This story is about my sister-in-law, Juwahir. No, it’s about her car. No, let’s be honest. It’s about me.

It was a struggle to write it.

This Week in Palestine asked for a “positive” story about Palestine for their January issue themed, “The Common Good.” I could not for the life of me think of a single positive thing about Palestine. I went to sleep sure I’d miss the deadline, but I woke up with this fully formed story. It is one of my favorite stories of all time.

You can find the original here on pages 56-60.

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Through the Window of Juwahir’s Old, Gray Chevy

My sister-in-law died at the age of 40 leaving four beautiful children. Breast cancer moved to her lungs, then to her brain, and stole one of the kindest and most humble human beings I’ve ever known. Five years on, there is still a hole in the village in the shape of her life-force.

Her husband gave me Juwahir’s old, gray Chevy and told me to donate payment for it to people in need. I sent it to Syrian refugees in Jordan. I still try to do good in her memory every day. When it’s very hot, my daughters and I pick up old ladies who are burdened by kilos of vegetables balanced in baskets on their heads, or old ladies dragging bushels of wild thyme they harvested in the mountains. We drive them home and they bless us and we feel we’ve honored Juwahir.

But driving Juwahir’s old, gray Chevy through Palestine isn’t always easy. Through her window, I have seen a lot of stupidity.

Just last week I pulled into a parking space marked with the logo of the beauty salon where I had an appointment for an expensive procedure. The doorman came out to tell me to move — it was the private parking space of the owner of the salon. I looked up and down the block and there was no other place to park. I remembered my uncle in the US who had owned a jewelry store where excellent customer service wasn’t a matter of greed, it was a demonstration of integrity. “Are you really sending away a paying customer so you can keep a spot empty for the owner?” I asked incredulous. The man smiled as if to say it wasn’t his fault, but I was tired and stressed and I left in a huff. Yes, I have seen a lot of stupidity through the window of Juwahir’s old, grey Chevy.

But I have also seen decency.

There was a time I stopped at an intersection then inched forward right into a car that was soaring by. The only damage was to the guy’s hub cap, but if I’d hit the body of his car, he might have flipped over. That experience scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t bring myself to drive for weeks. My husband and I often walked passed the guy’s house, and he waved whole-heartedly and invited us in for coffee.

When the car died on my way to an important meeting just before the busy Sharafa Junction in Ramallah, I leaned out of the window and summoned a small group of young men on the sidewalk. They pushed me into a space in front of the bookstore before there was even time for a traffic jam to form. I hailed a taxi and phoned my landlord to ask him to have a mechanic meet me at the car two hours later. But in just 15 minutes he walked into my meeting, took my car keys, supervised the mechanic, and it was all fixed before my meeting finished.

When the car died between two Israeli settlements as I left my friend’s house in Susya in the South Hebron Hills, a man and his wife with what seemed like ten kids in the backseat stopped and filled my radiator with water. They followed me for more than one hour, refilling the radiator every couple of miles, until we reached a military checkpoint they couldn’t cross with their Palestinian license plate. Although I didn’t have his name or mobile number, I believe he was genuine when he yelled from his window, “Call if you need any more help!”

When the car died in Beit Hanina, I went into Ja’afar Supermarket to ask for help and ran into a friend who offered to deliver me to work – on his bicycle! I found a nearby service station, but the mechanic wasn’t yet at work. A neighborhood boy went to wake him up. He arrived soon, coffee in hand, without complaint.

Juwahir’s old, gray Chevy is a piece of junk but I can’t say goodbye to it because I can’t say goodbye to her.

Last week I had one terrible day after another. It seemed everyone around me was ignorant and incompetent and selfish and I just wanted to be alone. I dropped my daughter at her circus class and parked in front of Zaman Café where I could sit in the car and use the wifi. I guess I stayed too long because when I turned the key to pick up my kid, the car battery was dead. I collected my daughter in a taxi and brought her back to the old, gray Chevy where we tried to figure out what to do.

