APWAL Transcript:
(Dialogue in Hebrew with English subtitles.)
[00:00:19.04]
Narrator: What about the innocent people who just lived here?
[00:00:21.17]
Boy: They weren’t innocent. A Gentile is not allowed to own any part of the Land of
Israel.
[00:00:28.03]
Narrator: Do you want peace?
[00:00:29.19]
Boy: Peace…if there were someone to make peace with, then there would be peace.
But a peace…You can’t make peace with Arabs inside the Land of Israel.
They should leave the Land of Israel and there there will be peace with them.
[00:00:41.00]
Narrator: So there’s no possibility for peace here in the State…Here in the Land of
Israel?
Boy: No possibility whatsoever.
[00:00:46.08]
Narrator: And when you say ‘The Land of Israel’ do you mean the 1967 borders, or
do you mean from the River to the Sea?
[00:00:52.20]
Boy: From the River to the Sea. The whole Land of Israel.
[00:00:55.21]
Narrator: So what should we do about…
Boy: We have to expel them. All of them.
Narrator: Come again?
Boy: To expel all the Arabs.
(Musical sequence)
[00:01:47.22]
Narrator: There are people who will tell you that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
an eternal religious conflict. Others will argue that it’s a symptom of a
larger clash of civilizations. But the truth is, that the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict isn’t even a conflict between Arabs and Jews. It’s a conflict
between people who believe in Democracy, and people who believe in
Ethnocracy.
(Title sequence)
White Letter Productions presents
A Film by Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon
A People Without A Land
[00:02:32.12]
Narrator: In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, two major forms of nationalism emerged in Europe. Civil Nationalism came from Western Europe, and argued that a state belongs to all its citizens. The other form of nationalism was Ethnonationalism, and this came out of Central and Eastern Europe, with the idea that a country doesn’t belong to all its citizens. Rather, it belongs to one particular ethnic group.
[00:02:59.02]
Jeff Halper: When Zionism was developing as a national movement, it’s not going to jump to Thomas Jefferson and become a civil form of nationalism. It took the form of nationalism where the Jews lived, which was this tribal Ethnonationalism, and brought it here to Palestine.
[00:03:15.12]
Benny Morris: The problem was that the Jews were a very small minority in the country, and remained a small minority, even after the beginning of Zionist immigration and settlement in Palestine. This led some of the Zionist leaders, including Ben Gurion and Weizmann to the conclusion that in addition to immigration, there would also have to be some form of transfer of Arabs out of the area of the Jewish state-to-be. Either, be it all of Palestine or part of Palestine, in order to attain a Jewish majority.
[00:03:49.08]
Ali Abunimah: Lake Michigan Springs.
Narrator: Thank-you very much.
Ali Abunimah: That’s what I drink.
Please don’t show the pile of laundry in the film. My mother would
kill me if she saw that.
Narrator: Where’s your mother from?
[00:04:04.21]
Ali Abunimah: She’s from Lifta, which is near Jerusalem. I grew up in England and then in Belgium, and then I came to The United States to go to university, so I’ve never lived in Palestine. Like millions of Palestinians born to Palestinian parents outside Palestine. This is in Lifta. This is my mother’s grandfather, so my great-grandfather.
[00:04:31.16]
Rabbi Asher Lopatin: Well, I think as a kid, I lived in Israel for 4 years, from 8 to 12, in Jerusalem, in French Hill. I became politically aware when I was 9 or 10. I consider myself to be a Zionist. I understand Zionism as the importance of Jews having a political state of their own. And it focuses on the people. That this people needs a place.
[00:04:58.16]
Ali Abunimah: If the myth were true, that there were “a land without a people for a people without a land”, and Jews discovered this “land without a people” and went and formed a state on it, that’s not my business. I couldn’t care less. But Palestine wasn’t a land without a people. It was a land with a people who had lived on it continuously, who were in all likelihood the descendents of the Jews who lived there in the past. And nobody has a right to come and impose a state on them and say “you have no rights here”.
[00:05:35.18]
Narrator: But in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine gained serious international legitimacy. On November 29, 1947, the UN voted to divide Palestine. The Palestinians rejected the partition plan and launched attacks against the Jewish ‘Yishuv’ (community). But the Zionists rebuffed these attacks, declared the establishment of the State of Israel, and withstood a multi-pronged invasion by the surrounding Arab states. When the dust of war settled in 1949, most of the Palestinian people were refugees, and the State of Israel controlled 78% of historic Palestine.
[00:06:20.14]
(Dialogue in Hebrew with English subtitles.)
Eitan: I guess…Johnny Cash.
Girl: Who is that?
Eitan: I don’t know. I recall the name, but I don’t know what he sings. I know the other ones…
Girl: Who is Cat Stevens?
Eitan: Cat Stevens was my favorite musician when I was growing up.
Girl: Well done, Dad! It’s Johnny Cash.
[00:06:38.00]
Eitan: So my name is Eitan Bronstein, and I was born in Argentina, and I came to Israel when I was 5 years old. My mom was a communist, young communist in Argentina. She told us that she almost joined the revolution of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba, but she gave this up. And my father also was, from what I know, also a young idealist, but not a Zionist. They were not into Zionism, so they came to the Kibbutz. I was 5 years old, and I grew up on the Kibbutz, since I was 5 until I was 27. For example, I remember I have memories from the 1967 war. As a child I remember, because we were very close to the border with Jordan back then. The Kibbutz was 200 meters from the border. In fact, the ‘67 war began in that area near our Kibbutz. So I remember the beginning, the war, and I remember the bombs falling around us. And we knew that on the other side of the border there are the Arabs, and they are our enemies.
[00:08:03.15]
Narrator: In the summer of 1967, fearing a joint attack by its Arab neighbors, Israel launched a pre-emptive war, which came to be known as the “6 Day War”. During the course of the war, Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along with the more than 1 million Palestinians who lived there.
[00:08:22.08]
Gershom Gorenberg: The big debate was between people who said “Ah, we’ve completed the work, now we have the whole Land of Israel”, and people who said “No, now we have a bargaining chip that we can trade for peace and acceptance and normalization.” Essentially, you ended up with what was considered a temporary situation in perpetuity. A situation in which Israel rules the territories, but does not annex it. And in which, therefore, the residents of the territories, the Palestinian residents of the territories, remain permanently disenfranchised.
