ISRAELISM

Video Transcript:

The nonchewish community does not understand our fixation, our obsession with Israel. Cleaning and welcome to 2018 to the 2016-2019 readers of Nordic Lovely Birth Rectours Very易 Interesting … what's your name again? And I am for Detroit, Michigan! Everybody knows somebody who was in the army. There's really soldiers. They're hot. They're awesome. They're strong. They're everything we could all want to be. I'm my name is Ysraah Hana from Brooklyn, New York. I came around from Berlin for right at 2016. I joined the Army four months after I finished birth rate. This is my flight back to America. And I'm still the Army now! Yeah! Army's fly inside! Call the call up. It's beautiful. It's real! The first time I've been to the United States, I met so many nice people. Jewish Americans will tell me things like, we like you, but we don't like Palestinians. Even though I'm the only Palestinian they know. Of course, around that time I would take it personally. But then you come to realize that people do not know. They know nothing about Palestinian Palestinians. Or have no idea about what Palestinians are going through. Coming into Palestine for the first time, I remember asking people, what do you think? Should I do it? And the response that I always got was, you know, you're going to be killed. As a curious young person, like, what is this thing that is so horrifying that you can't bear to let me see it? Because it's not bad. Found in the depths of my family's house. I found some of my Hebrew textbooks from elementary school. I found some of my Hebrew textbooks from elementary school. Isoeel Shev Sincha, my Israel. Congratulations to Simone Zimmerman for winning the Israel Jubilee contest. February 1998, I was seven. I had like a pretty traditional Jewish upbringing. I grew up in LA. I went to a Jewish day school, kindergarten through the end of high school. I went to Jewish youth group, Jewish camp. My family in Israel, I lived in Israel in high school on an exchange program. Israel was just treated like a core part of being a Jew. So you did prayers and you did Israel. Israel is something that I feel so passionately about, like it's, you know, it's my greatest passion. Everything is real. I became a Jewish educator after my daughter started Hebrew school. I started teaching second grade. During the years I did fourth grade also. And just to be able to start them on this wonderful journey, I mean, if you, it gets in your blood. And we teach Israel at the day school very well. We introduce them to the food and to the music and to the culture, in addition to the history and the geography. Figure out which one is the Israeli flag. Draw a circle around every time you see the symbol of the state of Israel. Draw your own symbol of the state of Israel. We also celebrate it holidays, obviously. So Hanukkah, Israeli independence, all of it together. Can you separate Israel and Judaism? I don't know. I can't. You know, some people I think can't, to me, it's the same. You can't separate it. Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel. And that is who I am. And that is my identity. And I think every single thing that I experienced along my life has melded into that. Like there was never, you know, a divide for me. I grew up in a conservative Jewish household in Atlanta, Georgia. Israel was a central part of everything we did in school. My elementary and middle school, as well as my high school, both had organized trips to Israel, which was touted as one of the most important things you could do. Do you want to go to Israel too? We want to go! We want to go! When I visited Israel for the first time when I was eight years old, I put a note in the Kotel in the Western Wall saying that one day I hope to live in Israel and prosper. Every one of our kids should be going over, not for ten days, but for a minimum of a semester or a year. Every time I send somebody over to Israel that come back, all of a sudden, they feel totally different about who and what they are as Jews. When I was a teenager and I went to Israel, it was amazing to meet, to travel in this place, where Hebrew was a language that I finally got to speak on the street with people and where Jewish heroes, the streets were named after them. We're planting seeds that eventually are going to blossom. Does the average congregation understand that I'm teaching them to become Zionists? Probably not, but it is part of my madness, so to speak. I have learned about Israel as this great miracle of Jewish history. For thousands of years, we were persecuted, and Israel is the place that you can go to be safe. My grandfather's family made it to Israel. His immediate family were some of the only ones who escaped the Holocaust. Many American Jews, if not most people I know, have family or friends that live in Israel. Israel is the insurance policy. Today, a Jew doesn't have to worry. Where is he going to go, God forbid? Even here, no Holocaust survivor will say to you, it could never happen again. I was born in Poland in 1940. Not a good place for a Jewish kid to be born. My parents were separated. My father went through a series of camps. Who knows why I survived and in no given half Jewish sort of embarrassed? Israel became very significant in my life even though 6000 miles away. I visited Israel over 100 times in my lifetime. As we sit now, my granddaughter is there for two weeks at an ice bowl. I did have many friends in Israel growing up. Every time I would visit Israel, I felt closer and closer. The Jewish summer camps would always bring a big contingency of Israelis to try to drive Israeli culture within the camp and connect the American Jews to Israeli culture. When I was in high school, I went on this Jewish use trip to Israel. One of the programs we did was called Kudna, where we spent a day pretending to be soldiers in the Israeli army. We wore army uniforms and stuff like that was just a normal part of what our childhood looked like. At summer camp, in the middle of the night they would wake us up and take us out. Sometimes that was to pull pranks and other times I remember doing military games. Using the command Pazatsta sneaking around. So any time the commander, who was one of our counselors, said Pazatsta, we would all get on the ground and they made a game out of it. Simulating being in the military and sneaking around and having to be a part of that. On youth programs that I participated in in Israel, you could spend a whole week on an Israeli army base wearing army uniforms and going through a sort of simulation of basic training. And that's