"'All due respect.'"

News from the West Bank.

Children of Palestine. Al–Arroub refugee camp. (C.M., 2024)

16 August—It gives me great pleasure to inform you that I deposited the final donations for the al–Mughayyir kindergarten playground into an account with Nonviolence International. It will go directly to our partners in the West Bank. We met our fundraising goal in full, and with a little extra. 

In a text exchange with the head of the kindergarten, she reported that the engineer was onsite taking measurements and that work should begin on Saturday, a work day in the West Bank. Let us pause to rejoice in this success. This kind of happy event, the building of a playground, is a rare moment in the West Bank.

Thank you to all who made this possible!

I am keeping the fundraising campaign open for another few months. Any additional contributions that come in will go for school supplies and badly needed repairs to an existing bathroom. It is not too late to donate! You can do so here.

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Even as I shared this happy news with our funding partner in the West Bank, a man I cannot name, we were unable to ignore events in Jerusalem where Israelis had stormed al–Aqsa mosque earlier that day. 

“They keep on pushing and pushing and pushing,” my friend texted. “It is very tense around here these days. An explosion is expected at any minute.”

Alarmed, I quickly reached out to my friend Sabeel, a university student and artist who lives in the Hebron area. “2500 Israeli settlers broke into al–Aqsa today,” she texted. “The situation here is so fucked up.”

Life is not at all normal in the West Bank, which makes the building of a playground an extraordinary event. Sabeel, who is studying to be a pharmacist, has not been to school since October when it became too dangerous to keep the university open. Professors driving to work were unable to pass barricades set up by the occupation forces or were attacked in their cars by settlers. People throughout Hebron and the surrounding villages and refugee camps were shot and killed in frequent military raids. All of her classes have since been online. And things have only gotten worse.

“Since October 7th the aggression became the worst. We have never seen this amount of violence in all our history,” she texted. “It was always bad, but we unlocked a new level. Every time we think that this is the worst time and it could not be worse, those Israelis surprise us.”

These are remarkable comments coming from a woman who’s father and uncle were killed during the second Intifada. Young men in their early twenties, they had just returned home from Fajr, dawn prayer at the village mosque, and were standing together in the front yard. Sabeel’s mother, seven months pregnant, was talking with them from the doorway when the bomb fell. Inside the house, Sabeel’s seven-month-old sister was asleep. The two sisters never knew their father. They still have the watch he was wearing when he was killed, the hands stopped at 5:08 a.m.

“How could we like them or live peacefully with them?” Sabeel asked in another text. “They took our land and houses, killed our beloved people, and destroyed our country. They are killing us everyday.”

This understandable, justifiable, seething anger—far from unique to Sabeel—is not to be missed or underestimated. With the genocide in Gaza, it has only intensified. It exists side-by-side with all the details of daily living like studying for a university exam or cooking a meal—or constructing a playground for kindergartners. 

In an email I received just this morning, another West Bank source had this to report: “Over 100 Jewish Colonial Settlers committed yet another pogrom yesterday in
the village of Jit near Nablus. They torched many houses and many cars and
killed one civilian and critically injured another. All while the Israeli
army looked on.”

This is what daily life has become for the people of the West Bank. These are the obscene circumstances and contradictions forced upon Palestinians by the Israeli military occupation: The creation of a playground or a work of art, the celebration of a birthday or a graduation, juxtaposed with—never entirely separable from—violence, brutality, and destruction. 

Because Palestinians are unfailing polite, it is easy to miss their anger and frustration. It is a mistake to do so. The more time I spent in the West Bank, the more clearly I could see and hear it—in what was said and left unsaid, in body language, and the expression on a face. No people can forever endure the amount of violence that is routinely inflicted upon the West Bank. To say nothing of Gaza.

The resilience and humanity of the people I met never ceases to surprise me. To know they exist side by side with the most profound feelings of anger and rage is something we must all understand. Events of 7 October should have surprised no one.

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An email arrived last winter from Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at the University of Bethlehem. He wrote to encourage me to come to the West Bank when people in the U.S., including longtime activists, were telling me it was too dangerous. How glad I am that I listened to this wise man. “We cannot succumb to fear,” Mazin advised. “People do live and must continue to live.”

Palestinians continue to live—and to resist the occupation in every way they can, never losing their humanity and dignity. Even as the situation intensifies the people of the West Bank continue to care for family and community, for the bereaved and those most impacted by violence. They continue to rebuild demolished homes and schools, to make art and to get university degrees. They continue especially to create happy moments for their children.

They continue to build playgrounds. 

I pass on to you these words from our West Bank partner, sent to me via WhatsApp when he learned that our fundraising goal had been met: “All due respect.”

All due respect to you, who made a playground possible.

All due respect to our common humanity.

All due respect to Palestine.

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