all we're there to document him and rights abuses in the region and second of all we're there to support nonviolent resistance to the occupation and i'll be telling you more about what this occupation looks like in the present taishan but before i do so just a little bit about myself i'm a jewish american and i originally got into this work when i was living in turkey and i would take trips through middle east during my vacations i was in iran in syria and lebanon and along my way i was taken in by families many of them palestinian refugees and through my friendships with these people that i met along the way i began to hear for the first time a whole different sort of version of the history and present of israel and palestine i really different from anything that i've ever learned growing up as a jewish american and i was very disturbed alarmed by what i heard i didn't believe it i thought it was all propaganda but it sort of planned to deceive and i began to do some of my own research and eventually decided to go to palestine to see with my own eyes what was happening this is a picture showing palestine in the springtime and see how fertile and green the land is but beyond showing how beautiful it is i actually think this photograph captures what i have come to believe is really at the heart of the israel palestine conflict a lot of people have sort of been a perception of this issue as being kind of in an age old rivalry between jews and muslims something that's been going on for thousands of years and will continue for thousands more because at its heart are these sort of deep religious differences and one of the first realizations that i came to when i got to palestine was that for the most part this really is not a war about religion the so war about land about water about resources here's a map of the middle east israel and palestine are located in the middle east that tiny little purple and white sliver there here's a larger version of that map and the beijing areas in this map indicate the defacto internationally recognized borders of the state of israel meanwhile the pink areas on the right and left are the two land masses making up the palestinian territories occupied in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven and they are on the left the gaza strip and on the right the west bank as i said these are known as the occupied palestinian territories occupied what does that word mean right well the the purpose of my presentation is to tell you about this occupation so to get started with restricted movement in the palestinian territories there are both palestinians and israelis living there but they use different roads palestinian roads tend to be older and even unusable like the one you see in this photograph israeli roads tend to be more modern constructed by the israeli government citizens living in these territories and they might be sort of four lane highways like the one you see in this photograph the palestinians are not allowed to use the israeli roads unless they're able to obtain a kind of permit in which case they might be able to use say a certain section of a certain road but in all of their cases the roads are segregated palestinians and israelis use different colored license plates palestinian cars have green or white colored plates meanwhile israeli cars have yellow colored plates and this is so it's easy to see from afar whether a vehicle is carrying palestinians or israelis and it also makes it easier for the soldiers who are manning the area to monitor who is using which road so for example here you can see an army jeep pulling over all green or white plated vehicles to the side of a road meanwhile yellow plated vehicles are allowed to pass by and hindered on the left and this is called a checkpoint and checkpoints are major institution in the occupation and they are essentially barriers manned by soldiers or border police that are used to control palestinian pedestrian or be a killer movement and the idea behind a checkpoint is more or less what you might experience like at a border crossing where you go you stand in line you show your id you had her couple questions maybe open a pure bag one of the main differences with checkpoints in the palestinian territories as you can see from this map of the permanent checkpoints installed in the west bank those little blue things is that the vast majority of these checkpoints are not located around the border of the west bank but actually the vast majority of them are located internally within the palestinian territories namely most of them between palestinian towns and villages and what this means for a palestinian person who's living let's say just south of hebron in the south of the west bank who wants to travel and another thirty miles north to the city of bethlehem which is a little bit more towards jerusalem so thirty miles that should take a person under normal circumstances like thirty forty minutes maybe an hour tops well it's very likely to take that palestinian person anywhere from two hours to four hours to eight hours to maybe even an entire day to travel just those thirty miles because of the number of times that he or she would be stopped along the way at these checkpoints and well this is obviously very frustrating you know people are spending hour after hour day after day at these checkpoints to get from any one place to another but beyond just being sort of a frustration these checkpoints are extremely disabling to palestinian daily life to all aspects of palestinian daily life for example and these checkpoints make it very difficult for palestinian person to hold a steady job it's never clear if it's going to take you ten minutes or three hours to commute from your little village to the nearest city similarly attending classes on a regular basis is pretty much impossible unless you happen to have a university in your little village higher education is basically out of the question so beyond just being sort of an annoyance or a burden these checkpoints preventing palestinians from earning a living and from getting an education beyond that you know getting to a marriage a funeral a graduation going to visit your family you know all aspects of daily life are affected and i don't know imagine if if you every time you wanted to go to work or to school or to church or wherever else you were going that you had to go through series of checkpoints that held you out for two three hours how did that affect your life and maybe