where some people learn to shoot guns for the first time. It's not just regular military games. It's specifically using Israeli military commands often with Israeli counselors giving them. When you're a young kid that really drills it into you that this is something important. And I wanted to be a part of that. We often talked about the ways that you could be a good supporter of the Jewish people. One was to join the army. And the other was to go become an Israel advocate. There were even clubs within school to work on advocating for Israel. My high school sent a delegation to the APAC conference. APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They're the people who tell the Congress which legislation affecting Israel they like and which they don't. The bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today. Unbreakable tomorrow. Unbreakable forever. APAC is just the thing that you do. Like going to the APAC conference is just sort of seen as like a community event. Here with us today are leaders from across the pro-Israel community, including Abe Foxman. I learned a long time ago. There is no way you can say no to Abe. You know, I don't know to what extent one anybody makes a difference. I try to make a difference. Jewish education is still a major priority for the future. And certainly relationship is real. If you want to ask me, you got $100 million. How would you change the future of American shoes? I would make trips to Israel available to any Jewish kid who wants to go. Make that experience. You're doing it now. It's World War TRIP. The World War TRIP is a major priority for the future of American shoes. The World War TRIP is a major priority for the future of American shoes. It is up to you to be our soldiers abroad. And with love and knowledge and conviction, ready to sway public opinion in Israel's favor. Learning about the quote-unquote conflict is something that is part of programming as something that you have to learn how to defend Israel from the lies that other people are saying. And you have to be able to tell people the truth. And we're going to be able to tell them the truth. By the time I got to college, I had teachers who said to me, people hate Israel, people are attacking Israel, people don't know the truth about Israel, and we're the only people who actually know the truth about Israel. If you're a Jewish college student, hello is your central address for Jewish life on campus. As a freshman, I remember walking into hello was one of the first places I went when I got to campus. It's a place where you can go for meals to meet other young Jewish people. Pro-Israel advocacy is a central part of how they work to engage Jewish young people. I'm the director of engagement and program sir at Hillel. In this campus happens to be very proactive for Israel. A lot of people are very passionate, a lot of people love Israel, there's a lot of advocacy here on campus and lots of different ways, lots of different groups. How could you become involved in advocacy for Israel? I kind of came to hello just because I was new on campus, I didn't really know where to go, and I really did find a lot of friends here. I came here on and off, but then when I went on the birthright trip and kind of got to know the staff, Tom and Jackie, a lot better, got to know people at Hillel a lot better, and just got to know Israel a lot better. I came back and I knew that I want to put a lot more of myself into Hillel, the Jewish community on campus, and just Israel advocacy in general. On birthright we had Israel soldiers with us throughout the entire trip. You learned so much and you learned the reason that they served. It's just a feeling that I don't think any of us could ever imagine except for you. My job is doing Israel program on campus and that relates to a Jewish events, called Political, sorry, Israel events cultural, political. I would say, name a university in America, we probably have a person there. I like to talk about the army a lot because that's an experience that I lived through and I have a lot of personal stories. A couple of students would say, yeah, I'm thinking about joining the idea from the day. So my first thing is saying, are you sure? Because it's not an easy decision. That being said, it will probably end up being the most meaningful experience that you ever go through. You're going to tell your kids stories about it. One of our former young emissaries just graduated into the Air Force. And that's the greatest gift you can give. And we actually have had quite a few of our former students join the idea. Amazing. I mean, just amazing. These are kids. These are 18, 19-year-olds. It's like something I've dreamed about doing since I was seven years old. You find your sense of purpose. All my friends are so proud of me and they understand that this is something that I have to do. Almost 10% of my graduating class at my Jewish high school joined the Israeli Army. And I had many friends from my summer camp and youth group who joined the Army as well. Part of becoming part of Israeli society is to join the military. When I was in high school, I told my parents I don't even need to apply to college because I'm just going to join the Israeli military and make a living in Israel. I honestly have felt for many years that I fit in better in Israeli society than I do in American society, even before I moved there. And I wanted to defend what I saw as my country. So when I enlisted, I was a maghist, which is a heavy machine gunnest during my basic and advanced training and then they put me on a light machine gun. We were training for war. Training for strategy to conquer hilltops and conquer open spaces. One week was focused on urban warfare in close quarters and that was simulated in what looked like Arab housing. After the seven months of our training, we were deployed to the West Bank. Our missions included working in two different checkpoints, patrolling villages on foot in full gear and bullet-proof vests. We would go into apartment buildings, go up to the roof and make sure that we could be seen. So that we could make our presence felt. We wanted them to know that we were watching. That was the goal of the mission. We would set up what's called a checkpost, which is a checkpoint that is situated at a major intersection. At checkpoints, we would stop people, create a traffic jam, check their IDs, check their trunks, every day on their way to work or on their way to visit their family, to keep them on their toes essentially, and they being Palestinians. Even though Israel was a central part of everything we did