Where Olive Trees Weep (2024) Movie Script
WEBVTI think it happened
on the way to school.
I got slapped at some
point by a soldier.
So that was a good slap,
because that kind of woke me up
to the reality of where I really am.
I experienced occupation
through the nostalgia,
and the emotions,
and the stories of everyone.
I had the questions,
why can't I see my grandfather?
Why are half of my family
not in the country?
There are these questions
and this feeling
that you get as a sensation,
but not as a knowing.
And the knowing came when
when I went to a protest,
I was more the type that believed
in fighting confrontation straight,
but my mother wanted to show me
the non-violent style,
so she convinced me to go
to a protest in Jerusalem.
There was a musical protest
between, a joint one,
internationals, Palestinians
and Israelis.
And she's like, 'I want you
to see how this is done.
There are other options, you know,
we can go and we can sing.'
In the beginning,
I was making fun of them.
I was telling my mother,
'You're gonna be
liberated by those
few people singing here.'
A few minutes after that,
the soldiers started storming
and they came at us
with full force.
I'm not hurting you!
I'm not hurting you!
I'm not hurting you!
So the musical team
started making a human chain
so that at least
they can't reach us,
and I thought I was a part
of that human chain,
and I was holding on.
And then I saw
the people being taken further
and further away,
and I was still the only one
that was being held
in the human chain. I was like,
'Okay, I'll keep the human chain!'
Until I realized that
something was wrong
and I was being pulled too far.
So I started pushing, kicking
the guy behind me and saying,
'Khalas, we have to go back'
until I turned and he put the
Israeli military police hat on
and I looked at him,
I was trying to run away.
Um...
And he basically took me
down to the ground
and I remember my head banging.
And I then woke up,
with I don't know how many soldiers
and police beating my knees,
and they were just going and going.
And I would wake up and look
and see the cameras flashing
and I could see that there
were other people around,
but then I would just look at them
and they would keep going.
I would faint again and wake up.
Of course, the police handcuffed me,
slammed me into a jeep.
And there was a young boy,
and they kept beating him
and beating him and beating him.
And his head was
just going next to me.
So I started beating and
starting to shout in the jeep,
so that I can get...
That's when the shock went
and the anger rose.
Another kid gets beaten up
and thrown with blood
on his face, and I just...
I froze.
It's so important for
people to understand
colonization in order to understand
what's happening in the world.
And here in Palestine,
it's, you know,
it's happening now.
The issue is the
present day, ongoing,
settler colonial project,
that by definition is meant to
take the land and
create a political system
that excludes the indigenous people.
200 years ago in the States
or New Zealand or Brazil,
it was not considered violations,
it was the norm.
Now, because Zionism
is an anachronistic
settler colonial movement,
the world understands
it's not according to the norm,
but the world accepts it.
In this Holy Land,
there's always been a lot
of violence and oppression
and injustice, going
back to ancient times.
And then... the foundation
of the State of Israel,
which could only have
been accomplished
by denying the rights
of the local population,
so in that sense, it's
just another colonial project.
In 1917, when David Balfour,
a British foreign minister,
who the hell was he to promise
a foreign land to anybody else?
when he issued that declaration,
that the British
government views with favor
the establishment of a
Jewish entity in Palestine,
there were something like
100,000 Jews here, or 75,000,
and half a million Arabs.
How are those half a million
supposed to feel
about the 75,000 declaring,
as they did,
I'm quoting Zionist history,
'That our aim,
in as short a time as possible,
is to make Palestine as Jewish,
as England is English
and America is American.'
And then the Jews came here
through the doors
opened by Zionism,
which was initially
both a settler colonial movement,
in its core,
but not a very successful one,
until Nazi Germany came to power.
Zionism was partly a
response to antisemitism.
So the Zionist narrative means
a narrative that believes
that there should be a
Jewish state in Palestine.
So that, that is like,
goes without question.
Everything I heard was...
I was so Zionist,
we were Zionists, that
we didn't know we were Zionists.
The Jewish people were
always the victims.
We've never hurt anyone.
And we were somehow morally
superior to, to everyone.
My grandmother, she would say
'A good Arab is a dead Arab.'
And she would say,
'An Arab will hug
you with one arm,
and stab you in the
back with another.'
I stayed in the jeep,
then we were taken
to the Moscobiyeh,
the Russian compound, which is a
the f-, the-
I was going to curse.
It's the dungeon of torture.
This is just one of the many
dungeons of torture
that Israel has operating
all over the land.
We always used to
say that you can...
If you walk in silence at night,
you can hear the people
screaming in these dungeons.
They interrogated me.
I was crying and crying and...
'boom'
you know, the slap came and
it was like, okay.
So the nervous system
got also that message.
I apparently signed a lot of
things without knowing.
Of course, they
don't read it to you.
You get slapped every time
you ask a question.
So the straight signal is,
if you don't want to get beaten,
you don't want to get tortured,
sign and you're out!
That was the beginning.
And for me, that was a shift
because the fear that I felt
I had never experienced before.
I said to myself,
'I never want to be back
in that place, ever.'
The trajectory of
once you experience
those feelings and emotions
is that something has to change.
And for me, it was like, Okay...
I'd heard the stories of the pains
of how people were
tortured in these places,
I never believed it,
until I saw.
And when I saw,
I couldn't unsee it.
So it did affect every choice
made after in my life.
So how does the world completely
turn a blind eye to the
Israeli continuous violence,
both physical military violence,
and bureaucratic
institutional violence?
And still sees
Israel as the victim?
This is the big question.
My parents were both refugees
after the Second World War
and the trauma of coming back
from the concentration camp
and the ghetto,
to their respective countries,
Yugoslavia and Romania,
which they never
intended to leave...
But after the war,
and after realizing
that many of their Jewish
friends and family
had been murdered,
I think they felt such
a vacuum or a void,
that pushed them out
of their countries.
