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Yalla é um podcast de conversas sobre a Palestina—uma luta contínua contra um sistema colonial que persiste há décadas. É sobre romper o silêncio, desafiar narrativas e manter viva a resistência. Porque é preciso falar sempre, independentemente do que o mundo escolhe ouvir.
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Yalla is a podcast that delves into the Palestinian struggle, examining the enduring resistance against a colonial system that has persisted for decades. Our mission is to challenge dominant narratives, amplify silenced voices, and sustain the spirit of resistance. Speaking out is imperative, regardless of the world's attention.
Today, we speak with Saed,
coordinator at the Aida Youth Center.
Born and raised
in the Aida refugee camp.
Founded in 1968,
the Aida Youth center
is a grassroots organization
that works with camps,
children and young people
through art, film, photography, music
and summer programs,
and advocates for refugee rights.
Saed is also one of the people
who walks visitors through Aida,
explaining from the inside
what it means to live
encircled by a wall, under watchtowers,
and at the sharp end
of a military occupation.
Aida is one of the most
densely populated places on Earth.
About 5500 people
in a few square kilometers.
It was established in 1950, right?
Right.
By Palestinians
who were expelled in the 1948 Nakba.
So, I have been to Aida
and Saed walked me through it.
While he was showing me...
I don't know if you remember,
but while you were showing me the camp,
the Israeli army fired tear gas
and we saw the children begin to run.
Afterwards, I ate maqluba
at your place, cooked by your mom.
The best maqluba I ever had.
So, this conversation
will be about that place,
that history
and the story of refusal of everyone
who is in Aida.
First of all, I'm really happy
you're here and you made it.
Me too. Thank you.
- Thank you for being here.
- You're welcome.
So, Aida exists
because the 1948 families
were driven from more than 40 villages
around Jerusalem,
Hebron,
and they were never allowed back.
Where is your family originally from
and what do you still carry,
or your mom carries,
from that village
that they were forced to leave?
So, we're originally from Jerusalem,
a place called Allar.
And...
There are some settlements, actually.
They still exist.
What we carried from there
is nothing but our inherited memories.
And the key...
Which is the key of our house.
Because Palestinians, during this time,
thought the shootings would stop soon.
They didn't even consider it a war.
Things would return to normal
in a few days.
That's why once they left their houses,
their villages, cities,
they didn't have anything with them,
like most Palestinians.
Others had money, belongings.
There were different
ways of how refugees lived.
Some in better conditions
and others in terrible conditions
because they had only their memories
and their keys with them.
One of them was my grandfather.
He only had his key.
And there was a very...
... crazy story we'd hear from him.
I always wondered how come,
within me...
I've never told this to my grandfather.
How come someone leaves Jerusalem,
the most beautiful place in the world?
But later, during the last war,
during the genocide
that happened in Gaza,
I understood why he left.
I understood the thing
that forced him to leave as well.
If I was in his place,
I would have done the same thing
to protect my family
and everything that I had.
So, once they left,
they had a last conversation
in Jerusalem.
They were cooking in their yards.
And he told my grandmother:
"Just lower the fire on this."
She asked why?
There were shootings.
"Just lower it down."
"We need to go to Jerusalem.
We'll come back, the shooting will stop
and we're going to find our food ready."
- This was the last conversation.
- Wow...
And you know what happened? We say:
"It's been more than 76 years
and the food is not ready yet."
Yeah.
So, this is something we have.
The memory of how the house looks like.
I know exactly how it looks
even though I've never seen it.
I know the names of all the streets.
I know the names of the trees
better than those who lived there.
Not because we live in the past.
No, because we are...
There is a difference
between remembering something
and someone forcing you
to forget something.
So, we are trying to remember our past
to protect our future.
It's not that we live there
for all this time.
So, yeah, that's what is left.
We still have the key
because we hand it
generation after generation.
And what does it mean to you?
It's memory, defiance...
The key, as I said,
it's not just about the past,
it's a reminder for the future.
It tells us, to everyone...
Because in the main gate of the camp,
we have the biggest key
in the world as a symbol.
This symbol tells us...
It tells Palestinians and the world
that we have rights
and we should not give them up at all.
It means that there are still houses
that were not opened yet.
It means that we have been deprived
of our rights, our freedom.
This is the meaning of the key.
It's not just a piece of iron for us.
It's more than that.
It's something that keeps us on track
to not get too involved
with the life that we have.
We have issues,
like any other place has.
- That's besides the occupation itself.
- Yeah.
- Despite the occupation.
- Exactly, so...
And this is to remind us
that we have something
that we should never forget.
They always kept saying statements like:
"The old generation will die,
the new one will forget."
This are the statements
that they keep saying about us.
- That's the strategy.
- Yes, but this is...
- They were totally mistaken.