[00:08:53.03]
Adi Ophir: It is more than 40 years now. It is certainly the longest military occupation in the world today, maybe one of the longest in history, that continues as a military occupation without a political solution and without giving the inhabitants of the conquered territory any rights.
[00:09:15.07]
Rabbi Asher Lopatin: I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea that you have however many Arabs living in the West Bank that are disenfranchised, and not always sure why that’s remaining so.
[00:09:27.04]
Arnon Soffer: My name is Arnon Soffer. I’m a professor of geography and geo-politics. At the moment I am the head of, the chair of Geo-Strategy at Haifa University. If we annex the West Bank, without Gaza. Or I will say, If we annex Greater Israel, Palestine will be one united country, today we are 50% only. In another 20 years, we the Jewish people will be about 42%. This is the end of a Jewish State.
(Musical sequence)
[00:10:33.18]
Narrator: So I’m going to start with a very general question. What is the occupation, and what are its effects on the Palestinian people?
Hanan Ashrawi: Wow. That’s a simple question that demands a very complex answer. The occupation is a system of control, basically. Power control. Military control. But in addition to that, it’s a system of theft. Because you’re not just controlling or enslaving a population. You’re stealing their land, their resources, their rights and their freedoms.
(Musical sequence)
[00:11:20.17]
Samer: This is a permit. If you want to go to Israel, you have to apply for a permit through the Israeli intelligence headquarters. Sometimes you have to meet with the intelligence, sometimes in the winter when you apply, they just say “yes” or they say “no”. Every feast, at Christmas and Easter, as a Christian I apply through the church, but I have never gotten one.
[00:11:43.11]
So the best resistance is to be unarmed. And now I think this is very successful what we do, and what I do almost every day in my work. I became black-listed because of this. Since ’92 I’m black-listed. I don’t believe in fighting, I don’t believe in weapons. The best way…bring internationals and show them the reality of the occupation.
(Musical sequence)
[00:12:20.22]
Samer: And this is the house of the family I told you about. The settlers attacked it by Molotov Cocktail three years ago, and his brother was burned, who was 3 years old. Then when his mother was going to give birth, not in the same time…another time, because the ambulance couldn’t come there. The main road we came from, you saw, it’s very narrow. This is the only way to come for the ambulance, which means from the settlement. They forbid the car, the ambulance, so she lost the baby, actually. He died.
[00:12:50.02]
Gershon Baskin: There are now about half a million Israelis living in Occupied Territories. About a quarter of a million in East Jerusalem, and a quarter of a million in the West Bank. The purpose of the Israeli settlements is first of all answering a political and a religious wish and desire of a strong, powerful, organized part of the Israeli population. You have to remember that when you open up your Old Testament, and your fingers walk through the history of the Biblical era, they’re walking through the hills of the West Bank. They’re not walking through Tel Aviv. Our history, our story is there…in the West Bank.
(Musical sequence)
[00:13:26.04]
Text: The Jewish-only settlement of Efrat
The Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar
The Jewish-only settlement of Alon Shvut
[00:13:54.06]
Ari Abramson: Well, I’m a reserve so it’s hard to say name and rank because I’m not really in the army. I, you know, get called up every now and then to do some “shmira” (reserve duty). Ari Abramson, my rank would probably be Sergeant Major, in a regular infantry unit, and mostly our job is just to protect the area…protect the Israelis living in the area, that’s about it. Oh, look at that! Look at that. We have a lunch here. Interesting. Breakfast. Clean up. Lunch. That’s basically our day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, as I can see.
[00:14:36.22]
My belief is that most of the Palestinians do not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And I’m talking about, I couldn’t give you exact numbers because I haven’t done the proper research, but, it’s a large, large number.
[00:14:54.22]
Narrator: Do you believe that Israel has a right to exist?
[00:15:00.20]
Samer: Everybody has the right to exist. Everybody. Israel. Palestine. Europeans. Americans. Iraqis. Everybody has the right to exist, but you cannot exist by ignoring others. This is very important. They are humans. Israelis are normal people, humans. We are humans, normal people. Everybody has the right, since he’s born, to live in peace. So Israel has the right to exist. And I don’t say “no” for living here. They can live here. They can share the land with us. But equally.
[00:15:41.06]
Narrator: The vast majority of Israelis who live in the West Bank, reside in one of the 120 Jewish-only settlements. But there are a handful of Israelis who have chosen to live with the Palestinians.
[00:15:57.15]
Man: Oh, there she is.
Hello.
Driver: Hi.
Neta: Just keep going.
Driver: OK. Up this way, up here?
Neta: Yeah. We have to go around, kind of.
[00:16:13.00]
No, I can’t say that there hasn’t been a change. In the West
Bank, Obama’s made a change. Our friends, people involved in the
non-violent resistance, instead of being killed, are being arrested.
(untranslated Arabic and Hebrew)
They’re releasing Abu Nizar. Do you have any credit on your phone?
Girl: Abu Nizar?
Neta: On 5000 Shekels and the same conditions as Mohammed Khatib.
[00:16:54.08]
So, up until I was 15, I didn’t know that there was an Occupation. You know, it didn’t exist. The occupied territories were Judea and Samaria and Gaza. I would go visit my uncle, who lived in a settlement, but I didn’t know about the occupation. And the picture that was drawn for me is that we are, morally superior. We… basically, Jews, the Jewish history that I was taught in school. We had always been victims. We had never harmed anyone.
[00:17:28.22]
Ari: You won’t find Israelis that will purposely go in and start killing Palestinian civilians. It just doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t exist.
Narrator: Settler violence?
Ari: Settler violence is definitely wrong. It’s not the same. If there are settlers that would actually go and kill…you’re right, there probably are. 0.1% of the Israeli Population.
[00:17:59.00]
Samer: By the way, when the settlers came and threw stones, the soldier stays here. Of course not himself all the time. There are shifts. But there will be a soldier 24 hours on this spot. So when they came and threw the big stone, there was a soldier who was watching. But they cannot forbid the settlers.
And we can smoke now. As I said, smoking is very good for health. And we support the families who work in the tobacco companies. You know? I don’t want them to lose their jobs. That’s why I smoke.
