I have had friends who spent months in solitary confinement in Israeli prisons. I have had friends whose older brothers were shot dead on their university campus by the Israeli army because they broke the curfew to turn in a final project the evening it was due. I have had friends whose brothers died as fighters. I knew a window shop mechanic who proudly pointed to a martyr poster on the wall and told me it was his cousin. I knew a boy who at the age of two saw a man shot through the head.

And I have known hundreds more who resolved to live and love in the face of it all, to fight despair with laughter and camaraderie, to carry on like any other normal person, like everyone anywhere should have a right to do.

I realize now, so many years later, that I had known all along these people existed; it just takes a little imaginative empathy and a moment of honesty to admit to one's self that such people surely exist, their stories surely true. In Palestine, in Israel, in all places of the world where suffering and injustice are found.

I went to Palestine in part to try to make amends in some tiny intangible way, but mostly I went to meet the people I already knew were there, because I hoped that once I could know them as living breathing human beings, the memory of their friendship and acquaintanceship would seal in me the moral responsibility I owe to them and to everyone anywhere who has endured as much or worse.

My memories of Palestine will keep me honest, and inshaallah will keep me on a path to do some good in the world.