One day, he told me he was from Bethlehem in Palestine. He started to tell me about what life was like in Palestine: clean water was scarce, poverty was endemic, military checkpoints degraded and humiliated people, settler roads cut the occupied territories up and made it impossible for people like him to travel, he had to go through Jordan when visiting home because he would be detained if he tried to return through Israel.
Jonathan Cook took us on a tour of the newly finished museum dedicated to Hebron’s Jewish heritage, which focuses on various acts of violence done to Jews there and their triumph over them, which in his narrative, lead to the reality today.
Though the conflict between the state of Israel and the displaced Palestinian people is often characterized as a religious one, I found that religion was only one aspect of an incredibly complex and multifaceted issue. The basic premise of Israel — that the Jewish people need a state of their own in order to protect themselves from the possibility of another Holocaust — was first linked to religion when early Zionists (pre-WWII) chose this region to “settle” based on religious text and geographical references in the Old Testament.
On Friday at 7 p.m. Lyad Burnat, a leader of the non-violent popular resistance in Bil'in, Palestine, will be speaking at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spokane.
One of the main reasons I was encouraged to participate in the SUSI Program was to carry the true story about how much Palestinians suffer from the Israeli occupation. Most of what Americans watch on the news about the Palestinian – Israeli conflict is not true.