- Yeah.
Every generation is more connected
to their land than ever before.
Even though
they have never been there.
But we still have this connection
inherited through blood stories.
And as it is...
Yeah, the land is part
of the identity and DNA. It's like...
- Exactly.
- It's there...
Every single time
I think of my home in Jerusalem,
I think of that stranger,
settler, who's living my life.
Knocking on my door,
taking off my shoes, sleeping on my bed
and enjoying the freedom
that God was supposed to provide for us.
This is every time
I think of my home in Jerusalem.
Someone is literally living our life
while we have been
thrown in refugee camps,
deprived of every human right,
living in poverty, suffering.
And they did not get enough
from kicking us
or uprooting us from our home, no.
They chased us to these places
and started killing us
in these refugee camps as well.
Yes.
And...
Something that I really want
our listeners to sit with
is that Aida
did not begin as a ton of concrete,
it began with the tents,
around 94 of them.
Because, as you shared before,
everyone, including the United nations,
treated the exile as a matter of weeks.
But those weeks became years
and years became generations.
So, families started building it.
And...
I remember that you shared...
Even with the wall
and the relationship of, for example,
the Palestinians there
and the paintings on the wall.
I remember you shared something
like the refusal...
There was this refusal to build
and a refusal
to even do artivism on the wall
because it was
not supposed to become beautiful.
It was not supposed to last.
It was temporary.
And...
Could you share a little bit
about that story
of why it shouldn't be beautiful.
Sure.
In regards to the concrete houses...
This thing, you know...
Firstly, once we had a tent, UNRWA,
which is an agency
of the United Nations, by the way,
established the camp called Aida
and other camps in 1950,
which means that we had two years
living in nowhere.
As I said.
Once, I asked...
No one speaks about this spirit.
That's two years.
It seems it was always concrete.
It's not two days,
it's two years where people lived...
I would ask my grandfather:
"In these two years, what happened?"
"What you were doing?
No services, nothing."
"You didn't have a house."
"No one would take you
into their house."
Because there are no houses as well.
What happened?
During these two years,
they lived in caves and mountains.
Whatever they found, they used to eat
tree leaves during this time.
And my grandfather said
the coldest winter was during this time.
They had no shelter and no roof.
That was the coldest winter
in his whole life.
Later,
the UN came and rented the land,
the camps, from local Palestinians.
They rented the lands for a few years.
One, two years.
But after a while,
they rented it for 99 years,
which told us what was really happening.
"Why are you renting this land
for 99 years,
but you're telling us it's temporary?"
There is the Resolution 194,
which is the right of return
or of compensation
if you don't want to return by yourself.
But nothing happened.
This decision
and hundreds of others of decisions
have never been accomplished
or achieved,
but it's been written
and agreed by everyone.
So, that's a thing.
In the 1950s, they started
providing the Palestinians with tents,
gathering them in places,
so they could come and eat
and have some shelter over them.
So,
Palestinians gathered in these areas,
because they started providing
basic food, like flour.
There was nothing during that time.
That's how the camps were created.
The people were urged
or they have the need to find food,
just like what happened in Gaza.
Then, once they started gathering,
they had a community.
In Aida, as you mentioned,
there are more than 20, 30 villages
and cities like that.
They came to this place,
which has different backgrounds,
different, you know...
They came from the cities, villages,
there are Bedouins, farmers...
This is diversity in one small place.
Your whole life
was lived in a certain lifestyle
and once it changed
and you're in a mix
that you don't know how to deal with...
What's their traditions,
how do they act?
This was something different.
Then, in the 1960s,
they started providing the Palestinians,
in the camps,
a kind of cement shelters, actually.
Cement.
And the Palestinians said no.
"We're not going to live in these houses
or shelters that you're giving us."
"They look so permanent,
so, we don't want them."
So, they rejected the idea
of living in cement shelters.
Then, in 1967, which was, you know...
- The Naksa happened.
- Yeah.
So, we had the Nakba
and then the Naksa.
Nakba means "catastrophe",
while Naksa means "losing hope".
This is the turning point
when the Palestinians
started to accept
those cement shelters.
Then, in 1994,
which were the Oslo Accords,
that killed the last hope of return
during that period.
So, we started changing
and building houses by ourselves.
And why?
Because we chose to live in dignity.
We chose...
You know, it was more than 60 years
during that time
to move from shelters
to something appropriate to stay in.
That's the thing.
That's how we shifted from this
to the shelters
and then to the houses that we have now.
That sound or seem
to be more permanent right now.
Yeah...
How do you, as a Palestinian,
born and raised there...
How do you hold
to both things at once,
like the need to build
or to search for resources,
or to build something more "permanent",
let's say.
And, at the same time,
without never letting go
of the...
... idea and the belief
of returning to the village
you actually own.
