concentrated there in cruelty israeli occupiers deny even mandatory and basics decent food clean water and adequate healthcare one activist in particular has railed against israeli pleasure to welcome greater berlin to more politics welcome thank you what got you involved in mideast activism i married a palestinian i was straight out of university and i was getting my master degree and this marvelous man walked into my life one day and asked me if he could take me out for breakfast and i was living in chicago and didn't have any idea what you're getting into and actually when he told me he was three years of the marriage between sixty four and sixty seven we did what most young couples do i was teaching he was an engineer we had children and then the sixty seven war happened and it was as though overnight i became an and that was during the six day war and and they said that they didn't know that it was an american ship and of course there was an enormous american flag on top of the ship sixty seven war motivated you into action what did you exactly how did you get involved we started an organization called palisade international and that essentially raised blankets and money and medicine to send to the refugees that were now scattered not only i wanted to continue with working with the palestinians and my palestinian husband just wanted to be an engineer he didn't want to do this again he said look i've lost my country i've lost my home i've lost some of my family members i we've lost everything we have i don't want to do this again and i did want to continue so he went one way i went the other way and in one thousand i think seventy three i started to come back by the time the second intifada started in one thousand nine hundred ninety nine i was already back full time because i looked over my own career i looked over my own life and it only got worse for the palestinians it never got people promised all will give you this will give you this will give you the west bank will be able to do this and then little by little by little like a piece of cheese the palestinians were being cut cut into pieces and i i felt that i couldn't advocate for the palestinians i couldn't really do this without actually going and witnessing for myself so i went in two thousand and three i went in two thousand and five and i went in two thousand and seven then i got were interested in trying to figure out how to keep the people how to keep gaza on the map everybody was talking about the occupied west bank nobody was talking about gaza and so a group of us all of whom were out of i that's true gaza has four point three trillion cubic feet of natural gas under its waters israel already has several derricks out there there are already busy drilling they are already found it is it but israel has done is has never been sign with the native americans of of this country it's exactly the same analogy we were busy stealing their land we were busy stealing their resources i sometimes think that israel and the united states government get along well because israel has doing the same thing to the palestinians that we did to the native americans now when you got involved in your activism you did hear from the us you did hear from their iras and you did hear from an outlawed jewish organization we did in in fact that was one of the reasons that the marriage fell apart because i don't think reby wanted to continue this he'd already been harassed before he'd already been kicked out the next thing we know we've got the i r s audit auditing us every year for seven years we've got the f b i calling us all the time he didn't want to live that kind of life and i think he also was a naturalized american citizen he was much more worried about the consequences of activism than i was i was raised in the sixty's to believe that we activists had the right to change the world now you were married to a  maybe bipolar i think it's true i think two years after i got divorced from the palestinian i met this wonderful jewish man who was very pro palestinian and i think what ended up that the thing that he said to me that made me fall in love with him was i will make sure that your children grow up to be proud of being palestinian and i thought that was the kindest most wonderful thing that anybody could have said to me i was a struggling single mother by that time but we didn't take in supplies to make any changes the people of gaza are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves if they're given their freedom but we often took things in such as hearing aids israeli said that they couldn't have hearing aids because they might use the batteries to make a rocket so we took and things that were on the list of what israel said you can't have but our real reason was to break the siege you're also the co fish and we were so proud of them we thought oh my gosh these are our boats and we're going to sail to gaza it took us such a long time to get there and when we saw the people of gaza standing on the rocks it was one of the most amazing events of my life because everybody had said we would never make it we would never again and we would never make it the israelis would stop us and i think what happened is that the israelis took a chance that we if they let us marginalized that they didn't believe we'd get there and when we got there the first time they stepped up and they bought us a yacht a group of palestinians in the u k this is beautiful yacht and that's what we were taking in when the got hit during operation cast lead we decided the only way we were going to be able to make any kind of an in impact was to send in a flotilla and that's where the nine people were murdered but you also have to remember that fifty people were injured on our own boat we had a young woman with a broken nose we had somebody and they broke his leg somebody else they broke his arm