I began my summer work living in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the former haunt of Arab notables. While exploring the Old City, I worked on a variety of basketball camps and youth programs through Peace Players International – Middle East, an organization dedicated to peace building through basketball. From the Arab neighborhoods of Abu Gosh to the Israeli neighborhoods of Beit Shemesh, I coached, referred and got to know children from across the Jerusalem political scene, from recent Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to Arab Israeli political refugees from the Mediterranean coast. In connection with this work, I traveled frequently to Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish city south of Tel Aviv, to do the same work.

In conjunction with Peace Players’ West Bank program, BasketPal, I also assisted a two-day event in the West Bank city of Tulkarm which drew over 100 Palestinian boys and 50 Palestinian girls. As the school year subsided in Israel and Palestine, I moved to Bethlehem to continue my participation in BasketPal by working basketball camps in Dheishe and Jelezon Refugee Camps as well as in the cities of Tulkarem and Ramallah.

In Bethlehem, I became a part of the Arab Education Institute’s Summer School of Arts and Communication. The aim of this two-week course in English practice and journalistic methods was to offer AEI Summer Camp participants the dual opportunities to look at the world through a different lens – that of journalism – and to improve their abilities at expressing themselves in English. The course began with a general introduction to journalism and what it meant to be a journalist.

After having established some general outlines of the role of journalists in society (in the words of the students, journalists are supposed to be engaged in “telling the truth” in order to inform the lives of “ordinary people”), the course split into a double track: familiarizing students with journalistic questions and problems while honing the skill of storytelling. For example, students analyzed two articles, one from the Jerusalem Post and one from Palestine News Network, detailing a recent home raid in Nablus for language usage and political perspective.

After a series of English writing exercises, students took a field trip to Palestine News Network editorial and radio divisions to meet with professional Palestinian journalists and see professional journalism at work. After watching a live radio newscast, students had the opportunity to speak with two Palestinian journalists – one male, one female – in a Q&A session.

The final activity of the course was a personal writing activity aimed at binding the job of journalists – “telling the truth” – to the personal lives of the students. Students were prompted to write a page-long composition about anything of importance to them. Without exception, every student wrote a short piece about their future – their dreams, their hopes, the many obstacles they face. The students recorded these short pieces that were then set to photographs of their lives.

It was striking to this humble instructor that no matter how hard I pushed the students to leave behind the Palestinian political situation, the occupation, and their general frustrations, these topics inevitably resurfaced. When given the opportunity to write about anything in their lives – their love for soccer, their dreams for the future, their families – every student returned with a story that dealt with the occupation, with the difficulty of achieving their dreams, and the difficult relationship between their identity as Palestinians and the hard life in Palestine. In an exceptionally plaintiff and poignant quote, one young man wrote, “I promise my dreams won’t cost the Israelis anything.”

While this class didn’t focus on sumud, or steadfastness, as an intellectual or emotional category, the students often returned to it implicitly through their writing. Their talk about persevering, about making a life in Palestine was in equal parts to their fears for the future. But what will remain with me is an under-reported part of sumud: the profuse joy of these Palestinian youngsters. While their mature appraisal of their futures puts their American counterparts to shame, their raucous laughter and strong bonds of friendship are the most powerful form of sumud, a promise to keep their intrinsic human joy alive no matter the situation.

While living in the West Bank, I lived with a Palestinian family and took extensive excursions throughout the area to interview Palestinian journalists for a project published by AEI called, “Stories of Palestine.” At the culmination of my time in Bethlehem, I instructed an English-language conversation course for agents of the Palestinian Intelligence and led a weekly discussion session with adult members of the Bethlehem community on matters from non-violent resistance to the occupation to American cinema.

My time working in Israel and in the West Bank offered me myriad opportunities to explore the thorny political conflicts in the region through the actual participants in these issues. Because I was working in the communities I was living in, I got “full contact” interactions with people who before would have only passed glancingly through my life. I had the pleasure of engaging over 400 Israeli and Palestinian basketball players, the 24 students of my journalism class, on top of the standard slate of passing friends and day-long acquaintances acquired through traveling through an area. I have had long, sometimes angry, always thoughtful discussions about the Lebanese fighter Samir Kuntar, suicide bombing, the nature of Zionism, and the way in which Palestinian youth think about their futures because my job put me into contact with those who I could have never met academically or on vacation.

I have read much about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. But to understand the people, to get a feeling for the way the Israeli and Arab “streets” are reacting to the political situation, it was necessary for me to engage the dispute on the same streets, in the same cafes, and, in my case, on the same basketball courts as those involved. Through the prism of my work I was able to look in on issues that were inaccessible otherwise because when you’ve read all the literature, there’s only one place to go: into the fray.