And again, they were not Zionist
and they never planned
to come to Palestine,
never before that.
in some sense, it's the
worst event in history,
where there was
a deliberate attempt
to extirpate a whole people,
by mechanical,
scientifically designed,
violence.
So in that sense,
the project that
led to the creation
of the Jewish State,
arose out of deep trauma,
unspeakable trauma.
And the world supports Israel,
because the world either feels
remorse for the Holocaust or
a kind of guilt complex,
or is happy to
get rid of the Jews
and let them stay
in another country,
and we don't care
about the Palestinians.
But the whole
settler colonial system
was created here
before the Holocaust.
Many of the methods were taken from
British colonialism,
from French colonialism,
from settler colonialism
in the States.
This is like any
other colonial project.
It's only that it's the latest one,
and it's the longest-standing
ethnic cleansing
in the history of the 20th
and 21st centuries.
So it's fed by a stream of trauma.
But after all these decades,
you can't talk
about trauma anymore.
It's simply colonialism,
pure and simple,
and it's an apartheid state.
You can only beat them down
by brutal force,
and you can only get rid of them
by brutal force.
That's what happened,
and that's what
continues to happen.
The indigenous population
was brutally treated,
forced off their lands...
This whole occupied territories
where we're speaking now,
is like a giant reservation,
literally with walls around it.
So there was mass expulsion
of the indigenous people in 1948,
and then mass expulsions
in '52, in '67...
The Jews coming here
was an invasion,
was not meant in order
to include Palestinians
in one good society,
but to exclude them.
Around the time that I hit 15, 16,
the first intifada began and
I started hearing about things
and noticing things and,
and realizing that,
there was something very wrong.
You know, I didn't
have much information,
but it was clear to me
that Palestinians
were fighting for their freedom,
and we were killing them.
Following the first intifada
from '87 to '92-93,
both PLO and Israel
agreed to start negotiations.
And the negotiations
brought us to a reality
planned by the Israelis.
Most of the world thought
that the Oslo Accords
were a normal or natural
corridor to a peace agreement
with Palestinians,
while a Palestinian State
would be the end of this process.
People expected Israel
to put a halt
to its colonialist drive.
Palestinians made a very severe,
very serious compromise,
agreeing to have a state
in 22% of the land.
We'll have a state,
we'll put a halt
to this occupation,
to the cruelty
that comes with occupation,
to the bloodshed.
That was the expectation.
So what Israel did with,
after, with Oslo,
it did just the opposite.
This space had Israeli spots,
Israeli pockets,
in the form of settlements.
So the general understanding
was that these spots or pockets
will be removed.
And within these 30 years
since then, almost 30 years,
instead of having
Israeli enclaves removed,
what happened is that
you have Palestinian enclaves.
That's when they
closed off the West Bank,
because there was
this idea of separation.
Palestinians here,
Israelis here,
that was the Israeli
definition of peace.
It's like basically
apartheid, separation.
So then, any Palestinian,
suddenly, from one day,
needed a permit from
the military authorities
in order to come into Israel,
and also in order to come into
occupied East Jerusalem,
which is the heart
of the West Bank.
You know, the religious heart,
the economic heart,
the cultural heart.
In one day, you needed a permit
to go there, from the military,
which is not easy to obtain.
A child born in Palestine
will face challenges
from the very beginning.
You learn that there
are no easy games
for children in Palestine,
because everything,
it's under the,
the permanent threat
of the occupation.
There are schools like Hebron H2,
that children going to school
will need to cross
several checkpoints,
will need to cross
in front of settlers,
who will be
very violent with them,
and they will receive
tear gas a lot of days.
You are welcome in Nabi Saleh,
a small village northwest of
Ramallah, 20 kilometers.
We are here since a long time,
we don't know when.
That village is named Deir Nidham,
they are our cousins.
We all own this land together
because we are the
same family, TAMIMI,
and this is Nabi Saleh.
In this dry place
they build the
settlement of Halamish.
In terms of settlements,
there are different
kinds of settlements.
The largest settlement and
the second largest settlement
are both these cities
built by the state
in the West Bank
for ultra-orthodox Jews.
The state-sanctioned settlements
will be built strategically.
So here it's like
around Jerusalem,
because they're trying
to cut Jerusalem off
from the rest of the West Bank.
And then there are
other settlements
called 'illegal settlements',
even though
under international law,
all settlements are illegal
where basically
a group of settlers
will come to land,
and it can start with a tent,
you know, it can
start with a house.
But as soon as they build it
on private Palestinian land,
there will immediately
be military guarding them,
a road paved to them,
electricity connected,
water connected.
They'll be provided
with everything,
and the military
will protect them
from the Palestinians,
whose land they stole.
Because they have water,
you see how it's green?
You see how the settlement is green
and the village is dry?
There's a swimming pool.
They have irrigation
for their land.
We haven't had
running water since 1980.
They give the settlement
24-hour, day and night,
running water.
But we have 12 hours weekly.
We pay a big price, five times
more than the settlement.
As a Jew, I could
come to Israel right now.
I could move to
the occupied territories.
I could claim citizenship
overnight!
But not only would I be
granted citizenship,
if I moved into the settlements,
I'd be immediately granted
six times as much
water annually
as a Palestinian resident
of the occupied territories.
Because there is no water,
the farmer and the
owner of the land
stopped using their land
and they have an Ottoman Law,
since the Turkish:
if you don't use your
land for three years,
the government
can take the land.
For that, they took a lot
of land by this law,
and changed it from private
to be a public land,
and then they give it
to the settlements.
Recently, the commander
of the military said
that the settlement enterprise
and the military are one.
When the government can't
do something legally,
it will do it
through the settlers,
and then support them
to legalize it.
First of all, you can buy
an apartment for much cheaper
than you would if it
was inside Israel.