Within minutes, the shabab who work at Zaman and the shabab who work at Shishapresso across the street were in competition to see who could find jumper cables first. They accosted every single customer in their respective cafes, and when the cables were found, a small mob gathered around my car debating which bolt was positive and which was negative – it was a community affair.

For years one of Juwahir’s hijab pins remained stuck in the soft ceiling above the rearview mirror and I’d rub the white plastic tip when I needed strength and perspective. I’d imagine her fixing her scarf before she went to the health clinic where she worked or before she led a religion meeting for women, or before she popped into her mother’s living room to greet me warmly with her slightly lopsided smile. The pin got lost at a car wash years ago but I still touch the place it used to be.

Through the window of Juwahir’s old, gray Chevy, I have seen shooting and teargas and arrests and home demolitions. I have seen children sent by drug-addicted parents to beg at military checkpoints and women and children abandoned in poverty by cheating husbands. I have seen students disrespect teachers and teachers disrespect students and I myself have endured periods when I felt that nothing I did mattered in the slightest.

Then I remember Juwahir. I get into her car and go out into the world to do the work that has to be done. If I need anything, I just look at the world through the window of her old, gray Chevy, and I see good people like Juwahir. Ordinary decent people.

This article first appeared on Mondoweiss.

Tia, a Palestinian toddler in Qalandia refugee camp, looks doll-like, with a yellow bow in her hair. She only just celebrated her first birthday, but already Israel has intervened in nearly every aspect of her life. In a sense Israel even instigated her birth.

Four years ago, according to her father, Mohammed Abdel Rahman, an Israeli military judge offered him a secret deal. He told Mohammed to get married within 19 days or he would serve his five-year suspended sentence in prison. They also forced him to change universities. “They said they wanted me to calm down, but they interfered with my personal life and tried to provoke me.” His eyes suggested a maturity that is common among Palestinians who came of age during the second Intifada and who have served prison terms.

Now, only 24, Mohammed is married with a toddler and another child on the way, and already his life story reads like an inventory of Israeli harassment tactics.

Israeli occupation policies affect all aspects of Palestinians’ lives, including where they can study and how they get food. A recent NPR story on This American Life even documented in chilling detail how Israeli soldiers routinely invade Palestinian homes in the middle of the night to photograph children, ostensibly for security purposes. However, while teargas and shooting have become cliché in reporting about occupation, the cumulative impact of Israeli interference in Palestinians’ lives is rarely reported.

Mohammed knows the ingenuity of Israeli harassment tactics first hand. He was only 17, not yet a legal adult, when Israeli soldiers first came for him, claiming he was a member of an illegal organization. This video shows the day of his arrest; Mohammed says he is the one being put into the ambulance at the end of the clip.

Recalling the events of March 2, 2007 in Qalandia refugee camp, he said, “I escaped to a nearby house. About one hundred soldiers stormed the house. I was unarmed, but they shot at me. I was hit in the right leg and it destroyed the bone between my knee and hip.”

“So many people came to help me that the soldiers weren’t able to arrest me that day,” Mohammed smiled, “but they wounded thirteen more people trying to get me.” Camp residents told him that soldiers later shoveled over the entrance of the house where Mohammed was shot. Mohammed believes they sought to destroy evidence that he says proves that Israeli Special Forces shot an unarmed minor using illegal ammunition. Such incidents are not rare.

Palestinians, who are the world’s oldest and largest refugee population, are protected under various international laws. Yet Yousef Hushiyeh, Chief Area Officer of the Jerusalem and Jericho Area for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), said, “Residents of Qalandia refugee camp are subjected to many abuses.”

