and january of two thousand and nine gaza was bombarded for over a month by the israeli military and the result was a collapse of the infrastructure for twenty three days there with her ranges assault on this an armed population mosques were bombed all kinds of buildings were bottom as a result of that twenty three day assault close to two thousand people were murdered and of that two thousand close to four hundred were children gaza's a population of one point five million people eighty percent of them are refugees from one thousand forty eight of that one point five million people half of them are in of the age of sixteen years old when you speak about the civilian population you're speaking mostly about children those are the ones who are the majority of the population there and those are the ones that are being affected the most the last day of the bombing my friend sharon wallace and i got into gaza and it was astounding what we saw there was so much utter destruction that i can't even begin to tell you about all of it a few weeks after that i received a project that trained about four hundred mothers to go into schools to work with teachers to way with their peers and to help the children through this tragedy that had happened kids were waiting their beds they were in sleeping there was they couldn't go to school there wasn't a child in gaza who had not lost a mother or father grandparent a sister or brother or a friend and they were completely traumatized and as one of the ways in which they worked with the kids was they gave them the crayons and magic markers and the paper and told them to draw what their feeling were and what they had seen during the assault a woman named susan johnson went on a delegation last year and she saw these drawings in these centers and she's decided that she wanted to bring them to the united states she thought it was important to show the americans what was happening as a result of our tax dollars that we send to israel that purchases all of these horrific weapons that were used in gaza we flew off on july twenty fourth two thousand and nine with the purpose of seeing what had happened the results of what the bombing and the invasion of israel so operation cast lead i thought i was ready and i wasn't it just totally shocked me the devastation was horrendous no matter where you were you could see it you could see rubble i mean all that's my first street thought other them the children is rubble just everywhere we visited children centers because children were part of our focus and we went to i guess three or four and the one seven or the time center for the child we were to go visit we went in and they have a huge library and all kinds of programs for children and so i got more impressed as we walked through it and then the director a morning had time set aside to sit down with this and talk and she showed us drawings from art therapy classes that the children were more available for the children the first one i just welled up with tears because it was a confirmation of what i thought the children had gone through our picture after picture she showed us and they were done by oh maybe children five to six years old so  tried to adjust that they were there and i kept thinking how beautiful they were and how tragic they were and that a child had to experience elvis to draw about it i said to one of the people in our group those we have to do something with those pictures we talked about projects that we could do because wherever we went in gaza the people said all we want to do is live like everybody else and i would say when you go back when you go back to the states tell people what's happening t ell them what our lives are like with all that's being done to us the block they see the day to day wondering if you're going to get bombed and i said  we'll you know i promise i will and they said that's what everybody says and we never hear from them again and i promised and truly meant it that they would hear from me and i would do all that i could and then and thinking about it i thought like this needs to go to the states for people to see i got home and started thinking ok how are you going to do this with hundreds of people that were going to go into gaza a number of a number of the people that had been in my group were going on this freedom march they were going back to gaza and they said ok we'll bring the drawings back with them it ended up that they never got because they weren't allowed into gaza so we had no but no bad plan fell through and then there was someone in gaza who was coming back to the states and she offered to bring the drawings back and so i gave a sigh of relief and then she found that really it was too cumbersome to bring them all back and also she was coming back through ben gurion and if i had thought known that i would have said thank you very much but we'll have to find some other way because they would have been confiscated and destroyed you know before she could get on the plane so bam we began to look for other ways of getting them one of the senders said ok we can get them now for you you know they all were at this one center and they mailed them through d h l i don't know how they did it but i'm not going to not going to prom i i was just glad to get them and this was april of two thousand and ten and i opened the package and was just totally overwhelmed by you the first picture it took me back to cause and even back to gaza with something i didn't see it was like i had been there and i cry quite a while and then took out the next picture and went through all of them and i was just blown away by them and also very upset that children had to experience this the image that it left in their head that will be there forever it started out in her mind it was in maine for probably three weeks or a month i different locations it came back it was shown in chicago a number of times at a number of venues i took a out list summer to the  midwest and then macca the middle east children's alliance had one lead and a number of their