I was 11 when I first watched the footage. Mohamed Dura shielded by his dad from Israeli bullets. One moment they were pleading for their lives, the next they were dead. He was 12, we belonged to the same generation. The horror in his eyes still shakes me to my core 20 yrs later.

Those were the first day’s of the Second Intifada. TV channels aired the footage over and over again, and reported on other deaths ever hour. Israeli tanks patrolled our streets and helicopters were bombing our cities. Gunfire became our lullabies and lockdowns were our reality.

We tried going to Jerusalem for school but the main road out of Jericho had two zigzaged dirt mounds fitted with machine gun pits and the largest guns I’d ever seen. Negotiating that checkpoint became our daily routine. Would they or won’t they let us go to school today we asked?

My father gave my brother and I advice on how to cross that checkpoint which I still follow to this day. Back then I thought to myself “if they killed Mohamed as a child, they surely can kill me.” Now I think “if they killed Eyad as someone w/ autism, they surely can kill me.”

As a generation we carry with us a deep trauma living through one of the most violent and crushingly oppressive periods of Israel’s military occupation. This generation saw the ugliest of human nature and to what lengths a regime would go to crush and destroy another people.

This is not to dissimilar to what’s happening now in Gaza. A generation imprisoned for 14 years, never allowed to leave and growing up on the sounds of warplanes destroying and killing what is around them. It seems trauma connects every Palestinian generation.

I never asked for this. As an 11 yearold I craved normalcy, not military occupation, death and destruction. I want to live in a world where Mohamed would still be alive in Gaza about to start his own family. A world where his kids would never know a siege or the sound of a drone.

We have no choice but to fight and build that world. One where Palestinians are not subhumans, where our lives and bodies are not owned by a system that can decide to end them whenever it wants. Every Palestinian has a story of trauma, we cannot have that connect our generations.

For many of us from that generation, the Second Intifada infused in us the understanding that there is no peace without justice. We want peace and crave a normal life but not without freedom, equality, rights and being considered human. We won’t stop until we build that world.