Mohammed spent ten months in the hospital as a result of his injuries that day. Dr. Ahmad Bitawi, who is currently director of Ramallah Hospital, treated him for a fractured femur with a platinum implant. “The injury was consistent with the damage caused by dum-dum bullets,” Dr. Bitawi confirmed. Although use of dum-dum, or exploding bullets, is prohibited by international humanitarian law, Dr. Mousa Alatary, an orthopedic surgeon at Ramallah Hospital, said, “We see gunshot injuries every week. About 20 percent of them are the result of exploding bullets.”

Mohammed was finally sent home from the hospital to continue his rehabilitation.“I knew the soldiers would come to arrest me. But it was snowing, which is very rare in Palestine, so I thought they would wait until after the snow stopped.” They didn’t. Mohammed was arrested the same day.

He spent 65 days in interrogation at Israel’s infamous Moscowbiya facility, a period so horrible that he is still haunted by memories years later. He found the psychological tactics—denied sunlight so he did not know what time of day it was; sudden, threatening banging on metal; frigid air conditioning after mandatory showers—worse than the physical pain.

“I complained to the woman from the Red Cross when she finally came to see me on the 30^th day of my detention,” Mohammed said. “She didn’t seem very sympathetic. She just wrote down what I said and gave me three cigarettes and some clothes. The prison guard took the clothes away as soon as she left, and I don’t smoke.”

In court, the Israeli military prosecutor asked for seven years, so Mohammed felt fortunate when the judge brought it down to two years in prison with five years of probation. Mohammed was still under 18 when he was sent to Ofer Prison and later to Naqab Prison.

Mohammed recalls that the Israeli human rights organization, Btselem, which regularly monitors the status of minors in detention, saw him twice—once in the hospital after his injury, and again during his initial court proceedings, but Btselem was unable to locate Mohammed’s file and couldn’t comment on his case.

As the occupying power, Israel is strictly bound by International Humanitarian Law (IHL), International Human Rights Law, and a host of other protections. Also treatment of prisoners is governed by international rules concerning the administration of justice. These include treaties, customary international law, judicial decisions, and general principles of international law, but violations are frequent and well documented.

“It is typical for Israeli soldiers to enter refugee camps without a legitimate military objective, which can provoke stone-throwing, to which Israeli forces frequently respond with disproportionate force,” commented Shawan Jabarin, General Director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization. “It is common for them to arrest young men, individually or en masse, and hold the suspects incommunicado. They are not read their rights before being interrogated, and are often denied requests for a lawyer.”

Lawyers who work with Palestinian detainees say that denial of rights continues throughout the judicial process. Investigators regularly ask judges to postpone sentencing so they have more time for interrogation, which can involve mistreatment and even torture, even when detainees are children. Only after information is obtained under duress and charges are filed does the suspect get access to a lawyer. But if the lawyer is Palestinian, he or she may not be able to enter Israel to visit the prisoner, who is often transferred to Israel for detention, a practice considered a breach of the Geneva Convention. Furthermore, lawyers say that it often takes two to three years for a case to reach trial, and since there are no provisions for bail, there is tremendous pressure on prisoners’ families to cut a deal. One lawyer concluded that about 95 percent of cases end with a plea bargain and outcomes that further curtail suspect’s rights.

Israel’s infamous administrative detention policy allows the authorities to bypass even the sentencing process: Palestinians can be held for up to six months without being charged with a crime and without any opportunity to defend themselves. Moreover administrative orders are frequently renewed, sometimes for many years.

In Mohammed’s case, he was sentenced, served two years and was released with five years of probation, as promised. But after six months he was arrested again.

“Someone turned me in,” Mohammed said. “They lied and said I had weapons but it wasn’t true. The interrogators tried to get me to agree to collaborate and become a spy for them against my own people. They threatened to imprison me for five more years saying that I violated my probation.”