[00:18:30.13]
Yehuda: I served in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, from March 2001 until 2004. I was a combat infantry soldier and a commander. Basically, your orders are that you’re not allowed to touch settlers. You’re not allowed to arrest them. You have no authorization above them. You have these two systems of laws that you have in the occupied territories. Where, as a soldier, you enforce martial law on Palestinians and the police are there to enforce Israeli law on the Israeli settlers.
[00:18:58.23]
Man: You see, we put up this metal fence to protect ourselves and to protect visitors like you from garbage and stones because the people who live on top of us are settlers. They occupy these houses and they keep throwing garbage, stones, bottles.
[00:19:13.04]
Samer: I remember there was a strike in the school, and, you know, when we are kids, there is a strike, we are happy just to go home. So I was going home, and it was raining at that time, and I had the Palestinian Keffiyeh around my neck, just to protect me from the cold. And I remember a small jeep of the Israeli army with 3 soldiers in it. And they told me in Hebrew “Eifo beit sefer?”. So I didn’t know what it meant at that time. I knew “Eifo” means “where”, but “beit sefer” I didn’t know that it means a school. So they wanted to know “where is my school”. And why I left my school. So I didn’t understand, actually. And I told him in Arabic, because I assumed he spoke Arabic. And then he slapped me. And he said “Beit sefer means school”. And he spoke to me in Arabic. At that time I wanted to cry. I was a kid. But what hurt me, actually, was not when he slapped me, it was that the other two were laughing.
[00:20:01.15]
Mikhael: The bottom line is this is inherent to occupation. So, it’s not even that we’re saying that…we’re not calling for a specific solution. We just want Israeli society to know that this is part of what being an occupier is about. And we want that to be part of the decision making process. Maybe the only political line we have, straight
forward political line, is that it can’t be done differently. That you can’t do things in a nice way. Occupation is about the occupied being inherently worth less than you are.
[00:20:38.10]
Yehuda: You start your night-shift patrol from 10 o’clock at night to 6 o’clock in the morning. You walk in the old city of Hebron. Bump into a house, wake up the family. Men there, women there, search everything, you know…tear apart the place. This is an innocent family, by definition. As a commander of the patrol, you just choose a random house. Leave that family, go out to the street, shoot some bullets through the air, throw some stun grenades, knock on some doors, light some fires in the streets. Run to the other corner of the old city, invade another house. You know? That’s how you’ll pass an 8 hour shift, until you get tired. And in the morning, they will know the IDF was there.
[00:21:14.08]
Hanan: It just becomes part of the fabric of everyday life, and it’s a system of injustice in ways that you don’t have the capacity, the ability to solve everything. It’s just overwhelming. So you have to take little bits and pieces of the occupation as they affect your life, and try to overcome the impact. And try to maintain your sanity and your health and your sense of humanity, actually. It’s very difficult.
(Musical sequence)
[00:22:09.11]
Eitan: After ’67, when I grew up, I guess, I was a young person in high school. I remember that I was against the occupation of ’67 and I was for two states. And then, a few years later, there was the beginning…I was in the army, and the first Lebanon war broke out. In 1982. And then, since the very first moment, I was against this war. But, on the other hand, I was also a good soldier. In my 3 year service, I was a very good soldier. So, it was not an easy thing for me to refuse, and not to participate. But I decided in the end, I decided not to go, and I was jailed. I was on trial and I was jailed for, I don’t remember, like 28 days or something like that. So this was my first time that I said to myself and to the people around, the society, that there is a limit that I don’t cross.
[00:23:18.03]
Narrator: By 1987, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza strip had had enough. They rose up against the Israeli occupation in a popular uprising that came to be known as “The First Intifada”.
[00:23:31.06]
Ali: As a teenager, during the first intifada, late 1980’s, that was a time I became very aware, not just of our relationship to Palestine, but the world’s relationship to Palestine, and how the occupation, how the other injustices were perpetuated by international support. And I felt that it would be…I had a role in doing something, a sort of a need to act.
[00:24:09.02]
Neta: When the intifada started, and I first learned that there was an occupation, it really…I could recognize the elements of oppression. But somehow, we were on the wrong side of the equation. Where we were supposed to be. I started taking Israelis and Internationals to areas where Palestinians were trying to protest, on the model of the civil rights movement.
[00:24:36.20]
Ali: At the earliest stage, I think, The Electronic Intifada was very much reactive. It was about responding to the media. With time, it evolved into reporting directly, doing reporting, doing analysis of our own, rather than simply critiquing what other people were doing.
[00:24:59.11]
Narrator: In 1993, following 6 years of intifada, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords, which laid out a staged timetable for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The concept was, that the Palestinians would establish an independent state on the parts of the country that Israel had conquered in 1967. To this end, the Accords established “The Palestinian Authority”, and granted it limited autonomy over certain parts of the occupied territories. But crucially, the most sensitive issues of the conflict were postponed, and not discussed, and the situation in the occupied territories only seemed to deteriorate further.
[00:25:41.12]
Jeff: Over the 7 years of negotiations, in Oslo, from ’93 to 2000, the Palestinians got nothing. They ended up in worse shape, because before Oslo, you had the West Bank and Gaza. And Palestinians could work in Tel Aviv, take their kids to the beach. They had jobs. They could move around. All of a sudden, after 7 years, they’re locked into Areas A and B. 95% of the Palestinians are locked into 40% of the West Bank. Israel has doubled its settler population, and they’re in prison.
[00:26:17.20]
Narrator: In a desperate effort to reach a final agreement, President Bill Clinton sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in Camp David in the year 2000.
[00:26:30.18]
Gershom: My best reading, from what I think of as being the most serious accounts of the process is that Barak’s proposals would have been difficult for any Palestinian leader to accept. Even though it’s true that Barak was offering more than any Israeli leader had done before. Both of those things can be true at the same
time.
[00:26:51.19]
Narrator: The talks failed, and a second intifada, more violent than the first was launched. Suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, followed by brutal military reprisals against the Palestinians fed off each other in a deadly cycle of violence.
