My experience standing with Palestinians against settler abuse 

My Arabic is just short of non-existent, but football (the round ball game) is as close to a universal language as we’ve got. 

One of the kids I’m playing with – let’s call him Ramy – is maybe 10-years-old, but he’s a natural leader. Ramy is constantly talking as he rallies the team: pass here, move there, leave it, nice shot!  

He also seems to have a natural sense of justice. He switches the teams around often to try to even out the great battle played on the concrete quarter-sized basketball court in the middle of Umm Al-Khair village, in the Hebron Hills of the West Bank. 

​​I hope ​he remembers playing football with a Jewish foreigner even if the fun cannot displace ​​the memory of the rest of the day.​​​

I was not primarily there to play football​, but as part of a small group of protective presence volunteers. We were armed with two weapons: phones and non-Palestinian passports. 

The phones were to document the violence from settlers and soldiers that Palestinians in the West Bank expect every day. In my short time there, I took footage of soldiers preventing repairs to a house they had destroyed previously. This house is one of the 13,000 structures that have been demolished in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2009. The soldiers blocking the reconstruction ensured this family remained homeless.