Mohammed wasn’t the first person in his family to experience psychological coercion by Israeli military officials. He described how his older brother was in detention when he developed a growth on his neck. The prison doctor said that it was an insect bite, but it turned out to be cancer. For the next seven years Nidal was in and out of hospitals and at every stage Israeli intelligence services questioned him. More than once, Mohammed said, the interrogator promised Nidal treatment if he would provide information about political activists in the camp but Nidal refused. “Just before he died, Nidal was denied permission to go to Jordan for treatment, but the Israelis had already stolen all his medical files from our house, so it didn’t really matter anyway.”

When Mohammed went before the military judge the second time, for allegedly violating his probation, he was not sentenced to serve five more years as he had feared. “There was no evidence that I had done anything wrong,” he said, “but I felt they were all working together to pressure me to say I was guilty of something. The judge sent me back to the Israeli military intelligence agents and they tried to play with my mind. They pretended to be interested in me. They asked what I wanted to do with my life and I told them I wanted to get married and have a family.”

When Mohammed reappeared in court that day, the judge greeted him by saying “Mabrook,” which means “congratulations” in Arabic. “He told me I had to get married in 19 days or he’d arrest me again and sentence me,” Mohammed said. A lawyer, who refused to be identified, confirmed that Israeli military judges frequently take advantage of prisoners’ personal situations to elicit certain kinds of cooperation. He gave the example of a man, engaged to be married, who was released from prison for his wedding on condition that he would leave the country for a minimum of two years. Often, he said, prisoners with severe tooth pain are given pain relief in exchange for confessions.

“It took me three months, not 19 days, to find Rana,” Mohammed said, glancing proudly at his wife who poured glasses of soda in their kitchen. “But they [Israeli military intelligence] were asking about me the whole time. They knew that I was seriously looking for a wife.” Rana was 16 at the time of their marriage.

Rana said that Israeli military officers visited their home soon after the wedding claiming they came to congratulate them. “They sat on the couch in our living room for five hours pretending to be friendly,” Rana said. “But before they left, they broke everything in the bedroom and the bathrooms,” Mohammed added.

Ironically, Israel is under attack for its policies that impede marriage. They are not known for encouraging Palestinians to marry.

A few months later, Rana miscarried when Israeli soldiers let off a stun grenade next to their house in Qalandia refugee camp. “There was a lot of shooting that day, and our walls are thin,” Mohammed knocked on the plaster to demonstrate his point. “We were moving from room to room, staying away from the outer walls in case a bullet came through,” When the loud crack of the stun grenade went off just below their window, Rana felt a severe pain and ran to the bathroom where she started bleeding profusely. She had not known that she was pregnant.

“Rana was scared, so I couldn’t leave her. But I could see three young men had been shot in the street near my house. The soldiers were right in front of my door. It was dangerous so I didn’t go out. Later two of my friends died and I still feel guilty that I didn’t go out to help them,” Mohammed said.

“I grew up in this refugee camp, too,” Rana said. “One of my uncles was killed by soldiers and several of them are in prison. I’m used to it.” When asked why she married Mohammed, knowing his history and the likelihood that his problems would continue, she smiled shyly, “It’s my destiny.”

But now that they are parents Mohammed and Rana are more concerned about the long-term impact of the violence that surrounds them. “One time we were sleeping on the floor so my daughter wouldn’t fall,” Mohammed recalled. “She climbed up on me while I was having a nightmare about soldiers grabbing me and I pushed her away very hard. I nearly hurt her.”

Though it would be difficult financially, Mohammed and Rana could leave Qalandia refugee camp and live in Ramallah, where conditions are easier. “But,” Mohammed said, “that’s what they want. They want us to leave the refugee camp, and get a comfortable life, and forget our right of return.” The couple intend to stay put.

Mohammed conceded: “I did get married and I did calm down, but the Israeli plan for us isn’t going to work.” Despite Israel’s daily harassment and intervention in nearly all aspects of Mohammed’s life, and the lives of millions of other Palestinians, the Palestinian people still have their dreams and determination. Mohammed said: “They may destroy our lives, but they can’t damage our national spirit. It’s always inside of us.”