In 2005, following 5 of the bloodiest years of the conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon set Israel on a course of unilateral disengagement from parts of the occupied territories. He withdrew Israeli settlers and forces from the Gaza Strip, and accelerated construction of a separation barrier that was sold to the Israeli public as a security measure against Palestinian suicide bombers. But the path of the barrier deviated wildly from the 1967 green line, suggesting that its purpose was more than just security.
[00:27:45.01]
Arnon: Back to Sharon. When he became Prime Minister for the second time, the night of his victory…can you image? When all over the country people are celebrating his victory. He called me at home. (and said) “Please, tomorrow morning bring me your disengagement map.” And very early in the morning I was in his office, and one day later he called me (and said) “Arnon, I’m studying your map.” The ideology of the disengagement. How to do it. My philosophy is “Jews must be here, Arabs here.” It was clear to me, talking to you…let’s say you are from the left…Why are we not back along the green line? To prevent so many problems. Those who ask me to do it don’t understand that 300,000 settlers, religious people, the hard core of the Jewish people, ready to fight, are living today in the West Bank. It is a mission impossible. And by my demarcation…now listen…we managed to annex 86% of all the settlers.
[00:29:01.17]
Saeb Erekat: What do you want from me? I’m offering you a two state solution. I’m recognizing you on 78% of historic Palestine. And accepting to live next to you in peace and security, on 22% of the land. And you tell me “no! I want to have Maale Adumim, and the heart of the West Bank, Ariel, Gush Etzion.” And if you don’t say that…you’re against peace.
[00:29:25.22]
Ari: It would be completely unfair and one-sided to say that you have to get rid of all of the settlements and kick all the settlers out of their homes. Talking about transfer of people…I think it’s disgusting. I would never think of going over to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and kicking them all out of their homes and saying “this is our land now”. I wouldn’t think of doing that. I don’t think it’s right to do that to Jews.
[00:29:52.03]
Hanan: Every day the two-state solution becomes more and more remote. What the Netanyahu government is doing, and before that Kadimah, and before that even Labor, is doing on the ground is rendering a two-state solution a physical impossibility, a territorial impossibility. Unless they have a magic wand to wave and get rid of all these settlements that they’re building.
[00:30:14.22]
Arnon: I cannot withdraw, or ask 300,000 settlers to withdraw from the West Bank. And if you force me to do it, it’s a civil war. Another reason for the end of the Jewish people. The wall, or the fence, is a compromise.
(musical sequence)
[00:31:18.11]
Jeff: Israel, I think, has eliminated the two-state solution. We’ll see what Obama comes up with, but I don’t see Israel going back to a place where there’s really a viable Palestinian state. So then, the problem is not 1967…the problem is 1948.
[00:31:35.09]
Eitan: I was, for years, a kind of political, educational activist. I conducted and facilitated many, perhaps hundreds, of encounters between Jews and Arabs. And then, some 10 years ago, we began to see that whenever the “Nakba” came up as an issue in those encounters that there is a huge gap between the two sides. Yeah, so the “Nakba” is the tragedy that happened in 1948 when most of the Palestinians living in this country were expelled. Out of about 900,000 Palestinians living in the territory where Israel was eventually established, out of this 900,000 around 750,000 were expelled or fled. They fled out of fear.
[00:32:38.06]
Benny Morris: When the “Yishuv”, the Jewish community, feels that its back is against the wall, that its losing the war, that the Americans are withdrawing from support for partition and Jewish statehood, that the British are about to evacuate, and the Arab armies are about to invade…things change in April. Still even with this change, an atmosphere…you might even say an atmosphere of transfer takes hold among the Jews in April of ’48. 4 Months after the Arabs begin the war. Still, it is never translated into a consistent, systematic policy.
[00:33:11.18]
Avi Shlaim: But everyone knew, that that was the hope of the leadership…to expel as many Arabs as possible. And a lot of the expulsions were done by the local leaders, by the local military commanders, not on orders from above but because this was the ethos. To get rid of the Arabs. It’s a complicated situation. Ultimately, I
think that the term “Ethnic Cleansing” is justified.
[00:33:39.12]
Ghada: Zionists came to Palestine to establish a Jewish state. What is a Jewish state? It is not a state full of Palestinians. It is a state full of Jews. How are you going to do that? There is a country full of non-Jews, Palestinians. How on earth are you going to do it? There was only one way. Fully 1/3 of the Palestinian people had been expelled before May of 1948, which is the date of the establishment of the state of Israel. I am one of them.
[00:34:19.22]
See there, behind me? That is the house that I lived in as a child. This is very much as it was. What has changed, very strikingly of course, is the upper floor of this, which did not exist. By the time they got here, my father’s job was much better, things were really much more comfortable, and my mother really came into her own.
[00:34:48.10]
When it really changed was the beginning of 1948. That was when a very big hotel in our neighborhood, close to our house, called the Semiramis Hotel was blown up by the Haganah. That, I think, was the first time I began to feel that life was changing. From that moment on, that was January 1948, things got worse and worse and worse. Because our neighborhood was obviously targeted by Jewish militias, who were intent on taking it over.
[00:35:21.18]
Ilan: If you read the literature on ethnic cleansing in other places, you see that usually the idea is to force people to flee. Rather than to waste energy in taking them one by one, putting them on buses and trucks and so on. So usually, what you want is to intimidate the population, make it flee. And by that, you achieve your goal of a massive displacement.
[00:35:48.12]
Ghada: Our street had quite a number of Jewish snipers, who had taken over empty buildings because many of the families in our neighborhood had already left. Palestinian families. Because it was too dangerous. They took these over, and they would be either on the roof or in an upper window with guns pointing. You never knew when a shot would ring out. And, in fact, a man, I saw him as a child, he got shot. A poor Bedouin man who was just walking along the road trying to sell produce, cheese and so on. Shot. Shot by a sniper.
[00:36:27.09]
My parents both were resistant to leaving. Many of their friends had left, and talked to them and said “look, what the hell are you staying for? This is very, very bad. Well, let’s go and wait a bit and it will all calm down.” My parents said “no”. My mother, in particular, said “no way, no way. Nobody is moving. I am not moving.” I think the thing that…I think, and I say “I think” because they never discussed it. I mean, you know…people need to understand that the “Nakba”, this catastrophe, the loss of the homeland in 1948 was so traumatic that my parents really could not talk about it. Never. They never talked about it. I never got anything from them about it.
