I wake up late on Saturday morning on a mattress on the floor of my friend's apartment. It takes me a moment to orient myself in the stuffy heat of the room before I realise I am in his family's building in a refugee camp in the north of the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Ali and I had sat up talking till 6am so he’d offered me an spare room downstairs to sleep in. I can hear the neighbour’s new dog yelping loudly outside, as well as the usual shouts and squeals of children playing in the narrow streets. I’m an anthropologist conducting research that seeks to understand how camp residents experience and cope with situations of high insecurity created by the occupation. By placing myself alongside Palestinians in as many of such situations as is safe to do so, I use my own emotions and sensory experiences as a tool to better understand how occupation is constituted in more ways than the material. Eventually I get up and we sit on the roof with coffee and ma’aamoul (date-filled biscuits). Ali’s roof was how we passed the summer, carving out a relaxed space amidst the obstacles – the heat, the boredom, the stress, the tension, the high fence around the camp and the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) military post opposite, their machine guns permanently trained on the entrance. We lounged on sofas moved outside for the hottest months under a pergola groaning with huge bunches of green grapes. It felt exotic, Mediterranean. The night-time flashing glow of the Ramadan lights strung up on balconies and roofs was replaced by day with the glaring sunlight and the views of the rolling hills surrounding the camp, over the top of which in every direction are hostile Israeli settlers. After the first coffee we started making calls, or rather Ali made calls and I listened. The main reason I’d stayed overnight at Ali’s camp was because as I’d arrived the previous evening the IOF were sealing the camp’s entrance by placing large concrete blocks in the road and stationing soldiers at them to harass residents and visitors as they came and went. Ali was calmly making the usual calls to neighbours, relatives and friends from the camp to find out what the situation was, “shou alwad3?” at the camp entrance while I checked Facebook on my phone for the latest news. Friday is a day of protest for Palestinians and the previous night there had been an alleged drive-by shooting of a family of Israeli settlers by a Palestinian gunman on the West Bank highway shared by settlers and Palestinians. Ali’s camp, though not in the administrative district of the shooting, had been grouped with the nearby towns and villages to be punished by the Israeli regime. We didn’t know if the concrete blocks would be lifted and we would be able to drive out onto the main road or if we’d have to take a back exit and navigate the hilly fields to the south-west of the camp that would eventually lead us to a village not currently under siege and with a different road back to the city. The day was pleasant enough and we enjoyed a second and a third coffee between playing with the dogs and chatting with various cousins and friends dropping by. They grumbled affably about the concrete blocks, rolling their eyes. News of another shooting was met without surprise from any of us as at this point it had become regrettably normal. The practical implications, however, were dissected at length; who worked where and how they were going to get there, how long it took for the blocks to be lifted last time, who’s car was now stuck inside the camp. I learned not to show my concern since no one else did, and their responses were always the same, “shou e7na lazim nsawi?” “What are we supposed to do?”Stuck in the camp for now, Ali and I lay on our backs on the sofas looking up at the brilliant blue sky peeping through the vines and imagined we were somewhere else, somewhere far away, without any of this trouble. We talked about the times we had both spent barra, “outside” [Palestine], reliving happy memories which for both of us had become focused on freedom – freedom to move as one pleased, freedom to sit outside in the street at night, freedom to not be watched. The static-peppered drone of a travelling salesman advertising his wares through a tinny loudspeaker from his car brought us back to the camp and occupation. It was a sound we were used to hearing and we’d both tuned it out until we suddenly heard the word for fish - samak - and rushed to the edge of the roof to look. The salesman had parked just below us and was showing a gathering crowd the trunk full of loose fish he claimed had come from the coast that morning, a rare treat. Most West Bank Palestinians, especially those from camps, have not seen the coastlines of their country some 40 kilometres away in over a decade, prevented from crossing Israel’s apartheid wall. A Palestinian passing through multiple IOF checkpoints to enter the West Bank and the camp with a trunk full of fresh fish without incident is a rare treat. Sure enough, a refugee from Jaffa, a Palestinian coastal town, arrived and began inspecting the fish. She declared it to be old, and an argument broke out between her and the salesman as a crowd gathered and chimed in. Eventually the woman from Jaffa wandered off, but one of her friends and a few others bought some of the fish. The fish salesman moved on, the disappearing din of his loudspeaker trailing away into the heat haze and the hills. We had another coffee and I marvelled at everyone’s relaxed attitude to regularly being penned into the tiny confines of the camp. Camp residents are constantly placed under high stress by the occupation forces, including night-time raids, blockades, the threat of house demolitions, and the use of tear gas and live ammunition. These tactics are on top of the impoverishment and high unemployment, the threat of land appropriation, the poor schooling systems and infrastructure, all of which amount to situations of high precarity and instability within camps. I try to observe as well as ask how Palestinians manage these situations, how they bear the tensions and how they eke out pockets of security in a volatile setting. The roof became one of these pockets for us that summer; away from the curious eyes of neighbours on the street and soldiers posted opposite the entrance of the camp, their guns permanently trained on the residents as they come and go. Part of creating a safe space in Palestine seems to be creating a space that is inherently and exclusively Palestinian. Sitting high up, enjoying the land and the views and the grapes, drinking coffee in the Arabic way, eating Ali’s mother’s homemade ma’aamoul, switching between Arabic and English. All of this under the same vivid blue summer sky we shared with settlers, soldiers, the Mediterranean sea, and the children tirelessly playing in the street below. One last coffee and an hour later I was grinning and speeding off down the highway that connects illegal Israeli settlements inside the West Bank to Jerusalem, with connecting roads to Palestinian spaces added as inconvenient afterthoughts. I felt a weight lifting, though I hadn’t even noticed it was there. The worries I had not acknowledged to myself dissipated; worries of not knowing how or when I was going to get home and of what the soldiers would ask me if they stopped me. I revelled in the sensation of moving at my own will and pace, something I fear my Palestinians friends do not know as I do. I drove home to sleep, suddenly exhausted from the whole experience of trying to move a few kilometres in Occupied Palestine. Anya Evans is a PhD candidate currently conducting ethnographic research in the Middle East. Her work revolves around issues of the everyday and the future under occupation. She is a co-founder of The New Ethnographer and also works on issues of gender and fieldwork, digital ethnography, and radical methodologies.