So, I don't see
any contradiction in that actually.
We need to live with dignity.
We need the urge to build.
And that does not mean
that we forget
our rights and human rights,
but we just can't sit
and cry in the corner
and wait for help from others
because it does not work.
We have seen that.
So, we have the urge to build,
not to...
I don't want to say
to have a normal life
because nothing is normal there,
but at least to make it normal.
But at the same time, we're still asking
for our rights, our human rights,
our freedom and everything
that's related to our cause.
So, living in a shelter
or in a permanent house
does not stop me
asking for my own rights basically.
Even though I would live in a place...
I would love it,
but I will never forget being displaced
or the place that I was forced to leave
or stolen from me...
And in the center, you keep...
I saw you keep doing a lot of...
I almost don't want to say education
because I feel that those children
don't even need that
because it's on your body,
it's on you as well.
But you have been doing
a lot of work to...
So, that they don't settle, in a way,
so that they navigate these...
Building your life with dignity,
but, at the same time,
always with your eyes set on liberation.
Of course,
you're right that it's in their blood.
But we still need to. Why?
Because there is a systematic way
to ignore these students.
Why? Because they are not allowed
to learn about their history
in their schools.
- Yeah...
- Imagine in a whole year of school...
You don't know anything
even about the Nakba.
- Because this goes against their...
- Their narrative.
Yes... You don't know anything.
If your grandfather
didn't tell you the story,
you will never know anything at schools.
Because part of the conditions
is that they aren't allowed
to teach about this
because they consider it hate speech.
Hate about your own history?
About being displaced, killed,
arrested and your home being stolen.
No,
you are not even allowed to learn it.
I was shocked once I looked at a...
This is recent.
It's from the last ten years.
I looked at history books.
Where are we in here?
Let's say we're not in...
Out of curiosity, what do they say?
- The history books.
- What?
Out of curiosity, what do they say?
I don't know. They talk about Argentina.
- Okay.
- South Africa.
- Anything except Palestine.
- Okay.
Every place in the world except...
Ok. It's nice to know.
- But what about our own history?
- Yeah.
I said: "Okay, let's not
consider it a history. The present."
Any other book?
Nothing related to Palestine.
That's why,
regarding the youth in the camp,
we had the urge to teach
and to educate and to...
To keep the narrative continuous,
generation after generation.
So, in the camp,
the first generation almost died.
We maybe have one or two.
That's it, from the whole...
Now, we depend
on the second and the third.
We have to keep this narrative alive.
For me, the occupation...
They don't really care much
about the narrative in the world.
They've been exposed,
everyone knows what they're doing now.
They are working
on changing the narrative
within the Palestinians themselves.
They want us to feel
that it's our fault to be Palestinians.
They want us to feel
that we are a burden in this place
and they want us to give up
our narrative, everything.
This is what they're working on
right now.
They don't really care much
about the world.
Their reputation.
Because it has been exposed.
They're attacking the narrative
within Palestinians themselves.
They want us to feel that...
That it's all our fault.
What we did.
Some people I know
actually start to think...
"You know what,
I think we are the reason."
- The reason of what?
- Yeah.
- "What did you do?"
- "I don't know."
I asked: "What did you do
to say this about yourself?"
"I don't know. Look around you.
Everything is against us."
- Stop doing this. Exactly.
- It must be something.
This is what they want us to feel.
They want us to feel
that we are isolated.
They keep saying:
"Look,
the world does not care about you."
"We are doing whatever we want."
So, in psychological terms,
if you isolate the victim,
you can actually win, basically.
That's what they're doing.
They're trying to isolate us.
They're trying to change
our narrative within ourselves.
They're trying
to let us give up our own narrative.
That's why it's very important
to keep it alive.
Yes, it's inherited, but we need to
make it more...
- Enhanced, like we say.
- Yeah.
And to stay more and...
Because right now, the occupation
is doing a kind of systematic thing,
which is they want us to believe
that the right of return
is not just impossible,
it's out of the dictionary.
So, why and how?
Because they're creating...
They can't kill all the Palestinians.
So, what they have done
was to kill the life of Palestinians.
Now, if you want to go to another city,
it takes us almost 20, 30 minutes or...
It takes more than six hours
between Palestinian cities
with their daily attacks, with night invasions.
And also, checkpoints everywhere,
the humiliation at the checkpoints.
Once I went to Ramallah,
a city next to Bethlehem.
It's almost 50 minutes away.
It took me seven hours.
I hated Ramallah.
Then I was like: "I hated Ramallah."
I fell in their trap, basically.
I fell in their psychological trap.
Ramallah is a very nice city,
but I hated Ramallah
because the way there kills you.
You're just standing,
sitting there without anything.
