| Time-code | Speaker | Speech |
| 00:00:50 | AB | [Music] I lived in Berlin and I tell you the Berlin wall was a nice place compared to the Israeli wall that they’re building now. And it’s not built on the boarder, it’s built on Palestinian land and it’s a series of walls, it’s not the one wall. The only power in Israel, are the security services and that is not a healthy state. [Traffic] |
| 00:01:20 |
| You cannot travel because there are check points everywhere, I get strip searched every time I go in and out of the country, which is usually twice or three times a month. Recently they have been cracking down as they say, and have been denying hundreds, no it’s actually thousands of people, they’ve been denying them entry, back into the country. Now these are |
| 00:01:44 |
| people who are married to people, who have either Palestinian citizenship or Israeli citizenship, they’ve been living for years and years here and they’ve been divided from their families. [Music] |
| 00:02:10 | TR | My father’s family come from a village that used to be ten kilometres to the east of Tel Aviv. They fled in 1948 after the establishment of the State of Israel during what Israel calls the War of Independence and we Palestinian call as our catastrophe. They fled under fire. [Music] My fathers family moved into the Ramallah region where my father later on met |
| 00:02:43 |
| my mother and married so this became their first step in exile. But then in the early ‘60s, my father took the family out of the country. We were, he took us to Saudi Arabia for economic reasons, he found a job there and in 1967, the, Israel occupied the West of historical Palestine or what became known as the |
| 00:03:09 |
| West Bank and we were not allowed to return. So we became exiled again from our exile into another exile and we ended up having to immigrate, we ended up having to go to the United States. [Prayer] |
| 00:03:33 | HR | I’ve been living in the West Bank, the Palestinian territory since ’94. On August 3rd 2005, I was flying… I flew into Ben-Gurion Airport. For some reason the immigration department would not allow me in for the first time and I was not given a reason why. So I was detained in a jail cell and all my personal belongings were taken and my mobile, and I was made to leave |
| 00:03:54 |
| the next day. So I went to Jordan [traffic], and I came in through the Jordan crossing point, Allenby Bridge, and I was given a month. After the month expired I tried to renew but I was denied. So having the responsibilities that I have, my ailing mother, all the responsibilities of the school, I chose to |
| 00:04:14 |
| violate and overstay my visa in the hopes of trying to find means of staying and I haven’t been able to. |
| 00:04:26 | SB | One by one we started hearing from our friends, that they exited and they weren’t coming back and we basically put the peaces together to learn alone. Because this is not an announced policy from the Israeli side, that this is a new policy that’s being implemented of, of forcing internationals, whether they’re Palestinians who hold foreign passports or |
| 00:04:46 |
| internationals that are non-Palestinian, Israel is prohibiting them from entering or re-entering the Palestinian territory. [Traffic]. |
| 00:04:59 | TR | The information regarding Israel is totally controlled and carefully presented. Israel has total control of the crossing points here. The way you can enter the West Bank is either through the crossing point at the Allenby Bridge with Jordan or through a, a, a crossing point with Israel proper, if you will, and to enter Israel, you enter it through the airport. So that’s how |
| 00:05:24 |
| they control entry into the West Bank, into the occupied territory. An occupying authority which is Israel’s recognised as such in the West Bank, has the obligation to allow free entry into the area. But they totally control the entry. |
| 00:05:43 | AB | It’s bureaucratic evil. The Israeli system of occupation or system towards Arabs in Israel is an evil system. People are not evil, but the system is. [Child in background] I was stopped at the airport and interrogated by who I assume to be the secret police. When they started asking about how many children do I have and I say I have three children. Two have |
| 00:06:15 |
| German passports and one has an Israeli passport and the man told me, he says, no you don’t you only have two kids. And I say, excuse me but I have three kids and he says, no you only have two, that’s not your daughter. Going through your head you’re wondering, what do you answer and I just thought I’m |
| 00:06:38 |
| not even going to dignify that lowly bureaucratic secret policeman with an answer. Where therefore they inform me after a number of hours of interrogation that I would be given a, a visa, a visa for one week and then I would be considered personae non- gratae and I would have to leave and I would be denied, then I had to leave the country. [Children in |
| 00:07:05 |
