Over a plate of sliced apples and a side of pistachios

Oudy's mom brought out a giant platter of fruit, filled with sliced bananas, peeled oranges, tiny yellow plum like fruits (i have no idea what they are called in English, but they are delicious; one of those fleshy, juicy, sour, mouth puckering fruits with a couple of seeds inside of them that you have to spit out and you have to tolerate the fact that almost always a little bit of the juice squirts out as you pierce your teeth into them), and sliced apples.  I was sitting in their living room, with his dad sitting on the sofa adjacent to mine and Oudy sitting on the other side, watching some random Arabic game show on T.V.  Two days prior to that I would have never thought that I'd be in their house, enjoying a hospitable serving of fruit and pistachios munching away and talking to them like family friends.

 But here I was, graciously welcomed into the home of yet another student.  I'm almost used to the chain of events that lead up to this moment now.  What starts out as a concerned parent either waiting inside the main office or outside in the playground (an empty parking lot, not really a playground) to talk about their child, asking me what it is that we are doing in class, asking me about who i am, with their guard up drilling me like a sergeant and requesting  things from me that no other teacher is required or even expected to do (like sending home a detailed "objective" sheet that outlines the chapter objectives and what I do in class, or creating a password protected account for every single one of my students on my blog so that I can evaluate every student every night and send notes to parents) turns into a 30 to 40 minute conversation between them and I,  and as I answer all of their questions in detail without losing my patience I see their defensive guard slowly melt away and then the conversation ends with "Are you free tomorrow night? Maybe after school?".  Of course I never reject an invitation, because getting to meet my students outside of class and school, and getting to meet the entire family is thrilling. And it's always fun for the kid to have his teacher come home with him to watch tv. 

I learn a lot through these conversations, which is why I love meeting families so much.  They hyperactive but extremely brilliant kid in class, whose mischief  is sometimes skin crawlingly aggravating but sometimes cute in retrospect (sometimes) I discover has a dad that works in the Palestinian Military, who speaks fondly of having lived in Maryland for a year,  and a mom that works with the Ministry of Public Health.  Their curiosity about me is fascinating to me, but kind of fun, I get to explain why it is that I love what I'm doing right now so much.  I'd be lying if I didn't say that I feel an unspoken pressure having to prove myself to them though, especially when they ask me about my age (his mom literally said "oh my God, only 23? you are a babbbyy!").  Every single one of them asks me if I like Palestine and their faces break out into an appreciative smile when I tell them that I don't just like it, I really love it and I think the land is beautiful, and that I am truly grateful  to be here, and that in my brief stay here so far I've encountered incredible amounts of kindness.

And in these situations, there is always a moment of brain and heart jerking comment or conversation that leaves me a little (by little i mean a lot) dazed, and inches me toward understanding the occupation a tiny bit more.

Oudy's dad was candidly talking about living here, in Ramallah, and his village, and how he'd like me and M to meet his extended family and take us there one day.  I can't even remember how small talk after small talk led to this but maybe it was after a comment about how checkpoints were closed last week.  Or maybe it was after talking about how soldiers do whatever they feel like whenever they feel like, or maybe it was after his comment of "you realize that you are not living in a free country right?" when he started telling me  story after story of what happens in checkpoints.

"they don't let pregnant women go through the checkpoint sometimes, as she is going into labor, they stand in her way and the hospital.  and you know how Qalandia is, the queues of people are crazy, it's always so crowded.  there was one woman who they wouldn't let through and she was forced to give birth at the checkpoint.  You know what the soldiers did after she gave birth? they took the newborn and held it, and then passed it to another soldier.  And you know what he did?"  I shrugged no.  "He took his M16 and shot it, and left the mother alive, and she went crazy"

The TV was still going, Oudy and his siblings were crawling in and out of the room, we were drinking tea at this point, still munching on the pistachios, and he told me this the same way someone would tell you what the weather was like that day.  I stared at him for a good 10 seconds at least, not knowing how to respond. My face was stuck in a grimace for a long time, as I was trying really hard to comprehend what he just said.  A soldier shot a newborn at a checkpoint after the mother had given birth.  In front of a crowd, where everyone saw what happened.

"Things like this happens all the time.  This is not news to us" he said after all I kept on saying was "..I can't believe that".

I don't know what perplexes me more, the fact that there is a possibility that an incident like this happened/happens or that they are not jarred by this at all.  He continued to tell me more stories (one was about a father and son trying to cross a checkpoint in Gaza, and the soldier opted to repeatedly shoot 17 times at the kid, leaving him dead on his dad's lap)

It's one of those things where your mind stops grasping, and all you keep saying is "wait that can't be real.  a human being can't be capable of doing that to a newborn can they?"

but isn't that the same way  people had reacted when the incidents of the Holocaust were slowly being revealed for the first time? so shocked and disgusted that people denied that any of it was true? The irony here is that the victims of that historical mar, are now doing the same exact thing to another group of people.

M and i have had many conversations, and at the crux of everything is that people here are not seen as people or human to  proponents of the other side of the conflict.  Take any genocide, and that's the crux of the matter, when one group of humans start regarding another as beasts , the paramount of evil that spews out is unbelievable.

And somehow the predators of this situation have convinced the world that they are the victims in the situation and that their "right to exist" must be defended at all costs.