I found myself sitting at a house party in Ramallah with young, educated Palestinians engaging in casual conversation. The guys were making dinner that night while the ladies were sitting back enjoying the role reversal.
Some were recent graduates of Birzeit University near Ramallah, others had returned after completing their studies overseas, while the rest remained students. Many of them were also artists of various kinds, part of a flourishing art scene in the West Bank, in particular Ramallah. There was a liberal consumption of alcohol while Western, Arabic and Turkish …

My first experience of the Palestinian occupation was in the fifth or sixth grade. I grew up in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where politics wasn’t such a huge part of everyday life. My parents, though incredibly active politically in their youth, did everything possible to shield me and my brother from politics as children. I would always want to watch the news with them but they wouldn’t let me…

By Luke Savage

I am not a Palestinian. Nor am I an Arab. I am neither Jewish nor Israeli. Unlike many of the other voices that speak tonight my family did not come from The Old City or the West Bank, or from the bustling streets of Tel-Aviv. It fought the war on the safe side of the Channel, and not in the ghettoes of Warsaw or on the desert battlefields of El-Alamein. Canada is my land and I speak as a Canadian, whatever a Canadian is. S/he could be anybody, from anywhere; fresh off the plane from Dubai, or an Iroquois whose family has fished in the St Lawrence for a thousand years.

At first I didn’t think about it, but now I’m mildly alarmed that I was not alarmed. I didn’t really raise an eyebrow when my roommate and I went to the movies a week or two ago and we had to sit down behind a row of seven or eight young Israeli soldiers whose m16s clanked every time they moved in the dark theatre. I didn’t bat an eyelash when going through three different checkpoints to see the (in)famous Ibrahimi mosque in the West Bank. In fact, my friend Jo was even daring enough to take a picture of a soldier searching my bag at the second checkpoint out of the three…