You get a quality of life
that you would not
be able to afford
inside Israel.
So the state will make it
as comfortable as possible,
in order to encourage
the takeover of the land.
Colonies, historically,
function this way.
Taking control over
land of people,
by all sorts of legal acrobatics.
They invent laws
and then they say that
they're implementing
according to the law.
But the laws are basically
laws of an occupier,
and of a colonialist entity.
And then in order
to guard the loot,
they have to create
the myth of security,
and they settle Israelis
in land not theirs,
and they have to
protect the Israelis.
And then they need more land
to protect these Israelis.
And from time to time they kill.
And when Palestinians resist,
there are wars or
what they call operations,
military operations.
So the security is
the explanation for any
of their actions,
or any of their thoughts.
They said, 'We build the wall
for our own security.'
The wall is illegal
under international
humanitarian law,
and also transferring population
to the occupied
territories is illegal
under international
humanitarian law.
And they say,
'We don't care about
international humanitarian law.
We only care about
our own security.'
This house was built in 1964,
and I have a demolishing order
since 2010 for this house.
And there are 14 houses
in this village, Nabi Saleh.
Any time, in the day or night,
they will come
and destroy the house.
This is a type of silent
ethnic cleansing in Area C,
that's just by demolition order.
Half of the Palestinian
people are in exile,
are not in historical Palestine.
Half of them are in
the rest of the world,
mostly in the Arab world,
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
since they were expelled in 1948.
And then, within the area
occupied in 1967,
so that's the West Bank and Gaza
and the Golan Heights,
there are refugees from 1948.
So, 80% of people in Gaza are
refugees from what's now Israel.
And I think that
within the West Bank,
and in a way, also Gaza,
what's really important for me
is that they are redundant,
according to the
Israeli politicians,
and greater public, Israeli public.
Gaza has disappeared
from calculations,
from, from, they are not here.
Gazans do not go out of Gaza.
But also in the West Bank,
the process is
to condense Palestinians
into the enclaves,
which I mentioned before.
Life in Gaza
is extremely challenging,
because it's the worst example
of an ongoing human
rights violation,
happening in front of
the eyes of everybody,
with two million people
completely under siege.
It's like an open-air
jail controlled by sea,
by air, by the wall.
They do not allow you to bring
certain medicines in Gaza.
And when you ask, 'Why?'
They will answer,
'Security reasons.'
But can you explain to me
how this medicine can be a threat,
and how you can ban
a medicine from entering Gaza,
under the explanation
of 'security reasons?'
And they will say,
'Secret file, security reasons.'
When we would protest
at the Gaza fence,
during the Great March of Return,
it was basically Israelis that would
come to the fence and protest;
we would coordinate
with Palestinians
on the other side.
We had big Palestinian flags
and they would see us,
so it was like supporting them.
You know, people got beaten
upon the Israeli side,
and on the Palestinian side,
people were being shot in the head,
systematically.
Over 180 protesters
were killed, murdered.
There were children killed,
medics, people in wheelchairs.
The snipers would be behind,
there's like this artificial hill,
and they'd be hiding
behind the artificial hill.
The protesters were
right in front of them,
they could see exactly
who they were killing.
And they maimed,
like shot, over 6,000.
When Palestinians demonstrate,
live ammunition
is considered legitimate.
People always had
kind of this dream, like
what would happen if Gazans
would all just, en masse,
get up and just march to the fence,
you know, march home,
to their land beyond the fence.
And then we got the answer:
what happened,
when they got up and they marched,
is that they were shot in the head.
You know, they were killed, en masse,
and nobody... cared.
The world would see it happening,
week after week,
the UN said it was a war crime,
and no one did anything.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened,
week after week, people murdered.
So, it's hard to
it's impossible to argue
for nonviolent resistance.
Which is tragic, because of course,
if people could take that route,
they would.
So, I decided to study journalism
because I was
filmed while I was beaten up,
and nobody raised a hand
from the camera crew,
from the journalists.
And for me it was like,
I want to be that journalist
that gives you a hand
in the middle of the beating
so I can take you out.
There have been clashes in
the old city of Jerusalem.
There's been clashes here
where we are now, Ras Al-Amoud.
I was working
in the old city of Jerusalem.
Yeah, you kill people in a war.
That's what happens, everywhere.
Look around the world.
Yeah, people get killed.
And that's why?
That's why! That's a war.
But you're killing
Palestinians today.
We're not, we're not
killing them for nothing.
So nothing is happening?
Are we just killing them for nothing?
Maybe if they hear my narrative,
and they see the similarity,
and they see the closeness,
and what the Palestinians are,
then they can stop, you know.
And then you can open the hearts
of people inside Israel.
Because words
are everything, right?
So the use of the word
'resistance fighter'
versus the use of 'terrorist,'
makes a very big difference
on our nervous system.
and how we accept it,
and the level of rage that we,
we experience when
we hear those words.
We're so dehumanized
by this instrument and machine,
to the point where they can come
and they can exterminate you,
because to them,
you're nothing but a rat.
You're nothing but
something that can be killed,
you're not a human.
And that's what
creates a Holocaust.
You dehumanize first,
and that is a learned lesson.
You dehumanize them so that
you get people to the point
where they act in a group
against a minority group.
And they,
the Israelis couldn't see us.
They can't see us.
The image that was given to them
was that we're sitting there,
with the guns, in our schools,
waiting for the Israelis to come.
No, Habibi.
We're sitting in our homes
waiting for the guns to come
and attack us while
we're in school.
But if we had the chance,
we'd be in theaters,
we'd be playing,
we'd be doing these things,
and we would be living
like a normal life.
But they couldn't see us.
The military intelligence
echelon knows
that if the Israelis
in Tel Aviv hear my voice,
and hear the songs
of Gazan children
singing in the streets,
it might make an Israeli
in Tel Aviv think twice
before pulling the trigger
in the face of that child,
when they come to the point
where they need them.
