The Israeli government and the media explain the many Israeli checkpoints, military bases and daily incursions in the West Bank as security requirements.* But the suicide bomber only came to Israel a decade after the tactic successfully pushed the Israeli army back to the south of Lebanon. While Israel uses these acts of terrorism as justification for the continued occupation of the West Bank, the correlation between the two may be the other way around.

The media and the Israeli government have worked hard to marginalize the Palestinians. The soldiers I see certainly make no efforts to conceal their view of the Palestinians as being inferior. When a Palestinian kills an Israeli he is a terrorist, but when an Israeli kills a Palestinian civilian it is either the work of a madman or collateral damage.

There is no such thing as Israeli terrorism, just like throughout all discussions of the conflict in the media it remains taboo to discuss the continuing and violent expansion of Israel into the West Bank by armed fundamentalist Jewish settlers and the Israeli separation barrier—thrice the length of the Berlin Wall, 80 per cent built on Palestinian territory, annexing 46 per cent of the West Bank and itself taking up 9.5 per cent of it.

This is the world’s last colonial war. As Ariel Sharon, himself an officer during the Algerian war, told former French President Jacques Chirac: “You have to understand us, here, it’s as if we are in Algeria. We have no place to go. And besides, we have no intention of leaving.”

It is convenient to profile the suicide bomber as a monster, as something made of evil incarnate. Though this categorization is certainly politically expedient, despite the assurances of George W. Bush and Israeli generals, no such dichotomy of good and evil exists.

I have spoken to some who have lost a loved one gone to blow himself up in Israel. The bomber as a child has usually lost a best friend, or maybe his brother, cousin or father to an Israeli attack. He has sat amid the rubble of his family home or the home of a loved one possibly still buried under the slabs of stone. He has been humiliated, imprisoned and deprived of all hope. And at some point, their family will tell you, something happens inside. The once extroverted child becomes an introverted adolescent or young adult. He starts to speak more of religion, of death and of revenge. Soon after, innocent Israeli children die and he becomes a grisly headline.

Since I have been here I have seen Israel invade on an almost daily basis. I have seen them riddle homes with bullets and sometimes bulldoze them to the ground. I have seen the people lining up at the checkpoints for hours unable to move about freely within their own country and make a decent living. I have seen the soldiers roll in at the dead of night, surround a building and blast it with flash-bangs and gunfire while screaming through their megaphone for the occupants to come out. Three times so far they have dragged a man out onto the street and executed him—no arrest, no court hearing, just a bullet. Every child here or adolescent has suffered. Everyone has lost someone or been hurt.

The Israeli soldiers came into my friend’s home some weeks ago. They made him sit with his hands above his head along with his entire family. One soldier went behind him and broke his back with the butt of his gun. The other soldiers then vandalized and looted the home. This 19-year-old was no militant and certainly posed no threat to Israeli civilians. His passions include bodybuilding and American pop culture. His ambition is to go to America to be free. So why did a soldier feel it was necessary to permanently injure him?

When you see the soldiers riding through the city in their heavily-armoured vehicles blasting away at everything you have to start to wonder whether this is not just a game to them, a playground bout of cops and robbers. Do they understand the impact their actions are having on the lives of Palestinians and the potentially disastrous repercussions? Is it of any surprise that afterwards an adolescent, unable to see any glimmer of hope in his future, is ready to pick up a weapon and join the militants in defending their city? Is it any surprise that one of those youths will have his heart filled with enough rage to only dream of revenge?

I have met Israelis who have chosen to go to military prison because they felt that what they were being asked to do as soldiers was immoral. I have met Israelis who have bravely stood in front of tanks or bulldozers à la Tianamen Square to prevent yet another Palestinian home from being destroyed. I have met countless young Palestinians, many university graduates, who only want peace. Then I have met those young Israelis who will tell you this is a religious war and that in light of this the Palestinians must be driven out and their holy places blown to smithereens so that the prophecies may come true. Yet Jewish extremism and fundamentalism seldom make front-page headlines.

Spend time here and you will realize just how false the image constructed by the media of Palestinians is, and just how much restraint these people have shown. Witness the occupation and Israel’s total disregard for international law and you wonder how this place has not become radicalized to the point of forming yet another Afghanistan, Algeria or Iraq in the Middle East. Only when the international community begins to put real pressure on Israel and to take concrete steps towards guaranteeing Palestinians a state of their own and economic opportunities will there be peace. The longer this tragedy is allowed to go on the greater the risk it will turn into another war and cause the deaths of countless more innocent civilians on both sides.

In the meantime, I will have to go ask Israel, a foreign country, if they would be so kind as to renew my visa and give me permission to keep living in Palestine…


*Security has been used to justify Israeli actions to a preposterous degree. As Premier Urgence notes in their annual report, in the eight years following the signing of the 1993 Declaration of Principles, 70,000 hectares of land were appropriated and 282,000 trees on Palestinian agricultural lands were uprooted. Three reasons were provided: they lacked the necessary authorization, for security reasons and by calling into effect a law stipulating that lands unused for three consecutive years could be seized. Israel has even used the establishment of nature reserves as a means of confiscating yet more land from the Palestinians. Since 1967, half the agricultural lands of the West Bank have been appropriated in this manner.

To get involved in Nablus check out Project Hope at http://projecthope.ps/ Project Hope is a non-profit volunteer organization whose goal is to provide a participatory, educational space for Palestinian youth and children.