in the school, we never really discussed the Palestinians. It was presented to us that Israel was basically an empty wasteland when the Jews arrived. There were some Arabs there, they said, but there was no organized people. They had really treated the land poorly. Yeah, there are Palestinians, and they just want to kill us all and want us to leave land. I just don't think I had any conception of anything about what it means to be a Palestinian besides that it means that you're a person who kills Jews or wants to kill Jews. It was always presented to us that the Arabs only know terrorism. Ever since I came back from the States, I realized that the best way to help people understand the reality imposed on us by the state of Israel is for them to be there. The one thing that I want to give the rest of my life for is to help people understand the reality that is going on in Palestine. I grew up all of my life in this occupation. I grew up in Bethlehem, in Palestine. To be honest, I do have my days where I wake up and look in the mirror and ask what is going on, and what can I even do today to change anything in the situation. I remember from the youngest age growing up with my parents always warning me, always telling me not to go out, not to go on the street, not to play on the street because of the soldiers and the settlers. Of course, like your first experience with a soldier is terrorizing, especially because they would invade your house or your family's house late at night like Ab. They loved to work after midnight. The first experience with the soldiers as a child was an experience that put fear in you. An American Jewish soldier talking to my father and yelling at him and shouting at him, which of course was a child, you feel very ashamed and insulted. And then my father, because ironically we are American citizens as well, turned to him in an American accent and asked him where he was from. And then the soldier was almost shocked by this question because for his mind, he must have said he is a really Jewish people, but he is talking to an American now. And it's all in like from Chicago. And then just this reality that even as a child I remember, this American soldier who just moved here to be part of an army to play cowboys in India, somebody who comes here from New York or from Chicago and claiming that this land is theirs. What makes like an 18-year-old writing kid who was given ten days trip for free in Palestine, who made him want to come in and sacrifice his life. Why would a foreigner think it's okay to have superior rights to the rights of the indigenous population? Because somebody told them it's home. This is our land. This is ours. That's what was conveyed to us. It's got to be with me that people look at Palestine and Palestinians from the point of view of their oppressor. Now from the point of view of the oppressed. I think what I knew about who was in Israel before the state was created is basically there were some Jews always there. Most Jews were in exile. We'd always yearn to go back. The idea that there were native inhabitants that lived there was not even part of my family's reference. The This restaurant makes the most delicious hummus in Palestine and town. These families not from the town of Budland, just like my mother's family. They were expelled from the city of Fiyafah back in 1948. I was born to a family of victims of the ethnic lending of Palestine. That was carried out by the founders of the state of Israel. My mother's family were expelled from the largest Palestinian city, pre-1948, which was the city of Yafat. My father was a new born at that time. He was carried by his family. They ended up in Baslehem waiting for the atrocities to come to an end so they would be able to go back home. Of course, none of those people were ever allowed back home. My father's family was in Jerusalem up until 1948. When the war happened, he was shot by a sniper and was killed on the spot. His children actually dragged his body down and buried it in the courtyard of the house. A few days later, when the Jewish forces took over that neighborhood, they demanded that all the non-Jews of that neighborhood be affected. It was the biggest mass exodus percentage-wise of a people from their land in modern history. The ethnic lending of Palestine, the term Neckbaugh, the catastrophe, is the tragedy or catastrophe that hit almost every single Palestinian family. Nearly 750,000 victims was traumatizing in almost every possible level. Nearly 78% of the land of Palestine became under the control of the state of Israel. What else was I told about Israel? We were told it was a land without a people, for people with on a land and we came back. From the ashes of the Holocaust, the state of Israel was birthed. The rights of the people that lived here does not exist in that narrative, and other than us being unopcicle, the Neckbaugh continues. It started in 1948 and continues until this day. In 1967, the state of Israel managed to complete its control over Palestine by taking over the territory of the West Bank and the territory of Gaza. Here's the good stuff. More maps of greater Israel. That's just the whole land. We're always told that the whole land was ours. That's sort of what they teach us. After the 1967 war, Israel put a very forceful, very violent military force to dominate and control the lives of the Palestinians that continues until this day. The intention of Israeli control over the land of Palestine is complete colonization of the territory. Building homes for those who were born to Jewish families, and also demolishing the homes of those who were born for Palestinian families. Palestinians kicked out from their homes confiscated by settlers. You are stealing my house. And if I don't steal it, someone else is going to steal it. No, no one's allowed to steal it, you know what I mean? A massive movement to confiscate land, to build settlements, to expand settlements. Before we were even fully trained, we were deployed to protect settlements. It was all for the security of the settlements. Israel filled the occupied West Bank with Jewish Israelis living in different colonies and settlements throughout the region. And those individuals are subject to Israeli civil law. While you have Palestinians living within the exact same territory, there's our subject that is raiding military law. When an American citizen comes here, he has more rights than I would have my entire life. We are in the quote-unquote West Bank. We're in the quote-unquote settlements. This is one of the roadblocks that kind of ensured that cars get