| background, music] What’s it like living in Cairo? Well, I’m physically here but [laughs] emotionally I’m still not here. And the situation we’re in is, is tearing my family apart, in every way. |
| 00:08:04 | AH | I had to tell the kids, look Baaba [?] can’t come back now. I didn’t tell them first why. Because I thought, I was afraid you know, that they, you know, they get nightmares from stuff like that. |
| 00:08:13 | AB | How long do I have to live without my wife and kids? How long do they have to live without me? |
| 00:08:21 | AH | And my daughter kept asking is Baaba going to be back on my birthday, which was then like, five months away, ah two months away, sorry. And I was like, yeah, sure, of course he’s going to come, yeah. [Appliance in background] Our daughter is very emotional. She cried and she said, what do you mean, |
| 00:08:38 |
| he’s never coming back, whatever, and I said look, the lawyer’s helping us, and so, you know. And I guess it made it, for them it made it a bit easier, even though it’s hard to understand. |
| 00:08:54 | YF | As I see it, the officers don’t want Akrum and people like Akrum to enter the system, because once you are into the system you will get what you deserve by law. He’s not connected to any terror organisation, he never made any crime, so he’s very clean, very decent person, he works for his living, he can support his family there’s no reason for not letting him to Israel. |
| 00:09:25 | AB | Has nothing to do with legality, has nothing to do with security, it has everything to do with destroying any hope of a peaceful solution, that’s what it’s about and emptying Palestine of Palestinians. [Music] |
| 00:10:23 | HR | This is why I overstayed my visa. I, I, I can’t leave my mother. She is a precious, precious person. |
| 00:10:32 | LR | Last year when they, in the airport, they don’t want to give her a visa and I become cry and jump and how, her land where she can go? And my daughter, the oldest one said, calm down, wait, sha alo [?], then she come for a month and the month is finish and Israeli they don’t care, with many like Hanan. |
| 00:10:59 | HR | To be denied the, the ability to live here is like having my existence torn out of me. I don’t know what else I could do or what else would I be? I don’t know. I mean, it’s an existential crisis for me right now. It is; I’m at a loss. I’m a US citizen, I could go and live in America, people are dying to go to America, I have a Jordanian passport; I could live in Jordan, |
| 00:11:26 |
| but I feel so foreign. I think it, for the first time I feel as though I’m being evicted out of the earth. [Children singing] This school has helped the, the, the return of Palestinian Americans wishing to re-culture themselves in the local society and also it brings in people with capital, with money. |
| 00:12:12 | TR | I have been again coming back and forth for the past ten years probably three times, four times a year. For the past two years, I have been involved in the development of the Palestinian medical school. The campus of the university now has been placed outside the Jerusalem area through the recently erected wall. So we’re on the West Bank side of wall now. Because |
| 00:12:37 |
| university is outside now, they have passed the responsibility for visas to the Palestinian authority. But there is no liaison now between Palestinian authority and the Israeli government, so they will not issue a work visa. So on my recent attempts at entry, I was threatened that I would not be allowed in. I managed to come in finally through the help of the Israeli chapter of the Physicians for Human Rights, who engaged a |
| 00:13:02 |
| lawyer on my behalf and the lawyer managed to get a permission for me to enter the occupied territories from the military authorities. But I’m not sure whether I’d be able to use that on the following visit, so the, the issue remains… it’s random, it’s random and it’s unpredictable so there’s always an anxiety. |
| 00:13:37 | SB | I was requested by some Palestinian investors, to become a project manager for the Plaza shopping centre, which is the first modern retail shopping centre in Palestine. It has been a very successful project business wise and it’s a $10 million project and hires about 220 people directly and probably about 500 indirect hires as well. So the project was another |
| 00:14:02 |
| Nanwire [?] project that I feel I contributed to in a very significant way by being here. We as the business sector are fully engaged in ending the occupation. Israel should have no doubt about it. There is no backroom deal that can happen with the business community, that will allow occupation to |
| 00:14:24 |
| exist. However, there are many opportunities for the Israelis to open doors, open windows, allow access to happen, that while we’re ending this occupation, we can start rehabilitating the two peoples together. What’s happening today is just the opposite. Every single door, window opportunity that the Israelis have to, to lend a hand to those people who they have |
