One week today I will be moving to a warzone for three months.

In truth, calling the West Bank a warzone is probably a bit dramatic. The Palestine-Israel conflict has been going on so long that the occupation must be just another part of the lives of the people that live there, especially in Ramallah which has been described to me as a bit of a bubble. I only really say warzone because it makes what I am doing sound scary and impressive, and I do enjoy it when people find me impressive.

I will be volunteering at a Human Rights organisation in Palestine as a legal researcher, investigating war crimes committed in the region. It’s an exciting time for International Criminal Law in Palestine and Israel as the ICC has finally started a preliminary investigation into such crimes, but this blog isn’t really about the law. It’s about my experiences as a self confessed middle class white guy from Surrey with a very limited world view moving to a place which is totally alien to me. I don’t speak the language, I don’t know the customs, and I have never experienced anything like a life in the West Bank. I don’t really know what to expect so I guess one purpose of this blog is to help me keep track of how things change.

A common theme this last fortnight has been people asking me, ‘Why?’, and it is a good question. I’m not really sure why. I have answered this question in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people but I have never really been fully convinced by any of my responses.

I studied Law as an undergrad, taking a module on international public law, and it was here where I first developed an interest in the conflict. I was of course already aware of what was going on, how could you not be in a university as left wing as Sussex, but before I started the module I knew no real detail. As far as I was concerned there was a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, Palestine is just one of them. Of course the Friends of Palestine society had been very vocal, but you can only shout “FASCIST!” at UKIP members for so long before people stop listening. My Masters in International Criminal Law only furthered my interest in the conflict, but it’s safe to say my interest in the conflict was, and still is, purely academic.

I have also told people that part of my reason for going could be rooted in some kind of strange concept of guilt. It was after all the British Balfour Declaration that effectively told the zionist movement it could take a chunk of palestinian land and then when things went pairshapped the Great British Empire just upped and left, leaving the warring Jews and Arabs to sort out a problem it started. However, colonialism, in my opinion, is responsible for a huge number of problems all round the globe, and I have not done anything about those. I am proud to be British, but I don’t feel responsible for it’s past crimes.

So if the wider context has not motivated me, my reasons for taking this internship must be internal. A lot of graduates use their new found freedom as an opportunity to go travelling and ‘find themselves’ but I do not find the idea of getting drunk with a bunch of other white english kids in tank tops and flip flops on a beach in Thailand appealing. I’m also not that taken with the idea of moving to some African country to help build schools where my lack of any practical skills means that the locals will have to rebuild my efforts overnight. Instead, this internship offers me a chance to use my skills in a way that could actually make a difference, but then again, how much of a difference can I actually make? This conflict has been going on for 70 years, what difference can some like me, with no practical or life experience make? So maybe this is just a vain attempt to outshine other people that go off abroad, or perhaps I am just doing it to stroke my ego, reassuring myself that I am a great person.

I guess I’ll find out when I get out there.