it's it was think we threaten them with the truth now but i have a quote here that you declared israel an illegal entity a country founded on terrorism and you went further to say that our congress is occupied by the israel lobby you stand by those czechoslovakia people have the right to exist and when one set of people denies another set of people that right to exist then i think that the state needs to readjust itself reassign itself and be a state for all of its people and and controversy and it's over the tweet and actually some all the explanations i've been able to read and understand it seems like it's a lot to do about nothing to tell us about the story it's a lot to do about nothing that's actually quite accurate i think that when you have a high profile as i have had people sit around and they wait to see if you're going to make a mistake you have to remember i was you know the same bunch that if you see the same  they definitely don't like my being as vocal as i am about what israel does to the palestinians and so they took an opportunity to jump on me and on moss i part of me is rather flattered because to be called an anti semite semite puts me in the same category as jimmy carter and helen thomas helen thomas and which is kind of silly because she is a semite but i'm in very good company and the other anymore it's like the little boy that cried wolf use it when it's important don't go out and lay will people will do it doesn't it mean something to the flack machine isn't it just ammunition for them to make noise yes that is true j v p decided that they would not endorse one book event but l a jews for peace whom i have worked with for years came in straight away and indorse the book event so i think people have the right to say i'm not going to work with you i don't happen to like the way that you are phrasing things that's supposedly what the united states and the united states stand for but i'd also say that i found out several months after this whole thing happened that my facebook account had been hacked and had been attached to pre gus's twitter account that's what makes me the saddest because i have a private life and i have a life that where i work with free gaza and by attaching the free gaza twitter account to the facebook account it went out on the free gaza twitter account and that's the one thing that i apologized for that there was nothing that free gaza had to do with this it will do you separate or no well of course apologies accepted i mean we still have a board of of six people like ann wright for example who's on our board we have  one jewish attorney on the board nobody has backed off we have a brand new board because we have a brand new set of things that we are doing with free gaza so i was i was saddened to see that happen and i to the kind of work you do something that the kind of work i do i want to know about the whole of course i want to know about past poems it doesn't mean that i'm for them that's right but you know i want to know about well in fact when i drop the video down on to my front page of my facebook and i will bet you everybody watching this program has done the same thing they either have put something in the wrong place or a good example is sending an email out and you have five people on the e mail but you only want to send it to one person and you end up i wouldn't say that it's a jewish camp because i have so many supporters who are jewish i would say it's a zionist camp i mean there's a difference between the religion and an ideology and an ideology that i consider to be came from but well it doesn't help that my name is grettir berlin i mean everybody was jumping on me and saying look at that german look at that german look or how she does it and i kept saying look i'm burrowing as a jewish name i'm swedish and it got to be funny after a while it was at the point where i was thinking you know what i'm not going to apologize anymore i made a stupid posting mistake period  everybody has done that everybody has looked at a post and said oh crap but some of the critics have said you really can't make a difference between a private sharing of something hateful painful propaganda and  a private versus public the to the same and i don't agree but this is what's coming from some of the critics well i'm always interested in seeing that when you when you confront somebody like that and you say did you ever watch the video they say no i didn't watch the video i just looked at the title well the title to the video was not written by the man who was the lecturer on the video that happens all the time a title to a a newspaper article is not written by the reporter i was simply interested in it because i thought well this is something i've never heard of before i what bothers me is that my father was hounded during the mccarthy era i'm beginning to think the same thing is happening now in other words you can't say anything you can't even talk about the holocaust you can't say anything because you might be saying the wrong thing it completely cuts off dial and they've got this kosher wall and you can go over so we know there's a body of evidence that has even though people might find fault with the specific link you sent out that there's a body of there are books written by wonderful jewish writers lenny lenny brenner is one who has written about the zionist collusion with the nazis during world war two papal kowloon they do it especially in times of war they're hoping maybe they'll save their families they're hoping maybe they'll save their fortunes and to say that somehow this never happened is is as bad as not acknowledging that there was a horrific holocaust and there was a her millions of people died during world what world war two so i kind of have referred people back to lenny brenner and said look if you want to read about the collusion between zionism and the nazis