How to describe one’s average day under settler colonialism in slow motion, which, in fact, is accelerating by the day? We are still talking about military occupation — one does not exclude the other — only that the military orders and the military’s violent presence are in the service of perpetual land grab and dispossession.

The personal experience may differ from place to place, from a village and shepherd community in Area C to a village in Area B to a city or town. Take Masafer Yatta, an area that was declared a “military training zone” in the 1980s, and since the late ’90s — yes, during the Oslo [Accords] negotiations! — the authorities have been engaged in actively, directly or indirectly expelling — en masse or drop by drop — the indigenous inhabitants.

There the exposure to the monster is happening at every moment, and so is the resistance to it: namely, people’s insistence on remaining where they and their grandmothers were born. You wake up and go to sleep with the danger of being attacked by settlers or having the army destroy your tent or shack or your very basic water system, which — in a typical example of popular unarmed resistance — the local councils have installed, defying Israeli prohibition on Palestinians connecting to the grid. All the time you live in fear and with the knowledge that something may happen that day that will shatter your life again. Then you get up on your feet and start anew. It’s every moment. No rest.

In most villages, three Israeli practices occupy the physical and mental space: One, settlers’ violence against villagers (and shepherds), which has been steadily on the rise since the mid-’90s and nowadays is carried out with open — not just tacit and indirect — official endorsement; two, military house raids (very often in order to arrest and intimidate people who are daring to resist the invading settlers); and three, bureaucratic measures taken to obstruct the cultivation or reclamation of their land, and to officially expropriate it. An Israeli permit is needed to reach the land beyond the separation barrier or in proximity to settlements; a permit is needed to place a water reservoir, to build a shack, to remove rocks. Permits are refused much more often than they are granted.

Let us look at number two. Raids — with all the fanfare of roaring jeeps and shots into the air and stun grenades that wake up the entire neighborhood — may occur every night, a dozen or two or more — mostly in villages and refugee camps (where people whose land was stolen long ago reside) but also in urban neighborhoods.

Not all end up in house raids and arrests, but many do. I was told once by an ex-soldier who joined the Breaking the Silence organization, that soldiers like those house raids: Adrenaline, action, suspense. The house raid — usually with trained dogs and dozens of masked soldiers — may end up in an arrest, or [their purpose may just be] to train the soldiers or to intimidate and punish people.

In the case of an arrest — let us say of a kid suspected of having thrown stones or a youth who scribbled some “inflammatory” statements on Facebook or TikTok — it affects the family for the coming days, weeks, and months. At first you don’t know where your son is; then you go to the military court where he appears first before a military judge, then for a remand, then another one, then another one, and finally for the reading of the charge sheet. In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority [PA] or a human rights organization has designated a lawyer, or you contact one yourself, and each will probably settle for a plea deal — because a “real” trial (like one seen in an American TV series) with evidence and summoning of witnesses will leave your son in prison for much longer than the actual sentence would.

When it concerns “heavier” suspicions, it will mean a yearslong absence from society, worry and longing, encounters with lawyers, monthly prison visits that are odysseys of their own, parents who pass away while you are incarcerated. Life all the time proceeds through and is entangled with Israeli institutions of power. You get to know their representatives in a very intimate way. It’s not theoretical; you’re close enough to see the soldiers’ pimples and the gray hair of the Shabak [Israel Security Agency] interrogator (whose Israeli neighbors do not know he is one). These raids have a wave-like impact that touches people beyond the individually affected family.

It is interference from bedtime to sleep to when you wake up and go to work or school. Those powerful and hostile institutions are always present.

The cities provide you with what I call “restricted vacation” from the occupation — restricted in space and time. At a distance of two kilometers from one settlement and three from another, four kilometers from the wall, and 1,200 meters from a military camp or a checkpoint, you may run your daily chores and delude yourself for a few hours that you are free: work at your posh lawyers’ office in a shiny building, sit at a café, chat and joke, prepare a wedding, stroll at ease back home from school or returning from the market. It’s true not only about Ramallah, but all cities and towns, even Hebron — the part that is beyond the chain of checkpoints and sealed streets that separate it from the old historical city. Here there are ways to keep your thoughts away from this invasive foreign rule for a few hours.