centers that they sponsor gaza had sent pictures and so it went out to oakland california and that's really the only place there's been an organized protest at that point there have been we've been working with mocha with the museum of children's art which is right around the corner here in another building for six months they were very excited about ha exhibit in their museum we talked about different events we would do there with teachers with kids and talk about the exhibit and what it meant and what kids saw in it and then two weeks before it was to open the head of the board of directors from the reason c m came to the middle east children so alliance and met with us and told us that they were no longer considering having this exhibit show there and i was shocked we'd been talking with them we'd been visiting with them planned it making all of these plans and then for him to come two weeks before the opening and to tell us that no we couldn't do it was very upsetting and i remember sitting in the room at mecca and think in this can't be happening we sent out all these postcards thousands of postcards it was all over the internet we were very excited about it and i said to him i said i am very angry by what you're doing and i feel that the people who are really hurt by your actions by the actions of the museum are the children  i feel that we as mecca have a responsibility to those kids to show their art and we just sided after they left that we were going to show this art whether it was inside the museum if they changed their mind or if it was outside the museum but on september twenty third we were going to show it there was a very organized opposition to it who had a very organized plan of putting pressure on the museum not to show it there was a great deal of press involved in this because very brilliantly i think mecca did not back up they said ok this is the information that we have that when this was very organized we don't like censorship and so now it has a censorship issue involved with it we went all over oakland looking for an empty space to show the exhibit and nobody would rent this space to finally we saw this space that we're in right now and the people that on this property were very nice they rented it to where said it very very do straight and we signed the lease twenty four hours before the exhibit opened and it was really quite a moment everybody came to the museum around the corner and we had made a copy of the exhibit and we gave a piece of the art to forty eight people to  the band came in they were playing music and over five hundred people came to be part of this exhibit and the opening outside and at one point we told people to march with us around the corner without art and they did and they came here to this space and nobody knew that this had happened that we'd set it up in twenty four hours it was a great moment and over the two months that it's been hanging here hundreds and hundreds of people have come to see the exhibit some schools have come some church groups all kinds of people i think it's really the most important thing to remember is that the museum  they had no backbone they couldn't stand up to the zionist organizations that were pressuring them but this is all about is about the east bay federation jewish federation applying pressure to the board with the mocha museum and telling them that they're going to lose their finding they called their funders and in fact they had a trader on line that said relations to all that use of the east bay for making sure that this exhibit was not going to be seen at moca shame on them it wasn't the museum the board had no backbone they these organizations in one form or another have been twisted not arm of many groups and many organizations many speakers and they've come after the middle east children's alliance before about eight years ago we had an art exhibit called justice matters and it weighs in collaboration with the berkeley art museum berkeley art center and about eight rabbis went to see mayor tom bates and tried to pressure him to take the exhibit down and to defund the berkeley art center because they showed this exhibit which they said was anti semitic and i have to say that tom bates stood up to them and said that he believes in free speech and that the museum has the right this berkeley arts center has the right to show the soup it so we're very familiar with these guys about a year ago many of these jewish scientists groups the jewish federation of the east bay actually the national federation across the country and the a d l they committed to six million dollars to use to fight these kinds of fights they want to stop anybody who speaks out for justice in palestine and they want to stop any discussion  understanding about what's going on in the israel palestine the supporters of israel that are part of this lobby do want to silence the palestinian voice they don't want people to be aware of it they don't want people to see palestinian children's art it gets in the way of the false narrative that we've all been led to believe i think it's important for people to know what they're getting into i think people are blindsided when they do something about palestine about children's art or something that would normally not be considered controversial organizations museums need to be warned probably that this is what they will be up against that there will be donors that won't tell them that they're very unhappy with their plan to do this type of event and they need to stand by their principles and not cave in to that kind of pressure i would not be sitting here in california had they not had this controversy in oakland that shot themselves in the foot with it as far as a child's you from gossip i had in fish and initially that it would be pennsylvania and new jersey new york which are areas that the people who went in with my group or from i mean i never would have thought that it would be going all over never i had more requests for the exhibit then like a possibly handle and clothing about