07/09/2026
Until now, most of what I have shared about my time in Palestine has been about the children.
About teaching English. About favourite days, football and ice cream. About backpacks and pencils, and the simplicity of wanting to learn.
I deliberately chose to focus on the positive.
But there was another side to what I experienced in the occupied West Bank, and pretending it wasn’t there would feel dishonest.
There was a settler parade through Hebron’s Old City, where Palestinian shopkeepers were made to close their shops. There was Umm al-Khair, where I stood alongside Palestinian residents and international activists—including our friend finnjoughin, whose subsequent detention and deportation affected me deeply.
There were checkpoints. Closed streets. Soldiers. Settlements. Stories much harder to carry home than photographs of smiling children.
And yet, I don’t want to come home cynical.
Partly because it isn’t in my nature. But also because underneath almost everything I do lies the same, perhaps slightly stubborn belief: that there is always common ground for us to explore.
These lines from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s A State of Siege followed me throughout my journey:
“If you are not rain, my love,
be a tree.”
Perhaps we spend too much time obsessing over otherness: what makes rain not a tree; what makes us not them.
And that, clearly, isn’t working.
Perhaps we should spend more time in the unsettled part of our minds where things have no names. In Palestine, I felt at ease mirroring the children’s desire to be seen. And I wondered whether, for a moment, we were all poets—wedding words that seemed utterly unrelated until they found meaning in our imagination.
I went to Palestine to teach English.
And came home wilfully enamoured with all that makes us human.
I truly hope it catches on.
🕊️✨
