“Fiish mey, fiish zaitoun. Jaysh (Israeli soldiers) have taken our water and uprooted our trees.”

R’s mother has a straight-backed posture and direct gaze. Her family has lost much land to settlers and army restrictions. She has mothered 12 children, rising at 5 each morning to pray, make and bake bread, and begin morning tasks, which morph into afternoon, then evening tasks. Yet she is not bitter, is extremely welcoming and curious about me. Why am I here? What do I think of their home, their lives? Do Canadians know about the military checkpoints and roadblocks? The invasions? The land confiscations?

“Go to Canada and tell them. You must show them pictures and tell them what Israel has done to us, is doing to us.” She said it as an order, which R relayed a little embarrassed. She didn’t need to ask; he didn’t need to worry.

Earlier, when the wedding party blared its way along the main street—horns bleating, fireworks blasting by the minute, radios cranked…and when suddenly people jumped from their cars, leaving them in an unmoving tangle, and ran to a central point to dance, hoist the groom on their shoulders, and make as much chaos and noise as possible, R said: “We have to do this; we need to have fun, be crazy.”

Later, he told me how his best friend at 16 had been sniped by an Israeli soldier’s bullet for hurling a stone –pebblesque, according to R “it was smaller than a ping-pong ball.”— at a military jeep and was killed. Murdered for resisting occupation. His friend fell, dead, beside him.

How does one move beyond that sort of horror? Move on to more, daily, horrors and humiliations: military checkpoints, land-loss, evictions, house demolitions, banned travel, arbitrary arrest, extended administrative detention, vilification…?

R moves on with a grin. Others with a shrug. Through necessity. There is no option, no time to lament and feel self-pity. This is every Palestinians fate. And the majority of Palestinians I met in the West Bank related their stories of imprisonment without charge, assault and harassment by settlers and the army, house demolitions, house occupations, stolen sons, unemployment, work and study being interrupted and prevented by curfews, checkpoints, invasions…These norms abound and were related to me as a given in their lives. But always I circle back to my indignation and outrage: how would I deal with these human rights violations? How would most Canadians and Americans? We would SCREAM. We would SUE. We would contact media and highlight our injustice.

Alas, this is Palestine and the western media has its pre-determined narrative, the State of Israel has its laws which have many loopholes and ultimately work to deny justice to Arabs, and Palestinians can scream and non-violently protest all they want but NO ONE IS LISTENING.

Just look at Gaza.

Yet Palestinians continue, Gazan Palestinians persevere, and non-violent resistance is alive and growing.