They were to write about their career aspirations. Scrawly English words rioted across a sheet of
A4 paper. The paper belonged to Adnan*, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, a student in my
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class. The class was part of a US State Department-funded
education program to thwart budding radicalism in East Jerusalem in 2012. Adnan wrote that he
wanted to become a suicide bomber.
I sat at the kitchen table inside the apartment I rented from the imam of the Ras al-Amud mosque
in East Jerusalem, re-reading the boy’s awful eager words. He described demolitions of
Palestinian homes by the Israeli army, the arrests of people in his community, and harassment at
checkpoints. Simple sentence structures struggled to articulate a complexity of emotions his
twelve-year-old prefrontal cortex couldn’t process. One and two-syllable English words freighted
the weight of dispossession from writer to reader. He wrote he wanted to be suicide bomber
when he grew up so “Palestinians could be free.” He did not write about hate or revenge, about
Islam versus Judaism. I marked the essay for his use of language and paragraph structure, and set
it aside, noting how his cursive slanted both right and left, struggling to stay on the lines.
I scored the other twenty-odd essays. No other aspirational jihadists. Setting the stack aside, I
recalled my first impression of Adnan at the start of the summer term two weeks prior. He’d been
cocooned in defensiveness, his level of English lower than the others. He’d hung back a little, so
I’d partnered with him for paired activities to make him feel seen. He had a lazy eye and buck
teeth. Growing up in suburban Chicago, I had had a lazy eye and buck teeth too, but my parents
got me an eye patch and glasses; braces and headgear.
Having never received student writing aspiring to violence nor guidance on how to handle such a
situation, I was flying blind about whether I should report Adnan or not. Besides offering English
language instruction, this program nurtured students’ social and leadership skills. The students
learned about American democratic and cultural ideals, and were given access to a curated
library of US films and books. There was an upcoming field trip to a national park in Haifa,
difficult for Palestinians to visit on their own due to mobility restrictions and checkpoints. I
thought that Adnan, the type of student for whom this program had been designed, would
probably be dismissed from it if I reported his essay to the school’s administration.
Being dismissed from the program would be the least of Adnan’s worries.
Reporting a Palestinian student in Israel is unlike reporting a student of any nationality anywhere
else. Although Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the use of collective
punishment, Israeli authorities enforce collective punishment in the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank. I had sat with Palestinian Muslims in the Old City, listening to their stories of being denied
building permits to reconstruct their homes destroyed during the Second Intifada. My female
students in another cohort talked about their male family members being arbitrarily rounded up
by the Israeli Defense Forces in the Jenin refugee camp when violence around Jenin flared. I had
gone to lectures in Ramallah, where Western humanitarian aid workers detailed how Palestinian
farmers were denied permits to refurbish their wells while nearby settlers were allowed to dig
new deep ones. I remembered the first time I had seen the separation wall in Bethlehem, which
destroyed Palestinian homes and businesses and cut through Palestinian farmland. How I had
breezed through the Rachel’s Tomb checkpoint when I left Bethlehem while hundreds of
Palestinian women and children were herded into closed, cramped spaces behind barbed wire
walls and made to wait, sometimes for hours, before they, too, could pass through. These first-
hand experiences made me worry that if I reported Adnan, his family would be scrutinized, his
home searched, possibly bulldozed, and he would be arrested. Collective punishment also
permits Israel to revoke a family’s access to health care, their permanent residency status, and
their social security benefits. I believed that if I reported Adnan, he and his family’s lives would
never be the same. What if his essay was just an empty rant?
I am the type of person who gives second chances, especially to students. By demonstrating
compassion, I hope to build self-esteem, trust in authority figures and academic institutions, and
a sense of personal agency. I want students to learn how to show up for themselves, own their
mistakes, and know the power of redemption, but my teacher training hadn’t prepared me for a
moment like this. The stack of essays harangued me from the kitchen table as I went to bed that
night, not knowing what to do. What if I did nothing, and Adnan committed an act of violence
that I could have stopped? Who was I to really know what he was thinking? I wanted my
decision to be based on common sense and compassion, not hubris.
I awoke to the dawn call to prayer. Sweat beaded down my back as I inched along the cracked
sidewalks lining Derekh Yerikho street passed the Mount of Olives toward the Old City. People
stared at me as I walked by. Given my Italian facial features, light brown hair, blue eyes, and
suntanned skin, locals probably thought I was a settler. Although Israeli settlements in East
Jerusalem are illegal under international law, there were over 100 settler families living on the
Mount of Olives in 2012.
I arrived at the school and waited for the students to mill in. They were surprisingly lively, given
that most of them were fasting for Ramadan and water hadn’t passed their lips since the sun had
risen that morning. “Good morning, Miss Alex,” and “Did you grade our essays?” and “How are
you, Miss?” punctuated their footsteps. Adnan entered, chatting energetically with a few other
students with whom he had formed a band of brothers. His smile, once reluctant to show, now
regularly conquered his face. He was starting to blossom in the program, both socially and
scholastically. I decided to speak with Adnan before I decided whether to report him or not.
There was a 20-minute break between the two 75-minute lessons that made up each class day.
Right before the break, I handed back the essays and asked Adnan to stay for a moment because I
wanted to talk to him. Alone with him in the classroom, I shut the door and asked him if he
understood what he had written.
“Yes, Miss Alex.”
“So, you want to kill yourself and other people?”
“No!, Miss.”
“Then, why did you write you want to be a suicide bomber?”
“I want Palestinian people to be free,”
“Being a suicide bomber means killing yourself and others. People who haven’t done anything
wrong. Does that seem fair?”
“No.” Adnan’s eyebrows caterpillared.
I don’t remember much else of the conversation, but as we talked, I got the impression Adnan
hadn’t understood the reality of what he had written. His essay seemed like a child’s temper
tantrum in which the child screams that they wish their parents were dead, but in reality, has no
intention of killing them. I decided not to report Adnan. He, the rest of the students, and I had a
great term, but what if I had missed something crucial?
I look back at photos from my last days teaching Adnan and his cohort. He is front and center,
another student’s arm casually draped over his shoulder. No longer hanging on the fringes, he
looks happy, having found a place to belong. I think I made the right decision and that if I
received an essay like Adnan’s again, I would probably speak to the student before deciding
whether to report him or not. Even in our post-Sandy Hook, post-Marjorie Stoneman Douglas,
post-Uvalde heartbreak world, I believe in second chances.
Then, October 7, 2023 happened.
Unfortunately, there’s no parallel control group as we experiment with how to live. In my bones,
I don’t think Adnan was a part of Hamas’s attacks, but his involvement is not logically
impossible. If Adnan’s alive. Two months after I left East Jerusalem, the Israel Defense Forces
launched Operation Pillar of Defense in the Gaza Strip, sparking riots between Israelis and
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Israel launched Operation
Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, and again there were riots in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem. And again in 2021. And again, as I write this, reducing people to the most primal of
ambitions.
*Not his real name
Alex Poppe has written four works of literary fiction: Duende, a 2024 American Legacy Book Awards winner, a 2023 International Book Awards winner, and a 2023 Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist; Jinwar and Other Stories, a 2023 Readers’ Choice Book Awards winner and a 2022 International Book Awards finalist; Moxie, and Girl, World, a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her memoir, Breakfast Wine, will be published by Apprentice House Press in 2025.