checked to see that no terrorists are coming in. I lived in America for a few years. And then I came back to Israel by myself at the age of 17 to serve in the army. And there are elements, what I would call the jihadist elements, that don't accept our presence here. But it's just tough for them. It's a great vision coming to fruition in our time. And there's nothing going to stop us. From the day you are born, you live in day in day out, day in day out without experiencing a day of freedom. Palestinians have to be forced to live in cages. So I'm Israeli born and raised. As a young Israeli growing up, my grandparents lived in the center of Jerusalem. The battle for Jerusalem, at least 26 people are reported dead. People I knew were injured and killed. And from a very young age, I knew I'm going to be joining the military. I was never in the Palestinian house till I barge into one in the middle of the night. One of the things that I did routinely was a mission where you are ordered to take over Palestinian families home and use that house as a military point. No warrant, you don't call in advance, it's a military occupation. And during my service, there were many moments where I saw myself acting violently. And there were moments of shame. We can detain any Palestinian just because he looked at us in the wrong way. That's a system that's based on violence. I'm going to take it. Take it! Security is not security. Security is not security. I don't know what's in it. Is this the right for you? Don't know yet. When I was stationed in the West Bank, one day one of my commanders came and grabbed me and one other soldier and said, there is a detainee at the Huwala checkpoint. And we need to go pick him up and bring him to the detention center that's in the base. When we got there, the Palestinian detainee who was maximum in his early 20s was sitting on the curb with his hands tied behind his back with zip ties and blindfolded. We got to the detention center within the base and right outside there were about eight soldiers waiting for us. They saw us come, they grabbed the detainee from our hands and threw him to the ground while he's still blindfolded and hands tied behind his back. And they started kicking him for a good few minutes. I was responsible for this man's well-being. I was responsible to bring him from the checkpoint to the detention center. That was my job. And right outside the fence of the detention center, they grabbed him from me and they started beating him. I felt responsible. But my commander wasn't saying anything. So how could I say anything? The entire time that this was happening, a military police officer was standing just inside the fence watching and smoking a cigarette. As soon as these guys were done kicking this Palestinian man, the military police officer tossed his cigarette, he came, brought him inside the detention center. And I didn't even speak up. I didn't speak up. And that's just one of many stories that I have from my time in the West Bank. It took many years for me to really come to terms with my part in it. Only after I got out of the army did I begin to realize that the stuff that I did in the day to day, just working in checkpoints, patrolling villages, that in and of itself was immoral. Palestinians in the West Bank, even though their lives are controlled by the state of Israel, from morning noon and night, are not even theoretically citizens of the country in which they live. You see in some ways what non-democracy looks like up close. When people look at the West Bank today and say, this isn't a partized system, it's not just throwing out a word. A Palestinian lives under a different legal system than an Israeli settler living next door. The law for the men's faith! Anyone who sees these facts on the grounds or speaks to Palestinians would understand that this is a process of settler colonization of an apartheid regime. I remember crossing that checkpoint into Bethlehem and before this I had been very much opposed to ever using the word apartheid, with things sort of night and day difference just by crossing this wall, change that for me in an instant. I'm a shaman! I'm a shaman! I'm a shaman! I'm a shaman! The Syrian government is serving in the Israeli army as obviously one way of supporting Israel, but there's also another modern battle that is happening on campuses each and every single day. And you are standing in the front of it. And I mean the Israeli government, the Israeli people, thank you for that and that's why they put me here probably. I'm not thinking for that. So... We need PR, that's you. There's a lot of PR to be made. This university, thank God, is fairly a political, but I've heard all over the place how universities are these hotbeds of anti-stimatic and anti-Israel work. I remember very vividly I was sitting in my dorm room with a friend of mine. We got a phone call that an anti-Israel bill was being introduced in the student government. We bolted on the way called our parents, both got sent talking points. And then we went into this student government meeting. And I was waiting. Hi everyone, so we've been in work for a few days. We are trying to raise our voices and fans. Everybody is making a huge noise. The student senate at the University of California Berkeley calling on campus officials to divest from companies that supply weapons that Israel uses in its occupation of the Palestinian territories. You are siding with the Palestinians on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There's just no question about it. I just knew it was this bad thing that I had to fight. It is anti-stimaticism. It is. You are trying to make me feel marginalized on my own campus. And I remember all of us going, well, you should in boycott Israel because it's applying a double standard and you should in boycott Israel because it's unfair to single out Israel. Please, I beg of you. I beg you, please. Top compassion and to remember that we are alienating students and I am devastated by the smell I am human being. I still remember you have these Palestinian students who get up and said, you know, Jewish students, you are crying about feeling silenced and marginalized. You know, my aunts and cousins didn't sleep for weeks while bombs were falling overhead in Gaza. What do you have to say to that? If divestment is hostile, then where do we begin to describe the hostility of a military occupation? I was thrown into all these conversations where people were throwing around all these words that I never heard before. Occupation, settlement, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. I