| 00:14:42 |
| almost destroyed completely, they are closing it. So I would urge the Israeli community, to look deeper into their policies and to see that if you take the [unclear] horrors out of this community, if you take the international expertise out of this |
| 00:14:55 |
| community, what you will be left with, are those ten year old Palestinians, that today jump on the back of an armoured tank. In 20 years God only know what they will do. |
| 00:15:10 | NAH | There was no money. We did not develop our streets, our education system, our health system. The one who was running us is the Israeli officers, okay. The head at the education system, they call them an education general, he’s the only one running the system and everybody is Palestinian and the general at the top of the Health Department, and he’s the |
| 00:15:37 |
| only Israeli and the others are Palestinians. So we did not develop our systems over here. Our streets, our water, our electricity. |
| 00:15:53 | HR | As long as the Palestinians don’t have anything to guard, fighting and firing randomly will be easy, but when you create institutions that create jobs and create or help develop the economy and culture also, it creates a social peace that, from which a larger peace can be created. Now the word peace, I use it here very carefully because Palestinians are not |
| 00:16:20 |
| necessarily comfortable with that word because it’s so politicised and so, it’s almost hijacked by, I think, western nations that want a certain kind of peace. Nobody’s against peace but it’s between quotes. Peace has been translated as succumbing to, you know, others or western portrayal or image of peace for the Palestinians. [Traffic] |
| 00:16:54 | SB | From day one we’ve seen that the donor [?] involvement has been on the sidelines, trying to affect policy, trying to implement foreign agendas by way of NGOs or otherwise and what has happened is that a lot of money was spent here. Probably more humanitarian and technical assistance money was put into Palestine than probably anywhere in the world during this period of time, but what’s there to show for it? Not much. [Music] |
| 00:17:59 | MR | From Israel’s subjective point of view, we have no interest living next, next to a failed society, next to a failed economy, next to a failed political structure, on the contrary. We’d like to have a good neighbour, a more, a more successful neighbour, a more, a neighbour with a more, a strong democracy. That’s good for Israel too. [Music, children] |
| 00:18:26 | GA | You’re talking about 3.5 million Palestinians living near subsistence level. And it’s not the tradition of Palestinians to depend on charity. But in a repressive situation as they are in now, with excessive controls and almost an unprecedented internationally they have no choice but to depend on external assistance. When the occupation was imposed on Palestine in |
| 00:18:55 |
| ’67, the ratio of per capita income in Israel and per capita income in Palestine was seven to one. Now it is nearly 30 to one. The occupation has done us absolutely no good. [Music] |
| 00:19:54 | AB | I think it’s sad that my kids have to go through this. And this is bad for Israel and it’s bad, it’s not in the interest of my government, the United States Government, what they’re doing and I would expect my government to do more, have their citizens treated better and... I’m, you know, at the Central Bank of Egypt, I mean I’m a USA contractor so… But the fact is |
| 00:20:29 |
| that, unfortunately not all citizens are created equal. [Music]. I’m just excited to see my family again. For the past ten weeks I’ve seen them for a day. My kids have a right to see their father. I never thought I’d have to chose between my country and my, my kids. Ich liebe Baaba, wow. |
| 00:20:55 | YB | And you were not there. |
|
| AB | That’s what you wrote. |
|
| YB | I missed you. |
|
| AB | I missed you too, very much. You really wrote that? |
| 00:21:14 | YB | I missed you so much. |
|
| AB | I missed you too. |
|
| YB | Daddy, I slide down quicker with a pillow. |
|
| AB | Do you want to go eat pizza? |
| 00:21:28 | YB | What? |
|
| AB | You want to go eat pizza? |
|
| YB | I can’t, I get nauseous. |
| 00:21:49 | HA | My dad is from the Galega [?] from Maramin [?]. He went as a 19 year old student to Germany to study and he met my mum. I was raised in Germany and then when I was like 19 I thought okay, I’ll go, come here for half a year and study Arabic. I ended up in Jerusalem first and then somehow I met somebody and she said that I can live with her and her mother. |
| 00:22:16 | AH | We actually met in a camp. [laughs] |
|
| IVF | Did you? |
|
| AH | Yeah, we did yeah, going yeah, we, one of those, what do you call them? |
|
| AB | Service taxis, where you, goes from point A to point B. And you get, you know, seven people on the car and then they just… that’s how we met. |
|