And I was arrested
for my journalism work.
I was arrested for
doing investigative stories,
and collecting the stories
of the last freedom fighters,
who were fighting
the end of the intifada.
And immediately I was
at gunpoint, stripped,
stripped in front of them.
It was my worst fear
materializing in front of me.
It was the demons
that I was so scared of
when I was 15
and I saw that dark evil,
EVIL place, that I went back to.
This is why you boycott Israel,
because they're criminals,
because they're terrorists.
There is a procedure called
'Administrative Detention',
which means that
someone is arrested,
and they are considered
a security risk.
It's not because
they did something,
it's because there's fear
that they will do something.
So it's all based
on secret evidence
and they're like,
'We have to hold this person'
for reasons that cannot
be disclosed to them,
or to their lawyers,
with no time limit.
You get an administrative
detention order
for up to six months,
and then when that
time is finished,
it's either renewed
or the person is released.
And even when the person
is finally released,
when you are in
administrative detention once,
if anything happens
in your village or your city,
it's very, very likely
you'll be taken again
and again and again.
Torture in Israel is,
like in Israeli laws,
it's only legal
in certain circumstances,
but because those circumstances
are not clearly defined,
you know, who's going to question?
Nobody questions the Secret Service.
The Secret Service runs the life
of Palestinians and Israeli judges
would not dare to question.
If they decide this
person should be tortured,
this person should be tortured.
You know, as Israelis,
we have rights, we have a trial,
they have to prove
that we're guilty.
Any Palestinian would be
taken to a military court.
First of all,
you're kind of assumed guilty.
A Palestinian is dangerous
because he's a Palestinian,
he's the enemy of the court.
The conviction rate is like 99%.
I was put in the dungeon.
So, you just basically get,
you know, they close your eyes and
you're driven into the underworld.
And it was terrifying,
it was one of the
most terrifying things
I ever experienced, and I wish
that nobody in their life
would ever experience it.
It's a closed room,
and the walls are gray and piercing,
so if you try to sleep on the wall,
it's like pointy.
Then you only have the hole,
which is for ventilation,
through which the people
who walk the earth
will be able to hear you,
if you shout.
And my way of therapy,
and my way of calming
myself down, is singing.
And I made a party
in that prison cell.
The dehumanization process
also does the racial
profiling. So for them,
even the soldiers that were
grabbing me were saying, like,
'This is the first time
we get one of those.
Why is this one here?'
Because I was dressed differently.
They go with the profile
that they expect
the Palestinian to look like.
You can't be a Palestinian
and dressed like this.
Because it's, it's a lot
about perception.
They can't see me as a human.
The more human I look,
the weirder it gets
for them to torture me.
I had my period when I
got into the interrogation.
And of course,
they use that against you,
so they let you bleed.
It's that humiliation of
keeping you in a seat
while you're bleeding
in front of this man,
and he asks you questions.
And I was like, 'Okay, you
can keep me in my blood.
I'm completely fine with it,
but I need to take a shower.
And if I don't take a shower,
I'm just going to zap out of
answering any of your questions.'
So I thought I was negotiating
my well, myself into a shower.
I get taken to the shower.
It's a very small room,
so it only fits your body.
You can't escape the water
that comes from the top.
And I didn't understand it
when I got in,
I could hear the guys say,
'We heard a woman,
we heard a woman.'
And I was like, 'Okay.'
And I was saying,
'Yes, I'm a woman.'
And they started immediately,
all of them shouting,
'It's okay!'
because they were all so scared
that they brought
their mother or sister
to be tortured in front
of them, which Israel uses.
So they all immediately
were in a panic state
that I might be one
of their mothers and sisters.
And they were shouting,
'Stay strong. Stay strong.'
And I was like,
'I'm in the shower, this is wh...'
And then the burning
water comes down.
And then I understood
was going on.
So, it was first
burning hot water,
and then it goes
to cold water and it's like...
I was just trying to get out
and I'm in a wall.
You can't get...
It's like a grave.
And you're trying to get out
and all I could hear was like,
'Just be strong!
Don't let them break you.
Just be strong,
keep going! We're with you.'
And I could hear them
and that was it.
There was nothing in the
universe that I wanted more
than to get out of that.
Because the way that they do it
is they strain us physically.
So, it is three nights,
but we don't sleep.
So it lasts forever.
They arrested me
nine times in my life.
The worst one in 1993,
when they arrested me
and took me to
the interrogation center
for around a month,
they...
start torturing me by shaking.
They make your head
all the time moving,
by using their hands,
by using their [fists]
I went into coma for ten days,
I woke up paralyzed,
and they continued
the interrogation.
They moved me to
Al-Moscobiyeh prison.
Then they isolated me
in an Israeli criminal cell
for around a month.
And then they released me
in this bad situation.
And the same day,
they killed my sister.
She went to see my nephew,
he had a trial in the
Israeli military court in Ramallah
with her little son, 12 years old.
They detained the son, the child.
She asked, 'What you are doing?
Where are you taking him?'
She was in the front,
in the entrance
of the court and
the hall of the court.
One of the employees
of the court, a female,
started beating her, pushing her.
A group of settlers
started beating her,
they pushed her down the stairs.
She fell on her head,
and they killed her
in front of her little child,
12 years old.
This is part of our suffering.
We don't like to appear,
to show ourselves as victims,
to victimize our issue also.
Because we believe it's part of
our duty and responsibility,
to resist.
the word 'trauma,'
in the way that we use it,
and I use it
in my therapeutic work,
is just not adequate
to encompass what's going on here.
When we try to talk about PTSD
in this kind of context,
it does not apply to
this situation, because PTSD is
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This is not 'Post,'
this is not a 'Disorder,'
it is a traumatic,
ongoing situation,
that breaks
the soul of the people!
