Jacob Burns

He has been fighting for eleven months and talks with bitterness about the conditions in the dry hills where the front line is. He scrolls past pictures of himself posing with his rifle to find the pictures of his daughter, who is back in Aden, back down the road, back where he is from. Visibly upset, he pauses to collect himself.

The violence had been minor, in the grand scheme of things, though unprovoked. Yet the figure of the masked man, prowling round the car, seemed to stand in for a much greater violence. The texture of it is hard to capture, but it suffuses Palestinians’ experiences of the occupation. It is the violence of that moment in which your life is not your own, in which a car full of young people on the way home from a night out, flushed with all the pleasure of youth, is transformed into a threat, and they haven’t even realized.