minister of Israel, who was desperate in teaching the Palestinians "a lesson." Ahmed had known about Meir Ben David, since he was in college. Ben David was a radical, an Orthodox Jew, and a genocidal Islamophobe who plans on creating a "Greater Israel", which Ahmed first thought was a work of fiction. But it seemed that fiction can become reality, a warning for oppressed people, including Palestinians themselves. The woman had just planned to immigrate to the United States, particularly New York, with her three children and rich banker husband. Ahmed didn't know anyone from New York, just the people he saw on television: Jay-Z, Michael Bloomberg, Donald Trump, two of them he widely despised. And already he wasn't giving up without a fight. At the mosque, the cleric was under the table praying "Allah, Allah, forgive me, forgive me" and Ahmed disrupted him, saying "Allah can't save us from our destruction. We just have to go with it.." "