just never heard anyone use any of these terms before. I thought I knew so much about Israel, but I didn't really know what anybody was talking about when they were talking about all these things. I remember coming to Hillel and saying, why aren't we answering Palestinian students' questions? I felt really embarrassed by it because mostly I felt like we weren't doing a good job refuting their arguments. Do we not have an actual counterargument besides like rockets, double-standard, anti-semitism? People, people, I couldn't get an answer from anybody and that was really disturbing for me. I mean, there are these people called Palestinians who think that Israel wields all this power over their lives and don't have rights, don't have water. What, like, literally what is this? How is this happening? How do I respond to it? People that have a problem with Israel, there's a good chance they're misguided in somewhere or another. Everyone has a freedom in Israel, like you can have any religion, you can do whatever you want in Israel, but only in Israel in the middle is a lot of misinformation. Some of it comes from misinformation, some of it comes from ignorance, some of it comes from lies. And it's very hard to deal with that in any kind of a positive way when they're coming from such a place of not understanding what the reality of the situation, when they just have this in their head, all this misinformation and all these lies. I mean, somehow pro-Palestinian has become pro-social justice. I wanted to know answers from within my own community and nobody could answer those questions for me. How is it that I am like the best the Jewish community has to offer? I've been through all the trainings, all the programs, and I don't know what the occupation is. I don't know what the settlement is. Eventually, I got to a point where I found myself wanting answers to the questions that Palestinian students were asking. And so it led me on a process of trying to go figure those things out for myself. What is this thing that is so horrifying that you can't bear to let me see it? The summer after my freshman year, I went to Palestine and I knowingly crossed line for the first time. I was just wondering if I could get a chance to see it. I don't think I realized the extent to which what I would come to see on the ground would really shock me and horrify me. So if you look at your masks, we're standing in front of the wall. We're standing right before it's going to turn red just so we can hear where the soldiers are standing. So just look behind you guys. This is a block of houses. The people living in all these apartments here were not allowed to walk on this main road. So this was like a red road, a sterilized road, and imagine if you're a family living here you can open the front door of your house and walk out. I am listening to Palestinian students talking about what it was like being beaten at a checkpoint and sitting down with a Palestinian family and hearing their story about being displaced by Israeli settlers. What a job. And even when we fix the water wells and we try to cultivate the rainwater to come into the water wells, even those things are being attacked by the settlers. Either they throw stones in them or they throw chemicals in them or they throw dead animals in the wells. So he's saying firstly welcome you and thank you very much for coming, especially because you're Jewish. The area here is populated by Palestinian farmers, Supreme Court in Israel ruled that they're allowed to live in the caves that are here. They're not allowed to build anything. Today the Civil Administration and the Army came and demolished some of the tents here. Something is deeply wrong here and it's breaking my heart. What we've been told is that the only way that Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe. And I guess the more I learned about that, the more I came to see that as a lie. So this is the checkpoint that divides Jerusalem from Bethlehem. Palestinians definitely cannot drive on this road. So you can see that we're basically driving with walls on both sides of us right now. You want to go to the major square or where do you want to go? We're in your head man. This is my barber. I've been a painter. I should. As someone who came to see Jerusalem or Tel Aviv as places that I should imagine is home, I remember coming into the West Bank for the first time and actually seeing this place as someone else's home. This is a normal place where people are just trying to live their lives. For me to get to Jerusalem, I have to think of first of all having the permit, getting to the checkpoint, waiting in line for the checkpoint, getting to the soldiers at the checkpoint. The soldiers might do anything to me at that point, including sending me back and then crossing the checkpoint and then having to take public transportation. This is the fact that I cannot drive as a Palestinian, I cannot drive in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel. So we drove here today and. If I'm at home by 10 pm and I get caught on the other side, then I could be detained, I could lose my permit for good, I could be put in prison, I could be beaten up by soldiers who knows what will happen to me. Almost any rooftop you stand on in Bethlehem, you look one way or the other, you will see a settlement built around you. I started coming here in 2010, I heard you speak to a group about anti-Semitism and inherited trauma and started thinking a lot about what it means to challenge my community around the deep and grain traumas that are totally stopping us from any sort of movement on this issue. My first learning experience was when I was invited to go to Auschwitz on a bearing witness retreat. I actually say in Auschwitz I discovered one of the main reasons why this conflict exists today, which is this inherited trauma that exists in the Jewish community, where the feeling is that as used we're always attacked, we've always been attacked, we will always be attacked. And therefore, the only way to maintain ourselves is to create this very suppressive security mechanism that would prevent this from happening again. I mean that's what I learned. Yeah, that's what I heard. What is important for many of the Israeli Jews and the Jews from around the world we talk to is the simple recognition and acknowledgement of the story. And that story is where the healing work begins to happen. As an activist, I think for many activists what keeps us going is our ability to be able to look towards the future. I really believe that there is an emerging awakening within