those disheartening observations those observations will challenge our unwavering support for israel doctoroff trial and march release the second edition of broken promises broken dreams pleasure to be here you visit israel in the west bank in january and you wrote everything is getting worse did observations disturb you to despair no i find when i'm visiting israel on the west bank i actually am very inspired by the israelis who are working to make coalitions of palestinians who are working to fight the occupation who are working with palestinian conditions to provide health care these people are very inspiring and in the west bank i work in clinics i deal with a civil society activists i work with families and again this is not a place where i feel despair i'm inspired by the people that is one of three refugee camps in bethlehem and the camp is right next to the separation wall so the sense of being imprisoned is very powerful and the camp is about one square kilometer it's very crowded in terms of housing there is no green space there are no playgrounds there multigenerational families living in small quarters so it's a very typical refugee camp the reason i was there was that i was visiting who's the head of the children's theater group there and they do incredible things they have a theater group they have a computer room they have a women's empowerment group with a palestinian broidery it's a whole group that's motivated from the grassroots to help people to maintain their culture to help people build cultural theater and dance and music and that's why i was there but you described it as a living hell i described how brown this a living hell the particularly painful city to visit because there are one hundred fifty thousand palestinians living in hebron and then in the in the old city there are four hundred very militant jewish settlers who moved in gas chambers women settlers accuse pelosi women of being whores i mean this stuff has been both documented by palestinians particularly in a program called shoot back where which is a jewish human rights organization ga palestinians video cameras and they just document what's going on outside their windows but it's also absolutely visible when you walk through the city is a lot of that leaking out into mainstream media now this is a pretty invisible catastrophe so when i say living hell what i mean as that these very racist very right wing settlers are tormenting the palestinians who live there do you think impoverishment circumstances the refugee camps and has been a deliberate design to find various ways to make palestinians leave whether it's the forty eight war or whether it's making life miserable you know the goal is in some way to get more land for jewish settlers and less land for palestinians and so one of the ways is to make them miserable or to make it economically unfeasible to stay one or the other someone used by the government well there are a lot of different kinds of settlers i think in broad categories eighty percent of the jewish settlers in the occupied territories are there for economic reasons so the government says to someone coming to israel if you move into the settlement you'll have a beautiful house with a low mortgage and a lovely lawn and swimming pool and good schools and if you want to get into jerusalem you just happen your car go through the tunnels and poof you're into a solemn so it's a very nice place to live it's clean it's safe it's cheap so a lot of settlers are in that category and clearly the government is encouraging them to do this because they want to encourage the taking of more land than twenty percent of the settlers are more religious based so they feel that you know they use the torah as a real estate document that this is ours god gave it to us and we're fulfilling god's plan where is the palestinian gandhi family where is well in my blog what i did as i describe various people that i saw as incredibly powerful nonviolent resisters so on the one hand my feeling is having lived among palestinians having interviewed people having met with families that every palestinian gets up in the morning and feeds their children and goes to work and stands at checkpoints and behaves in a decent dignified nonviolent fashion is in some way expressing the principles gandhi the big problem is that many civil society activists in the west bank in gaza have been either assassinated or imprisoned so a lot of palestinian gun these are rotting in israeli jails and it's really interesting when you look at the you talk to a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher you know people who are educated and have very respectable lives have spent some time in jail so the that impact on particularly the male population is very intense and as part of living under occupation i mean  palestinians reading poetry while particular poetry nationalistic poetry i mean the issue is that if a military has a host of reasons why you could be arrested you never know when they're going to come down on you for that particular offense even though that might be part of daily life it's just like if you think about the checkpoints because the military is in control of the checkpoints and there are six hundred or so checkpoints and it's unpredictable what they're going to be like if you're going from village to village b if you knew it always took two hours to get through the checkpoint you could plan ahead and you leave to our as early and you played at the checkpoint you get through but because you never know sundays it's not any time though and there are some days it's a two hour wait some days you're turned away some days it's a five hour wait it means that the military has total control over your life and it means that every day you get up and try to leave your village or your city or go to school you know know if you'll get there how long it will take and what the price will be so between the arbitrary kind of illegalities you mention and the checkpoints it really means that people don't have control over their lives and it's like living in a giant prison with the desire being that you know palestinians should be being encouraged to  jerusalem and she works with the israeli committee against house demolitions so it's a sort of an eyewitness account of this tour and what we saw and how she explained it to us and it was a really i opening experience that i have a chapter in the bar tal who is a professor at tel aviv university he's a