that gives you sort of a glimpse of how  disabling these checkpoints have become to palestinians just sort of on a daily basis this is the checkpoint outside of the city of nablus it's called who are at and we were there doing checkpoint watch where we basically document what's happening at these checkpoints day the rule was the following women were a lab at the checkpoint older men who were allowed for the checkpoint and young boys were also allowed the checkpoint but any men between the ages of fifteen and forty weren't period it didn't matter where you were coming from it didn't matter where you were going it didn't matter who you were it didn't matter if it was an emergency if you were palestinian male fifteen to forty years of age you couldn't get home or to work or to school or to the hospital or wherever you were going and so they gathered here literally hundreds of palestinian men in this ditch next to the checkpoint in hopes that the rule would change at some point and at one point i start two of them go off to the side with trash bags frantically trying to fill them up and i asked them why you suddenly picking up trash and they told me that the soldiers had actually given them the trash bags and told them that if they were able to fill up their trash bags with trash they would be allowed through the checkpoint health violations are another major issue at these checkpoints and in the occupation in general here you can see a palestinian green and white plated ambulance that's pulling over to the side of a road to allow yellow plated israeli vehicle privilege priority on that road and these ambulances will sometimes wait for hours before reaching the checkpoints themselves and when they get there they're oftentimes not sort of rushed rushed through quickly but actually held at gunpoint as you can see in this photograph while another soldier will go around the back to sort of scream through the back of the ambulance and the reasoning given for holding up ambulances oftentimes even longer than average civilian vehicles is that apparently in the past these ambulances have been used to transport weapons wanted by the israeli government and well i've got a little research on the subject and discovered that actually there is one documented case of a palestinian ambulance being abused for these purposes this is the checkpoint outside of the village billet where he spent some time in this checkpoint is open from seven in the morning until seven at night what that means is that if you have any kind of an emergency between the hours of seven pm and seven am well you're kind of out of luck the itself is sort of over to the left of the photograph and there is a direct road from the village to the checkpoint the villagers are allowed to use it and that's because there's something called road blocks on it and roadblocks are like you see here often concrete coops placed on palestinian roads to prevent palestinians from being able to use their vehicles on their roads so what these roadblocks mean for example for the village of deer balut is that instead of taking a half mile paved road from their village to the checkpoint every morning on their way to work or  school they have to take a three mile unpaved detour all the way around through the countryside to reach the exact same spot what does this mean for them more time more stress more wear and tear on their vehicles more money for gas and again this question of security right these institutions the checkpoints the roadblocks are supposed to be there for the security and safety of the israeli population to prevent terrorism in what way are these roadblocks securing anybody you know forcing palestinians to take this long detour how much is this about security and how much is this about control some roadblocks are made with dirt and you can see these villagers on the right here are coming home from work they live on the other side of the road block so what they have to do every morning is that they drive their cars to the roadblocks park them walk around by foot and take a taxi the rest of the way to work or to school and repeat the process of coming home so these roadblocks prevent something as basic as palestinians taking their vehicles from their house to their work or trips to school and finally these roadblocks are extremely disabling to the palestinian economy as you can imagine transporting goods from one end of the land to the other is not a trivial process given all of these checkpoints and roadblocks so basically a truck that's carrying palestinian goods when it reaches a roadblock has to sort of turn around and back up against the roadblocks get him another vehicle to come from the other end and turn them around and back up from that end and somebody has to actually manually transport these goods from one end of the road block to the other as you see in these photographs and well the products are not always office equipment they could be produce perishables things that go bad by the time they reach their destination and they could be desperately needed medical supplies beyond just taking a long time this whole process renders a lot of these palestinian products much more expensive than they otherwise would be because of the extra manpower and vehicular power that's required to transport them but what happens that is a lot of these pilots the new products and have been even more expensive than their israeli counterparts which are very easy  to transport on these really only roads what happens then of course is that the palestinian market is then flooded with israeli products which palestinians many of them struggling to make ends meet and are purchasing instead of supporting their own economy supporting the very country that is occupying them settlements are the next part of my talk settlements in the territories are essentially communities of jewish israelis who are living on palestinian land and they may be sort of villages towns cities here's a rather large one near bethlehem and jerusalem and again all of this land here is palestinian land belongs to the palestinians internationally recognized as palestinian land and yet there's this city that's been built on top of  that is exclusively for jewish israelis well what does this mean you know who gets to live in that city well i could live in that city right because i'm jewish i would just have to fill out an application i could move there next week if i wanted to and yet the farmers the palestinians that own the