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The West Bank’s war symphony

20 August 2026, Mariam Barghouti, https://newint.org/peace/2026/letter-ramallah-war-symphony?utm_source=ni-email-whatcounts%20&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2026-08-21%20enews%20-%2021%20Aug%202026%20enews&utm_content=1%20NI%20Main%20List1%20-%20enews%20-%20International%20AND%20North%20America

Mariam Barghouti explores how the Israeli occupation is transforming the landscapes and soundscapes of the West Bank, and the silence left in its wake.

The Israeli occupation doesn’t just happen through laws, military checkpoints, army raids and expanding settlements; it also seeps into and transforms our entire sensory world.

On a drive from Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, to Ramallah, in the centre, I had a jarring realization of how much the Palestinian landscape had changed.

I was returning from an assignment covering the largest mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967. It was dark and late, and all that was in front of me were hundreds of Israeli flags planted by aggressive settlers in the last year. The blue and white flags not only adorned the streets, but acted like lines prepped for a butcher’s cleaver.

New Israeli roads that did not exist months ago now cut through our towns and cities. Home not only looks unfamiliar, it feels like corridors carved for someone else’s future. In the car, I broke down in tears. ‘Please, God. Please, get me home safe,’ I prayed. I’ve driven these roads my whole adult life, and now they feel like death traps.

I put on my high-beam headlights, hoping that if Israeli settlers were attacking Palestinian cars they wouldn’t be able to catch my license plate. I managed to get home safely, but I did not return to Jenin for months.

The daily experiences in the West Bank requires a reconfiguring of our understanding of war. War is not just murdering people and obliterating cities. It’s also the banalities that transform our entire engagement with space, and ourselves.

Sometimes, war is in the acoustics. At any given moment, the skies of the West Bank rumble with mechanical sounds of Israeli drones. They don’t just watch us, they are intentional intrusions on daily life. The monotone buzz creeps closer, then hovers away. The drone is now part of our architecture, sitting in our living rooms, interrupting us in our bedrooms and holding us hostage in our cars.

It is not only the violence of aggressive sounds that is striking, but the noises gradually disappearing beneath.

There was a time when the laughter and cries of children playing outside used to fill my afternoons and evenings. As land annexation stole any recreational spaces for Palestinian children, the streets were the only place left to wander and play. I heard their arguments through my apartment walls. Someone would fall while playing, another would get angry with his friend for not sharing his bike. But mostly, it was laughter and their mothers calling them to come back indoors.

Over the months, and then years, that changed. As the drones got louder, the children got quieter. Rather than cry over a scratched knee, they’re training themselves to survive bullets.

When reporting on Israeli raids, I encounter Palestinian children who can confidently identify the bangs we hear outside. ‘That’s not a stun grenade,’ a 10-year-old explained to me, ‘that’s teargas.’ Over the last two years, their knowledge has expanded. ‘That’s live ammunition, likely a 22-calibre.’ ‘That’s a dumdum bullet, the kind that explodes inside you,’ they tell me. When I visit hospitals to verify information on the wounded, I often find that the kids are right.

Palestinian children have developed an acoustic literacy of occupation because their survival depends on it. Perhaps that’s why, when I do hear them playing, children are pretending to be Israeli soldiers carrying out a raid.

The defining sound of war and the occupation is not the drones or even explosions, but the silence that follows. It is the absence of children playing in the streets.

August 25, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, PERSONAL STORIES