Then you leave the enclave, you go through a checkpoint, you pass by soldiers, you go through surveillance cameras; you sometimes have to take a detour because the direct road to your home village is blocked by a military gate. Then there are the night raids and arrests and the news — everyone listens to the news: you know what’s happening in Jenin and Masafer Yatta, how many olive trees were torched and demolition orders handed down.

Nobody can be disconnected from reality. There is permanent uncertainty. There is permanent anger that has no exit. Or, if there’s an exit, it does not improve anything. All the time you live with this perception of tremendous injustice.

The settlement of Psagot is just around the corner from several of Al-Bireh’s neighborhoods. In some places, only a narrow street separates them. Beit El settlement is opposite Jalazoon refugee camp, just across the street and over a valley. Both settlements sink deep in their lush, thick western vegetation, while drinking water reaches the surrounding Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps in rotation, only once for a few days or weeks. The same is true everywhere: Israel controls the water resources. Settlements and outposts are supplied by plenty of water while regularly, a quota is imposed on the Palestinians.

You wake up to this injustice, and it’s never normal; you never get used to it. The anger boils in you without a way out. The few who express it by killing or trying to kill an Israeli, or by dreaming about larger-scale armed operations (be they against soldiers or civilians) express the general rage — but do not stop settler-colonial expansion.

Indeed! It strikes you in every detail. A friend of mine is a tour guide, mostly for foreigners. There are always complications and delays transferring fees through US banks to his account in a Palestinian bank, because all banks are terrified by the “financing terror” suspicion that is automatically raised. He uses my account at an Israeli bank instead. When he needs to get something by mail from abroad, he gives my postal-box address in Jerusalem because ordinary mail to PA [Palestinian Authority] areas must go under the supervision of Israeli officials: they neglect it, and their PA counterparts neglect it as well, so you can wait a year for your package or envelope. And not everyone can afford private-delivery companies.

Another example: when the PA froze civilian and security coordination with Israel (as a warning against the annexation plan in 2020), driving licenses that expired during these months were renewed by the PA. But any such change needs to be registered in the Israeli “computer” and database in order to be valid outside of the A and B enclaves. If an Israeli police officer checked your license in one of the West Bank’s main roads (in Area C, under full Israeli military and civilian authority), he would impose a fine and forbid you to continue driving the car. I don’t know how often it happened, but a high-ranking PA official shared this detail with me and was very upset by it.

I am always afraid excessive details tire my interlocutors, but I don’t know a better way to describe the abnormality of people’s reality. Take electricity in the Gaza Strip, which is supplied in shifts, to every region, for only part of the day. Here the reason is not only the occupation and its restrictions, but also the ugly fights over money, bills, and payments between the two “governments” — that of Hamas and that of the PA.

There are many high-rise apartment buildings in Gaza; people calculate their coming back home, or visiting family in such buildings and so on, according to the operation hours of the elevator. A young friend, a survivor of cancer (and Israeli wars) with the talent of a stand-up comedian, once told me that the floor of an apartment has become one of the considerations on which to decide whether to propose to someone or accept a marriage proposal. I guess she was exaggerating, but she wasn’t when she told me how she is locked in for long hours when the elevator does not work: her knees do not allow her to take the stairs, and in case of an Israeli bombardment she never knows what to choose: the agony of rushing down the stairs or the fear inside the shaking apartment.

An old friend told me long ago: “Once we spoke about the struggle for freedom and ending the occupation — now we are concerned with the elevator and the shifts in electricity supply.” I would add: also with waiting too long for an Israeli exit permit for a medical treatment in Amman or Ramallah, or permission to bring in spare parts for an outdated wastewater treatment plant, and so on.

There is always fear — based on experience and sound analysis — that things will deteriorate. There is defiance all the time, because people do insist on going on with their lives, because they are not just mere products of the oppression. During the extreme closure of cities and villages at the beginning of the 2000s, teachers walked long distances — climbing up and down hills and mountains — to reach the schools. My friend in Nablus was pregnant and did it. I watch children walk to school — on their own or in groups, but not accompanied by parents. Any moment, an arrogant military jeep or two may pass by, or in some areas a group of settlers may break in for provocation. For the sake of sanity and normalcy, the parents must overcome the fear and let the kids walk on their own.

And then there is anger. I sometimes don’t know where to apply my anger — articles aren’t enough — so imagine ordinary Palestinians, bombarded with messages from this regime saying that they are not only inferior, but disposable.