[00:37:11.01]
However, I learned afterwards that Deir Yassin was a small village close to Jerusalem. And, on the 9th of April, units of the Irgun, Jewish terrorists, moved in and shot and killed about 200 people. And that, I think, was…that was it. The feeling was, we cannot now stay. It was too dangerous.
[00:37:41.22]
Eitan: Zochrot is an Israeli organization, founded 7 or 8 years ago, by Israeli activists, most of them are Israeli Jews, working on the Nakba. Because we believe that unless we acknowledge it and take responsibility for the Nakba, there will never be…there is no possibility for reconciliation in the future between Israelis and Palestinians. There may be peace. Some political agreement. But there will never be real reconciliation unless Israelis take responsibility for the Nakba.
(Live Radio Interview, dialogue in Hebrew with English subtitles)
[00:38:27.14]
Ask the Jews around the world how much Israel contributes to their security today. How many Jews today live in fear, because of what Israel does? There’s more anti-Semitism in the world and more people against the Jews, precisely because of what Israel does. So how can you say that Israel protects Jews in the world? Just today we heard that they are closing the Israeli embassies in Turkey and other places in the world, because it’s scary to be an Israeli in today’s world due to Israel’s behavior.
[00:38:56.03]
What’s that supposed to mean? You aren’t establishing a state for the Jews in the middle of the desert where no one lives. We expelled and continue to expel every day. In Al-Araqib, every day, we shoot and injure people to expel them from their houses. Every day! I’m talking about today. Not sixty years ago. Sixty years ago, we expelled most of the people who lived in this land. We didn’t just establish a state in some place. We established a state by expelling most of the people who lived here.
[00:39:25.14]
Eitan: How are you? Great to see you! Great to see you in Lifta again!
[00:39:29.16]
Yakub: My name is Yakub Odeh from Lifta Village. A refugee from Lifta Village…Evicted in 1948. The Lifta residents in 1948 numbered 3000. They were living in more than 400 stony houses. You are welcome to Lifta. Always I used to say…I hope in the future you will come to our house in Lifta and drink a cup of coffee or tea. Or to eat olives with hyssop. You are welcome.
[00:40:27.04]
Ali: It is a village that was ethnically cleansed in late 1947, early 1948. It was one of the first. And Ben Gurion even crowed publically about how Lifta and Romema were now emptied of Arabs, and he hoped the same would happen in the rest of the country.
[00:40:55.18]
Yakub: The Lifta men did not leave the village until Deir Yassin. When the Deir Yassin massacre happened, all the people left. And the gangs, the Zionist armed gangs, went looking from house to house so that no one would remain in the village. We went in the truck only with our clothes. Nothing. We took nothing. And the key was with my father, because we thought we would come back tomorrow. Most of the people thought ‘we are coming back tomorrow’, but we left because of the shooting or killing or fearful conditions. Until now we say ‘We are coming back’, but I will not lose the hope that we will come back.
[00:41:59.17]
Eitan: Now, this is the most important and crucial point here. The prevention of return home of civilians is a political decision. It is not exactly a result of the war. It is mainly the result of a political decision.
[00:42:17.11]
Ilan: For me, one of the most shocking, as an Israeli who was born here, the most shocking Israeli decision…I don’t think I have recovered since I first learned about this decision in the archives in the 1980’s. In July already, 1948, the Israelis decided to demolish the villages so the people would not say that they could come back. Because there would be nothing to come back to. How people who survived the Holocaust could do such a thing? For me, I must say it is a riddle I have not solved to this day. How could they decide in July 1948 to go to 500 villages with bulldozers and tractors and wipe them out?
[00:43:06.00]
Narrator: But the destruction of Palestinian villages didn’t end in 1948.
[00:43:16.17]
Eitan: So here we are standing now in the West Bank. Legally, this is the West Bank. This is the border. Here, as you can see with the colors. This was Jordan until…this is the West Bank, OK? And this was Jordan until 1967. We are standing here at Imwas village. At the center of what was Imwas village. And there were three villages here. Imwas. Yalu, which is some 2 kilometers to the East, and Beit Nuba.
[00:43:43.02]
Just when you walk, look at the stones around and also the metal of the remains of houses. We are passing through the center of what was Imwas village. The Israeli government, talking about the issue of these villages…so for example, Moshe Dayan, his line, like in many other cases…he says “OK, but the houses have been destroyed in the war”. Now there is not one house, not even one house was destroyed in a war. Not one. They moved from house to house with bulldozers, as you see, and by explosives.
[00:44:17.08]
We have this photo of 1958. And this is a photo from 1968. One year after the ’67 war, and you see the same structure here. It has still not been excavated. But the village is gone already. The village is totally destroyed. And you see from the same angle. Here. And here. And this is 10 years later. Again, more or less the same place of the photo. It’s ’78 already, the park is already growing. You see the trees. And then ’88. This is the park. Green. What they would call “Blooming the Desert”.
[00:44:57.23]
For me, as an Israeli, the importance goes far beyond this history of the Palestinians. Because for me, as an Israeli, as I see it, the Nakba, in a way, constituted us Israelis as colonizers. And that’s why it’s so important to understand the reality in which we live. The refugee issue is the most important issue. Palestinian refugees. The most important part, or component, of this conflict. If we don’t deal with it, we will never have any solution here.
[00:45:37.06]
Narrator: In addition to the original 700,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948, another 300,000 became refugees as a result of the 1967 war. Today, these two populations and they descendants number upwards of 6 Million people, and constitute a majority of the Palestinian population. Roughly 1/3 of them still live in UN administered refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
[00:46:08.05]
Chris Gunness: Classically, in a refugee situation, refugees have three choices. They can stay where they are, they can go to a third country, or they can go home. The preferred choice of the United Nations is for them to go back to their homes.
[00:46:20.03]
Omar: This is a basic right of all refugees around the world. Jews, in particular, know how important this right is. Many Jewish refugees from World War II have exercised, and are still exercising, their right to return to their homes of origin, in Poland, Germany, Austria and other countries they were expelled from by Nazi Germany.
