There, at Far’a refugee camp, 20 kilometers north-east of the city of Nablus, in a complex, which once served as an army camp during the British and Jordanian rules of the West Bank, but which gained its fame in the 1980’s as an Israeli detention and interrogation centre for Palestinian prisoners arrested in massive waves during the first Intifada, children, together with released women prisoners played, cooked, hiked, swam, but most importantly discovered the meaning of imprisonment and a deep sense of isolation and injustice.

Indeed, the choice of Far’a for the summer camp was not a coincidence, rather part of the healing process. According to Anan Srour of the Palestinian Counseling Center, it allowed the children to discover and imagine through their own eyes the meaning of a world that has been part of their life since the moment of their sisters’ arrest, but yet remained foreign to them. In the aftermath of the Oslo Agreements, the Palestinian Authority turned the Far’a detention center into a youth and sports center, which now accommodates marginalized youths at summer camps, but also performers using art as resistance and a social healing process. More than a decade after its closure the complex still reminds a prison; children slept in what used to be cells, old interrogation rooms still remain untouched. “The idea was for the children to understand their sisters’ experience by themselves, and break the isolation that the walls of a prison impose on a family” says Anan Srour, clinical psychologist at the PCC.

Particularly shy and introverted, the children tried to make themselves almost invisible during the first day of the camp. After all, they grew up in a relatively conservative society with the label of brothers and sisters of female detainees. It took several group games on the football field of the Far’a center, a hike to the Al-Badan swimming pool, dance and art therapy sessions for them to open up and express themselves. PCC staff, which are used to constant bickering and fights breaking out during summer camps when they work with those they usually support - “problematic youth” - were surprised at how calm and well-behaved the children were. The families of the female prisoners are mostly “normal” families - they say - where the children are taken care of and properly fed. Their sisters’ arrest – founded or not – is always a by-product of the Israeli occupation.

As for former prisoners, they did not have to be asked twice to show up at the summer camp. Friendships created in prison are for life they say. There were laughs and those nicer memories of long chats in prison, but also tears, especially during a pantomime show prepared by PCC staff, which expressed the beatings, intimidation, fear and solitude that many women went through while interrogated. The women did not want to stand by watching their story, rather reenact it for their families to see what they went through and why, according to them, they went to prison.

Thus, the last day of the summer camp they put a play together in only one rehearsal. The script did not have to be written down, protagonists did not have to be invented, the decor did not have to be altered – after all they were in a former prison. The acting might have been hectic and disorganized, but words seemed to come naturally for the story was all too well known. It included all the elements that make up for Palestinian reality and collective imagination: dispossession and house demolitions, checkpoints and soldiers, a deep sense of injustice, the military resistance and its failure, the figure of the collaborator, the interrogation, intimidation, humiliation, detention, isolation, prison, but after all of that hope. When the show ended, it was time for the party – dabke, singing and finally phone numbers exchange. The bus was waiting to take the children back home, while stopping in Nablus for its famous knafe.