To work in Israel is a desire of many — too many — because the obligatory minimum wage in Israel is almost three times the Palestinian minimum wage (which, in any case, many employers do not respect). A construction workers’ salary is higher than the Israeli minimum wage. The risk of work accidents and death among construction workers is very high, more than double the death rate in OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries (eleven deaths per 100,000 employees versus five in the OECD countries).

It shouldn’t surprise us: more than half of the construction workers are Palestinians (either citizens of Israel or from the ’67 Occupied Territory: the latter constitute around two-thirds of the overall WBGS [West Bank, Gaza Strip] workers in Israel). It’s one of the main reasons why companies and contractors do not feel the pressure to maximize safety measures. I’ll never forget the man in Rafah, Gaza Strip, who, during one of the Israeli invasions to the city and refugee camp in 2004, told me, in perfect Hebrew: “We Palestinians built your homes in Israel, now Israel comes and destroys ours.” He had been a subcontractor in Israel for many years, and a military unit occupied his home during that invasion, damaging it beyond recognition.

Young Palestinian policemen are quitting the police to work in Israel, or work there on their days off, since they work long shifts. I heard this, by the way, from a leftist activist who was imprisoned for a few days by the PA and befriended his young jailer. It’s not only about the salary: work opportunities for the thousands of university graduates are scarce.

The IMF [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank pressure the PA to reduce the number of public employees, who, since November 2021, receive only 80 to 85 percent of their already low salaries because Israel regularly steals from Palestinian revenues, which it controls. In 62 percent of the West Bank, there can be no real Palestinian investment — it’s controlled by Israel and Israel does not allow any Palestinian development. Not in the neoliberal sense of the word, but the human one: building a regional school, for example, planning and designing, allocating land for solar energy panels, putting distance between industrial zones and residential neighborhoods, reclaiming rocky land for agriculture or for a new neighborhood or a farm — all are forbidden, and this contributes to the scarcity of jobs. And I haven’t even started talking about the blockade on Gaza, which has nearly destroyed its participation in the Palestinian economy.

Gazans are known to be very creative, and Gaza has produced many computer experts. Theoretically, they could work for international companies and develop the digital economy. But Israel restricts the import of information and communication technology, limiting spectrum allocation (2G in Gaza and 3G in the West Bank). The slow connectivity works against them, despite their proven talents and skills.

There were two or three golden years, when the army turned a blind eye and thousands of workers passed through “holes” in the West Bank separation fence. I heard Palestinian employers in the West Bank complain that they could not compete and couldn’t find workers, because they were demanding a higher wage.

The “holes” in the fence serve not only people without entry permits but also those with valid ones who simply wanted to spare themselves the checkpoint ordeal and save on waiting time. While Palestinian towns, cities, and villages are still asleep, the checkpoints to Israel are buzzing and bustling with people crossing westwards to construction sites or factories or fields and greenhouses or in search of work. People may leave their homes at 3 or 4 a.m., reach the checkpoint an hour before it opens, and stand in a line that quickly gets longer — there are thousands of people at each checkpoint. People from twenty-four to seventy years old, and perhaps older, who return home at 6 p.m. or later, day after day. And each day they cross from Third World conditions to the First World, and back. Thousands, especially those who do not have permits, stay in Israeli towns, sometimes even on the construction sites, only to return home once every several months.

There is a black market for work permits, from which Israeli employers and both Israeli and Palestinian middlemen profit. It costs a worker between 2,000 to 2,500 shekels per month — whether they work or not. Around a third of Palestinian workers pay this “tax,” enriching an army of anonymous profiteers. Despite Israeli promises to close the loopholes in the system that permit and encourage this black market, it persists and has even reached Gaza, where around 18,000 people have been officially allowed to work in Israel for the first time since 2005.

And still, those who work in Israel are considered lucky. With their salaries and savings, they are not only able to pay for food and bills, they are able to send their children to university. They are able to build another floor above the old family house, maybe start a business, or take better care of an ailing family member. But the price is heavy, in every respect.

Work is a form of hostage-taking, in Israeli eyes. Whether it’s a village that collectively protests against a settlement, or Gazans who demonstrate along the border line, or a member of an extended family who is said to be involved in an armed attack against Israelis — the work permits of the village or family members can be revoked and exit from Gaza denied. This is a decades long practice of official blackmail.

But I also see self-confidence that comes with the work — self-esteem — and the expansion of one’s ability to choose new directions for themselves or their children. Another side effect is that those workers get to know an Israeli society more varied than the one represented in the West Bank by settlers and soldiers, and in Gaza by unseen bomber pilots and soldiers shooting from watch towers.

