In this op-ed, Rawan Eewshah explains what it’s like to be a Palestinian in the current media landscape.

When I ask my parents to tell me about growing up in Palestine, their faces swell with pride and joy.

My dad tells me about playing soccer in the streets of al-Jib, a small city just north of Jerusalem. As the oldest of 10 children, my dad has always been a natural leader. He’d go outside, gather the neighborhood kids, and they’d play for hours on end. The only thing that would stop the never-ending games of footy is if his mother called him in for dinner or if they saw a soldier approaching. Growing up, he says, he witnessed children his own age be jailed — and on two occasions, he says he saw his own relatives shot and killed by who they believed to be Israeli forces disguised in keffiyehs. (A keffiyeh is a traditional black-and-white Palestinian scarf.) So, the sight of a soldier was reason enough to abruptly end any carefree fun my father and his neighborhood friends were having.

During the Six Day War of 1967, the soccer games with the neighborhood kids became far and few between. A year later, when my father became a refugee, they ended altogether. After telling me these stories, the joy that first spread across my father’s face starts to dissipate, but the pride never leaves. He’ll shake his head and say, “Maybe one day we can move back,” but he doesn’t seem truly convinced that that is an option.

It’s been more than 50 years since the day my father told me that soldiers marched to my his door in al-Jib with the intention of seizing his family’s home and subsequently rendering him homeless. And 50 years later, not much has changed in the West Bank. Israelis and Palestinians have technically been fighting for control of the same territories for nearly a century, according to NPR, but the heart of the conflict dates back to the 1940s. In 1947, the U.N. voted to divide it into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Arabs rejected the plan and fighting began within days. Immediately after the British Mandate for Palestine expired on May 14, 1948, Israel declared its own independence; the next day, neighboring Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) invaded Israel and began fighting on behalf of Palestinians.

This is why stories like 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi’s are nothing new. Like my father experienced in May of 1968, one year after the Six Day War began, Israeli soldiers entered the property of Ahed’s home because they appeared to believe they had the right to. Unlike my father, cameras captured what happened next. Ahed was shown slapping a soldier across the face, and now she, her mother, and her cousin sit in an Israeli prison for various charges from that day; Ahed and her mother, Nariman, each received an eight-month sentence, and her cousin Nour was sentenced to two weeks, according to The New York Times. The story has gotten so much attention that even Hollywood has taken notice: Everyone from actor Rosario Dawson to comedian Sarah Silverman have called on Israel to release Ahed from prison.

As of February 2018, there are more than 300 minors in Israeli captivity, either as prisoners or detainees. According to Israeli Prison Service data handed over to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, at the end of 2017, 2,200 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons without having been convicted of any crime. In The Washington Post, Ahed’s cousin Nour detailed what described as "systematic abuse" Palestinian minors face in Israeli prisons after being there herself.