[00:46:36.22]
Ghada: When I was in my thirties, I wrote to the Israeli embassy in London. I mean, if I think about it, it’s absurd, but I was going to have a try. So I wrote a very nice letter, and I said I had been born in Jerusalem, that I was an original inhabitant, and my family had had to leave in 1948, but I now wanted to go back and live in the city. And could I be assisted by Israel to do that? I did get an answer. I got an answer which was perfectly courteous. But it said “yes we’ll give you a tourist visa as a visitor, but we are not able to accede to your other request. Yours sincerely." End of story.
[00:47:27.10]
Ali: Somebody that the state identifies as a Jew, living in Canada or Argentina, who has no organic connection to the country, is entitled to come and live, and be given a home, have access to land, be given financial support, and gain all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Whereas a person, born in the country, who is Palestinian, whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were born there has no rights, whatsoever. That’s what a Jewish and Democratic state means in practice.
[00:48:06.02]
Narrator: Another often overlooked consequence of Israel’s ethnonationalism is the State’s treatment of its Arab minority. While most of the Palestinians either fled or were expelled in 1948, a minority remained in Israel. These people were granted Israeli citizenship, but they were stripped of their land and forced to live under an internal military occupation for 18 years. Today, the Arab minority in Israel is 1.6 Million people strong and constitutes 20% of Israel’s citizens.
[00:48:37.17]
Reem: I think we’re some sort of a mixture, because on the one hand, we are Palestinians, but on the other hand, to a certain extent we were not able to not be affected by the Jewish society or by the Israeli State on different levels. Of course one of them is culture and education and foreign…how can I say it?
(word in Hebrew)
[00:49:10.12]
Narrator: Influences?
Reem: Influences. Maybe the discrimination is not as clear and as vulgar as it used to be, but it is still there, in the law itself.
[00:49:21.12]
Yousef: I can see a lot of similarities between the situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel today and the situation of African-Americans back during the segregation period. Discrimination against the Arab community in Israel has two levels. One is that level which is formalized by the law itself in issues of citizenship, immigration, political participation, religious services, language and culture. And that is the law itself that contains these privileges for the Jewish majority. But also, in other areas…where supposedly, the legal situation was supposed to grant equality for Palestinian citizens in Israel…in reality, on the ground, you will see the situation of the community lag far behind that of the Jewish community. And I’m mainly speaking about the socio-economic situation.
[00:50:17.18]
Narrator: As an ethnonationalist state, Israel sees itself as the exclusive state of the Jewish people. This means, that Jews from around the world are encouraged to immigrate, while Palestinian refugees are prevented from returning. But it also means, that the state treats those living in its sovereign territory differently depending on their ethnicity and geographic location. Jewish Israelis enjoy the highest level of rights and privileges, Arab Israelis have fewer, Palestinians who live in the West Bank have fewer still, and the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have the least. And if you are a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem, you may find yourself in the absurd situation of being made a refugee twice.
[00:51:04.16]
Man: (dialogue in Arabic with English subtitles) The mother of Kamel El-Kurd lives in this tent. She was kicked out of her house by settlers. We have been here for around two months sitting in this tent to support Im Kamel, who has nowhere else to go. She sleeps in this tent. The city has torn the tent down five times and each time she comes back and rebuilds it. The law they use to tear down the tent is called ‘the removal of garbage law’. So we Arabs are considered garbage in this city.
[00:51:42.23]
Woman: They intend to move 27 other families from here. And this has been their home since 1957. This has been their home. Most of them are refugees, actually. UNRWA brought them here. They had homes in either West Jerusalem or in what is now known as “Israel”.
[00:52:06.17]
Arik: Rabbi Arik Ascherman, I’m the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights. Their house in Sheikh Jarrah is being taken by a Jewish group claiming pre-’48 ownership, which may or may not be true. But then let these people go back to their homes that they owned before ’48. So we’re demonstrating that they’ve been made twice refugees. Once from their homes in Talbiyah and Jaffa, once from now their home in Sheikh Jarrah. One way or another, they have to have a home.
[00:52:38.10]
Woman: You are occupying our country, mister.
Man: Yes, but when you say that, it looks like you want to take us out. When you said ‘occupying’…it’s not like…
Woman: Yes, of course you are. Israeli government is occupying.
Man: It was war! It was war!
Woman: Yes.
Man: Yes.
Woman: Yes. Who came to this country?
Man: We did because it’s our country.
Woman: Oh…2000 years ago.
Man: If you don’t believe that it’s our country, the Jew…
Woman: You’re going back 2000 years.
Man: …we can’t live together.
[00:53:02.15]
Woman: Sorry. We are here as human beings now. This is the 21st century.
Man: But we are Jews, and you are Palestinians…this is the place for the Jews.
Woman: Christians, Jews and Muslims…this is their place. And you have to accept this. If you don’t accept this, you will never see peace. Believe me, because we are not going to disappear.
Man: The question is, are you looking for peace with the Jews, or are you looking to take out the Jews?
Woman: No, we’re looking for peace with the Jews.
Man: With the Jews, OK.
Woman: And the Jews have to understand that this land is a holy land for anybody in the world.
Man: Yes, but you should look at the Bible. God said he gave this piece to the Jews, not to the Palestinians.
Woman: No. God is not a land broker!
[00:54:00.22]
Yousef: Israel is defined by its basic laws as a Jewish and Democratic state. With this order. Jewish and Democratic. Not the opposite. But, our analysis of the situation clearly leads us to the conclusion that it is mainly democratic for the Jewish community and it is mainly Jewish for the Arab community.
[00:54:25.16]
Reem: As much as you try, and as much as you do, there is still something fundamental in the state that wants to delete you. Delete your culture, your language, your existence.
[00:54:36.13]
Arnon: If you endanger the Jewish-ness of my country…my compromise will be on democracy. Then you will see long nails.
[00:54:49.17]
Narrator: The fact that Israel is not a democracy, but an ethnocracy is the hidden engine behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is the reason that the refugees were not allowed to return, it is the reason that the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been forced to endure half a century of occupation, and it is the reason that the Palestinian citizens of Israel continue to live as second-class citizens.
[00:55:14.05]
Neta: Living in an ethnocracy, living in a state in which any minority is a demographic threat…where we have to keep this demographic majority…it’s a recipe for Apartheid. It couldn’t really come out any other way.