You see soldiers in front of you
just checking their Instagram reels,
and you are just waiting there
for them to search you, but nothing.
At least, you know.
They want us to feel
that a normal life isn't even valid.
This is a way to not let us
think about human rights or about...
Many Palestinians think:
"I wish the way was opened." That's it.
"I wish there were
no checkpoints between the cities."
They try to suffocate us
to make Palestinians
have their dreams limited.
Yeah, it's almost to make you...
Instead of dreaming
about your right to liberation
and your human rights, you just...
For now,
you just dream about leaving Aida.
Exactly,
that's what they're trying to do.
Many Palestinians,
unfortunately, fell for this trap.
Sometimes,
I don't blame them, because I also...
It's human.
I was also saying "I hate Ramallah".
Once I said it, I thought:
"Why did I say that?"
It's not... Why did I say it?
So, I fell for the trap.
They're doing this every single day.
In every single moment.
It's happening
so that we doubt our own narrative
and ourselves.
That's why it's very important
to remind ourselves
and to remind others
about the situation.
To not make it normalized
and to avoid thinking that it's normal.
I always say you should be aware
because awareness brings anger,
and anger brings change.
If you are just okay with it
without anger...
It's going to be as it is
and that's the thing.
And by staying in Aida,
I think that...
The wall...
One thing is to read about Palestine,
another is to be really there.
I feel you have to unlearn the world
because things don't function
the way you learned.
Things that, for any person on Earth,
not just for Westerners or outsiders,
for Palestinians,
as well, are not acceptable.
Anyone would say "what the hell".
I think the first thing I understood
with my body, and not just my mind,
beyond reading and learning about it
was the wall.
Exactly for the reasons you described.
Because we were using
Palestinian transportation
to go from one city to the other.
For example,
from Bethlehem to Ramallah.
We were in tracks that...
That didn't even have roads.
They were trying
to make the best out of that.
- To reach those cities. Yeah.
- Exactly.
You were talking about the...
All of that.
The watchtowers,
the settlements that you can see
on the hills,
the checkpoints and all of that.
You were talking about the psychology
of occupation and all of these...
When you grow up surrounded
by all of these,
your movement is limited.
Your time.
I understand the frustration
because time is life.
It's like,
you are just making me waste time.
From your perspective,
and not only
by being with these children
and young people at Aida,
but also what you studied.
What do these...
The wall,
all of these surroundings,
the checkpoints, the watchtowers,
even the limitations of water,
and the stuff
that we learned from you,
do to a child growing up in there?
What does it do to a child?
Yeah, to the next generation, you know?
Basically, as a child,
I remember growing up in the camp.
It was...
I don't recall any memory
from a normal childhood.
All of this is stuck in my head:
running, killing, blood.
Seeing your friends dead next to you.
So, I saw the wall
from the beginning of my life, as well.
And the checkpoints.
Somehow, you think that is life.
Once you are born in a place like this
from day one, you think...
- There's this...
- This is life.
Once you grow
with something like this...
When we went to school,
we carried in our bags
the burden actually, not just the books,
of our life as children.
So, I don't think
that we had a normal one
because, usually, the kids there,
and their mothers,
don't allow them to play
because their afraid all the time.
Mothers spend their lives
waiting by the window.
Just because they sent their child
to buy something.
Outside, a few meters away.
They stay by the window or the door
waiting for them to come back.
Because the option of losing
and dying
and being kidnapped, is always there.
Growing as children there...
It's like....
With their mentality,
psychology,
everything for them is different.
So, imagine you are born in a prison.
Someone was born in a prison.
This is exactly what happened
to the new generation.
They are born in this new prison
and they are forced
to adapt to the life in it
and to keep going.
They learn things they shouldn't learn.
They learn how to run from tear gas.
They learn how to differentiate
between the sound of bullets,
bombs or tear gas.
This is something
they shouldn't learn at all.
They should learn how to sing,
how to play, how to enjoy life.
But in Palestine, they learn something
they shouldn't be in at all.
And this also affects our choices.
Freedom is not just freedom of movement.
No, it's freedom of choice.
I wanted children, but I always think:
should I bring them to this place?
It's a choice I can't make.
It's not my choice
and it's always in my head.
I wouldn't want someone
to live the life I lived.
And this is another way
of controlling our life,
of restricting us like this.
This is how the third
and the fourth generation thinks.
This is always in our minds.
At the same time...
- Existence is resistance.
- Exactly.
These are
the contradictory thoughts we have.
Because we don't even have a choice.
We don't have a way to control our life.
The children,
once they grow and see the world,
they think this is part of their life
and there is nothing beyond it.
So, that's why
you always try to show them.
- We try to tell them...
- It's where the world ends.
Exactly. This is like...
If you're born in a prison,
they think that's life.
You know, the philosophical...
- Yeah...