For me, personally,
I accompany sometimes
cases of children,
that have been terribly
mistreated by the army,
going to visit them
in the hospitals and seeing
how they're
physically hurt and harmed.
And they will ask me,
'But why? I was just
going out of the school.'
They started throwing tear gas,
they started shooting.
Some of them have
been shot in the legs.
You know how many
children and teenagers
got completely disabled
because they are shooting them?
- Let him go! Let him go!
It's, it's a boy.
It's just a boy!
After I got released,
my post as a journalist was changed
from covering the West Bank
to covering Israeli stories.
So I would go to Sderot,
and be with the settlers
who are getting bombed,
and I would have to
report their story.
For me, from my childhood,
I was very much influenced
and I was obsessed
with the Holocaust,
with Apartheid South Africa,
African-American Native struggle,
and for me it was
the curiosity of,
how could someone
get to that point?
So I wanted to experience
things through their eyes.
I don't know how it can be, like
how you can
ease the pain of this one
and ease the pain of that one
and stop the instrument,
the big destructive
machine, which is
causing all this pain to both.
And when you
understand the Holocaust,
it gets so much even worse.
It gets so aggravating
in your cells,
to understand that
somebody could go through
what they've gone through,
and come back and
perpetrate it again.
You know, it's infuriating,
because I do understand trauma.
I understand that it's a cycle,
and that it starts there.
But, I can't understand
the mentality of those
who created the regime
in the way that it is created,
because it is exactly
the same operation,
it's exactly the same beliefs,
it's exactly the same
notion and the same evil,
that created the Holocaust
and allowed it to happen.
And now it's happening again.
It's people that
perpetrate the same cycle
of hate and violence
over and over.
Whether it be incarnated
in this body as Israelis,
or be incarnated it as Hitler
at his time and the Nazis.
You just need
the power that's evil,
that's able to control,
and that's supported by
the US and the Europeans
and the White people,
who also want the domination
and want the colonization
and can't smell
the breath of the earth
and the Native
coming back to life.
People see the
Palestinian violence,
they don't see
the Israeli violence.
They don't see
that the Israeli violence
is the root cause.
So Palestinians live
in permanent discrimination,
institutional discrimination,
which is also violence.
So let's not exceptionalize Israel.
We see a system, a world system,
where violations
perpetrated by Western countries
are tolerated.
That is why
the Israeli right wing
always aspires
to war, to have wars.
Because a little war in the area,
we'll be able to do something
that we cannot do in 'normal times,'
we can do it during wars.
And instead, the world watches
how Israel's completely
taking the space of Palestinians.
The remaining space of Palestinians,
and does nothing.
Why? Because Israel sells weapons.
Because Israel is such
a high-tech nation,
develops weapons, develops
surveillance techniques,
and because Israel has such a
security pact with America,
that they are so such allies.
All these reasons!
And when they want,
they use the pretext
of the Holocaust.
But it's a pretext.
Because if they
really cared for us,
really, because of the Holocaust,
they would have done anything
to bring sanity
back to this place.
But it's insane
because it won't be...
I don't know
how long it can continue.
There's a biblical
phrase, which says,
'Don't covet the possession
of your neighbor.
The land will vomit you out.'
That's what the
Jewish prophet said.
This is not sustainable.
But it's going to
do a lot of damage,
a lot more suffering,
before it's over.
I'm not pro-Palestinian,
but I'm pro-truth.
And the truth is,
the Palestinians
have been oppressed
and suppressed
and murdered and controlled
and dispossessed for decades.
That's just the truth.
And I don't like it,
as a human being.
In terms of antisemitism
that's just one of the biggest,
most pernicious
concoctions of modern ideology.
Not anti-semitism,
there's genuine anti-semitism.
I've experienced it as an infant,
I experienced it as a child,
I've seen it.
It's got nothing to do
with supporting
Palestinian rights, nothing.
The charge of antisemitism
is simply an attempt to intimidate
well-meaning non-Jews,
who might be really uneasy
about what they perceive
is happening here,
and it's an inducement
to shut them up.
Who wants to be accused
of being associated
with one of the worst
crimes in human history?
And I just invite anybody
who wants to find out,
visit!
Look at that ugly wall,
look at the settlements
on the hilltops,
look at the attacks
that the settlers make
with impunity
on Palestinian lands,
how they burn down
Palestinian olive groves,
how they desecrate
Palestinian wells,
daily!
Come and visit!
See for yourself!
I left journalism
and I joined human rights work,
because I thought
that I could expose more.
We started going to protests
in the village of Nabi Saleh.
We would walk together, march,
and we would be tear-gassed,
we would be shot
live ammunition, rubber bullets.
But the special thing that
happened in Nabi Saleh is,
the confrontation
moved from the distance
to the face.
Free, free Palestine!
I would see it
and still get surprised
every single time:
How could this
soldier just shoot me?
How could they be this aggressive?
And then when the
exposure was closer,
for me, it was confrontation
with the soldiers with my words:
I could speak Hebrew,
and I understand where
these soldiers came from.
So I used that to try
to speak to the soldiers,
and the commanders
were far more
aggressive towards that,
because they could see
that the soldiers could listen.
They were confronted
by a line of women...
Of course, as I told you,
profiling and faces and colors.
Nabi Saleh people's
skin is lighter.
For the cameras, the reason why
they got all the
publicity from the world,
that village,
is because they're White!
And White people were able
to see themselves in them.
And there were girls
with their hair out,
it wasn't the conservative
look that you imagine.
So for Israel, this image that
they had bought and created,
was getting destroyed
by this bunch of young children,
women, who are going
out to these protests.
You guys, a whole army occupying
civilian people who are armed
only with their voices,
their flags, and their conviction!
The only thing I would do
in the protest is chant.
From the beginning 'til the end.
Because I am the chanter
and the one in front,
they started targeting my legs.