| AH | Can get in, can get out wherever you want, you know. And I didn’t know I wanted to get out somewhere to bring a gift to a person in a refugee camp, a woman. And I didn’t know where it was exactly so, I heard him speaking English with, with some girl, you know, so I asked, oh could you please help me and tell me where is Kalandia [?], you know? And he’s like yeah, sure, of course, you know |
| 00:22:50 | AH | I’ll show you, and that was our first meeting and ah, you know, I get out of the cab and I thought nice guy, but that was it. Two weeks later he showed up at my friend’s house. And he’s like, you were in that cab, and I was like, I don’t really remember you. |
| 00:23:09 | AB | My ego went [whistles] very quickly. [Laughs] All right, it is over-inflated anyway but… [laughs, music] We got married at the Sharia [?] Court at the religious court. We took our marriage certificate to the US Consulate where they notarised it, recognised it. |
| 00:23:43 | AH | It was kind of like a reception, because it was intifada [?] time, you know and people didn’t dance which we were lucky back then. We thought, oh thank God, you know we didn’t have to dance. |
| 00:23:51 | AB | Weddings were very low key at that time. |
|
| AH | Yeah, it was kind of like a reception and you know, everybody getting together and… |
|
| AB | And eating and taking pictures. |
|
| AH | Yeah [laughs], exactly. |
|
| AB | Three hours of eating and taking pictures. [Music] |
| 00:24:18 | AH | We didn’t have any intention to going to Germany first. When we left we said we were only going to go for like two, three, four years and then come back here but in the end we stayed nine years. We always had this, you know, thing in the back of our heads, you know, that one day, if there’s an opportunity, |
| 00:24:34 |
| we’ll come back. And one day it just happened, you know, because I come get a job offer and then we decided well, this is the opportunity to do it. |
|
| AB | Emotionally and psychologically, we had, we were ready to come back. [Music, traffic] |
| 00:25:30 | AH | When I get up in the morning and I hear the roosters crowing and I look, you know, over, over the hills or whatever it’s like there’s something that’s very, it’s like my childhood dream’s come true in a way, I’m very hooked to this place. There’s something about it. I can’t even tell you exactly what it is, but there’s something you know. Maybe I, I got this feeling from |
| 00:25:50 |
| my father who was telling stories about how he grew up and, and ah, I mean people are very nice, it’s the society is very much, you know, it’s different than Germany. I mean Germany has it’s other opportunities or whatever advantages, you know, but here people are very close knit, you know, |
| 00:26:08 |
| people smile, people say hello when you talk to them, you know. They’re very sweet with kids, even the men are very sweet with kids, you know and the kids feel, felt that too and I think they, they were very comfortable living here. They are very comfortable living here. But also when they moved, you |
| 00:26:25 |
| know, it was very nice for them. To having their family around also and ah, yeah. I mean for me it was the right decision, definitely. |
|
| AB | We wanted them to go to the Friends School which is a Quaker school. It’s where my father went to school, it’s where I went to school and now it’s where our kids are going to school. It’s a wonderful, 150 year old, Quaker institution in Ramallah. [Kids playing] |
| 00:26:56 | JA | One of our values, our school values is non-violence. And, and therefore we stress the issue of non-violence so we’re challenged by our students when we talk about non-violence when they see the, their, their town bombed and their relatives killed, they, they challenge us and they come and say, you know, how can we be supporters of non-violence, non-violence |
| 00:27:20 |
| when all of this is happening and we engage in long dialogue with our students and we teach conflict resolution, we, we share with them examples from around the world, and so this is something that we’re proud of. That we, we provide the, sort of, the alternative to them. That there are ways of resolving |
| 00:27:42 |
| conflict non-violently. But at the same time we allow them the space to express anger, because you can’t suppress that. |
| 00:27:53 | SB | The Palestinians were able to meet the challenge the international community put upon them by holding democratic elections for the Palestinian parliament. These are elections that Jimmy Carter and a whole series of officials, John Kerry, who is presidential candidate in the States, was at my polling booth here in Al Beda [?] when I went to vote and he was |
| 00:28:13 |
| checking the ballet boxes to make sure they were correct. I kind of think he should have been in Ohio checking the ballet boxes there but that’s a different story. [Music] When the international community started to penalise the Palestinians, because the results of the elections that they supported did not |