As workers, they come to know Israelis as secular and orthodox, poor and rich. They come to know them as stingy and cheating employers — as well as kind and fair ones, as indifferent, suspicious, and friendly. I think it makes the workers more knowledgeable than many academics who rely mainly on books, newspapers, and theories.

Why not everything together — why not a hybrid? Including the oxymoronic, “democracy for Jews,” which — as we predicted decades ago — cannot last forever while the oppression of Palestinians continues. The main dynamic, though, is and has always been that of settler colonialism, the escalating violence of which is well organized and planned.

In the early ’90s — after the first intifada — there was widespread hope that Israel could and would disengage from its settler-colonial nature in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory and start a process of internal democratization, which would include its Palestinian citizens. This hope — though formulated differently — was shared by the first intifada rebels and leaders, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and a significant group of peace advocates that was active at the time. The assumption was that the international community would back the process and ensure that Israel respected the terms of a peace accord. Instead, with bad faith, Israel entrenched its settler-colonial practices under the guise of a peace process.

There has always been an “unofficial” face to it — settler movement initiatives that circumvented the regular bureaucratic path but were eventually “laundered” and made “kosher,” as we say in Hebrew. Official land grabs, through military decrees, have always stolen larger areas than these quasi-private initiatives. But in the past ten years, we have faced a qualitative leap: well-organized, heavily financed settler movements now take hundreds of thousands of dunams [unit of area equivalent to roughly 900 square meters] by establishing herding farms, assisted by violent, overtly racist, messianic private militias. There has always been an official tolerance of this growing violence, and it’s not an accident or a sign of weakness — it’s a signal to continue.

This unrestrained, privatized violence succeeds where official violence has failed in expelling communities from large areas. In less than three years, about two dozen have been expelled. There is a WhatsApp group that shares real-time reports on settlers’ aggression. Reading it is agony — every hour or two there are reports of harassment: settlers kicking Palestinian shepherds off hills, shooting in the air to scare farmers, or bathing in village springs while soldiers protect them by throwing tear gas and stun grenades, damaging fields. Because it doesn’t result in casualties or major damage to property; it doesn’t make the news. Even if it did, would it change anything?

To get back to your question about definitions — apartheid is a more “mature” stage of settler colonialism, where the indigenous population already has some role, albeit inferior, in the overall system. They’re counted in statistics and needed for the economy. Here, we’re still in a stage where the indigenous population is considered totally superfluous — redundant and disposable. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics doesn’t include them in its reports — though it does include the settlers, who live 100 meters away. But the profits and incomes generated in settler industrial zones, Israeli tourism, the West Bank roads, and the updated electricity grid are all included in Israel’s economic calculations.

The surveillance and weapons industries are even trickier. These industries wouldn’t be as profitable as export merchandise without the ready-made testing ground they have in the Palestinian population. The income these industries generate is calculated and included in reports. The Palestinians used as guinea pigs are not.

A reality of Palestinian enclaves has been meticulously molded over the past thirty years — mini Gaza Strips replicated across the 5,800 square kilometers of the West Bank. These enclaves condense the Palestinian population, deprive it of nature, land, springs, and space. My conclusion is that these enclaves are Israel’s internal compromise between a wish to see Palestinians disappear and the understanding that we cannot expel them as we did in 1948. It’s very similar to how Palestinian villages and towns in Israel (those that weren’t depopulated and destroyed in 1948–50) had their land expropriated for new Jewish towns and suburbs.

The terrorizing of farmers and villages and herding communities to banish them from the West Bank has been systematically carried out since the late ’90s. Settler leaders realized years ago that suburban colonies wouldn’t devour enough Palestinian land. Agriculture, combined with military orders and violence, required fewer people and was therefore a better tool for land and water grabs. But agriculture does require some people and it’s too fixed for the unsatisfied lust for Palestinian soil. Over the past ten or fifteen years, we’ve seen the perfection of another tool: Hebrew shepherds.

There’s a clear pattern, which suggests that there is a network, financial sources, organizers, and most importantly: long-term planning behind the scenes. Young couples or single men, often second-generation settlers, start with a modest flock, setting up tents and pens just a few kilometers away from an existing Palestinian community without any apparent official authorization. Volunteers or right-wing militia force members herd the sheep or cows and perpetuate the violence I described earlier.

