However, last week a local event occurred that told me it was indeed time to write a column about life in the occupied West Bank, for it brought home at close quarters what in Australia we usually only get to see from afar.

As the Palestinian news agency Ma'an reported: “A 15-year-old Palestinian child was killed while dozens of others were wounded by Israeli forces during violent clashes in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the southern occupied West Bank district of Bethlehem predawn Monday.”

This was just down the road from where I’m working. Bethlehem immediately went into mourning, the city’s population went on strike and rehearsals were of course cancelled for the day.

The next day, I announced to my student actors that I would dedicate our production to the memory of 15-year-old Arkan Thaer Mezher, which deeply touched them.

What the Israeli Defence Forces were doing was unfortunately their standard two-fold process: using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and, at the same time, engaging in collective punishment for the alleged actions of a few.

More of that when I look at the bigger picture below, but before that a paragraph about the work I am undertaking here.

My project is an exercise in creative play building undertaken with senior students at the Alrowwad Centre that I have titled As It Happened: Five Micro Plays of the Ongoing Palestinian Nakba.

Nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe” and refers to the forced expulsion of 750,000 indigenous Palestinians (now numbering in the millions) as the Zionists fought to create space for the state of Israel back in 1948.

It is a most worthwhile project. The experience the students undergo re-enacting their lives under Israeli occupation is rewarding and it allows me to be the agent bearing witness to the world of the conditions they are forced to endure as I screen the video in Australia.

Now, to the “big picture”. Of great concern to many is Israel’s new nation state law, passed by the Knesset two weeks ago. As reported by The Guardian, the European Union has led a chorus of criticism after Israel declared that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country. 

As Al Jazeera reported, it establishes Israel as an “ethno-religious state”.

The legislation stipulates that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it.” 

It strips Arabic as an official language and gives parliamentary legitimacy to the illegal Israeli-only settlements that are being built throughout the West Bank on stolen Palestinian land.

It is of immediate concern to the 20 per cent of Israel’s population that is not Jewish, and of far-reaching consequences for the Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the West Bank, which is inexorably being taken over by Jewish-only illegal settlements.

Here, we have of course also been concerned by the ongoing and never-ending situation in Gaza.

Described by Israeli-born expatriate historian Ian Pappe as the “biggest prison on earth”, it is subject to a seemingly never-ending Israeli land and sea blockade and intermittent bombing raids that create intolerable living conditions and intense resentment, exploited by Hamas for political ends. Arguing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Nathan Hersh recently wrote: “Israel’s government continues to treat Gaza as it has for the past 11 years, preferring to simply keep the IDF prepared for the next confrontation. IDF reserve units are now preparing for the next Gaza war as if it could happen this summer.”

Indeed they are, which is an immediate and very real worry.

But even more worrying is that Israel, though it must be aware that the blockade isn’t working, doesn’t appear to have any realistic changes of policy in mind.