So I was shot in the legs
with the tear gas canisters
over and over and over
when they can get me,
and I would still keep going
because I always believed
that my body was,
you know, titanium...
Ironic.
I had a scarf on me.
One soldier pulled
the scarf from one side,
the other soldier hit my legs,
and I was lynched, basically,
I was hanging from the scarf.
I heard the,
but I didn't know
what was happening.
And this commander and I
were very much at lock.
I had my camera and I was like,
'I want to film you,
and show your face
to the world, as you do this.'
He was like,
'You want to show my face?!'
His eyes got red,
and he was hitting
all over my body
and I didn't move or flinch.
I was just holding the phone
and I was like,
'Okay, keep hitting,
keep hitting, keep hitting,
keep hitting. Does this
make you feel better?
Does hitting me
give you that peace?
Keep hitting. Do you
feel better now?'
And he couldn't,
and he just kept hitting.
Eventually, someone
came from the soldiers
and pepper-sprayed me
straight in the eyes,
and that's when I broke.
And then I was taken to
the Palestinian hospital
in Jerusalem, Al-Mutala,
and immediately, I saw one doctor,
I looked into his eyes and I said,
that I can feel something
happening with my fingers,
that I get this weird sensations
that started dropping on me.
And he immediately
asked for an MRI,
and they were saying...
The doctor said that
it's the end, you know,
that 70% of my spine is gone,
and it's just a matter of
the last living cells to die.
So I started going
to look for a doctor
that comes in
the same energy sphere,
and I found Barzily.
So I was like,
'I came to you because I know
that you have some research.
You think into robotics,
you can think outside of the box.'
And he's like,'Okay,
so what do you want?'
I was like,
'I want you to do the surgery.
I want you to fix this.'
And he's like,
'But there's nothing to fix,
you know, it's like the spine.'
And then he told me
'What we can do is
what we do for other
people, which is
put a titanium box
that holds your spine
so that your neck doesn't crash,
but the spine itself,
nobody can fix what was cut.
I was so angry that they would
get me to the point of being
broken and paralyzed.
It was like, khalas.
The anger was...
every time I would meditate,
the anger stops it,
the fear stops it,
every time. It's so automatic.
and very natural,
the way our brains work. It's like
this fuse comes up,
the nervous system gets activated,
and you shut down
the healing abilities.
I got to that point where
my left side
was completely gone.
I was just on
the walker-wheelchair,
and I was like, 'Okay.'
I called him and I was like,
'Hi, today's the day
I'm coming for the surgery.'
It was exactly
as I had visualized.
After six hours, I opened...
When I woke up,
the first thing was
to open the thing
they put closing my mouth,
'cause they didn't
want me to speak
for three days,
and I just wanted to make sure
that my voice was still there.
And I started singing
in the hospital,
and they would come a
nd they would close my mouth,
and I would like open it 'Aaaaah!'
Three days I was walking.
And I did my walk of power.
And I told them,
'Khalas, I'm off the hook.'
Working on trauma in this context
is extremely challenging,
because as we were saying,
you are not in a situation
where the traumatic
situation has happened
and now people have a safe space
where you can work on that.
So you need to understand,
that working on trauma will be,
in a context of ongoing
traumatic situation.
You cannot make a normal life,
if you are all the time
in touch with the pain,
and the sorrow and the grief.
And especially with...
a lot of these
processes are completely frozen,
because it's impossible
to deal with them.
They tell the mothers not to cry,
and I would always feel that
there's something wrong with it,
but I also couldn't cry,
because I didn't want them
to ever see us as weak.
I didn't understand that
vulnerability is courage,
it takes time until
you understand that.
That itself is traumatization.
It is survival.
They have to do it.
You know, they can't
show any vulnerability.
They'll get eaten alive.
But that suppression of emotion
comes at a cost.
The occupation is created...
Colonization in a way,
it's created in order to keep
you in a state of fear.
If they release the state of fear,
then they release
their control over you.
Because if we don't feel
the fear, we break through.
And the Palestinians,
we got to the point of
breaking that fear barrier.
You have the people
who are ready to go,
because there's this feeling that
there's nothing
we can lose anymore.
You know, if
there's nothing to lose,
then you're ready
to sacrifice everything,
and you let go of the fear.
It was always that
I had my true line,
I didn't have a problem to stand
in front of an Israeli,
or a White international person,
and explain to them
why a Palestinian
would go and do a
a suicide attack.
It's very simple!
You push people to that point!
There's nothing more to it!
If you get a person
to want to kill themselves,
there's a reason why this person
wants to kill themselves,
in the most
atrocious, painful way.
There's a reason behind it.
You must have killed, maimed,
pained them, their families,
to get them to get to that point.
So don't ask me why
they want to get to that point,
where they would use
so much hate and anger
and release it in that way.
Ask me where the pain came from,
and I'll tell you why people act.
Don't ask the person
who's in the cage,
why they're hitting the cage
and breaking their arms,
trying to be free.
Ask the person who
put them in the cage,
why they're there?
I don't imagine my presence here
will do very much.
I hope to help train
some people in trauma work,
to help support their people.
It makes a difference to people,
when others
hear them and see them.
It does not change
their situation,
but at least one can be what the
Jewish psychotherapist
Alice Miller called
'an empathetic witness',
who can validate,
and say to people
'You are not alone.
We can't do much
to change your situation,
but we see it, we get it,
and our hearts are with you.'
So I hope that'll
make some difference,
some small difference,
I should say.
I begin by thanking Ashira
for inviting me here.
This is my third time here and,
I was first here
during the first intifada,
and I cried every
day for two weeks.
And I'd like to explain
a little bit about
why it's important
for me personally to be here.
I was born in 1944, in January.
So my grandparents were killed,
sent to Auschwitz
concentration camp,
and they died there.
And my mother and
I came this close,
to the same thing
happening to us.