- They say that's life.
Just a reflection of the light.
But once they turn,
they see there's more than a reflection.
It's the same here.
You'll never recognize
you're in a prison until you leave it.
I also knew I lived in a prison.
But, in my whole life,
I didn't see the ocean.
I saw more soldiers than the sea.
I didn't see the sea,
like a normal person.
Once I left Palestine, I went to Jordan.
I saw freedom of movement.
That was my first time seeing the ocean,
at the age of 27.
Imagine you are from...
Since your childhood,
you just hear about the sea.
- You think about it...
- And it's not far.
It is just a few kilometers away.
In some places in Palestine,
you can smell it.
You smell the humidity.
In some places,
you can even see it from far away.
From tall buildings,
but you can't reach it.
Once I reached,
the first time I went to Jordan,
and I saw the sea,
this was my...
Usually, we don't cry,
not because we're strong,
but because we live in a place
with a lot of sadness.
We suffer a lot of loss.
So, you don't even shed tears.
You have them inside,
but you can't shed them physically.
Whether women or men,
it's the same thing, by the way.
Once I saw the sea for the first time,
I cried.
I shed tears. "Why am I crying?"
I didn't cry
for something bigger than that.
"I'm just shedding tears now."
This was because deep inside:
"Why don't we have this life?"
Why can't Palestinians
have a normal life like this.
Why should we live like this
and not have an easy life?
If I want to go to the sea, I can go.
So, I was shocked.
Why is no one stopping us?
I'm here in Portugal
and I'm still thinking the same thing.
"Why is no one stopping us?"
"Is this normal?"
- You know?
- Yeah.
There are no checkpoints, nothing.
You just go walk
and drive and no one cares.
So,
I realized that the value of freedom
is really, you know...
It's really valuable.
One of the most valuable things
in the world
is freedom of movement
or just freedom in general.
I realized
why Palestinians are dying for it.
Palestinians are dying for it
not because they like it,
no, because they know
the value of freedom.
That's what I understood
once I left Palestine the first time.
And I lived two buildings
behind the sea.
So, back in the West Bank,
I was always trying to see
the see behind.
Where is it?
I lived in this illusion,
but I wouldn't leave the country.
I wouldn't leave my land.
Despite everything,
despite the fact that we,
every single day,
we considered it a survival.
Despite the fact that I looked
at the place where I lived,
Aida Camp, as a graveyard of dreams,
and also like a cemetery...
A factory of pain.
At the same time,
it was a place of aspiration.
At the same time,
we believed that our existence
is one of the main tools of resistance.
That does not mean
that we are romanticizing it.
Not at all. Nothing.
- We have no other option.
- Yeah.
We have to continue our life.
We have to carry on this way
and live the way we should live.
They are depriving us from everything,
but we reject depriving us
of our humanity.
That's what we are trying to keep
by living normally
or trying to live normally
under these circumstances.
Yeah, you were mentioning the sea.
Also in the...
In the last question,
I briefly talked about water.
I would really like you
to walk us through
the access to water,
what it really looks like.
- You know...
- In Aida.
Before I came here to...
There was zero water in my house.
I told my wife
we were going to have a bath in Jordan.
I was like "what"? Yeah...
The lack of water is a systematic way...
Because we have the resources,
the water resources in the West Bank
are enough for all Egypt.
We could have water efficiency.
80 million.
But according to the agreement,
they are stealing our water
and selling it back to us.
And they are limiting the timing.
- They decide when the water comes.
- Exactly.
Sometimes, it's twice per month,
sometimes once.
That's why we have
a lot of water tanks to save it.
To survive weeks, not a whole month.
If you go to the bathroom at home,
or have a shower,
you have one minute.
Family members
would tell us to leave the bath.
I would be like:
"I didn't even take off my clothes."
This is something we have.
You think 100 times
about washing your clothes,
because you need to drink
and that's the main thing.
If you would like to buy a tank,
a mobile tank as they call them.
It's really costly.
It costs almost half your salary,
which is insane.
So, you can't go anywhere.
So,
one of the biggest issues that we have,
especially in summer,
is a lack of water.
And not only this, in the camps,
not outside of the camps,
Israeli soldiers, sometimes,
they have videos of that,
when they want to have fun,
they shoot the water tanks.
- Just like...
- And air conditioner.
Exactly, to make it harder
to live in these circumstances.
Which are insane.
Imagine saving
a little water for the rest of...
And you end up losing it.
And in winter,
they make electricity hard to reach.
Every time,
they find something to hurt you with.
And also the tubes.
You showed me
the proportion of a tube
that serves, for example, a settlement.
The tube, and I'm not exaggerating,
is very tight to serve a whole building.
- With four or five families in it.
- Exactly.
So, that's the thing.
It's very small and in comparison
to what they have...