again you can continue those lines and you can do it in the manakin begun in the mandate british period it's not a very pretty history but it is history and we have a right to it and one genocide does not give those people the right to commit what i call slow motion genocide against the palestinians i think that the palestinians are one of the final victims of world war two and that's the real tragedy the real tragedy of this whole thing is that people who suffered so much during world war two are doing the same thing to an indigenous population that has been there forever they drove out seven hundred fifty thousand palestinians in one thousand nine hundred eight they're still driving them out so it's it's a multitude in this tragedy which is one of the reasons i've stayed in this is one of the reasons we sent the boat because we don't want the world to forget the palestinians don't forget them they have the right to stay there they had that this is their land as well as the land of what i call the white man because that is kind of what has happened you know you are talking about something that i describe used to really have to sue much as we know  i think people are opportunists i think people have decided you have or you have an entire russian community for example in israel they're not even jewish they look at this is an opportunity to get land that was cheap to get houses that were cheap and of course that's on the back of the palestinians the palestinians have been rounded up in gaza into an open air concentration camp that is what they can't come in they can't go out that is exactly the situation that they are living in it's why we went to begin with we went to tell the world look you cannot do this to one point five million people you can't do this we are not past world war two we are past the korean war and yet you're still doing the same thing to the palestinians of gaza that was done during world war two why are you doing this we have international media now we have television and we have the internet you can't you cannot i can i can just sense your passion for the righteous cause these palestinian people to stop this atrocity i wish more people would get it and wish more people would understand real in the summa to some staying home and doing nothing to stop  going to be taking up quite a bit of my my time because it is the story of how we got to gaza in spite of ourselves there is another initiative as well that is being done by a group of canadians and  americans and it's sailing a boat out of gaza and into europe i mean it's just so perfect because what we've been doing is trying to send boats into gaza and we've been stopped but gaza needs its freedom it has a beach front property it should be able to trade on the mediterranean just like anybody else trades should be able to fish and hunt polluted waters all of those things that should be able to hit the menu or to be responsible for its own gas reserves gaza could be another single pour if it was given the right to take its own natural gas supplies so what we want to do is turn the tables on israel what are they going to do if a boat leaves gaza filled with embroidery and pottery and things that the people of gaza can sell in europe are they going to stop it on its way out by saying we have the right to stop a how do you feel that is really accurate jeff help recalls where housing uses they with a warehouse the palestinians they put them on shelves and they warehouse them they shut the door to the warehouse and then maybe nobody will pay any attention i think that that's partly true i think it's up to us the world the people who really care i think it's up to us to open that warehouse door they don't have to be warehoused but they're not going to be able to get out of that warehouse unless it's an enormous worldwide concern i think what's happening in israel is that they're really nervous about our about what free gaza has done that's why they jumped on me they jumped on me for such a stupid thing because there's trying to see if they can somehow stop us and i don't think that we can be stopped i mean something really substantial to go with that public opinion operation  what is it i do think that public opinion makes a difference i think every time that we sailed every time that we went into gaza we got the attraction of the media having been involved in this now for how many years forty some years i've seen a huge change in the united states i am actually very encouraged just i don't think that we're going to see israel in its current form lasting longer than about another seven years you so that's why we send the votes that's why we send the boats in the other direction that's why we're doing this it's not it's up to the palestinians in the israelis to make their peace with each with each other is it possible it seems like it's zero  or or new nuremberg were all everybody said that about the american south is it possible can slavery really disappear and everybody says that about any kind of a human rights issue it's not going to happen it can't happen i mean south africa that's never going to happen it always happens is zionism just a national ideology for jewish homeland or is it something more sinister you know i think it's a national ideology for a jewish homeland i think that that's where it started i think it's gotten increasingly pompous as they become more and more successful but it's like any is it's it it is concentrated on one kind of group at the exclusion of another kind of group tell the viewers what you want them to do i've seen groups that it were started with five people who have grown to five thousand people that are interested in the palestinians i am tremendously encouraged i think it's going to happen i think is going to happen in the next seven years thank you very much for appearing on moral forward to taking my questions