By Melanie Takefman

Until recently, Israelis could ignore the Occupation. People led normal lives: they drank their coffee and ate breakfast in the mornings, drove their kids to school, worked from 8-5, and went hiking on weekends. People did reserve duty, and some had relatives or friends who were killed in the line of duty or in terror attacks. But a majority, it seems, was able to keep the “conflict” neatly tucked away.
In recent years, something deep inside the Israeli consciousness has begun to rumble. Life is hard, really hard, now. …

The kids make a huge advance which elicits a loud “Khalas!” from one of the soldiers, and the kids slow down their pace. Two soldiers go up to them now and all of a sudden, they are actually talking. Some young men approach and join in. As if they are all human. And it is almost possible for Anita and me to forget what the military uniforms and guns mean and to see only young people talking to each other.

Standing at a bus stop, the bricks of the Old City hovering on the horizon and a deadly heat radiating off the highway pavement, I boarded a minibus that 20 minutes later had me face to face with the wall – yes, that wall – on the edge of Bethlehem. Disembarking the vehicle and walking (tentatively) toward the massive structure, complete with rusted barbed wire and ominous towers, I passed through the series of indoor turnstiles and ramps that landed me in a queue line. I knew these places existed, and equally knew the vitriol-strapped arguments surrounding them: security fence, separation barrier, land grab, open-air prison. Call it what you will because in this moment, standing in the stark reality of a hot-button issue, I’m not thinking about semantics.

A short poem by Sa’ed, a Palestinian living in the United States, in which he reflects back on his life in Palestine and yearns for the day to see it at peace

January: To be a Jew and an American, to be so egregious to say: when I left the United States and came to Israel, I left one diaspora and entered another. I am a diaspora Jew, a landless, people-of-the-book Jew. Homelands make me nervous. But here I am in Israel. Looking up the Hebrew word “galut,” meaning diaspora, in an English-Hebrew dictionary, I see that the adjective “galuti” is translated as “ghetto-like.” I suppose that’s how Israelis like to remember the diaspora.

Ari stopped his speech. His voice choked over a lump in his throat. He forgot his rehearsed denunciation and instead could only think of his sister, her curly hair, her peace pin. Everyone’s shocked eyes were still on Ari but he could not say anything. She was not here. She would never be here. Not at this meeting. Not at home or at the ice cream shop with a cone of that nasty bubble gum stuff. She was really truly gone.

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 Jillian Slutzker
Not too far from the community center Leila was seeking, nineteen-year-old Ari Saksonov sat at his desk in his home staring blankly at the calendar. It was February 25. The grief counselor his parents had forced him to talk to told Ari that he would likely be in denial for some time. The counselor had peered at Ari over his black-rimmed glasses with a look of contrived sympathy and said that it might feel to Ari like his sister had gone on vacation and would return home shortly, …

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.

By Ruth Stevens

Hebrew graffiti in the old city of Hebron calls for death to the traitors against God, presumably including everyone on our tour and a large majority of the citizens of Israel. It’s a bright sunny day. Many of the buildings here are quite old and have beautiful Arabic inscriptions carved into their facades or wrought in their gates. Most are locked, shuttered and abandoned. It seems that living nation of Israel, am yisrael chay, has quite effectively rocked the casbah.