Political conflict and military occupation bear serious consequences in the everyday lives of Palestinian youth. For so many young people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, life is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, life is the Israeli military occupation and there is no separation between them. After one of my many conversations about life in Palestine with Baha Hilo of the YMCA-YWCA Joint Advocacy Initiative (JAI) during my recent visit to Palestine with the JAI’s Journey for Justice Programme, I stood in complete awe of the depth and the breadth of his knowledge of the conflict.

“You understand so much of every issue, every angle,” I said admiringly, “you are like a walking encyclopaedia on the situation.” “Well, I’ve been living this for the whole 28 years of my life,” he replied,” it’s not just something I know, it’s something I live. I guess that makes me kind of an expert!”

The young people of Palestine, who make up over half of the population in the West Bank, are not only experts on the conflict, they are also extremely open about their experiences. They are willing to share their stories and they want to be heard. These are the children of the second intifada, the violent Palestinian-Israeli conflict that began in September of 2000. They have grown up in the jaws of destruction and terror, many having witnessed the arrests and deaths of family members and peers and the military-enforced curfews that kept them prisoners in their own homes, sometimes for days on end. These experiences undoubtedly left deep scars in the hearts and memories of many an innocent child.

As I listened closely to my Palestinian hosts relate horrific tales of the intifada, I couldn’t help but wonder: with the memories of such violence and chaos during a time when they should have been basking in the unassuming innocence and optimism of childhood, can these young people still possibly believe in attainable peace with justice in their land? Or has despair destroyed their hope?

Hope has been an elusive concept for Palestinians throughout the past 60 years. Time and time again, high hopes have been succeeded by grave disappointments, each pick-up and subsequent letdown proving to be more and more draining to the soul. As Mira Rizek, General Secretary of the YWCA of Palestine told me during my visit, “My mother still remembers when she left her home in Jaffa in 1948, she thought it was for few hours; she had complete faith that they would return home shortly after. But she and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians to this date are still being denied their right to return.” Likewise, during the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel, hopes again ran high with the idea of Palestinian independence and statehood on the brink of reality. However, violations of the agreements surged after Oslo, and parties on both sides raged, eventually culminating in the bloodshed of the second intifada.

And in Palestine today, while many of the youth told me the situation now is much better than it has been in recent past years, young people are living in such disturbing, saddening and angering conditions that it makes me shudder to think of what those recent past years must have been like for them. Children are being robbed of their childhood and pushed into politics at tender ages – along our travels in the West Bank, we met a group of four and five year-olds holding placards and chanting “Freedom!” in the street in front of the tomb of Yasir Arafat. Unfortunately, life doesn’t get easier as Palestinian children reach school age.

The Palestinian youth’s right to education is constantly under threat - students have been arrested on their way to and from school at military checkpoints, while others have been arrested during army raids on student homes and dormitories. Half of the educational institutions in Gaza have been shut down due to sanctions. There are currently 36 Birzeit University students in Israeli prison who have yet to be found guilty of any criminal act. And after the school years, the struggle continues.

Unemployment and poverty are widespread within the West Bank and Gaza, and there is little opportunity to envision a broader horizon. As one young Palestinian man put it, “We are living in a cage. If you were up in a helicopter and looked down on the West Bank you would see, we are literally living in a cage.” He was referring to over 500 checkpoints, roadblocks and road closures within the West Bank, which severely inhibit the ability of Palestinian people to move freely around their own territory. These restrictive mechanisms make daily life extremely stressful and loathsome, as Palestinians often must queue for hours to get through a checkpoint, and since actual passage through depends on whether the young, armed soldiers guarding the checkpoint decide to allow it. He was referring to the eight -meter-high, 408 km long Wall that snakes throughout the West Bank, illegally confiscating farmland, tearing apart homes and neighbourhoods, and looming ominously as a constant reminder to Palestinians of who has the power and the control and who does not.

The effects of living under such conditions should be obvious - Palestinian youth report overwhelming feelings of stress, frustration, and desperation in their daily lives…but have they all truly lost hope? After ten days of accompanying the young Palestinians, after seeing these manifestations of occupation with my own eyes and hearing story after story, I attempted to answer my own question with yet another question: “How can these young people have not lost hope?”

The JAI-PAL recognises the danger in lost hope and they are working hard to prevent that from happening. “Hope for a non-violent solution eliminates hatred, violent tendencies and sustains the belief in human rights, international law and justice,” says Ibrahim Hannouneh, Exchange Programmes Coordinator for the JAI, “This is very important for Palestinians and the coming generations.” “Keep Hope Alive” is the slogan of the Olive Tree programme, one of the many thriving exchange/advocacy programmes the JAI offers to young people worldwide. Through these programmes, the JAI works with both Palestinian and international young people to restore hope where it has been lost, and to weave together the threads of hope that do still exist. Through building partnerships, relationships, and trust between Palestinian and international youth, the JAI is helping to bridge the divisions that serve as the severed backbone of conflict and occupation in the Middle East.

One of the most poignant and persistent points I observed during my stay in Palestine were the expressions of absent trust between Palestinians and their neighbours, the Israelis. More than once, I heard a young Palestinian say, “I feel terrible saying it, but I cannot trust them! I could not, for example, live next to one of them. After all they have done to us, after all I have been through – I just don’t think I can do it.” Currently, very few Palestinian youth have the opportunity to meet and interact with other youth from around the world, and they certainly don’t have many opportunities to bond with other Israeli young people. In fact, usually the only Israelis a Palestinian youth will interact with in everyday life are armed soldiers and settlers.

Both the depleted trust and the restrictions on movement contribute to this lack of interaction. This separation and division serves the conflict and strengthens the occupation. As concerned youth, we have the opportunity to reject this division, to change the way things are. We have the ability to form relationships and to build trust where ignorance, misunderstanding, suspicion and hatred exist. It is up to us to form the bonds that are necessary to break down the walls – to envision, set the foundation for, and create the peaceful, just world in which we all want to live.

Trust is not always an easy thing to build, especially in a case like this, when it has been broken since before we were born. It will take time but it is possible, and there are actions young people can take to initiate it. Firstly, it is crucially important for young people to learn, to understand, to embody the truth, and to seek out this truth for ourselves. The best way to do this is to learn from one another’s experiences, to reach out and connect, ask questions and create safe spaces for discussion of the issues we feel are relevant.

Next, for people in a relationship to build trust, ordinarily they must define a shared vision, a common goal. An example: as young people, we want peace and we want our rights, and we don’t want to deprive others of either of these. Once we have gained the knowledge, made the connections, and defined a common goal, we can nurture our relationships and begin to build trust – and we can do this by showing one another that:

a) we are able and willing to contribute our knowledge and skills towards the common goal,

b) we have integrity and that our deeds match our words, and

c) we are concerned enough about each others’ welfare that we will not advance our own personal interests, nor will we impede the interest of the group. The more we show that we are truly committed to peace, the more trust we will have in each other, and the stronger we will grow as a movement of young people.

Throughout each stage of this trust building, we must raise our voices. World leaders must take into account the voices of the young people, especially those leaders who are profiting from this occupation – those who benefit from its existence, who have lost sight of the human experience in this conflict. We must remind those governments that we as young people will no longer accept division among us, that we will not accept the violation of our individual or collective rights, and that as the future leaders of this world, like one Palestinian student at Birzeit University said, “It is our responsibility to eliminate corruption in all of its forms.”

The Palestinian youth, in their own right, are the experts on the effects of conflict and occupation in the Middle East. Let young people everywhere learn from them and stand beside them in solidarity as we work to build trust, peace and justice among us and to keep hope alive.