A wedding, a checkpoint, a settler attack: the price of an ordinary life in Palestine

For one brief hour, we danced as if life were normal. Then the road home reminded us how quickly the occupation can turn an ordinary journey into a calculation of survival.

On Saturday evening, we dressed for a wedding. That detail matters. We were not going to a protest or entering a place marked on the news as dangerous. We were travelling from Ramallah to Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian village, to celebrate a dear friend’s marriage.

He is his mother’s only son, and this was the day she had waited years to see. Being there felt less like a social obligation than an act of loyalty: a promise to share a once-in-a-lifetime joy.

In Palestine, even reaching joy is never simple.

At a military checkpoint on the way, we waited for about 45 minutes. No explanation was offered and there was no indication of when we might be allowed through. Around us, drivers watched the road and the time. The wedding continued somewhere beyond the barrier; our lives did not.

We arrived late. But within an hour, the music had done what music sometimes can. We danced, laughed and watched our friend step into the life he had imagined. For a little while, the checkpoint receded. We were not people navigating an occupation. We were simply guests at a wedding.

Then we left for home.

On the road, a group of Israeli settlers – many of them appearing to be teenagers – stopped cars. They attacked the vehicle carrying our friends ahead of us, tried to seize phones and then turned towards us. They struck our car, shouted abuse and threatened to kill us.

Fear changes the scale of time. In seconds, I was no longer thinking about the wedding or the lateness of the hour. I was thinking about my children, and whether I would get home to hold them again.

We did get home. But survival did not restore the evening to what it had been. The celebration and the attack now belonged to the same journey.

People sometimes imagine that those of us who live in Ramallah are insulated from such realities. At times, we try to believe that too. Ramallah can create an illusion of distance: offices open, cafés fill and families make plans. But the illusion can collapse as soon as you travel from one Palestinian town to another. Here, distance is measured not only in kilometres, but in checkpoints, blocked roads and the uncertainty of who may be waiting ahead.

The next day, we tried to begin again. We took our children to watch the World Cup final. Across the world, millions were sharing the same ritual: families gathered around screens, strangers cheered together, and for a few hours football offered the comfort of a common language.

Before the match was over, ambulance sirens cut through the evening. News spread that two young Palestinian men had been killed in nearby Deir Jarir after a reported settler raid. The screens were switched off. People stood and left quietly. While much of the world waited to celebrate a champion, two Palestinian families were beginning to mourn their sons.

Only then did the shape of those two days become clear to me. The checkpoint, the attack on the road and the killings were not separate interruptions to ordinary life. They were expressions of the same system – one that reaches into the most intimate parts of Palestinian existence and makes safety provisional.

Occupation is often discussed through abstractions: territory, security, negotiations and borders. But its power is also exercised in smaller, relentless ways. It determines whether you reach a wedding on time, whether you take your children to a football match, whether a short drive ends at home. It inserts fear into the planning of ordinary life.

It also distorts the instinct to protect yourself. When you are attacked, you know that defending yourself may cause the story to be reversed: the victim can become the accused. So even in danger, you calculate. How do I get away? How do I keep the people with me safe? How do I survive without being blamed for trying to survive?

This is why the ordinary things matter so much. A wedding, a football match, a family visit, a photograph taken to preserve a happy moment – these are not trivial escapes from politics. They are the threads from which we make a human life. To keep choosing them is to insist that Palestinians are more than the violence imposed on us.

What we live through is not a war in the conventional sense: a rupture with a clear beginning and an imaginable end. It is a condition within which life must continue. We work, raise children, fall in love, celebrate marriages and plan for tomorrow while carrying a question that is rarely spoken aloud: how much of what we build today will still be standing by nightfall?

And yet we will keep going to weddings. We will keep sitting beside our children to watch football. We will keep making plans.

This is not because we are fearless. It is because a life organised entirely around fear is another thing the occupation would take from us. Hope, in such a place, is not naïveté. It is discipline. It is the decision to remain human when daily life is designed to make humanity feel impossible.

We choose life because freedom is not a privilege to be granted to some and withheld from others. It is the minimum every human being deserves.

We are still here. And we intend to live.