PALESTINE: A Palestinian state in the creativity borders

Z is a Palestinian Muslim young boy, 25 years old, who lives in Bethlehem. 3 fingers are missing from one of his hands because during the Second Intifada a hand grenade exploded in his hand. By then, Z and his friends were engaged in going out in the evenings to play football or anything else just to defy the curfew imposed by Israel. It was their way of saying: "You are not going to control our lives". A soldier must have felt upset about this idea and hided an explosive inside a tennis ball the kids had been playing with. When Z and a friend went to look for a ball they lost, they found the tennis ball. "Look how lucky we are, and you thought you had lost it!" His friend told him. Z took it, started to shake it and when he was still saying "this is not my ball, it weighs too much”, the explosion occurred.

Far from frightening him, the event made Z look forward to continue participating in the resistance against Israel. He joined demonstrations and confrontations with soldiers throwing stones, but he did it without his parents knowing it: they never stopped warning and even threatening him against any kind of activism, like any father, "for his good." Z kept swearing he was not involved in anything. Until one day, in the middle of the second intifada, Z to find his father throwing stones at tanks in the same demonstration. The two looked at each other, surprised, and the father, feeling guilty, said: "Well, enough, let's go home." An awkward silence accompanied the two to the door, broken only when his father told him: "Don´t say a word about this to your mother!"

The fact of having been wounded during the Second Intifada makes almost impossible for Z to get a permit to cross the wall and visit Jerusalem. Even when he had jobs that guaranteed a permit for the rest of his teammates, he was denied it. The official reason: "Z is a threat to the state of Israel."

However, Z does not care and he finds the means to do what he wants, and if he doesn´t get a permit, he does it without it. He recently spent three days "holidays" in Jaffa (in 1948 the largest Palestinian city, now an Arab neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv). He put on shorts, a modern hat, an earring and he went to the bush at night. Already in the morning, he reached a settlers road across the wall and started to hitchhike (not uncommon in Israel). A farmer picked him up and took him to Jerusalem. "I said I was a Canadian who grew up in Italy, and the guy went all the way instructing me on how terrorist the Palestinians are and how little they deserved to live in “their "land," he says. From there, he took a bus to Tel Aviv, and once there, he found accommodation in a friend's home in Jaffa. "I spent three great days on the beach," he says.

During Ramadan, Z wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al Aqsa compound, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. He hid overnight in the bush, but this time it was more complicated. "There were many military jeeps around the area with lights and I had to hide under a pile of excrement to avoid police dogs tracking me." After a while, he decided to aim at the nearest settlement, Gilo, and when he was about to arrive, he found several boars. "It is not the natural place for these animals to live, someone must have put them there to protect the colony," he assumes. Once in Gilo, he picked up the Israeli line bus and got to the center of Jerusalem.

The Z imaginative forays have taken him to sneak in a kibbutz (Israeli commune) and get to sing and play guitar with the settlers, pretending to be Italian, or trying to cross to the Israeli side by swimming in the Dead Sea; the Police stopped him and he apologized by saying "I didn´t notice, it must have been the tide". His technique is polished: "When I'm on the Israeli side, I always carry maps and books with me, and if a cop looks at me and I see that he suspects, I approach him, I speak in English with a funny accent and unfold the map in his face. I tell him I'm lost and I ask him to show me the way. The cop quickly loses interest. "

Z does not cross the wall with the intention of harming anyone or "pose a threat to the state of Israel." Just as he says, "If you deny me my rights, I provide them to me myself."