land that the city was built on aren't allowed to live in it now this process is nothing new it's happened throughout history all over the world and there's a name for it it's called colonization that in english and hebrew we have this kind of nine word you know settlements whereas in many languages like french for example these settlements are called colonies and that's exactly what they are and they are illegal according to international law which prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory which is exactly what israel is doing a lot of these settlements arielle included are populated primarily by immigrants who have moved to the territories not because they say this land is ours and nobody else's but because they're looking for a higher standard of living and these financial offers can be very appealing and people who take advantage of them will get nice housing oftentimes with mortgages subsidized by the government there are parks for their kids to play in strip mall swimming pools and a place where water is so precious at this point there are settlements all over the west bank the red  you have an illegal jewish only colony built on palestinian land and of course coming along with the settlements and colonies is the road network and here you can see it's just a handful of them but the way those blue roads and highways really chop compartmentalise that palace the landscape remember of course that these roads were built illegally on palestinian land at the end of the palestinians owning the land they were built on for the most part aren't even allowed to use them because of the segregated road system the next part of my talk is on outposts which are similar to settlements so i talked before about what i call economic settlers moving to the territories for financial benefits and they represent about eighty percent of the settler population a vast majority that says according to polls of they would be willing to leave if they were offered financial compensation so when israel says it's impossible to make all of these hundreds of thousands of lives leave remember that the vast majority are there simply because the government is paying them to do so the remaining twenty percent of the sudden the population are often called ideological settlers moving to the territories not for money but because of their beliefs and many of them believe that the land in the west bank and gaza belongs to the jewish people for oftentimes religious reasons or maybe political reasons and according to many of these people the palestinians are the ones who are occupying this land jewish land and so they will actually come in the middle of the night with trailers and simply establish themselves on a plot of palestinian land well the farmer wakes up the next morning and there's an outpost on his land and while the israeli government says that it doesn't condone this kind of practice it doesn't do a whole lot to prevent the settlers from coming or to make them leave and so over time these outposts begin to grow you know we have a right we have a responsibility to know where our tax dollars are going and to ensure that they are not being used to violate human rights international law and even us law these settlers have been numerous villagers they've poked a young boy's eye at his face they've been an old woman with her walking stick they've killed a villager they've stolen olives the settlers have burned the village generator so the villagers didn't have any more electricity and this is the new water source where settlers have come down they've urinated in the water source they've poisoned it with dead chickens anything to try to make the villagers leave the palestinians in this part of the world are not allowed to have any kind of weapons now clearly some palestinians do manage to get weapons we hear about it in the media but the vast majority of palestinians don't have they don't have anything to defend themselves with besides stones or their bodies now it's very important for people to distinguish between what it means to be jewish someone from the jewish religion or culture like myself what it means to be israeli a citizen of the state of israel and what it means to be a zionist someone who supports the idea of an exclusively jewish state these are three separate categories there is some overlap but they are not the same thing it's very important to distinguish there are jewish people who are not israeli like myself there are israelis who are not jewish twenty percent of the israeli population is palestinian there are jews who are not scientists they're a zionist who are not jewish the increasingly influential christian zionist movement in this country and it's very dangerous when these ideas become conflated because people start associating them as equals such that people are afraid of standing up against what israel's doing because they're afraid that would make them in an anti semite or a nazi or something and it's absurd it's crazy and i have to say that in the israel is a much higher tolerance for debate and dissent on this issue than you find in the united states and so when people talk about this occupation as as helping the jewish people they don't realize how many israelis are actually against it and how important it is for the jewish people as well as the palestinian people to and this this is a picture of the wall that israel's building that's me and a friend standing in front of it and this is what it looks like in urban areas it's twenty five foot concrete and oftentimes the newspapers will find it's not called the wall instead they call it a security fence and a lot of people really believe that this is security means it's to prevent terrorism and i've talked to people who say well look you know it's very sad to have a wall and everything but we've been fighting for so long you know and all they want is peace and maybe if we just stick up a wall between the two sides they'll stop fighting each other they'll stop killing each other well this is an interesting question right does segregation bring peace also interesting is that a lot of the people that support the wall it turns out if you ask them may not have ever actually seen a map of where the wall is being built and this is really critical to understanding the intention behind it what the effects are actually going to be of this wall so you know if you were going to build a wall between your house and your neighbor's house where would you build it along the