“Closure” is shorthand for a policy that basically turned upside down the one that was in place since the early ’70s. Back then, Israel largely respected the right of freedom of movement for Palestinians between the rivers and the sea, with only certain groups — mostly political activists — facing restriction. Since 1991, it’s been the opposite: all Palestinians have been deprived of their right to free movement, except for select categories that Israel designates, deciding who qualifies, how many permits are issued and when and where those permits apply.

At the time, I was living in Gaza, and I wasn’t yet acquainted with the situation in the West Bank, but I sensed that Gaza was being used as a testing ground or laboratory for this policy. Closure is the bureaucratic and logistical counterpart to the physical seizure of land.

Another indispensable by-product of the pass system is the theft of time: time belonging to both individuals and the community as a whole. You wait for a permit to attend a meeting in Ramallah, say, or to work or for medical treatment, often not knowing if or when it will be granted. You wait at checkpoints, stuck for hours on what should be a five-minute drive because you’re not allowed in certain areas or because the direct road is blocked.

The time of the colonized, whether women, workers, or any subjugated group, is always cheap in the eyes of the hegemon. Israel did not invent this. The Soviet bureaucracy also disciplined people by controlling their time. But here, the robbery of time is an art — the accumulated violence of it is unseen, easily dismissed as a mild, restrained response to “terror,” which, of course, is a lie. In the ’70s, Palestinians planted bombs in Israeli cities, yet no one stopped Palestinians from crossing daily, with their cars, to Israel. Waiting for a permit to build or plant has nothing to do with security.

While stolen land may be returned one day, stolen time cannot. I suspect that stealing time is not just a by-product, but a deliberate, calculated measure of repression.

The cruelty is deeply ingrained in the system and those who work within it. The Israeli military’s civil administration, a hybrid authority combining military and civilian oversight under both the army commander and the Ministry of Defense, was created in the early ’80s to “serve the civilian Palestinian population.” In reality, it facilitates colonizing activities.

This hybrid state of affairs causes confusion. One authority sends you to another one to solve a problem. I accompanied a friend whose entry permit was revoked. We were sent from one soldier to another, from one office to another, each saying it wasn’t their responsibility. Making you waste your time, leaving you confused, or even making you feel incompetent — it’s all part of the system.

Yes, and quite early I realized how the Gaza enclave was replicated in the West Bank. At the time, I thought myself a genius when I summarized the process with the sentence, “It’s the seven-state solution. It’s not a two-state solution.” I was to discover some years later, in an interview at Haaretz with an Orientalist — an ex-intelligence officer by the name of Mordechai Kedar — in which he suggested or prophesied a “solution” of seven city-states in the West Bank. Each one was to be controlled by the local clans, as this is the “natural state of affairs” in other Arab countries. Each such tiny emirate should run its affairs separately, and they could establish some sort of a “union.” So, according to him, it’s the fixed nature of Arab culture that hasn’t changed for hundreds of years that gave birth to the reality of the enclaves and not Israel’s conscious and studied policies.

They fall very neatly into Zionist history — the colonization, hypocrisy, lies, planning, trickery, and self-righteousness. They introduced the false idea that the Palestinians in WBGS are no longer occupied because their “government” is responsible for civilian affairs. These three decades weakened and shattered the Palestinian political structure, turning a once-popular and beloved representative national liberation organization into a pitiable nomenklatura, with corrupt, unelected, leaders who are indifferent to the people and despised. They suppress discussion and are viewed by many as operating somewhere between compradors, subcontractors, and collaborators.

There are questions I can ask but can’t really answer with total certainty: How much of this could have been planned by the Israelis? How much of it is accidental, circumstantial, or an unintended consequence? And how much can be attributed to internal shortcomings of the Palestinian political structure?

The geopolitical split between Gaza\Hamas and the West Bank\Fatah — isn’t it both an Israeli creation and the result of Palestinian internal dynamics? In 2008, Dr Eyad el-Sarraj, the late Palestinian founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, told me, a year after the short and painful civil war in besieged Gaza, that “Israel wrote the script, but Hamas and Fatah excel at playing their roles in it.”

Another question I wonder about is: If countries that consider themselves democratic hadn’t betrayed their commitments to international charters — if they hadn’t allowed, or rather assisted, Israel in carrying out its colonization project — what would the Palestinian political map look like?

