Jane as Sanabel

In everything that the Israelis do, such as kicking my family out of their house in Israel and putting my dad in jail, they are trying to send us messages: we will never come back to our land, they own our land, and it's as if we never lived there. They are powerful and we, the Palestinians, are weak. When the Israelis took our house, they sent us to the crowded Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, not the most pleasant place to live. I've never even been to my family's village, although I've heard many stories about it, and it has been vividly described to me so that when I close my eyes I can see every house, every tree. My dad is in a jail in Israel even though he has never been convicted of a crime. I'm allowed to visit him on visiting days, but the process to get to him is tiring and slow. I ride a Red Cross bus with all the other prisoners' families for several hours. Then, I have to wait more in the hot sun with no bathrooms available. Then, finally, I get to yell at my dad through a wire mesh fence for only thirty minutes. After that, I have to get back on the bus and go home. The Israelis don't understand what they are putting us through. Young children, such as myself, have lives full of hardship and fear. At least everyone in my family has their own bed, unlike some families with seven or more people on mats in one room. It seems like Israelis come into the West Bank and shoot someone almost every week. They use chemical weapons illegally, and I have seen the white phosphorus burns on several of my neighbors. People call Palestinians "terrorists," but they don't understand that it's the Israelis who are torturing us.

—Sanabel is a third-generation Palestinian refugee, living in the Deheishe refugee camp in the West Bank. She comes from a family of "modern" secular Arabs and expresses her feelings in a manner uncharacteristic for a girl in a conservative Islamic society. Sanabel is training to be a folk dancer and wants to use traditional Palestinian dance to tell the story of the story of her people. Her father, an outspoken journalist, has been held in an Israeli prison for two years without trial. She rises with her family at dawn to travel to the prison for their bi-monthly 30-minute visit.