Playtime in Palestine: Police Brutality and a Child's Imagination

I've had the wonderful opportunity to watch a lot of kids at play this year in Jerusalem/East Jerusalem/Palestine/Israel, and often the even more wonderful opportunity of getting to play with them.

It warms your heart, entertains, creates a fulfilling sense of human connection far quicker than any "adult conversation" usually does, etc. etc., reasonably good workout, laughter, childish sense of wonder and imagination -- unburdened by the real world or any of the concrete knowledge of aforementioned world that you usually soak up as you spend your life floating around in it.

(Which eventually deadens you and leaves you a useless, gross, dried-up but otherwise quite worldly kitchen sponge.)

But on top of those things and that one unfortunately cynical tongue-in-cheek tangent, watching kids at play is also interesting and insightful in its own right -- partly because you get to see what "knowledge" the kids have already soaked up.

A lot of play, especially anything that involves some element of make-believe, can be pretty revealing of values, ideas, experiences -- whether they be based in wider culture, the kids' personal lives, or a wacky dream they had once. 

Which makes sense! As little human beings, they've only been here so long, and there's a lot to figure out about this world, from physics to biology. (i.e., learning to live with gravity, and figuring out what in the lord's name all that stuff that keeps falling off of trees is.)

And at a certain point everyone around them just assumes they should be able to name animals and identify colors and apply their abstract "counting exercises" to actual objects at a 3-year-old level, which is a lot of pressure and probably kind of stressful actually.

But as it turns out, one helpful study tactic is to take ideas/roles/identities you've seen or otherwise picked up on in the world around you and act them out -- literally playing with them.

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One thing I've seen this year is a lot of animals. (There was one month-long period where pretty much every day this boy would proclaim himself a lion/tiger/fox/dragon (depending on how he was feeling), and proceed to eat my fingers, often narrating for me while doing so.) Eventually that progressed a bit, and so after maiming me he would switch characters and be a doctor for a little bit. 

That all seems normal, and potentially more or less universal. Animals, ouchies of various severities, and people that fix the ouchies.

Then there's food! Thus every day of playtime in the sandbox ends up being an hour of "Let's pretend to cook things for Michael!" 

Child: CAKE! (nearly shouted, as they proffer some dish or shovel-full of well-groomed sand at me)  

Me: Ooh, nice, thanks! (*pretend munch*) (Turn to child #2) And what are you making? 

Child #2: CAKE! (Puts shovel up to my mouth, dumping half the sand in my lap in the process)

Me: Oh wow! What type of cake? 

Child #2: .... cake.

(The road to more creative interactions seems to be closed that way (occasionally an older child will sprinkle dirt on their sand and call it chocolate cake, but that's the only specificity we get.), so I usually satisfy myself by making really weird eating noises.)

(And I've gotten weirder through the year. I started in the fall as a very polite teatime snacker, and now I'm more like that grind-y garbage disposal thing some people have in their sinks.) 

So yeah, Palestinian children apparently see/eat a lot of cake. And they know what animals and doctors are.

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But here's an example of something a little more unusual (in relation to my experience) that I've come across. 

First of all, there's the interesting way the stories go when one of the boys rambles out long, vividly imagined but clearly fabricated tales of the events of the latest weekend. Usually something about his mom (or other family member) getting shot (or otherwise hurt or killed) by police and him then hitting someone with his sword (ostensibly the police officer responsible for the attack). 

Then there's this friend of mine and this not-horribly-irregular game:

(Here is link to the video elsewhere if you're having trouble)

This seems like a fairly innocent random playground scene at first, right? Complete with a baby eating grass. Well it is that, but what else is it?

A not-quite-3-ish girl pretending to be a police officer and shooting me in the face.

Oof. (My baby friend was, however, indeed trying to eat grass.)

Fun, right? The playground setting and the "playtime" feel of this sort of thing makes everything feel like inconsequential fun and games -- but then occasionally I think back moments to hours after the fact and it's weirdly horrifying. 

"ANA SHURTA!" --> "I AM A POLICE OFFICER!!!" She says, in a voice usually reserved for Godzilla or cheesy cartoon villains. (For the record, this altercation was entirely unprompted, the police officer identity just sort of gets put on sometimes -- BUT it is a somewhat regular "make-believe character" that I see. 

