We sat in a beautiful room, around 50 of us. Jews and Arabs together, as is usual wherever we go these days. It’s our normality, living in a shared and equal society.

We watched the Oscar-winning documentary, ‘I Have No Other Land,’ in the horrified silence it deserves. How many times have I heard from my students, from friends, from colleagues, from Israelis, ‘We’re not the terrorists here. We don’t intentionally murder Arabs.’ Well, my friends, I watched settlers shoot and kill a man who was simply running in the street, trying to defend his home. I watched soldiers (yes, soldiers, those people who are supposed to protect the people who live here) drag women away from their homes, shoot male protestors, push little children down to sit and watch their homes being demolished by bulldozers.

I recently told a friend about a primary school in the West Bank, burned down by settlers. What had the Arabs done to them? she asked. Sensible question. Because that’s what we expect of our Jews. To defend themselves against attack from the Arabs who hate us. And yet in the case of the Palestinians who have lived on this land for generations, it is very much the other way around. The Jews are attacking the Arabs, because they don’t want them ‘taking over’; the army tells them they need the land, it’s to be used for training. These people must leave their homes. But not only leave. Their homes are broken into, smashed, trashed, destroyed, sometimes with live chickens, furniture, full kitchens still inside. They sometimes don’t and usually barely have time to pack up and get out.

And every day, every night, because they rebuild their homes on the land their parents and their parents before them and their parents before them have lived on for hundreds of years, and they are not prepared to give it up, they wait again for the next demolition programme, the next set of........

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