For young Palestinians, skateboarding is a respite from the occupation

For most of the last year, the skateparks of the West Bank have been deserted. “Skating was dead in Palestine,” Mahmoud Kilani, the 23-year-old founder of a new organisation, skateboarding.ps, tells Dazed. “The war is happening to us as well. It really affects you: the fact that you are able to do this, when people who are the same blood as you, who are merely kilometres away, are stuck in a place where they can’t do anything. It wasn’t just skateboarding: everything in Palestine stopped.”

But when Mahmoud’s friends in Gaza began skating again, and urged him to do likewise, he grew determined to revive the scene. Along with his friends, he started going back to their local skatepark in Asira Al-Shamaliya – a village near Nablus – and offering free lessons to whoever wanted them. Within a short space of time, the park has been brought back to life, buzzing every day with skaters and local families.

Mahmoud’s local skatepark was built by SkatePal, a non-profit which has for the last 11 years played a central role in Palestine’s skating community. But as founder and director Charlie Davis tells Dazed, the organisation has decided to change course. “We’re at a crossroads. We’ve been running an international volunteer program, and we want to slowly phase that out, so that kids don’t rely on volunteers and start skating more on their own. We’re turning into more of a community interest company, raising money through branding and online shops which we can give to whoever we want,” Charlie says. At the moment, the organisation is focused on raising money for skaters in Gaza, who – like anyone else on the strip – face continuing bombardment and dire shortages of food, shelter and clean water. 

With SkatePal taking a back seat, Mahmoud’s new project aims to fill the gap, offering skaters similar support but in a more sustainable way. But this is not without its challenges at a time when life in the West Bank has become more oppressive and deadly than ever. Since October 7, at least 870 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including 171 children. There has been an explosion in settler violence, forced displacements, arrests and unlawful detentions. New checkpoints and roadblocks have left Palestinian cities, towns and villages more isolated than ever. For young people in the West Bank, something which should be as simple as travelling to the nearest skatepark is a complicated and dangerous process, and often simply impossible. In the weeks since a ceasefire deal was announced between Israel and Hamas, Israel has only escalated its assault on the West Bank. 

We spoke with Mahmoud about what he’s trying to achieve with skateboarding.ps; why skating means so much to people in Palestine, and how life in the West Bank is impacted by settler violence, checkpoints, administrative detention and more. 

Why did you decide to start skateboarding.ps and how is it different from SkatePal?

Mahmoud Kilani: I started skateboarding.ps because I’ve been friends with skaters here forever, who have been putting everything that they can into the community, and I felt like I needed to do something for the community too. It’s the first local skateboarding organisation in the entirety of Palestine and we’re trying to figure out how to avoid the challenges that older skaters have gone through here. SkatePal has built parks here already; they’ve sent us boards, they have been amazing and great, but our goal is to have a fully self-sustaining skateboarding community in Palestine that offers skaters whatever they need to keep going. 

Restriction of freedom of movement is a huge problem in the West Bank. There are hundreds of checkpoints, road blocks and other barriers to getting around. How does this affect your daily life and your ability to skate?

Mahmoud Kilani: There are checkpoints everywhere and some of the main roads, like the one connecting Nablus and Ramallah, no longer exist. You have to go all the way around, which means that what should be a 40-minute drive is going to take an hour or two. But it depends – one time we were stuck at a checkpoint for nine hours. I know multiple people who’ve been arrested just for having Telegram on their phones, because there’s news on it. I also know someone who got beaten up because they didn’t have Telegram on their phones, because the IDF thought this meant that they had deleted it. They just do whatever they want, whenever they want.

In a situation like that, you essentially have no legal rights as a Palestinian, right?

Mahmoud Kilani: Yes, and this is not new. For years they’ve been arresting people under ‘administrative detention’, with no charges, for six months, and then once the six months are done, they can add another six months for absolutely no reason.

My mum does work with a couple of organisations here around women’s rights. She was taking a statement from someone who had been detained and I was writing it down for her. The entire time this woman was detained – around seven and a half months – she didn’t even know why she was there. She asked when she got arrested, she asked when she was searched, she asked when she was at the first detention spot. She asked when she was in the car going to the jail, she asked in prison, and when they transferred her, she asked in the second prison. And every time she asked, they told her that she’d find out at the next place.