And yes. More often than not with that same voice and that same level of unprompted violence. 

"fee ayndak dam!" --> "You're bleeding!" She says afterward, in the same announcement/FYI voice she used one time to inform me that she'd noticed there was blood on my lip. In this make-believe scenario I can't tell if she's actually trying to be helpful or if I'm supposed to read that more as a "clean yourself up scum" type thing. Or maybe she stepped out of the make-believe for a moment so she could narrate and catch me up a bit.

Later that day she shot me a couple more times (this time with a "hand"-gun instead of the big orange-y thing.) (WATCH VIDEO HERE) I asked her why -- she seemed to think about it a little bit, then told me something along the lines of, "because you didn't understand." Which is sort of cryptic and sort of horrible. (But also funny because I didn't totally understand it as an explanation and I'm still not certain I'm hearing her right...)

(If I just managed to get video of these two specific pieces of a larger episode, imagine how many times I've played this game before without filming it. After many episodes of it, eventually started thinking about it and realizing I should try to videotape it.) 

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But why is this a thing? Why are these Palestinian Jerusalemite children's perceptions of police officers so starkly different -- and far more violent and manifestly unjust -- than the happy image of police officers much more common in my home environment of comfortably-well-to-do majority-white American suburbs?

Well let's see. 

For one thing there's the fact that the police officers in Jerusalem are Israeli. They speak Hebrew, and they have Israeli citizenships, and they have Israeli rights. Whereas more often than not, Palestinians in Jerusalem don't speak Hebrew, don't have Israeli citizenship, and most decidedly do not have Israeli rights. 

East Jerusalem is controlled by Israel, and its Palestinian residents are forcibly separated from the arms of their own government, the West Bank's Palestinian Authority. They're a marginalized community with crowded neighborhoods, horribly neglected by the municipality and all its services and funds. Also they're essentially under martial law. They can be shot and killed with only the slightest extremely subjective cause for suspicion by police or military officers, and there will be no questions asked. Even children of as young as 8-12 can be detained for long periods without justification and without real oversight of their treatment while in custody. 

Then there's the fact that the Israeli security and military sectors have a firm, unwavering institutional record for responding to non-violent protest with brutal force and violent suppression. This often succeeds at turning non-violent protest into violent protest, but even when it doesn't, it's not what you'd call pleasant. 

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So the thought process that led to this violent make-believe --> it's perhaps justified, but tragically unfortunate. Especially because I know confidently that there are countless military and security personnel in Israel that are wonderful people only trying to do their job and support their families and their nation. 

And without positive interaction with many Israelis, a horrifying image of "the Israeli police officer" can easily become the violent, terrifying stand-in for Jewish Israelis in general. Which is misleading and untrue, and also incredibly unhelpful for breaking down the massive separation walls of fear and hate and concrete that cut up this beautiful land into ugly broken inefficient pieces.

But we can't condemn this seemingly common image of the "horrifying, brutal and unfeeling Israeli with a gun and a uniform" without simultaneously recognizing the frequent individual, family, and community experiences that create this concept and give it a prominent and clearly-defined place in a child's imagination. 

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And it might be important for us to take this opportunity to reflect on my comfortably-well-to-do majority-white American suburban community as well. I grew up in a home where -- I might not have been especially excited or happy about police officers -- but I felt I could trust them. I understood they were there for people's safety, or, um, speeding tickets? Never quite figured that part out.

But I never felt any reason to fear them or to question the assumption that they were there to do good, that they were there to help. And most Jewish Israeli children probably feel the same way!

But that's not the case for many Palestinians, and that's not the case for many marginalized communities in the United States, especially in African-American communities, but also throughout many minority communities and probably in many lower-income communities regardless of race. 

And just like here, in Jerusalem with the Palestinians, our job is to open our ears, open our hearts, and seek out the stories of those around us. To understand, to bridge those divides, to join the slow work of healing those walls of separation -- wherever we are.

These two children are valuable and fascinating and loving individuals that mean a lot to me and whom I will miss dearly. (Even if Señor GrassEater below hasn't had enough time to fully develop into an "individual," per se.)

I will be going back to America in a month, but these kids won't. This is their home, this is their future, and this is their reality.