When you carry the Homeland in your heart and travel the world with it, you become its ambassador wherever you go, telling its story, transporting its concerns and spreading its culture.  – Amjad Rfaie

If that sounds to you like the antidote to genocide, you’re thinking the way I am but Amjad has a more immediate goal just now. He’s the President of the Askar Association for Community Development and Advancement and he’s currently doing talks, raising money and seeking other kinds of support for setting up a medical centre in his part of Nablus.

Why do they need a new medical centre? You may have heard that the Palestinian towns in the West Bank are currently ‘under lockdown’ by Israel but Nablus is one of those places where people have been feeling pretty thoroughly locked down for a long time. Israel has been busy building settlements all round the city, and the government has taken to arming the settlers, and those settlers are ready and willing to shoot at Palestinians.

Meanwhile, there is now one of those hellish checkpoints between Amjad’s part of Nablus and the nearest hospital. You know, those checkpoints where ambulances can get held up for hours, and occasionally destroyed? Those checkpoints where anyone Palestinian, no matter if they’re mortally wounded, can find themselves abducted, beaten, detained for months, or just plain disappeared.

Israel is currently planning a major development between Nablus and Jenin. Technically, Jenin is a ‘refugee camp’ but Nablus is not, although like many of its population, Amjad is a refugee – his family were originally from Jaffa but were hounded out during the original Nakba. Can you spot Nablus and Jenin on this Brilliant Maps depiction of the ‘Palestinian archipelago’?

If you get a chance, show this map to your MP and ask them how the hell they think a ‘two state solution’ is going to work after decades of the deliberate fragmentation of Palestinian territory.

We had a Q and A after his talk, and most of us were thinking about why Israel has treated the Palestinians so badly for so long, why they see them as nothing but a threat…

…personally, I’d say it’s racism. Racism has always been a favourite tool of political troublemakers, particularly colonialists…

Click here to hear Gideon Levy talking about that in 2018

Anyway, while we were talking last night, Amjad said at one point, “What would you do? Palestinians have tried everything – what would you do?”

And that’s the bit I’m absolutely stuck on, and the bit I’d like you to think about, while our politicians are waffling on about terrorism and a ‘two state solution’, and who is ‘a threat to stability’. Israel was founded in 1948 and whilst it has been more or less violent at different times, there has never been a time when its settlers, and most of its politicians, weren’t taking more and more of what was Palestinian territory, and complaining about any and every action Palestinians have taken to try to survive. I’ve spoken to some British Zionists who give me the distinct impression they really resent Palestinians surviving. Why can’t they just stop being there?

So that’s the question. Can you think your way into the position of Amjad and his community, being ever-more thoroughly cut off from other Palestinian communities, being shot at ever more often, as the settlements spread… What would you do?

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