Figs, Bread and Rage

Figs, Bread, and Rage, along with a cup of cardamom coffee, were my regular 7:00 a.m. rendezvous under the porch of the farmhouse overlooking Gaza and the Israeli settler settlements in the occupied West Bank.
On the morning of October 7th, breakfast was different: I stuffed my loaf with figs and terror, and the aroma of coffee was drowned out by the deafening roar of air-raid sirens. Mushrooms of smoke, missiles exploding overhead, the deathly silence punctuated by the ever-closer roars.
And then Beth, an 80-year-old with purple hair, an Englishwoman from Manchester, who welcomes me as if I were her granddaughter and teaches me that you can crave a gin and tonic even if all hell breaks loose outside.
I retrace a journey on a farm between Hebron and Bethlehem, in the Occupied Territories of a suffocated Palestine. It is a personal story without any pretense of geopolitical or historical explanations. It's a story that attempts to give voice to the nonviolent resistance of farmers who never stopped planting new shoots.
Some names are fictional, the stories are true, and the emotions are unashamedly sincere.