A RECENT visit to Palestine as part of a fact-finding delegation of Britain’s teachers gave me the rare privilege of meeting some of its younger inhabitants. Unsurprisingly the young people we met shared many characteristics of their counterparts in the Britain. The friendly curiosity of schoolchildren in Nablus, the moves of talented young dancers in a Bethlehem refugee camp, and the ubiquitous garb of jeans and trainers were all expressions of identity that spoke of such similarity.

However, we were soon to bear witness to shocking differences between what shapes the identity of young people in Palestine compared with youth in Britain.

Around 2.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, with just below half aged 18 and under. While in Britain this demographic has many rights enshrined in law — the Children Act and safeguarding legislation for example — we soon found the daily experience of Palestinian youth, sanctioned by Israeli law, to be of one of adversity, oppression and, at times, tragedy.

The Israeli occupation shapes and governs their daily lives, a military state of affairs that increasingly points towards Israel’s ambition to carry out the internal colonisation of the Palestinian peoples.

The Nation State Law of July 2018 declares Israel the land of the Jewish people — only Jews are entitled to self-determination in Israel. The status of the Arabic language, the means by which Palestinians may express their society, culture and political will, was also downgraded, no longer designated an official language alongside Hebrew.

Opposition politicians within Israel as well as many critics abroad, including those representing liberal Jewish groups, have pointed out parallels with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In South Africa the Soweto uprising involved demonstrations and protests of schoolchildren, figuring strongly in our memory as a necessary and integral step in the path towards reversing the manifest injustice of the South African regime. If we mirror this image with that of stone-throwing Palestinian youth — an image that too often serves to justify all manner of injustices in the name of Israeli “security” — we must surely ask ourselves why these children too must be condemned to a destiny in which, as second-class citizens, their human rights are so often disregarded.

Education is highly valued by Palestinians, and yet the journey to school for many children can involve queues at military checkpoints manned by armed soldiers, with students waiting for ID scrutiny and permission to move on. Random closures of access roads frequently make both students and teachers late for school.

Watchtowers and security cameras monitor children’s movements as they walk past the barriers, fences, walls and barbed wire that are the physical manifestations of their containment.

We even bizarrely saw a security checkpoint at the entrance to a Palestinian nursery school, with the everyday existence of the mothers and their young children presumably a daily affront to the illegal settlers nearby. During a visit to a school in Hebron the unmistakeable rapid fire of tear gas canisters by Israeli military was audible, and we met a young boy who had suffered from a tear gas assault that very morning.

A video obtained by Haaretz newspaper in December 2018 showed Israeli soldiers deliberately firing tear gas canisters into a school yard in Hebron. How can Palestinian students flourish if the normal routine of daily life is never actually normal? Their identity is fashioned in an atmosphere of mistrust, prejudice and violence. At best they are viewed as “the other” and at worst as the enemy.

The security of home for many Palestinians is fragile. While numerous UN resolutions declare Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal, such unlawful land acquisitions continue to dispossess Palestinians, the ideology of a “Manifest Destiny” of Jews trumping the opposition of the international community, human rights organisations and the long held land rights of the Palestinians themselves.

We visited a home in Jerusalem in which a whole family had been informed of their imminent eviction. Having lived there since the 1950s, the father, his face deeply etched with worry bordering upon despair, asked us what could be done about the fate of his children and grandchildren under such a regime. During our stay the Abu Assab family were evicted from their home in East Jerusalem where they too had lived since the 1950s, when legitimately housed in abandoned property by the Jordanian administration of the time.

While Israeli law allows Jews to take back such once abandoned properties, it does not allow Palestinians the same right to claim back lands that they owned before 1948. Currently over 900 Palestinians are at imminent risk of eviction, as endless petitions reach the courts from new Israeli settlers — many of whom are US immigrants whose fervent ideology demands that they acquire land at any cost, brazenly disregarding the centuries-old birth right of indigenous Palestinian children, supposedly protected by international agreement. Other children we met faced the privations of entire lives spent in densely populated refugee camps, their families having resided there for decades.

At the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem 5,800 people inhabit an area 200 x 400m. Around 60 per cent of its population are aged under 18, their descendants evicted from 27 villages. Surrounded by walls and six manned and armed watchtowers, and with its expansion forbidden by law, the camp stands as an open prison for its youth, presumed guilty and condemned from the day of their birth. We learned that the camp has the highest number of tear gas attacks anywhere in the world. Protest is a natural and understandable defence against such injustice, but the price paid is high. A large placard positioned at the entrance shows a picture of 13-year-old Abdel Rahman Shadi who was killed by a bullet during a weekend of protest in October 2015, his dark, wide eyes staring unblinking into those of all who enter.

What does the future hold for Palestinian youth? The parents, teachers and representatives of organisations promoting peaceful change we met described to us the bleakness of their present state, citing the move to the right in Israeli politics, the lack of interest in compromise by most Israelis and the daily oppression of their occupation. Yet they also said there must be a discourse of hope for the young — they cannot face their lives believing they stand condemned to the cages of oppression, stifling their free movement, their human rights and their freedom of expression.

This is already what their parents have too long endured. For that reason alone we must listen to their voices and support their cause.

Abdel Rahman Shadi looks us in the eye as we leave the Aida refugee camp and asks us all: “I wonder whether the international community will bring justice to Palestinian children.”