They have pipes
ten times bigger than ours.
And once water comes,
it comes through with weak pressure.
So, we have motors
to increase the pressure
and to fill the water tanks
within a few hours.
If you missed turning on your motor
during this few hours
that you have during the whole month,
you have to wait for the next one.
- Yeah...
- This is...
We can't have wells in the camp
because the infrastructure is temporary.
Also,
we can't dig for natural resources,
because they don't allow us to.
Even if it's below your house,
it's not yours.
- It's theirs...
- Exactly.
Because they own the soil, the air.
And the air.
This is according to the Oslo Accords.
That's why you can't even dig
for your own water resources.
This is a way...
- Or plant things...
- Exactly.
This is the way the walls behind you,
the checkpoints and everything.
And as you said,
there are seven watch towers.
You feel that you are watched
even in your home.
You feel there's a soldier in your room,
another in your salon.
They do it
to tell you they are always there.
We are watching you.
It's their way.
And all this for one reason:
to displace you from this country.
- Yeah.
To kick you out.
As I said,
they can't kill all Palestinians,
even though they had killed
almost 70,000 in Gaza.
Instead,
they just don't allow you to live.
They kill everything related to it.
And that's one of the biggest issues
that we have with water.
That was what I was going to ask.
What's the message
in those kinds of attacks?
It's really about what you were saying
in terms of
making you feel you don't belong
or that you're a burden,
that it must be your fault,
for you to leave, right?
To make it... I don't know.
Exactly, that's really it.
There's one thing that they believe in.
They want to uproot all the Palestinians
in any way possible.
Through any means.
In Bethlehem,
we have very limited space.
They're looking every single day...
We're sitting, speaking,
but they are stealing the land.
Right now, they are seizing
as much as they can from the land.
Because it's not just about killing...
No, it's even more than that.
It's the land. That's the whole thing.
And the resources,
like the lines they drew around the...
Even the water spots, for example.
In Bethlehem, there is zero green now.
There's a place called Solomon's Pools.
They're trying to make it religious,
but it has been built by a guy
called Solomon 1000 years ago.
It has nothing to do with our prophet.
But the name is similar,
so, let's make it...
It's a pretext to take it.
It's the last green thing in Bethlehem.
Like...
One week ago,
they said they needed to take it.
Even though it's Palestinian
and UNESCO...
But no...
This is what they're doing
every single day.
Yeah.
Something I mentioned in the beginning,
while you were showing the camp,
the tear gas came
and I watched children start to run.
And it's almost like...
It's not normal, but it's usual.
They already kind of...
I could see that...
We were the ones lost...
You could see that just by the sounds
that we're hearing,
they could understand
where the army was
and where to run to and all of that.
Aida is the most
gassed place on Earth.
Everyone has been exposed to tear gas.
You grew up with this.
So, what does that do...
Even to, like...
From the psychological side of it.
You know, to...
When every game has to, you know...
Has to begin by deciding where
or even if everything
you do can just be interrupted
during your day.
Once the tear gas has been shot,
everything is going to be interrupted.
You're going to start looking
for a safe spot
where you can't smell anything.
And also they... Sorry to interrupt.
I just remembered
that you explained that
even in Europe
you have laws regarding tear gas.
It's only used to demobilize big masses
and has to be in a super open area
and stuff like that.
There, there's a huge amount
in a tiny street.
Like it's...
I had a friend, from France,
and they were doing
some protests there
and they were shot by tear gas.
He was one of them.
Once he was in the camp
and suddenly
they started shooting tear gas,
he said: "What I smelled in France
was a perfume compared to this one."
- It's totally different.
- You can't breathe.
This thing affects
your respiratory and nerve system.
If you smell it for 15 seconds,
you'll black out.
This could lead to death.
We lost many people
only because of the tear gas.
One of them was a woman
called Nuha Qattamish.
A lot of tear gas broke into her house.
She couldn't run away.
She was 53 years old.
She suffocated and passed away.
And what happened?
Did they stop shooting? Absolutely not.
They did it more and more.
So, tear gas is a way
to make life unbearable
and to make it, you know...
We don't know
the long-term effects of it.
Yeah...
We're just being exposed to chemicals.
What happens?
It also affects the nerves of the...
The nervous system,
which makes you angry faster.
You're going to act
or react in a certain way.
So, that's something that we have.
Yeah.
And...
Aida is raided constantly,
but soldiers
don't only enter through the gate.
One of the most documented
Israeli tactics
is to move house to house
by breaking inside.
Through the walls between homes.
You described how they enter
not through the door,
but by knocking the walls between homes.
And like...
I feel it's kind of naive to ask,
but...
... besides this, and the impact
on those homes and families,
but also if you could talk a bit more
about the strategies
that have been used year after year.