the American Jewish community. I've had even some American Jews who come here and they say we came to Israel and we left from Palestine. For Americans who are coming here and listening to us in hearing us and seeing our humanity and understanding that we are not just out sitting in bunkers planning the next attack against Israelis. And that we do have a desire to live in peace and to have our freedom and to walk in our streets and to eat in our restaurants. I mean it's crazy that I have to say this, that we are real human beings that just want to survive and live in like all other people in this world. The moment they see this and experience this for themselves, it creates something, it shifts something. What they do with it when they go back, it becomes their responsibility. I came home and spoke out. I think initially it was very painful and shocking for a lot of people. I had friends from high school and from college who didn't know how to speak to me at the beginning because these conversations were forbidden for us growing up. I've grown up very much as a product of this mass mobilization across the community to ensure that young people stay engaged in pro-Israel politics. For most people I know who actually took the time to see what their own eyes, what was happening. It very quickly challenges everything we've been taught. It's very painful because it is so intimately bound up with the identity of the community. There have always been Jews who have spoken out for Palestinian rights and more and more people are willing to take off their blinders looking at this reality saying this is intolerable. I continued to meet more and more young people like me who were having similar experiences. It made me realize that I was part of a bigger story of something that was happening not just to me but to young people around the country. We decided to bring the crisis of American Jewish support from Israel to the doorsteps of Jewish institutions to force that conversation in public. I'm not a Jewish person. First of all, all my friends at APEC stopped talking to me. I've lost many childhood friends over this. Also, many friends have come along politically with me over the years. Many in my family have also. Many in my family also deeply disagree with me. Every time I've protested outside of a Jewish communal event of some kind, I have seen a friend, a family friend, a parent of a friend on the other side of the barricade. We're literally talking about parents and children. Young Jews, they go to the Jewish federations. They go to the reform movement. They go to their day schools and they say, you mobilized me to be a soldier for Israel, but I had been completely misled. We are also in a moment when there is the possibility of some kind of alternative. I see it hundreds of times over and over again and those hundreds speak for thousands. And they went to the Jewish camps and they went to the day schools and they went to the synagogue Hebrew schools. They're really, really angry at the way they were educated and the way that they were indoctrinated about these issues and justifiably so. The indoctrination is so severe. It's almost hard to have a conversation about it. It's heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking. Our community right now has to grapple with our complicity. Jewish opinion is split. Some Jewish groups vocally oppose Israel's military policies. More than a thousand Jewish activists descended on Washington DC Sunday to protest APA. So we tell some of our more conservative brothers and sisters on the inside that you do not represent the best of the Jewish prophetic tradition and we hear about we just keep going. It's a new day now. When you got a number of young Jewish brothers and sisters who are undergoing moral and spiritual awakening that deeply concerned about the suffering of Palestinians, they come from people who have been hated but they don't want to see the cycle of hate perpetrated even by Jews themselves. Israel has been part of my life since early childhood. I was in the Jewish community. There has been a striking change. Israel is well aware of it. Human will and commitment can change things. My name is Talia. This is the first time I am using my full real name to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. I never thought in my life that I would be standing with this many Jews for Palestine. I'm a rabbi. As long as Palestinian lives are treated as disposable, our house as a people is not in order. Tomorrow we show up and we march on the leadership of Palestinians. Messenger of Islam Congresswoman Rashida Tille. I am the only Palestinian-American member of Congress now. How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter? Life under our part-time strips Palestinians of their human dignity? How many more decades do they need to enjoy this subjugation before there is a shift in this unreasonable status quo? And what would you recommend? I would recommend freedom. The real challenge is trying to keep that moral and spiritual dimension strong. Does any time you cut against a grave, are you going to catch hell? Three times more! Three times more! Antioch, the patient Jews are blocking Damascus State. The doctors are endoccipient in Ramide Jews don't allow people to eat excuse of themselves. And not passé calcul друг at this interval... They got her surgery... I don't think it's as serious as it's made up to be, okay? They're entitled, that's fine, okay? I don't think they represent much. I think they're a little super naive. I think the most American Jews, even though they have different views on settlements or occupation, I think that's still a decision at the end of the day they're gonna leave for the Israelis to make. As long as Israel is under threat, and as strong as it is, and as dynamic as it is, it's still under threat from its neighbors, and a hundred thousand missiles, we postpone that philosophical debate to another time. What? Palestinians are so dehumanized in the community that it's really hard for people to figure out how to even understand Palestinians' legitimate rights and claims to the land. Palestinians gather for protest disease, really, Gaza border. They're demanding the right to return to lands from which they were forced out in 1948. At least 55 Palestinians died Monday during mass protests. Israeli troops fired on the demonstrators. I'm the one who's been with the media all day, all day long. I'm so proud of the people who have been with the media. Look at the more recent Gaza demonstrations. Ask yourself the question, if the Mexicans stood at the border