Bassem Tammimi in his garden. Author's photograph.On a warm spring evening in the occupied West Bank Bassem Tamimi was looking over his collection of new plants — fruit trees, oleanders, climbing roses, jasmine, mandevillea — and planning exactly where he would put each one in the freshly dug earth next to the old olive and fig trees beside his house. Such quiet forward-looking domestic pleasure is an everyday scene anywhere else, but in the village of Nabi Salah it is a story of resistance in the face of theft and violence. Village gardens here are typically marked with decorations strung between trees from hundreds or thousands of spent tear gas canisters from the Israeli military's weekly attempts to stop the regular Friday protest marches through the village which have gone on for six years.
Every week sees the protest against the loss of the village's water and land to the nearby settlement. Bassem's own children's confrontations with masked and armed Israeli soldiers have gone viral on YouTube, and one of his nieces is Palestine's youngest journalist, blogging about each week's violent clashes and frequent arrests of youths. Late last year 22 were arrested, with seven still in prison while others paid a fine of 2,000 shekels (£400) and were released.
In one home we met a silent 20 year old released that day from prison. It was not his first time to have that harsh experience, his father, a polymath speaking four or five languages, explained. He went on to say that he could not forecast his son's future: “It is his choice – he is not a child any more.” Lawyers who work on these cases say that few young people, including children, go through these chilling experiences without being asked to become an informer for the Israelis, and emerge having to cope with the fear of their friends who think that they may have agreed.
