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I grew up in an anti-apartheid household in Toronto. My parents met
while my father was touring southern Africa as part of a Canadian
anti-apartheid organisation, building links with postcolonial African
socialist states and the South African liberation movement. On long car
journeys, our family would mix Nelson Mandela’s autobiography with Just
William children’s story tapes, and my parents would occasionally hire a
babysitter so they could attend organising meetings for the
international boycott campaign against South Africa.

As much as I was taught about apartheid, the violence of
segregation, and the brutality of a state designed only to serve a
settler population, I didn’t experience it first-hand until I moved to
Ramallah in 2007.

Going to Jerusalem through the Qalandia terminal checkpoint and
watching the soldiers harass and degrade Palestinians with Jerusalem IDs
– while most of my Ramallah friends were barred from travelling there
altogether – was the first I saw of state-run segregation. Walking
through the Balata refugee camp on the edge of Nablus was the first
township-style ghetto I set foot in. Seeing the Palestinian Authority
beat anti-Bush demonstrators in the street during the former president’s
visit in 2008 was my first real taste of the bitterness of
Inkatha-style divide-and-rule.

In Ramallah I was regularly woken... >>>