property line right or maybe a little bit on your territory well take a look at where israel is building this wall in this map you can see the border around the west bank and then you can see those red lines that indicate where israel is constructing this wall as you can see over eighty percent of it doesn't even touch the green line that border of the west bank but actually snakes and in effect anik seeing all that land on the western side to the israeli side twenty percent of the palestinian population is christian and they along with their muslim counterparts are being separated from the religious center of their land as well as the economic center of their land and the geographic center of their land and well this is a man that i  company to the to the gate of the of the wall in hopes of getting to his land and he had gone to a choir one of these permits to get to his own land and he actually had papers as well dating back to the ottoman era proving that he was the owner of that land on the other side that he could see through but he couldn't get to what he wanted to well we went together and we waited for two days trying to flag down any jeep that would pass by hoping that soldiers would let us pass and they wouldn't sometimes if you have a house on the outskirts of a village because they build the wall right up against the village that house will end up on the wrong side of the wall and that's exactly what happened to my friend who lives in this house in front of it you can see that twenty five foot concrete wall separating manure and her husband and their six children from their village from their community and on the right and left sides of the house are two more fences separating the family from their own land land that has been annexed by israel so mira and her family are basically living in a kind of cage here's the gate to the cage you can see it's manned by soldiers so people who want to visit mira whom you can see in the back with one of her kids i have to sort of hope that the soldiers are in a good mood and will let them through and when we're at this point hardly dares to leave her cage because she and her husband have been served something called demolition papers which means that the israeli army actually intends to demolish their home and many people actually consider sort of lucky because oftentimes if a house is in the way of an expanding settlement or road or the wall they won't bother building a whole fence around it and getting a soldier to command it but they'll actually bulldoze that house and so many are is actually afraid to leave her house for fear that she could come back and it would be gone not that they wouldn't bulldoze a house with people there which they've done in the past as well what this demolition order what this while what this occupation what these things are doing are threatening to make candy and families like his refugees for the second time in recent history keep in mind that sixty percent of the palestinians living in the west bank and gaza are already refugees having lost almost everything already so keep that in mind when you hear people say things like palestinians just aren't willing to compromise palestinian territory has been sort of chopped up and compartmentalise by that wall in particular at the top left of this is the city of calcul yet a city of more than fifty thousand palestinians that has been completely surrounded by this twenty five foot concrete wall such that it's outskirts look something like this now this is these are the sniper towers razor wire a concrete wall around the qalqilya city also known as the calculated ghetto now or an open air prison even and very interesting is that as a person of privilege in this part of the world as an american as a jewish person as a white person i was actually able to see this wall from both sides of it so here are photographs of the qalqilya wall from the city of calculus at the palestinian side meanwhile the next photograph i'm going to show you is a picture of this exact same wall from the israeli highway that passes by on the other side of it and i think this is very interesting they sort of built up on a slant to the wall where they plant flowers in the spring time such that it doesn't even look like a wall and as i said before many israelis are much better informed about the situation than american jews or americans in general in this country and yet at some point i actually think that most israelis probably don't even know what the law looks like  where it's being built what it's doing to palestinian farmers and families and this to me is also the kind of censorship preventing that message from getting across here's a little anecdote of friend of mine who was flying back from palestine to united states and she had a layover in germany along the way where she picked up this issue of international news week because it had a particularly sympathetic article about the plight of the palestinians you can see at the top there also newsweek august two thousand and four but the u s version that article about the plight of the palestinians had been completely removed from the entire magazine this is a kind of censorship and it's happening all over the place we need to be aware of it it's very dangerous of course because the very people who are paying for what's happening don't know what's happening and so you know you don't have to take my word for it i tell people do your own research you know i don't believe it when i first heard it but go beyond mainstream media sources go to palestine or support somebody who is but you don't have to go to palestine to be effective on this issue you can get involved locally you know join a divestment campaign based on the divestment move used against south africa during apartheid saying as long as you're committing these violations of international law and human rights so systematically it won't be us who pays for it you can join the palestine solidarity group or you can write letters to your local media and if you find that what's purported is  biased call or write or even visit your representatives tell them what you think let them know that that their constituents care about this issue talk to your friends and family ask people in the community do they know about the wall do they know about what's happening in israel and palestine you have the power to affect people in your community so use it to ensure security and peace and justice for all people in the middle east no matter who