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When I hear the missile alert on the phone, I know I have about 5 minutes to get downstairs. Not that that would help if it struck us. The Anar office, located in the historic old city of Beit Sahour, has no reinforced ceiling or walls, no massive steel door with a maximum strength latch, no double-layer sealed windows. But if there is any intercepted rocket debris, maybe it won’t be big enough to reach the ground floor. When I enter the downstairs room, the staff there greet me with friendly laughter; it has become an entertaining routine to see me walk sheepishly in with every alert. The phone app buzzes again, and I look to see where the targets are. This time, they are close – Jerusalem and the nearby Israeli settlements, some only a few miles away. Soon the sirens start, blaring from the settlements, signalling everyone to run to the nearest shelter or reinforced saferoom (that does have a massive steel door with a maximum strength latch). But here, in Palestinian communities, there are no shelters. The best you can do is go inside. When the explosion comes, we all freeze, lock eyes, and wait for the next one. A few minutes later, it’s over, and everyone is back at their work, as if nothing had happened. For the last month, this has been daily life at Anar. The office is as it has always been, full of good will, laughter, and hard work. The periodic missile attacks all around us do not seem to shake any of the resolve, commitment, or shared vision of this small but mighty organization. And that is the pattern I see everywhere. Daily life continues. The outside observer of this town would not know that missiles are flying over it, that checkpoints and gates encircle it, that settlers are attacking nearby villages, that the Israeli military is raiding the local refugee camps, that most people who live here have never been able to see the ocean, just 30 miles away. That is not to say that there isn’t fear. For many Palestinians, though, it is not the rockets they’re watching. It’s the spike in Israeli settler attacks that has families across the West Bank living each day with the question of who will be next. The picture is hard to convey in words. Imagine cars aflame, windows broken, young masked men with clubs, metal pipes, or assault rifles, running through the village. Imagine them attacking Palestinian men and women – fathers, mothers, even grandparents, with a brutality hard to fathom. The war on Iran has turned the eyes of the world even further from the West Bank, which enables an astonishing degree of impunity. Today, driving along a country road to a local elementary school, I saw a new illegal Israeli outpost – the small collection of trailers that settlers place on Palestinian land they intend to claim, knowing that this will in time cause Israel to approve the construction of a burgeoning settlement there. Just up the road was the entrance to the school. It is not uncommon for Israeli settlers to attack schools. I tried to imagine being a child in one of those classrooms. With the establishment of the outpost came gates and a new military checkpoint. Now, driving to school each morning means machine guns pointed at your children, as the soldiers check your ID, interrogate you, or worse. Other days you may arrive to find the gate arbitrarily closed, and you turn around and circuitously drive another 30 minutes to the other school entrance. I learned that a few days prior, settlers had come down into the valley on the other side of the road, planted an Israeli flag in the middle of Palestinian farmland, and told the villagers, “We aren’t here yet, but we will be soon.” With every story, I think of the children. Yesterday I found myself in a conversation with a 7-year-old girl about the missile attack a few hours prior. “Did you hear it?” she asked me with eyes wide. “Yes,” I said. “It was really big. Did everything shake where you were?” She nodded her head emphatically. “It was scary,” she said. “We went to the safest room in our house, and me and my sister brought in one thing each. We brought a doll, and a bear.” Children in the West Bank live between converging streams of violence. They see it and hear it all. At some point they realize that even the reassuring embrace of their family is not enough to keep them safe – safe from rocket, gun, fist, or boot. When the searing injustice of this becomes too much for me, I return to Anar. I return to the knowledge that, in the face of the enormity of these forces of violence, we have a choice. We can give up, we can become immobilized, we can believe we are helpless. Or we can join with those who have chosen differently. Recently, Rami Khader, Anar’s founder and executive director, wrote this: In the face of continued violence, displacement, and uncertainty, our response at Anar is one of SUMUD, steadfastness in the face of oppression. We refuse to accept despair as the final answer. Instead, we choose the harder path: to remain present with the most vulnerable in our communities. We do not wait for the war to end, or for violence to ease. We walk alongside children, caregivers, and communities as they live through it. I invite you to walk alongside them, in whatever way you can, as they do.
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