For example,
one of the things that really scared me
was the new AI machine guns.
That can, I don't know, mistake you...
They can mistake you for someone else
and you get shot and killed.
So, all of these tactics,
do you feel like it's not even if...
Do you feel that they're becoming
more and more aggressive?
But what are the things that changed
in all of these tactics from last year?
One thing has changed:
every time, it's more aggressive.
That's something that can't be...
Here's the thing:
every time, it's more aggressive,
they're mentally destroying us
and that's how it becomes
and grows every single time
within like...
Since the Nakba, until this day,
they're always trying new techniques
to kill us with.
Or to make us give up.
Every time, it's insane.
Yes, the system that you mentioned
is called "knock on the wall."
In Gaza,
the system was "knock on the rooftop",
where they have
one rocket on the last floor.
They kill people in the last floor
as a warning for the others.
That's very humane, of course.
Another thing in the camps
started in Nablus, by the way,
in the Nablus camp.
The Balata camp.
Because the houses
are very close to each other.
Once we speak
about the Balata camp,
it's the same size as Aida,
but with almost 25,000 people.
Once I went there myself, I thought:
"What is this?"
- I looked at my camera...
- It's three times bigger.
Aida is heaven compared to this.
"How do people live there?"
Although I'm Palestinian,
I couldn't imagine life in such a camp.
So, they used it in that place
and then they used it in other places.
I witnessed this when I was young.
They wanted to arrest our neighbor.
Our neighbor
was living one wall from us.
We lived in the first floor
and an Israeli
came through our wall
and they entered our room,
where my sister,
my younger brother and I lived in.
We were very squeezed
in a very small room.
And that was my first...
That was the...
One of the worst things
that I witnessed in Aida, basically.
They enter your room
not through the doors,
but from a wall outside,
in order to get to your neighbors,
which is insane, by the way.
It took me four hours or more
to understand this is not a nightmare.
As a kid, I remember asking:
"Is this real?"
"Am I dreaming?"
Because even an adult
would go crazy seeing that.
Imagine kids,
9 and 10 years old, seeing such things.
Armed soldiers
and a collapsed wall.
My brother was afraid, for a long time,
that the wall, he was six years old,
would collapse on him.
He never slept near the wall.
He slept in the middle for a long time.
Six months or even more.
This is one of the ways.
Once they made that big hole, they said:
"Oh, it's a mistake."
- And they just left.
- Yeah.
They left a hole in the wall
and a hole in our minds for a long time.
That's why I had...
... the need to help Palestinians,
kids or otherwise,
who live under such circumstances.
But it's useless for me.
I found it's not really helpful
to bring the psychology or the methods
or techniques from the outside
and to make it work in Palestine.
It doesn't work.
I was like: "What am I doing here?"
Because the first thing
to treat a traumatized person
is to take them out of the...
... of the place of trauma.
Or remove those who caused the trauma.
- The two things...
- You're in constant trauma.
Exactly.
So, the trauma is constant.
I always say: imagine
you see a fire in your...
In someone's home and you ask them:
"What did you lose?"
But the house is still on fire.
How can I know what I lost?
Until the fire is out,
I won't know if I can fix it or not.
It's the same situation in Palestine.
The Nakba is not just one event.
It's happening every single day.
That's what we see every day.
Aside from that,
this is one of the ways,
but they don't use it now.
Luckily...
They used to bring a hammer.
Now they don't,
because they bring bulldozers.
The hammer is not convenient
for them anymore.
Like what happened in Jenin and Tulkarm.
They don't use hammers.
No, that's old fashioned for them.
They bring the bulldozer and they...
Which is insane...
We've seen
what happened to the camps.
I don't know if the world knows or not.
The two camps are almost demolished,
in the West Bank.
- I'm not speaking about Gaza.
- Yeah.
Gaza is a whole other story.
These camps are not even there.
They're not standing anymore.
So, they come
with a bulldozer to a house
and they have
to demolish 10 houses to reach it.
What's this exactly?
There's no explanation for such actions.
So every time, as I said,
they're more aggressive
and more destructive with AI weapons.
We have lost many people
and, in every attack, someone dies.
The last month,
during the last month and this month,
there was a person...
He's teaching in Bethlehem,
but he's from Hebron.
He lost his child.
I don't know if you heard.
She's was three years old.
She was in the car
and she was shot
and the cameras showed nothing.
Another was trying
to bring a gift to his wife.
She gave birth to their first child.
- He was holding flowers.
- Yeah.
He was coming back to his wife
and he was shot in the head.
That was just one of the cases
that happened as if it was nothing.
As if it's nothing at all.
Yeah...
I... Yeah...
Sorry... Yeah...
Talking...
I mean, I had
another question for you about this,
but because...
I do remember...