ten from europe there were some from canada so i responded to those  three of the three exhibits out of all the what the drawings that i've had it's been broken down into smaller exhibits and there are three of them in canada right as we speak going in all different directions and in the united states sense that issue an oakland when it left oakland it went to boise idaho and wichita kansas and new war alone and in places in california and then back to chicago where it was there for quite a while going to places and it also brought in people from colleges who wins i think that the kids in palestine one this time and i think they won because the community said we're not going to listen to these zionist groups we're going to come see the art we're going to come and we're going to demonstrate and we're going to keep coming to see the art and support the middle east children's alliance i think the losers really are designed as groups in the museum of children's art because the museum looks ridiculous and design is groups show themselves to be who they are and i think that they're the big losers and what saddens me is that i think that we jews i'm jewish i think that we are the big losers also because i think that people see this and hear about these kinds of intimidations and sometimes they lump us all together forgetting that there are many people like myself who have nothing to do with those groups other than to be attacked by them and who believe in justice for palestinians and believe in the right of return and the children are my main concern and that doesn't mean i'm not concerned about others i truly am on both sides i don't want anybody going through trauma but the bloom's that's scary the issue which i think should always be taken into consideration is what type of long term effect these policies have on the psychological wellbeing and mental health of the population in g we know very well that there is a high level of post traumatic stress disorder p t s d among children in gaza some say as high as ninety five percent of all children in gaza suffer for some form of symptoms such as a result of living under these conditions where they're exposed to violence rockets helicopters assassinations in the middle of the street closures the lack of cutting off of electricity which is a common practice there's only six hours of electricity every day and kids going to school and in under in schools which have been damaged by israeli bombs and most importantly seen the fear and the insecurity that comes from parents who are unable to protect their children who are unsure what tomorrow will bring for them when bombs are falling and when people are being killed relatives are being killed on a daily basis which happens in gaza quite frequently  type of psychological impact that has within a family within a society can't be adequately measured in the problem for organizations like ours and any organization who wants to address these issues adequately that say we want to do a project to deal with chilled children who are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder in gaza it's impossible to do it effectively because the root cause of this disorder remains in place so if you try to treat one to one child or one hundred children or thousand children ten thousand and i said ninety five percent of the kids there it's been estimated suffer from post traumatic stress disorder that means over five hundred thousand children suffer from post traumatic stress disorder in the gaza strip how do you treat five hundred thousand children when the root cause which is the violence of the israeli occupation remains in place what does the long term effect of the whole general ation growing up with post traumatic stress disorder what is the long term implications for that society and for the larger region as a whole nobody kno that's a it's not a positive one that when children are brought up from the age of zero to eighteen every day being exposed to violence being exposed to a siege in an occupation which is denying them their basic rights and access to the outside world and in addition to that the knowledge that people there are not stupid the knowledge that the outside world the international community is doing nothing about it that is talking about democracy and freedom in the region but when it comes to gaza it says nothing does nothing when their freedom and democracy is being denied and doesn't do anything to intervene to prevent or stop the human rights violations which occur there on a daily basis people there become very frustrated and cynical about the west and about the united states government united nations europeans the arab regimes and this also produces in my opinion a very negative implication for the future in the region i'm passionate about trying to bring some understanding about the situation or at least stimulate interest that people will look further i would hope that people are looking at the exhibit would leave it better informed about what the people in gaza are going through by these children my purpose for for this project was to make people more aware of what's happening in gaza i did i am not one to try and say this is what you should believe i believe that way you should believe that way i'm going to convince you that this is the way to go i used to be that way you know i couldn't understand why everybody didn't believe the way i did because i saw the true way and now you know i'm finally mature late in my life that ok i will dispense this information i was show these drawings i will show pictures i will give my experience and what you do with it is your thing i just do it if we start to see the reality and the truth of what life is like in palestine not the way that it's presented to the american  media or the propaganda which surrounds this issue outside but when you start to see the facts if we start to see how people are suffering there to see the truth to see the reality then there has to be a shift in u s policy towards that region so the first step is to not deny