When we're under threat,
there are three
natural responses.
The first one is to ask for help.
If there's no help available,
then there are
two other responses.
One is to fight,
or the other is to run away,
and to hide.
But what if there's no help?
And what if you're
too small to fight back?
And what if you can't run away?
Then your body, not you,
nobody does this deliberately,
but your body goes into
what's called 'freeze'.
When you freeze, you go numb,
and that's the way of the body
protecting you from the pain.
The reason you didn't run away
is because you couldn't,
the reason you didn't fight back
is you couldn't,
and your organism
had the wisdom to freeze you,
as the only way to protect you,
and if it can't
protect you from the situation,
at least it can
protect you from the pain.
Just two weeks before
you guys arrived,
I had inflammation in my,
in my finger here, and my foot,
and then I went and
I did blood tests
and they said that there
was rheumatoid arthritis.
Oh! So in my experience,
these inflammations
have to do with
the body saying 'No'
somewhere where you didn't,
so the body protests
in the form of inflammation.
Anger is an inflamed emotion.
When it's not expressed,
it'll show up in the body.
There's something
that keeps arising
Yeah.
And you keep
choking it down, yeah?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I see that
I didn't cry for
about 20 years or something.
Under conditions of occupation
and resistance,
there's this natural tendency
to believe that
I have to be strong,
that I can't have any problems,
that to
feel shame or to feel helpless,
is a sign of weakness.
And I mustn't be weak,
in the face of the
oppression.
I healed only when the knife
was away from my throat.
I wasn't able to heal
when it was here because,
your body doesn't let you do it.
And I just want
to try to bring that
to some of the
people that I encounter
and the lives that I touch here.
Palestinians here
are super creative.
From this love,
from this resistance,
from this hope that
they keep on having,
and you really don't know
where it comes from.
Because we can't go into Gaza,
it was my dream to be able to
work with the children
there, because
Gaza is the biggest
ghetto on Earth.
That is the strongest cycle.
These are the children being
born into prison
without any options.
And they're the most creative
beings on Earth
to be able to survive!
If you want to learn
resilience, it's there.
So when I came to approach to work
with children in Gaza,
what am I gonna, like,
teach them?
They can teach the Universe
how to be resilient.
So what I do is active meditation,
where the children just
release somatically
what is going on,
and we build resilience.
I went into the room
with the kids,
and the first thing was that
they were shouting in a way
that I could not control.
And I was like, 'Okay,
let's shout together, you know.
We need to shout
our anger and rage and pain
and get it out!'
So why not? That is the healing.
And I saw what happened
after the shouting
and the calming down
and they were like,
'Please, Miss, we don't
want to shout anymore.'
I was like, 'Okay, so
what do you want to do?'
'We wanted to do Dahiya.'
What the Bedouins do is a dance,
and they stand
in a circle, everyone,
and they just clap
together in unison.
And they do a sound,
'Ha-hi-hi, ha-hi-hi,
ha-hi-hi,
ha-hi-hi, ha-hi
I was like, 'Ah, voila!'
You know, like
yogis around the world,
breathing exercises,
and we're sitting here
native to the land,
from prior to any occupation,
doing 'ha-hi-hi'
and coming together
as a circle in celebration.
So that's us!
And the chants and the singing
and this culture, the people
they've come to occupy.
Our families in
Jerusalem brought the...
brought Jewish immigrants
into their houses,
to keep them safe
and protect them,
not because
it's your promised land,
but because
we will take care of you
and put you in our houses.
Because we're that!
And that, in our sayings,
we're so naive,
that's how we got occupied.
We let them in.
And we welcomed them.
And still we welcome them.
But stop...the killing.
And I can understand the psyche
that they need to be safe too,
they have a homeland.
Yeah, I mean, it's understandable,
everybody wants a homeland.
Something has to change,
here.
Something has to change here.
And I hope I can just
be part of that.
So what we're seeing here is that
indomitability of the human spirit.
Not easy,
and it's punished,
but it persists.
I remember when I just
started going to Gaza,
I was always surprised to see
people laughing.
It has become such a norm,
Israeli injustice and Israeli...
the pain that Israel
inflicts on people,
that you know how
to separate, you know,
like people live
in compartments, you know,
ok, so there is a compartment
of trauma and of injustice.
But at the same time,
people know how to go to the,
to the weddings
and to laugh and to dance.
So people who lost
20, 25 members of their families,
I cannot say
they were not traumatized,
but I see the health in them,
I see the strength in them.
We don't ask for people...
you know, we've
finished this chapter
of the Palestinians pleading
for the world to
come and rescue us.
We can rescue ourselves,
if you at least stop supporting
the machine, you know.
If the machine is ostracized,
then we can keep going,
because nothing in the world
is going to stop
the people in Jerusalem.
Nothing in the Universe
will stop them.
But we need...
you.
We need you,
if you can't be our voice,
just to, at least,
not put a penny,
that goes to the bullet,
that shoots...
our children.
For how long are people
going to be able
to sit in their homes
and watch this documentary,
and watch the people
and the children suffer?
Palestinian and Israeli,
because you don't want
your children to go into
the military and hold the gun
at a nine-year-old.
Either way you look at it,
you can't accept it,
you can't accept that it's this.
Your brother and your
sister being in chains
will not make this experience
on Earth acceptable.
Your chains, will be still
held by my chains,
and unless I am free,
you won't be free!
If I must die,
You must live
To tell my story
To sell my things
To buy a piece of cloth
And some strings,
Make it white
With a long tail
So that a child,
Somewhere in Gaza,
While looking heaven
In the eye,
Awaiting his dad
Who left in a blaze
And bid no one farewell,
Not even to his flesh,
Not even to himself,
Sees the kite,
My kite you made,
Flying up above
And thinks for a moment
An angel is there
Bringing back love.
If I must die,
Let it bring hope,
Let it be a tale.
on the way to school.