social psychologist who studies societies in conflict and i reflect on conversations i had with him and articles he's written because i think it's really important to understand israeli society why people behave the way they behave and what happens to people living in chronic conflict the third new chapter was discussing realities in the west bank so i talk about a woman doctor that i've gotten to know i've worked with her for the past three years who actually was living illegally until carm which is a city because she couldn't get a permit she was married to someone who had a permit she had been born outside of the west bank even though she was a palestinian and it actually ended up i think taking her nine years to be able to live there legal i mean while you know she's married she had two kids jennifer's practice and then there's a story of a family whose house had been invaded by israeli soldiers in the middle of the night and i happened to get there like two days later and got to know the family interviewed people in the apartment building and continue to have a relationship with this woman and then there's some work on the combatants for peace which are israeli soldiers and palestinian militants who spent time in israeli jails who have come together to renounce violence and to try to spread this message within their own communities well i was able to go into a few of preface and i would like to just state your book actually does a wonderful job masterful in fact of reaching out to the writing of audiences it's not just an audience for jews it's it's also going to talk to the secular crowd the christian crowd as well so it's a very well done book in that sense i also hope to make out to reach out to the muslim community as well now you mention angela and the israeli committee against house demolitions the very fact that that organization exists is because of collective punishment that the israelis are demoed demolishing palestinian homes yes the israeli government has a policy of demolishing palestinian homes on a variety of charges sometimes it's because there was someone in the home who was arrested for accused of a crime and then the home is demolished you know and the family the family in the multi generational family often is left homeless sometimes what happens is that the ability for palestinians to obtain building permits is almost zero so if you think about it if people are having children and going families they're going to make additions to the house they're going to fix a porch they're going to do something and that leaves them open to the threat of home demolition so there's a lot of that kind of collective punishment that goes on and also it's related to the very and the other spouse may not be right i mean twenty percent of israelis are palestinian and then there are also palestinians living in east jerusalem who have a different form of permitting to they're not citizens but they have residency rights and the current israeli law is that if those kind of people marry someone who's from the west bank or gaza they can't bring the family into israel they have then there's no family reunification so this creates havoc because palestinians who live in israel he couldn't get permits to live with her in east jerusalem so he has a house and they had a refugee camp she has a small apartment in east jerusalem they want to keep that and she wants a keeper east jerusalem identification because it gives her the right to visit the holy sites it gives her kid a better education and gives her access to the israeli health care system so their five kids live between the two houses part of the week in one house then they come over and they live part of the time in their father's house and they're so young so they don't really understand that this is an odd way to have a life and he described it i think it took him six years just to get a permit to visit with his wife in east jerusalem so he would sneak through the hills and he would get arrested and he get beaten and also it's of things and he was just a husband trying to go home to his kids so it it creates a very  unhappy and unjust kind of situation but it's part of an attempt to make the number of palestinians in israel less by making life more difficult to be there now but i would call passive transfer was a comment new book about  and during that israeli incursion they were firing at the apartment they took one of the people in the apartment and was using him as a human shield going from apartment to apartment and on the bottom floor there was a seventy something year old man and they opened the door and just shot him dead and so that was just part of the outrageous kind of activities that go on and you know the i d f said well people were shooting from this house and i interviewed the people that were in this house and they said we were asleep we have kids we weren't shooting this is crazy and you know this kind of t of a double speak because the sort of mythology about the israeli defense forces quote they're the most moral army in the world that's there they are mythology and yet there's a lot of evidence that trying to function under d post traumatic stress disorder in israeli society and in palestinian society going to be a trauma tars of generations of the palestinian is really i think you know when israel was founded it was founded by many people who were already extremely traumatized by the holocaust and the people who were dispossessed by the arrival of the people who founded the state of israel were traumatized by their dispossession so trauma has been sort of a foundation of this conflict and all in all parties and it's past it's a historical trauma and it's an intergenerational trauma and then you have ongoing trauma because i mean there are israelis who've lost children to suicide bombing there are many many more palestinians who've lost children to israeli incursions and war and that kind of thing i mean this is very disproportionate levels of trauma but it's traumas a recurrent theme and this gets of the root of what you observed and commented everything is  was a devastating war the infrastructure of the country was really defeated a lot of the medical institutions were destroyed u n institutions were bombed i mean there are people still living in tents there are people dying from lack of medication and gaza is just each year i think it's reached its most lowest point and it keeps being more desperate in the west bank the occupation