Matthew Knott and Kate Geraghty report from the West Bank, where people who live beside each other are driven apart by competing historical narratives and modern grievances.
If you want to see the violence, the anger that is always ready to erupt here in the West Bank, this is where you come. A petrol station on the outskirts of Ramallah on a Friday afternoon. The sound of gunfire and screeching ambulance sirens; the smell of burning tyres and tear gas. Black plumes of smoke soaring to the sky from blazing orange fireballs. Palestinian boys lobbing stones and Israeli soldiers shooting bullets.
Martin Luther King Jr described riots as the language of the unheard, and most protesters offer a version of this statement when asked why they come here. They don’t know any better way to express their indignation at life under occupation. Lying in a hospital bed near Ramallah, Sohaib Mahmoud lifts up his gown to display the stitched-up chest wound where he was almost shot dead. According to Sohaib and his relatives, they were picking olives peacefully on their family land, near Jibiya, early in the morning last Tuesday when Israeli settlers started firing on them. “They didn’t even tell us to go away,” says the 16-year-old engineering student. “They just started shooting. They were aiming at me.
“What happened in Gaza broke Sohaib’s heart,” his grandfather Zaid tells us, describing him as a non-violent boy and a hard-working student. “His father raised him with a love of Palestine. It was important for his father to remind him that this was his land.”Driving south through the spectacular limestone mountains of the West Bank, we arrive at Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement an hour’s drive from Ramallah.
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