I hope that one day I will gain power somehow, and somehow convince myself that there is still hope and go back and fight, people who's trying to make that place worth living for both Jews and Palestinians.

Here I am, a Palestinian Arab who only knows how to write in Hebrew, stuck in central Illinois.

Probably also due to the political situation getting just worse and more extreme, but also this distance and this sadness of this feeling that I gave up - that I surrendered, that I felt that I lost my small war. So the whole column is different than the columns that I used to write back home, back in Jerusalem.

I knew very well that I could not stay. Everything collapsed. Everything in my life just collapsed, and it started with the kidnapping of three teenaged settlers and then judging the life - the young Palestinian from Jerusalem. That was the day that I decided that I have to go now.

I always see my wife as the clever one, as the wise one in the family.

I very much hope that when my wife reads my writings so she reads it as if she is a character and not the real one. Sometimes she takes it too personally.

I'm not sure that I recovered, but I also know that I cannot afford going back yet. I see how much the kids are happier, I guess, here and I think that they might have a better future not hiding.