is very very brutal i mean people really don't have the ability to move very easily from place to place this disrupts the economy health care education it's it is getting worse and in israel you see a very right wing swing i mean that's how the netanyahu got elected and for instance there was recently a study that showed that over fifty percent israelis are unwilling to live next to an arab family so sort of fear racism being wanting to be separating out of himself so i mean these folks are locked in a very intense internet in battle but within each society it's getting it well that's referring to what's going on in east jerusalem there is an ark an excavation site near what's called the city of david that's trying to document basically the ancient city of today and the kingdom of david and the objection that archaeologists have and that many internationals have to this is that the way that the archaeologic biggest being done is to sort of throw out the several thousand years of cultures that  existed after whatever was there in the beginning of this discussion to find evidence of the jews being there and you know my contention is the jews were probably there but so were and a whole lot of other people and they all have you know they all have left their archaeological evidence and if you're going to be an archaeologist your responsibility is to identify and honor all the different layers of history but this archaeological dig is very political and its goal is to is confusion in this country between a love of israel a sort of nationalism about israel and a love of jewishness or judaism and in our country there's really religion has become identified with a love of israel that's completely  uncritical and if you're in that particular camp of the jewish community then you know want to hear from people like me because i raise that are very painful and why would anyone want to talk about something that's painful now i would suggest that we have to do this and that unless we face all the complexity and the contradictions and the fact that for instance nine hundred forty eight was a day of celebration for jews but it was a day of catastrophe for palestinians unless we can openly talk about that and honor the in some segment of the jewish community is no different in some parts of the jewish community discourse on israel with a sympathetic ear towards what's happened to palestinians as well and an awareness of what's happening in israeli society which i think is another part of this conversation is not welcome and is actively muzzled in the israeli government and some p r kind of organizations are very sensitive towards attitudes towards israel so in two thousand six both on a governmental level both in the us and in a surreal and on a p r level a campaign was los was launched called brand israel and the goal of that campaign is to bring out the beautiful things about israel the music the science the high tech that this effort is to have people think about jewelry when they think about this or rather than to think about conflict and i think that that brand israel campaign is in response to the fact that there are more and more people saying hey there are a lot of very difficult painful things going on here and if we don't face them we're going to just get into more trouble you know everything we do it seems as we move through this sanction movement that is gaining momentum communities before the state of israel they boycotted jews who hired arabs so lots of different people telling us nobody is really going to write yes i suspect they are doing that so the point is that this is but in the progress community this is been used for a long time it's not some new thing and so the idea is that with that a community can organize around different products either from the state of israel or from the settlements they have to make sort of a political decision about where they're going to put their energies away and there is a wonderful website called who profits which has good lists of where things are made now the divestment movement means that companies need to do what's called morally responsible investing or divestment from companies that profit from the occupation like motorola supplies some of the stuff at the security wall and sanctions or more on a government level so you know there's three different levels to that george mitchell actually was quoted  and is just beginning to rumble around the united states the thing that i feel about b d s is that individuals and communities and activists communities and faith based communities can work on this on the grassroots level and that you know of course a pac is going to be against this and there's already organizing against b d s but the fact that there's already organizing against b d s and it's just barely gotten going means to me that's a very powerful weapon and it's also a nonviolent weapon and it's also what palestinian civil societies are asking for so if people who are oppressed who are engaged in a struggle for a betterment and a more just solution to their lives and they're asking for this i think we need to really take it seriously and of course the more right wing elements in our society whether it's a pack of the christian zionists or whoever of course they're not going to support it but that doesn't matter we still should do it respectful have to follow the moral compass and start having discourse and of course for viewers to have the option o with well i think the first thing the viewers need to do is to be educated so don't just trust the usual media i mean go on the web read our rights listen to others they are and look at different human rights organizations read jewish peace news go to american jews for a just peace and there's a lot of websites out there that can give you a much clearer education about what's going on so education is the first thing and then i think the other thing viewers need to do is to work to make this conversation possible and safe within their communities whether it's faith based communities or activist communities and not to be afraid of the backlash which there will be so i think it's important to be brave and to find communities of people who will work with you  to do political work on this and we must remember that it's our government that's funding this so we well if you're not jewish and start your state you do have a responsibility as an american citizen so it's part of being as i said earlier very forthright and very