When Mustafa Haddad works on an ancient wall, time seems to stand still. Nothing else exists around him; there is only him and the stone.
He is 27 years old, lives in the West Bank, and is a restorer—a craft he didn’t study at any university, but one he feels as a true vocation. This is his story. To tell it, he starts from the beginning: "My family comes from a village called Saris, west of Jerusalem." It was 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, and his grandparents were displaced. They found refuge in al-’Eizariya, in Bethany, where the family took root. Mustafa grew up curious, with a hunger for discovery that never left him. "As a child, I loved adventure," he says. "Today, I find it again in what I do."
He wanted to study archaeology at university, but he didn't have the chance: he stopped at the tawjihi—high school—without finishing. It was during those years that he met Osama Hamdan, an architect known as the Muslim restorer of Christian churches. A meeting that changed his life. "Osama passed on the passion for this craft to me and made my big dream come true." From a simple laborer, Mustafa began to grow, to learn, and to become something more.
Then the war came. Blocked roads, checkpoints everywhere from Jerusalem to Ramallah. The West Bank slowly closed in on itself, becoming like a prison. But Mustafa continues his restoration work: "I haven't stopped because I want to protect the country I love." Even when everything around him speaks of war, when he looks at the stone, time stops again. And the checkpoints cease to exist. "I will never lose hope," he tells us with a steady gaze.
He has had to face many losses in his life. The first was the death of his father—a void that cannot be filled. It was 2013, and shortly after came his first arrest: Mustafa was taken away, leaving his sisters alone. "I will never forget the guilt I felt." It wouldn't be the last time. In 2017 and 2020, the army came back for him. "I used to throw stones," he says. In those years, it was a common form of resistance among young Palestinians. "I realized that I couldn't free Palestine by throwing rocks." Stones don't stop an armed soldier or an armored vehicle. "If I had to tell our story to a foreigner, I would tell them that true resistance is preserving this land. Because it is our culture, our identity; and none of that can ever be taken away." For him, this is a form of resistance stronger than a hundred stones.
Mustafa hasn't stopped building. Today he works in Bethany to restore archaeological sites, but also for something more: to pass this passion on to local children, those who risk growing up without knowing who they are. There is a moment, in his pottery workshops, when a child stops looking at those places as ruins and starts seeing them as their own. It is the same moment Mustafa experienced as a child. "In this way, little by little, they learn to respect and protect archaeological sites instead of damaging them."