It must be intense, psychologically, to know that anytime you have to pass through a checkpoint you can basically just be abducted for no reason. What’s that like? 

Mahmoud Kilani: It’s not just a psychological effect. Practically it’s very difficult to travel from one place to another. When you need to pass through the checkpoints, you have to get your ID, and you have to go through your phone beforehand to check there’s nothing on it – you can’t even have news on your phone about the roads. Whenever you have to travel anywhere, you’re always thinking: OK, here’s a checkpoint. Are they going to stop our car and search us? Are they going to start questioning me? Am I going to get stuck here for hours? Am I going to get beaten up? Am I going to get strip-searched in front of everybody?

Recently, they ordered me out of the car and I was a little bit shaky, because there were six soldiers aiming their guns at me. One of the soldiers demanded to know why I was shaking, and I explained that I was a little nervous because of the guns. He said, ‘Yeah, but you’re not a kid’. I told him that if he had six guns aimed at him, he would be stressed too. He pushed and slapped me, then kept me waiting for 45 minutes, all because he felt like it.

There’s been a significant rise in settler violence in the West Bank in the last year, which has made moving between different Palestinian towns and cities even more difficult than it was already. What kind of effect has this had on you and on the skateboarding community?

Mahmoud Kilani: Settlers are everywhere. They’ve thrown rocks at us. They shot someone 300 metres away from us. They stand in the middle of the road and when you drive along, they throw rocks at you. And the violence is worse now, because most of them have guns, so they’re shooting on the roads too. People aren’t leaving cities unless they have to. 

When settlers are attacking someone, nine times out of ten they have IOF soldiers protecting them. You can’t really do anything. It’s got much worse recently, but even before the war, if settlers threw rocks at you while you were driving and you stopped the car, the first thing that would happen would be an IOF soldier popping up, aiming a gun at you and saying, ‘fucking move! What are you doing?’ It’s infuriating, but it’s the reality here. There’s a settlement near Asira Al-Shamaliya, and when settlers show up in the village, the kids don’t go to the park. Nobody comes out of their houses.

Why is it so difficult to import skateboards into Palestine?

Mahmoud Kilani: Israel will stop them. They won’t give you a reason. They either confiscate them or make you wait six months to get half of them which is a risk that you don’t want to take. They might not just not tell you anything about it, and you’ll just stay waiting for the shipment for the rest of your life. It’s hard to get anything delivered here, basically. 

SkatePal used to bring them in through volunteers, who would usually arrive with ten boards, so you had a good number of skateboards coming into the community. But it’s harder for volunteers to get in now and we’re down to our last couple.

Is there a way to produce them in the West Bank?

Mahmoud Kilani: Manufacturing them here would be hard, because the material isn’t available. But in the office we have these old, chipped boards which are barely usable. SkatePal has started a project with re:ply Skateboards which involves recycling boards, reshaping them, making them a bit smaller and kind of new. This isn’t ideal, because the wood gets weaker and you’re not going to be able to skate like it’s brand new, but it’s what we can do. 

What kind of solidarity would you like to see from people outside of Palestine, whether in the skateboarding community or in general?

Mahmoud Kilani: Just keep sharing what’s happening and talking about the skateboarding scene here, because a lot of skaters don’t know what it’s like. We don’t have one skate shop. We don’t have boards. We don’t have anything. But we want people to know that and to share what’s happening, so maybe it reaches the right person and we can get the equipment we need – not just skateboards but protection gear for kids or anything else we don’t have.

What does skateboarding mean to young people in Palestine?

Mahmoud Kilani: As cliche as it might sound, it’s true: it’s a tool to escape everything. It’s the feeling of freedom, having this board under your feet that you can do whatever you want with. Because we don’t have freedom here. We are surrounded by walls. Sometimes we can’t go to the park because they say we can’t, so we take our boards and we go skate somewhere else. It’s just a break from the occupation.