in March, and million Mexicans are 20,000 Mexicans, and what would America do? First they were trying tear gas, and then it was not, and eventually it would have to shoot. There are a lot of Jewish young people who see a Jewish establishment that is racist, that is nationalistic. Israel is in the middle east, not the Midwest, so the neighbors are not necessarily the Jones or the Smiths. I don't want more, but it's been opposed on us. So we should do right, then defeat the terrorists. We don't want to be a part of that, but we are actually building an alternative. I've been involved in this work for about a decade. I was seen as a face of this young growing Jewish resistance to the American Jewish establishment. It made perfect sense to me that Bernie would hire someone like me as a Jewish outreach coordinator. Within about 48 hours of being on the campaign, the attacks started rolling in. These old men from the Jewish establishment came out to say that I was dangerous, that I was a threat. A journalist wrote an article about me, the headline was Bernie Sanders' new Jewish outreach coordinator is an outspoken critic of Israeli occupation. The next headline that I found out about when I walked into work was Abe Foxman calls on Sanders to fire new Jewish community liaison for quote, anti-Israel comments. On Thursday, the Sanders campaign suspended its new national Jewish outreach coordinator, Simone Zimmerman, two days after she was hired. So as far as I'm aware, this was Abe Foxman's first comment in public since his retirement from the ADL and he came out of retirement to defend the world from the great threat of Simone Zimmerman. It hurts me for a Jewish kid to stand up there and say, justice for the Palestinians and not saying justice for the Israelis troubles me, hurts me, bothers me, means we fail. We failed in educating and explaining et cetera. When we talk about we're losing the kids, we lost them. The Berth Wright participants staged a protest walkout. I love us with these things to learn about the occupation and the perspectives of Palestinians and the other countries. Thank you very much. You cannot be a tyrant of this battle. I know you have the best. It's just the protest. It's just the protest. It's just the protest. It's just the protest. It's just the protest. It's just the protest. It's just the protest. We're seeing that many millennials are becoming disenchanted with Israel and I take a very different approach on this. I say that we need to love Israel even more. We're not very brave. We're not just playing. No free trips on stolen land. We're not brave. Vacuum land. We're not brave. We're not brave. It means that we who are the older generation have much more work to do. This whole communal obsession with defending Israel has basically warped into seeing someone like me as a threat to the community. The word that I used to hear a lot was self-hating Jew. Like the only way that a Jewish person could possibly care about the humanity of Palestinians is if you hate yourself. Let's see what I find in here. You are a self-loathing Jew. Go kill yourself. With Jews like you, who needs ignorant, racist, bigot Arabs? You work against our people. You're an anti-Semitic Jew. You've been working for the enemy. Simone Zimmerman, another member of the lunatic, anti-Semitic, far-left. There's always been this argument of, oh, you can't criticize Israel. Criticizing Israel feeds anti-Semitism. Criticizing Israel helps the enemies of Israel. As more and more American Jews are speaking out in support of Palestinian freedom, now they just say instead, we're over it anti-Semites. We hate all Jewish people or even worse that we're not Jewish at all. We are attacked as being not really Jewish if we are not support of Israel. And that's where you start seeing just the blanket, illegitimization of an entire sector of American Jewish society, focusing on this so-called new anti-Semitism. And then came the new anti-Semitism, which was the anti-Semitism relating to Israel. What some said, the Israel became the Jew of the nations in the same way that historically, whatever was permitted for everybody else was not permitted for the Jew. Now Israel was single now. So many of the self-appointed leaders of our community have been trying to equate the idea of supporting Palestinian rights itself with anti-Semitism. This is about anti-Israel anti-Semitic attitudes. Classic new anti-Semitism, the extreme left has a long history of anti-Semitism, of anti-Israel hatred. How stupid have they been for all these years, voting for Obama and other anti-Semites like him? Unwillingness to grapple with Palestinian suffering is putting a lot of American Jews in a really dangerous and sad position. How far will Jews Americans go in the effort to quash pressure on Israel? How far will people go? It's hard to see how far they won't go if this is where things are today. The end of the day pro-Israel's leaders want to be in the room with the people in power. They will do anything to preserve unconditional support for Israel. Thank you. When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one. History is not going to judge us kindly. I'd like to say that we were blessed by heaven with Donald Trump being elected president of the United States. We should pray that they should remain in office so that he should continue to do the great things he does on behalf of the United States of America and on behalf of Israel. We're saying like a horrifying culmination of what support of Israel at all costs has led to. Disregarding any less than of history, disregarding any sort of morality. The great irony of having this be where we are today within the Jewish community is that there actually is a resurgence in anti-Semitism. The kind that I think my generation and the generations that have come after me never thought we'd see in our lifetimes. Hell's from. Hell are people. Hell victory. In the US, a couple of things have been happening. We'll go to Trump, but Trump isn't. It's not a question. Is he a bigot? I don't think he's a bigot. I think he is what he is. I don't think he's a racist. I don't think he's an anti-Semite. I think you can call him all kinds of things. The community has spent so much time attacking anyone who criticizes Israel when there are actual threats to our community. That's led our communal institutions to basically be silent in the face of rising white nationalism. Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us. The way that we talk about anti-Semitism isn't about protecting Jews. It's about protecting Israel. How dangerous is that? At this moment with the rise of anti-Semitism. And often, when American politicians are asked about anti-Semitism, they talk about their support for Israel. Support for Israel today is actually replacing what it means to be a Jew. These people have basically decided that support for Israel is more important than the safety of Jews. We're not going to say anything about the spreading of these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. We have seen a tremendous amount of this use of vile anti-Semitic tropes. The thread talks about a Jewish plot to enslave people in the United States. Antisemitic flyers seeped in COVID-19 conspiracies, saying every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish. That's the way the Jews work. They are deceivers. They plot. They lie. They do whatever they have to do. The gunman told a SWAT officer that he wanted all Jews to die, and that they were committing genocide against his people. It's a profoundly sad moment, and I think it's a tipping moment. These anti-Semitic nightmares that we all, like it's all coming to life in front of our eyes. I can't help but think about all the American Jewish organizations that have spent the last decade pouring millions of dollars into smearing and marginalizing human rights advocates, Jewish, Palestinian, and not trying to brand Palestinian protest as anti-Semitic when there were neo-Nazis trying to kill us in our synagogues. My parents and grandparents' generation grew up in a world in which Jews were not safe. They invested so much in the idea that Jews could only be safe through Israel, but our safety and our security is actually bound up in the safety and the security of all people. The most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the country are now donating money to Republican politicians who either incited or continued to support the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. That's part of a politics of solidarity. It feels totally morally coherent and morally urgent to support freedom and dignity for all people in all the places that we live. Palestinians have already been telling us this for decades. So guys, here's the world. But the world is finally coming to catch up. For me, I would say if anybody has any influence on Israeli policy and I say this with a big F, it is the American Jewish community. The American Jewish community have the potential to have the greatest influence in shifting our reality outside of this land. For many people around the world, when they see the voice of the Jewish community rise and protest against this occupation, it will allow other voices to say, yes, we could also have a voice in it as well. Now we're doing joint work in trying to end this occupation and bringing peace and justice into this land. The most inspiring experiences I had are with Jewish Americans who have come in and take a stand. We're going to hear tonight a number of personal stories. At some point, you guys decided to quote unquote break the silence. And I'm interested, was there a particular moment that led you to this? In 2008, I joined the military. In America, we have this concept of innocent until proven guilty. There is no innocent Palestinian according to the army. That's so true. In occupied territory. All right, down please. Get that here. Come on, fly. That's a lot. She said there's no law. It's not a lie. What we're talking about is not getting Palestinians the right that we of Israelis have. And that's a part of it. To go against the grain is not an easy thing to do. So I did not speak about my experiences in the occupation publicly until very recently. I was afraid that I would be demonized. I've seen friends of mine be demonized for speaking out about the same things. The first time I ever spoke publicly about my experiences, I cried the whole time that I was speaking. It's gotten a little bit easier to talk about since then because I have taken the time to process it. But that doesn't mean it's easy any time I talk about these experiences. But we can't wait any longer. I've been longing for this Jewish conversation for Kevin T. We're here today to talk about some things that are often can feel impossible in the Jewish community. These conversations can happen. We are not risking our Jewish history. You are not closing indoor to the rest of your Jewish life. All that we have to risk is our denial. I got started. My high school had an Israel Studies class all about when you get to college and people start telling you about Israel being an apartheid state. This is how you respond. From my summer camp in my youth movement, one of the core tenets of it was the Jewish state need to be built. And just no questioning of what price we were really willing to pay or willing to make Palestinian's pay. The Israeli Palestinian identity itself is not something I had to learn that it exists. So slowly as I came to learn that the occupation exists, I started learning that there is another narrative. We're here to talk about the history that's often referred to as the Nakba. 750,000 people displaced from their homes. At least 400 villages undone in their entirety. The colonization is also ongoing. The ongoing Nakba continued not just the historical but the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I have been blessed to witness the ways that Palestinian society continued to find ways to thrive. But we can't deny that there has been catastrophe and that it's been catastrophic the scale of loss. We're really here to teach each other. But I think nothing's as important as action because we are talking about ongoing displacement. People might tell you that if you stand up for Palestinian rights that you aren't really Jewish, that you're maybe a self-hating Jew. As a rabbi, what I see when I look at the work of solidarity is a long chain of Jewish history. This chain of people, of ancestors and texts and traditions that are about justice and fighting for it. Jewish tradition tells us to envision a world where all people are safe and free. To never stop fighting for that world. So may you all feel blessed in a tradition of liberation. And may you be blessed to know you're not alone and let's get to work. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. That is returning. Even though this is a darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. Back the dawn. We chose what not meant to be occupiers. We have been occupiers. We have always been segregated and discriminated against. It is just so distressing to me to see the checkpoints and the special roads and the special water. Why? It is a shunder.