I prefer to say ”non-armed resistance” instead of “nonviolent.” The term “nonviolent” in this context puts the onus of violence on the occupied and ignores the inherently aggressive nature of the occupation itself. Mass Palestinian resistance during the first intifada could turn “violent” — throwing stones, coercing merchants to strike and the like. It even evolved into the brutal killing of suspected collaborators. But the focus should be on the collective, mass character of resistance, not just of the actions of a few.

While the collective nature of the first intifada evokes positive memories of internal cohesion and solidarity, the result was Oslo. . . So the simplistic conclusion is that it is always doomed to fail. During the 2000s, certain villages began using tactics of collective resistance against the separation fence, attracting international and Israeli support, but rarely Palestinians from outside each village — it was as if the struggle was the “private” affair of each locality. The price was heavy — Israeli soldiers killed and wounded demonstrators, intimidated them with mass arrests and night raids. Teenagers dropped out of school or failed their final exams. In some cases, the wall’s path was modified thanks to the demonstrations and a parallel battle in courts, but the cost was very high.

Armed struggle — the use of arms and explosives but also the use of “cold arms,” such as knives — has always had a high prestige among Palestinians. So, there is nothing new about this support. Once collective non-armed struggle — with all its casualties and personal, social, and material costs — fails, it’s natural for many to praise individual armed struggle. This ranges from individual acts and organized cells in some refugee camps and cities to the more advanced weaponry and tactics that Hamas and Islamic Jihad develop and use in the Gaza Strip.

The real question is: How many of the people who say they support armed struggle actually do and will take part in it themselves or want their children to? I suspect very few.

The sanctity and romanticization of armed struggle do not allow, in my eyes, a candid and thorough evaluation of its past achievements, failures, and potential to check Israeli land grabs. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have bolstered their political position through their use of arms and their ability to embarrass the Israeli military power. But they have not challenged the separation of Gaza from the rest of the ’67-occupied territory, haven’t broken the siege, and have not stopped the main instrument of colonization: settler violence. So armed struggle’s current role oscillates between an internal political instrument, sporadic revenge, and symbolic expressions of rage.

It’s a shame that farmers, shepherds, and Bedouin communities throughout the West Bank are left alone to face the malicious state-backed violence of armed Jewish pogromists. The PA has thousands of trained police and national guards. According to the Oslo Accords, they are not allowed to operate in Area C, and they are not allowed to take actions against Israeli attackers. In practice, this means that they are not allowed to protect their own people. But it’s not written in the accords that Israel should permit settler violence.

If the Israeli military does not protect people in Area C, which is under its blanket security and civilian authority, why should the PA forsake them? The PA could have positioned dozens of unarmed, plainclothes officers in each community to work the lands alongside farmers. Their presence could deter the settler militias and send a message to Israel and Europe that this violence is intolerable. If the PA’s existence is so important for Israel and the West, it should be allowed to protect its people, even if the outdated accords don’t explicitly allow it.

At the same time, the dozens of armed activists in Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm — who are courageous enough to face heavily armed Israeli troops invading their cities and refugee camps or are angry enough to carry out revenge attacks against civilians — are absent from the main scene of Israeli colonial aggression. They could use their courage for a concrete goal, not just symbolic acts that don’t really challenge Israeli might. There is a small group of mainly Fatah members, some on the PA payroll, who have initiated demonstrations against violent Israeli settler outposts and provided protection for some intimidated communities. But there are very few and they are not joined by the many critics of the PA and Fatah or supporters of an abstract armed struggle.

There are several dozen leftist Israeli activists who, since the early 2000s, have regularly accompanied some of those communities and individuals to deter Israeli attackers or at least ensure quick intervention from the military and police. But the number of endangered communities has continued to grow, as has the number of Israeli attackers and their brazen criminality.

What gives me hope is Palestinians’ deep rootedness in the land, even when they choose to live abroad or are forced to live in exile. The ties and affinities that are kept and nurtured between Palestinians here and abroad are strong. Their natural state is one of defiance and resilience against a sophisticated and sly foreign military rule. Every single family is a project of resistance.

What also encourages me is people’s love of life, their ability to laugh, celebrate, and create, despite all the tragedies, both past and present. I am in awe of their ability to live — to not just merely survive or exist — while enduring so much suffering for so long. I do hope that all of this will eventually translate into stronger internal solidarity and more strategic resistance.