[00:55:31.03]
Narrator: At the same time, Israel’s international legitimacy has always been contingent on it not doing anything to prejudice the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. The game of the Zionists, since 1948, has therefore been to pass Israel off as a liberal democracy. Since Oslo, that game has expanded to include the appearance of negotiations with the Palestinians.
[00:55:54.11]
Gershon: We love going to the negotiations. We love the headlines, we love the international conferences…the Annapolises and the Wye Rivers and the Camp Davids. We’re in love with this process! …of getting people to talk about the solutions. But at the end of the day, the process is about making decisions.
[00:56:10.07]
Saeb: You know, why would a Prime Minister of Israel, like Netanyahu, stand on TV, and for 25 minutes put conditions on me? Not Jerusalem. It’s not Jerusalem. It’s Yerushalayim, the eternal capital of Israel…so I’m not negotiating Jerusalem with you. That’s what he’s telling me. Refugees…not a single refugee to be returned…so I’m not negotiating refugees. Security…you will be demilitarized. Your skies, your borders will be under my control. Your water I already control. I have to finish the settlements and the wall. And then, after 25 minutes of putting conditions on me, he says ‘I asked the Palestinians to come and negotiate without conditions.’
[00:56:55.20]
Reporter: This week, The Palestine Papers.
Reporter: The papers are the largest leak in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Reporter: More bombshells today relating to Palestinian documents leaked by Al-Jazeera.
[00:57:06.13]
Ali: The Palestine Papers is a trove of about 1600 documents amounting to 20,000 pages that were leaked from the Negotiations Support Unit of the Palestinian Authority to Al-Jazeera, and published by Al-Jazeera in January 2011. Al-Jazeera did about 4 days of reporting on them. I was one of the analysts whom they invited to go to Doha to look at the papers before they went public with them. I think they confirmed the extent to which the Palestinian Authority is fully integrated in the Israeli occupation. And the extent to which the negotiating process was a process of one-sided surrender to Israel. That there was nothing the Palestinians could offer the Israelis that was ever enough. Whether it was on refugees, on Jerusalem, on settlements. Nothing was enough for Israel. And I think it really confirms the death of the so-called ‘two-state solution’ and the peace process.
[00:59:09.03]
Samer: This is part of the the wall. This is Banksy, actually. The picture here was done 3 or 4 years ago. The first time…because Banksy came to Bethlehem two times. This is from the first time, and he had a picture of the sea, actually.
[00:59:27.10]
This is my house. This is my house. Just in front here…the white with the stars. I started decorating.
Driver: You started decorating already?
Samer: Yeah. I put the lights on at night starting 2 nights ago.
You are welcome at my house. These are my daughters. Mary. She’s sick. I took her to the doctor today. Natalie, Shadine and Christine.
[01:00:01.09]
Narrator: You were talking before about a two-state solution and a one-state solution. Which solution do you prefer?
Samer: I prefer the one-state solution. One state, two people equally. And every religion is free. Jews or Christians or Muslims. Even Buddhists if they want to come here. Atheists. Anybody is welcome to live in this country peacefully.
[01:00:21.16]
Gershon Baskin: These two people cannot live together today in the same state. It is not possible. The hatred, the fear, the history, the bloodshed that took place here…cannot be healed in a one-state framework.
[01:00:35.13]
Gershom Gorenberg: The political parties of the two nationalities, even ones that may agree on certain internal issues, would be incapable of putting together any kind of functioning government. The more serious threat is that the communal conflicts would turn violent.
[01:00:51.22]
Ariella: What we live in everyday, and what people who think…contrary to what I think about reality…People who oppose the one-state solution are living in a one-state solution.
Adi: No, they are living in one state.
Ariella: They are living in one state. They are living in what will someday be a one-state solution. And they are living in this one state as privileged citizens, and they are living in this one state with fellow governed who are under-citizens or non-citizens of the same state.
[01:01:27.13]
Ghada: Of course I’ve never been anything but a one-state supporter. Let’s look at this in two stages, and not mix them up together. Stage 1…Is it a good idea? Never mind whether we can have it or not. I just want to know the answer. Do you think it’s a good idea for these two peoples to share this land, to end this misery and conflict? Let the poor people who have been thrown out in refugee camps come home, and everybody calm down. Do you think that is a good idea? Now, you’d be amazed whenever I ask this question nobody ever says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that idea. They immediately say ‘Oh, yeah, but how is it going to be done?’ And what I say to them is ‘Look. Just a moment. First tell me…do you think it is a good idea? Now, once you get a mass of people saying ‘Yes. What a good idea! Why the hell have we been worrying and bothering with all these thoughts?’ What about that? Once you get to that stage…the next stage is “How do we do it?”.
[01:02:31.07]
Omar: My vision for a one-state solution is a secular democratic state. Which promotes what I call “ethical co-existence”. Which means co-existence without oppression. Without anybody being master, anybody being slave. This would have to be based on equality of all humans, regardless of ethnicity, national origin, gender and so on. This is very important. Equality is the most fundamental principle.
[01:03:01.10]
Ali: Equality. Decolonization. Decolonization means there’s an end to colonial rule and occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that Palestinian citizens of Israel have equality, and that Palestinian refugees who wish to return, and are currently excluded from doing so just because they’re not Jews, are allowed to return. For Israeli Jews, it means exchanging a privileged colonial status for citizenship.
[01:03:36.01]
Jeff: Political Zionism has run its course. The State of Israel is not sustainable. This ethnonationalism is not sustainable. The Arabs are here, still. And we’re going to have to go back at some point…when we go back to ’48 and before, and we start to reinvent ourselves. And we start to think of how can we create here a bi-national reality of these two peoples living together. But Bi-National. I’m not saying we’re giving up our national claims. We still remain Zionists, in that sense. Bi-national means, yes, the Jews here are national. I want to keep the Hebrew University. I want to keep the Hebrew language. But our nationalism has to be expressed in a way in which we’re a part of the Middle East, and in which we can reconcile with the Palestinians and the other Arabs with whom we’re living.
[01:04:35.06]
Narrator: In 2009, Zochrot embarked on a project together with Palestinians and architects from around the world to imagine the return of Palestinian refugees to the destroyed village of Miska.
[01:04:51.04]
Eitan: We came today to Miska with a group of architects from different places in the world, together with internally displaced Palestinians from the village.
