Parenting under occupation

A child who passes through a checkpoint twice a week to get to school learns several things the curriculum does not list. She learns that her family's time is not her own. She learns that an eighteen-year-old with a gun can decide whether she is late. She learns that her mother, who is the most competent person she knows, becomes quiet and small in front of this eighteen-year-old, and that this smallness is a strategy, not a truth. The parent's task is to debrief the checkpoint after, without dramatizing it and without minimizing it. The right register is the hardest to find. Too much narration and the child becomes anxious; too little, and the child concludes the parent agrees with the arrangement. Most parents err in both directions on different days.

In many occupations, the permit system is the central technology. The permit to travel from one village to the next, the permit to bring a spouse from outside, the permit to build a room on your own house, the permit to attend the funeral of a parent. The family's life is organized around applications, rejections, and waits. Children grow up understanding bureaucracy as a hostile weather system rather than a neutral civic infrastructure. This understanding is accurate to their situation and a serious handicap when they later try to engage with institutions that are not designed to harm them. Parents have to teach two literacies at once: how to survive the hostile bureaucracy, and how to recognize a non-hostile one if the child ever encounters it. Few parents have models for the second.

When soldiers come at night, the family is awakened, the children are made to stand outside, the house is searched. Even when no one is taken, the bedroom is never the same place again. Parents try to give the child a sense that the bed is safe, the door will hold, the night will pass. They invent rituals, small mythologies of safety, often involving a particular blanket, a particular doll, a particular prayer. These work, partially, until they do not. After the second or third raid, the child knows the rituals are stories, and respects that the parent told them anyway. Something is built in this knowing, a kind of compact between parent and child about the use of fiction in a world that does not always allow truth to be load-bearing.

When the school is closed by curfew, by demolition, by the arrest of teachers, the parents become the school. Mothers in many occupations have run informal classrooms in living rooms for months at a time. The curriculum is improvised, the materials are scarce, the children are uneven in age. The mothers learn fast that pedagogy is harder than it looked. They also learn that they know more than they thought they did. Years later, when asked about the most important thing they did during the occupation, many will say: I kept my children learning. The phrase sounds small. It is not.

When a father is detained, the family rearranges around an absence that is not death but cannot be addressed like absence. The mother takes on the father's roles, the older child takes on some of the mother's. Visits to the prison, if allowed, are events the children prepare for like ceremonies. The father returns, eventually, sometimes years later, and finds children who have grown without him and a wife who has learned to function without him and is not sure how to function with him again. The reintegration is its own slow project. Parenting under occupation includes parenting through the long return, which is rarely discussed because the politics demand a celebration narrative that the families themselves know is more complicated.

The home is demolished. The family stands in the street with what they could carry. The children watch the bulldozer pull down the wall where their growth was marked in pencil, the corner where the cat slept, the kitchen where the bread was made. The parents respond in front of the children in a way the children will remember for the rest of their lives. There is no right script. Some parents wail, which gives the children permission to grieve. Some parents stay calm, which gives the children a model of composure. The wisest parents do whichever is honest in the moment and explain it afterward. Demolition recurs in many occupations, and each demolition is the first demolition for whichever children are inside it.

Where settlers and indigenous families live close, parenthood acquires a constant low-grade vigilance. The walk to school passes a settlement road. The olive harvest happens within sight of armed settlers. The child is told which paths are safe today, which are not. The map of the village in the child's mind is overlaid with a second map of danger that updates weekly. Parents teach this map without making the child paranoid. Many succeed at this remarkable pedagogical feat. The cost is a quality of alertness in the child that does not turn off later, even when the child grows up and moves away. The body keeps the geography even after the mind has left it.

International journalists arrive, ask the children to tell their stories, photograph the wounds. Parents have to decide how much to expose the child to this, and on what terms. Some refuse, to protect the child's privacy and the family's dignity. Some agree, because the documentation matters. Some find a middle way, in which the child speaks but not on camera, or speaks under a different name. The decision is made under pressure and rarely revisited later. Children who became symbols sometimes grow into adults who resent the symbolism. Parents who consented to the exposure sometimes regret it. There is no clean answer. The parent does the best they can with bad options, and the child will eventually have an opinion about it.

Relatives outside send money, news, advice, and expectations. They want the family inside the occupation to be holding the line, to be educating the children well, to be keeping the language alive, to be not despairing. The diaspora's love is real and its remoteness is also real, and parents inside have to manage the relationship without losing patience. The phone calls take energy. The children pick up the imported standards of the diaspora cousin who never had to do without electricity, and ask why their own life is poorer. Parents explain, again. The diaspora is a lifeline and a low-frequency exhaustion at the same time.

In every occupation, some people collaborate. Children eventually understand this, and ask. The parents have to give an answer that does not produce a child who suspects every neighbor and does not produce a child who is naive about the structure of co-optation. The right answer is usually contextual: this person collaborates because they were threatened, this one because they were paid, this one because they believed the lie, this one we do not know. Teaching the child to hold this complexity is teaching the child to live in a real political world, which is itself a gift the occupation did not intend to allow.

Birthdays still happen. Weddings still happen. Children still laugh until they cannot breathe. Parents under occupation work hard to make these moments, because they understand that a childhood composed only of resistance is a childhood the occupation has won. The party in the backyard, the cake assembled from scarce ingredients, the song sung loudly with the windows open: these are not denials of the situation, they are claims about what the situation does not get to determine. Children remember these moments with the same vividness as they remember the raids. Both belong to the inheritance. Wise parents arrange for both to be available for the memory to compose later.

Children of occupation grow into adults along several paths. Some leave and never return; some leave and return; some stay and resist; some stay and accommodate; some break. The variance is wide and the parent's influence is partial. What most of these adults share, across the variance, is an early adulthood spent integrating a political education that began before they were old enough to ask for it. The parent who raised them did not have the luxury of waiting until they were ready. The parent gave them the world as it was, in doses calibrated to what the parent could absorb on the child's behalf. The accounting of that gift, and its costs, takes a lifetime, and is one of the things these adults will eventually try to talk to their own children about, in whatever country they are then living in.

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