I don't know if it was you who said it,
but it was someone
around Aida and Dheisheh,
who said:
"Since we are born, we are dead."
And I wanted to ask if you...
How do you...
If in a way you believe it,
but in a sense of...
It's not that this
gives you strength to actually do
other things that people
who are afraid of dying or something.
Or do you refuse it totally?
Basically,
the idea behind this notion
is that once you grow, as I said,
you are always surrounded by loss...
You could be arrested anytime,
killed at any time.
You could be displaced anytime.
So, we feel
that our lives are temporary.
Even if you lift...
But you feel
that you are here temporarily.
Not just to come back.
I feel that happens with relationships.
Like, for example...
Attachments to friends or to...
We are always very cautious with that.
We're very cautious
to be attached to a friend
or someone else because it's in our head
that we could lose them at any time.
So, this also affects
our relationships with people,
with our surroundings.
Even with our belongings, as well.
So, this is something we do.
At the same time, it doesn't mean
that we're losing hope to keep going.
No, it's the opposite.
We carry on despite everything
and we try to lead lives
and create lives as well.
Despite all this, we keep going.
Yeah, you're saying that,
that you're all super cautious,
and I'm thinking about how,
at the same time,
my whole experience
was that you are all super loving
and super...
You show a lot of hospitality.
Actually, on the other hand,
you become friends
with your allies.
You meet them
and it feels like a lifelong friendship.
- You're always there.
- Exactly.
And hospitality in Palestine is not...
I felt it was not just courtesy,
it's like a...
It's almost like an identity
and a statement.
And just...
To wrap things up, and also I don't...
I'd keep going, but...
But what does it mean...
... to open your home, for example,
like you did,
to a stranger from the outside,
in such a besieged place?
Because for...
It's just like it was...
I think that for someone
who is an ally
and who is visiting,
it was super emotional actually.
This mix of being in one
of the most besieged places on Earth.
At the same time,
that moment felt frozen in time
or in that circumstance.
Now we're here,
eating from the same plates and living.
Like, this they cannot take from us.
That moment of sharing a meal together
and sharing it with people
who just believe
and who are allies
and exist in the community.
Yes, that's actually...
Our idea of hospitality
is something that we inherited,
by the way.
It's been that way for a long time,
even before these incidents.
They always say, they have a saying:
"Give to those who lack something."
In our case, it's the opposite.
We are giving the thing
that we are lacking.
We are always...
This is what made us
a strong community.
We have the knowledge of giving.
Once I give, I feel alive.
This is our door,
our gate to feel the meaning of life.
We have to give, we have to help,
we have to be bridges for others.
We have to welcome anyone,
no matter what...
To tell...
We don't have to tell,
we have to show
that there is a human aspect
to our life.
There is not only this shooting
and stuff.
We don't want it to take our minds.
We are trying to create another world
as a way to defend our minds.
To protect
what is left from our humanity.
To be against what is happening.
This is our way
to make a stand in this place.
Because we always believe in giving.
I give to someone
so they give to others.
So, it bears fruit and that's
how we make the community strong.
Hospitality, for us,
it's as you said,
it's part of our DNA,
we have to do it.
We should help because we know...
If we do, it will...
We don't want help back,
we just want to help others.
We don't need something from you.
Just think of it and help others.
We don't need anything.
That's how the community
stays connected in every way.
So, Palestinians are very welcoming.
That's our natural state.
We welcome everyone because they...
Once you sit together with us,
we're all human beings.
We have the same hopes,
dreams, the same things.
- Everything is similar.
- Yeah.
You will feel that you're out of there
and out of the whole thing.
- Even if only for a bit.
- Yeah.
But that's something we need.
We don't need to live
always under this pressure.
We don't need to always live under fear,
even though it's imposed on us.
But we are always
trying to counter it through love.
And once we say there is...
We have cautious attachment,
but that means we still love.
We still have dreams, hopes.
We still actually...
We would love to see the world
and have it see us normally.
We don't want to be always shown
as breaking news
or as a subtitle.
We want them to see
that we have dreams, hopes.
We are not just numbers.
We are human beings.
We shouldn't be in these debates
to prove that.
But that's how it's being naturally...
So, yeah.
- Shukran.
- Afwan Kteer.
For making the time to be here
and for all the work you do
at Aida, as well.
And I really hope to see you there.
- Inshallah.
- Inshallah.
- Thank you.
- You're welcome.
At Don't Skip Humanity,
we believe in storytelling
as a path for collective liberation.
At Yalla, every voice is a reminder.
A reminder
that Palestinians keep creating,
keep resisting,
keep living
and fighting for their liberation.
So, if you want to hear
more of these stories,
more of these voices,
and you also believe that these stories
are a way for collective liberation,
collective mobilization,
join and support us.
Thank you. Shukran.