Mothers worry all the time. She sat behind the counter, busy with paper work. Her boss, who lost sight in one eye when he was hit with a rubber bullet, was speaking to us about their organization, which provides free wheelchairs and crutches to thousands of those wounded. It ’s easy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time if you are a Palestinian living anywhere in the West Bank or Gaza. I was leading another Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation to the land of sorrows, visiting health care professionals on both sides of the conflict to gather information about those who occupy themselves with healing broken bodies and souls. We had just come from a women ’s center where the director told us about her daughter who volunteers in a youth ambulance corps. Her daughter comes home and pulls a finger out of her pocket, which she found in the street after an incursion, and wants to know how to return it. Muslim sensibility like Jewish sensibility demands that all the parts of the body are buried together. I have to find out to whom it belongs. She tells her mother who does not know how to keep her daughter from the extreme risk-taking which is all too common among Palestinian youth. Death is all around them, and they don ’t know how to stop it, she says.

I walk over to a woman behind the counter surrounded by stacks of crutches and greet her with “salaam” and ask if I might be able to interview her for a few minutes about the Occupation and she agrees. I sit down.

“What is the most difficult aspect of the Occupation for you,” I ask. Tears well up in her eyes and I immediately regret stirring up her pain. “It’s okay,” she says. “The hardest part is coming to work because I have to pass through two checkpoints. I have two sons, one ten years old and the other fourteen. It is so difficult. The younger one never wants to let go. He pees in his bed every night, is frightened by noise, and cries and screams every day when I go to work. Once I take him to school, he ’s better, but all the children are easily terrified. My elder son refuses to go to school. Every day I argue with him before he finally leaves the house. He prefers to stay at home and play video games. I tell him education is important. He says, ‘Why bother, they’re going to kill me anyway.’ I sent him to a peace camp before the intifada, but those days of hope are over. ‘How can I be friends with people who put on a uniform the next day and shoot at me? ’ he asks. I wake up at two every morning, my heart pounding. I start to worry in the middle of the night. I try not to think about it but I am scared to leave my children, scared I will not make it home, scared something will happen to them. Sometimes, if the situation is really dangerous at the checkpoint, I walk through the hills, which takes hours, and then my children worry even more. Some days, ” she says, her eyes overflowing with tears, “I think perhaps it would have been better if they had never been born. Tell me, what can I do? ” Both of us are crying, we hold hands in the silence of her question.

As always, after listening to the testimony of survivors, I am speechless. I carry thousands of stories in my heart, as I have been listening to both Palestinian and Jewish survivor accounts since 1966; when I first heard the story of the Nakba from the lips of Atallah Mansour. I always wonder which terrible rendition of loss and grief will tip the balance of scales so that a flood of compassion will wash away our fear and create the resolve to not turn away. In times of profound sadness, I gather up seeds of hope from the tears of those Israeli Jews and Palestinians, who in spite of the worst kind of loss, nonetheless, reach out to each other for the sake of peace, and then take their message of reconciliation to anyone who will listen. Aware of all the complexities, they refuse to be enemies, they speak out against occupational brutalities, construct bridges across the abyss. For the sake of our children, how can we not do the same?