By Jillian Slutzker
“They think there were more than twenty killed.” She heard her uncle say to no one in particular. Leila had managed to sneak away from her cousins and was standing in the doorway of the living room watching her uncle pacing with the phone receiver dangling in his hand. He turned to his wife. “Did Yousef come back yet?”
“He isn’t here. ” She answered, holding her head in her hands. Neither of them had noticed Leila in the doorway.
“There are …

By Michael Rom

At first glance, Peki’in is a tourist’s dream. The Galilean village is situated on the side of a hill, overlooking a green valley, from which it takes its Arabic name, al-Buqe’a (little valley). In the centre of the Galilean village is an ancient spring, ringed by cafes and restaurants. A little ways north of the spring is a cave, said to be the spot where the 2nd century kabbalist Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai hid for fourteen years from Roman soldiers. According to legend, although the great rabbi subsisted only on carobs from an adjacent tree, and water from the spring, he was able to compose the Zohar, the seminal text of kabbalah.

By Yousef Bashir

When the Intifada started in 2000, I was only in the 6th grade. Kids my age did not go to watch movies or travel with their parents for the summer time. Instead, we watched the young men throwing rocks at soldiers who were sitting behind strong, safe walls. Some soldiers used to beg the teenagers to go home and not waste their time. Collecting Israeli bullets was also a very cool thing to do or even waiting for an Israeli tank to get closer and then run away. This is what I used to do for fun when I was a kid. I also loved playing soccer in the street even though the ball was older than me.

I was born in the West Bank; the first born child to my parents. As I was growing up, nothing around me seemed out of the ordinary or even remotely remarkable. Sound of bullets, kids discussing politics, destroyed buildings, masked men in funerals, checkpoints, a disproportionate number of handicapped youth, and the fact that we had to be home every night before the 6 o’clock curfew- all these were facts of a life that was, to me, completely normal. I did not know any better.