So Ramat HaKovesh kibbutz has a very small part of the land of Miska. But Mishmeret, which is a moshav (village), and also Sde Warburg each got a piece of the land of Miska.
We are now in the center of what was Miska village until 1948. We also have some Israelis here from the Zochrot organization. We are trying to think together how it could be possible to have the return of Palestinian refugees.
Woman: What this return would look like, what it would mean for us or for them…or how the place would look after the return…is something we don’t usually speak about.
[01:05:51.02]
Man: So I want to introduce Ismat. Ismat Shbeit. He’s a member of the family who remained in the nearby town of Tira. The only family from Miska who stayed inside the borders of Israel. Ismat is very active, and he knows the history and the story of his village.
[01:06:17.17]
Woman: Of course I have no problem working with Israelis, but I have concerns. What I would love to avoid is…how can we work with Israelis without making people feel that there is a sense of paternity, and to try not to put them in symmetry, because why should I, as a Palestinian from Miska, have to have the agreement of the Israelis that are surrounding me?
[01:06:49.20]
Woman: But it is not just the people of Miska. There are also the Jewish people that are living around them, and I think that if we will think about them as part of the project, the project will be more homogeneous. And I think it can maybe show that the project will also be good for them.
[01:07:19.01]
Man: There were two main roads for the village, crossing the village in the middle, between the houses. One crossing from the south to the north, and one from the east to the west.
[01:07:32.09]
Man: First of all, it is not going to be a rebuilding of the village as it was. In a way it’s important to know the mental maps and all of that, but the complexity of 60 years of exile has to play a role, also. This is why we have to understand how to involve the community that is in exile, because that’s the only way to bring some of the contemporary life of this people to the old place.
[01:08:50.09]
Eitan: From my point of view, living in one state, the one-state solution, is probably also more practical…not only more moral and just, but also more practical. In the sense that in one state…you know…one state between the Jordan River and the Sea, both Jews and Palestinians, including of course the refugees and their descendants, can live everywhere.
[01:09:17.05]
Rabbi Lopatin: So my vision is kind of like the United States of the Holy Land. We’ll call it The Holy Land, you’ll have a bunch of states. Very much like the United States starting out with different states. There will be states that are more Jewish…that have a majority of Jews, and there will be states that have a majority of Arabs, but free flow. And you have to really make sure that people can buy houses wherever they want to and that there are no laws of discrimination. In these Jewish areas if there are some Arabs who want to live there, and vice-versa in the Arab areas…Hebron/Khalil…if there’s a minority of Jews that they’re treated well.
[01:10:04.02]
Ali: I have no objection to recognizing in some way that you have a large Jewish population in Palestine that maintains connections to Jews around the world. Especially if Jews actually did find themselves in trouble in other places around the world because they were Jews…then, I would want Palestine to be a place where they could come and be safe.
[01:10:29.14]
Omar: Not reversing oppression, mind you, because some people might think ‘Oh, the Palestinians want to become a majority so that they can oppress the Jews in Palestine and turn them into the oppressed, the colonized.’ The ‘colonized’ wouldn’t apply, but at least ‘the oppressed’. I would not support that. I’m not interested in reversing oppression, I’m interested in ending oppression. Ending injustice. Not reversing it. So this is the difference between justice and revenge. I’m against revenge because it has serious moral problems.
[01:11:00.07]
Arnon: Liars. Liars. Nasty Liars. Forget my idea. We will go now and we will travel from Morocco up to Afghanistan. The Arab-Islamic world. What happened in Turkey? The transfer of the Greeks and the massacre or the mass killing of the Armenians. What happened with the Italian people in Libya? What happened with the French in Algeria? Talk about Muslims vis-à-vis the Berbers of Morocco. And they cheat me and they think that I will believe them? Liars! I repeat again. Liars. Because they know exactly what I just told you. Now, after the last terrible 100 years, with so much hatred and war, they will accept me? With love? To believe them? Sorry!
[01:12:09.11]
Adi: I don’t know if Palestinians, and this is my main reservation here, I don’t know if Palestinians would agree to a one-state solution. If they, after all these years, would be happy to live with us as their fellow citizens in the same state. But considering this, and considering the fact that in Israel itself, the idea of one state is something that terrifies most Jews…A One-State Solution is not a solution at the moment. It’s a vision. It’s not a solution. You cannot think about it in terms of practical solutions to practical problems. But as a vision…this is my vision. I would like to dream about this possibility. And to use this vision, this dream, in order to change the perspective of people about the possible. Not only about the real, but about the possible.
[01:13:20.00]
Neta: I remember that when I first started going, like during the Oslo period, when I first started coming to the West Bank, I used to get on a service that would go from Damascus Gate. And I knew that during the first 15 minutes of the ride, I would have an anxiety attack. My heart would beat like crazy, and I’d be sure that everybody around me wanted to kill me. And then the fear would be every once in a while…like if something scary happened. Like if a soldier pointed his gun into our village. Then again, that fear would touch the fear of the Arabs that I had. And it took years until that stopped coming up for me. And then I remember times when I’d see a really human scene. Like I’d see this Palestinian grandfather with a long, long keffiyeh meeting his grandchildren in the street, and their eyes would be sparkling…and all of a sudden I’d feel like… “oh, they’re human!”
[01:14:19.18]
Rabbi Lopatin: We should never lose sight that the ‘ikar’, the principle, is the human being. That’s where the Torah starts from. It doesn’t start with us becoming a nation. So it’s not nationhood that’s the most important thing, it’s not the land. It’s not even the Torah…it doesn’t start with revelation at Sinai. It starts with human beings being created. And, yeah, I think we’ve really got to get back to that.
[01:14:43.12]
Narrator: After 2 decades of a failed peace process, it’s easy to see why many have given up hope on finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But if you shift your perspective, and focus on the people, it becomes clear that the conflict is not actually a zero-sum game. And that the obstacles to political change are not geographic or practical…but emotional and psychological. The path, then, to a just and lasting peace, leads not through ethnic segregation, but through cultural, and ultimately psychological integration. And if you look closely, you’ll see that there are Israelis and Palestinians who understand this, and are working together to transform the suffering of their people into a shared wisdom for the benefit of all humanity.