Learning about
#Solidarity
How my son is learning to build relationships
Little dust clouds popped up and floated over the workers as Alex and Ahmed used all their strength to lift up and drop their shovels into the pile of fill dirt. Just as kids are apt to do, they joined in with what everybody else was doing. Unable to speak fluently to each other, yet understanding the need to be strategically deliberate about their work, Ahmed, seven-years-old and the local Bedouin boy, took Alex by the hand to different parts of the hill which appeared to be the easiest to dig into.
Since Ahmed was born, his experience with Israelis, in general, has been shaped by Israeli soldiers leading armored vehicles into his community to pave the way for buzzdozers to come in unimpeded and demolish the homes of his family members. He has carried the pain of watching his community oven, the main source of village food, demolished and leaving an entire community without the means to feed themselves. He was been awakened out of the dead of night, as Israeli settlers have tossed rocks onto his community’s homes. He has basically only known Israelis from the lens of the violence they inflict on his community.
For Ahmed, like other bedouins, even at his young age, he took a lot of pride in having a foreigner come into his village and making sure he was taken care. I think also for Ahmed, there was also the additional layer of Alex being an Israeli Jew and what that meant for him to be able to work with him in this little embattled village. In the village of Um al-Khair, the leader of the Hathaleen tribe, Suliman, has one important rule that governs the treatment of foreigners: Always make them feel welcomed.
“Even if it’s the Shabak (the Israeli intelligence), my uncle Suliman says we are to offer them tea,” says Tareq Hathaleen, one of the local activists here. “Some of this is our religion (Islam), but some of this is just the Bedouin culture. This is something that we learn at a very young age here.”
While it is easy to exotify the experience of children and turn it into a mystical experience because after all, children who are five and seven years old aren’t really in the thralls of identity politics. But for Ahmed, a young Palestinian who lived in a village that has been razed 13 times, his life has been formed on the frontlines of Israel’s colonial project.
For Alex, whose center of life is within the Jewishness of West Jerusalem, whose second language is Hebrew, who by Bedouin standards lives a life of luxury, realized that there were stark differences between his life and those of the kids around him: no paved roads, no grass, outside bathrooms, a little playground in desperate need of investment.
There were layers of dynamics at play. There was the element of parenting, where there was an opening for me to talk about the differences of Um al-Khair and the neighborhood where Alex lives and why there is that disparity. Explaining that in terms of what a five-year-old can understand, while at the same time, not demonizing an entire people I’ve come to realize isn’t a solidarity moment, but rather an ongoing conversation.
There was the component of the people from Um al-Khair looking to how much trust I was going to give them with Alex. They were watching me see how far I was going to let Alex out of my sight, if I was going to intervene when other kids were playing with him, if I was going to expect him to work with the other kids or let him play a game on my phone.
Then there was Spanish delegation that I led there, a group of volunteers that had come to a country to better understand the dynamics of the conflict and wanted to better understand what Israeli-Palestinian solidarity looks like. They too wanted to see how Alex was going to be interacting in this environment and how the Bedouin community was going to interact with him.
In that moment, between those little puff clouds of dirt, you could see how in many ways the whole world was in Alex’s and Ahmed’s hands waiting to be molded. Those dust blooms represented change. It was reaffirmation of parenting, in how everything we do has to be with the intention of creating spaces to break down the systems of oppression and make an environment where authentic relationships can be built on mutual respect and authentic vulnerability. But just as importantly, this must be done in the confines of contributing tangibly to the lives of those who are living under oppression, in the ways in which they request.
What I want my son to learn is: Yes, build relationships of all kinds, despite what those around you may say — but do in a way in which you add to their lives. This was a lesson my dad taught me: If a friend is in need, and you wish them luck, feel sorry for them, or lift them up in prayer without actively trying to help them with their problem, you have done little — or perhaps nothing. And while yes, although my son is only five years old, these are lessons he is already learning.