I got slapped at some
point by a soldier.
So that was a good slap,
because that kind of woke me up
to the reality of where I really am.
I experienced occupation
through the nostalgia,
and the emotions,
and the stories of everyone.
I had the questions,
why can't I see my grandfather?
Why are half of my family
not in the country?
There are these questions
and this feeling
that you get as a sensation,
but not as a knowing.
And the knowing came when
when I went to a protest,
I was more the type that believed
in fighting confrontation straight,
but my mother wanted to show me
the non-violent style,
so she convinced me to go
to a protest in Jerusalem.
There was a musical protest
between, a joint one,
internationals, Palestinians
and Israelis.
And she's like, 'I want you
to see how this is done.
There are other options, you know,
we can go and we can sing.'
In the beginning,
I was making fun of them.
I was telling my mother,
'You're gonna be
liberated by those
few people singing here.'
A few minutes after that,
the soldiers started storming
and they came at us
with full force.
I'm not hurting you!
I'm not hurting you!
I'm not hurting you!
So the musical team
started making a human chain
so that at least
they can't reach us,
and I thought I was a part
of that human chain,
and I was holding on.
And then I saw
the people being taken further
and further away,
and I was still the only one
that was being held
in the human chain. I was like,
'Okay, I'll keep the human chain!'
Until I realized that
something was wrong
and I was being pulled too far.
So I started pushing, kicking
the guy behind me and saying,
'Khalas, we have to go back'
until I turned and he put the
Israeli military police hat on
and I looked at him,
I was trying to run away.
Um...
And he basically took me
down to the ground
and I remember my head banging.
And I then woke up,
with I don't know how many soldiers
and police beating my knees,
and they were just going and going.
And I would wake up and look
and see the cameras flashing
and I could see that there
were other people around,
but then I would just look at them
and they would keep going.
I would faint again and wake up.
Of course, the police handcuffed me,
slammed me into a jeep.
And there was a young boy,
and they kept beating him
and beating him and beating him.
And his head was
just going next to me.
So I started beating and
starting to shout in the jeep,
so that I can get...
That's when the shock went
and the anger rose.
Another kid gets beaten up
and thrown with blood
on his face, and I just...
I froze.
It's so important for
people to understand
colonization in order to understand
what's happening in the world.
And here in Palestine,
it's, you know,
it's happening now.
The issue is the
present day, ongoing,
settler colonial project,
that by definition is meant to
take the land and
create a political system
that excludes the indigenous people.
200 years ago in the States
or New Zealand or Brazil,
it was not considered violations,
it was the norm.
Now, because Zionism
is an anachronistic
settler colonial movement,
the world understands
it's not according to the norm,
but the world accepts it.
In this Holy Land,
there's always been a lot
of violence and oppression
and injustice, going
back to ancient times.
And then... the foundation
of the State of Israel,
which could only have
been accomplished
by denying the rights
of the local population,
so in that sense, it's
just another colonial project.
In 1917, when David Balfour,
a British foreign minister,
who the hell was he to promise
a foreign land to anybody else?
when he issued that declaration,
that the British
government views with favor
the establishment of a
Jewish entity in Palestine,
there were something like
100,000 Jews here, or 75,000,
and half a million Arabs.
How are those half a million
supposed to feel
about the 75,000 declaring,
as they did,
I'm quoting Zionist history,
'That our aim,
in as short a time as possible,
is to make Palestine as Jewish,
as England is English
and America is American.'
And then the Jews came here
through the doors
opened by Zionism,
which was initially
both a settler colonial movement,
in its core,
but not a very successful one,
until Nazi Germany came to power.
Zionism was partly a
response to antisemitism.
So the Zionist narrative means
a narrative that believes
that there should be a
Jewish state in Palestine.
So that, that is like,
goes without question.
Everything I heard was...
I was so Zionist,
we were Zionists, that
we didn't know we were Zionists.
The Jewish people were
always the victims.
We've never hurt anyone.
And we were somehow morally
superior to, to everyone.
My grandmother, she would say
'A good Arab is a dead Arab.'
And she would say,
'An Arab will hug
you with one arm,
and stab you in the
back with another.'
I stayed in the jeep,
then we were taken
to the Moscobiyeh,
the Russian compound, which is a
the f-, the-
I was going to curse.
It's the dungeon of torture.
This is just one of the many
dungeons of torture
that Israel has operating
all over the land.
We always used to
say that you can...
If you walk in silence at night,
you can hear the people
screaming in these dungeons.
They interrogated me.
I was crying and crying and...
'boom'
you know, the slap came and
it was like, okay.
So the nervous system
got also that message.
I apparently signed a lot of
things without knowing.
Of course, they
don't read it to you.
You get slapped every time
you ask a question.
So the straight signal is,
if you don't want to get beaten,
you don't want to get tortured,
sign and you're out!
That was the beginning.
And for me, that was a shift
because the fear that I felt
I had never experienced before.
I said to myself,
'I never want to be back
in that place, ever.'
The trajectory of
once you experience
those feelings and emotions
is that something has to change.
And for me, it was like, Okay...
I'd heard the stories of the pains
of how people were
tortured in these places,
I never believed it,
until I saw.
And when I saw,
I couldn't unsee it.
So it did affect every choice
made after in my life.
So how does the world completely
turn a blind eye to the
Israeli continuous violence,
both physical military violence,
and bureaucratic
institutional violence?
And still sees
Israel as the victim?
This is the big question.
My parents were both refugees
after the Second World War
and the trauma of coming back
from the concentration camp
and the ghetto,
to their respective countries,
Yugoslavia and Romania,
which they never
intended to leave...
But after the war,
and after realizing
that many of their Jewish
friends and family
had been murdered,
I think they felt such
a vacuum or a void,
that pushed them out
of their countries.
And again, they were not Zionist
and they never planned
to come to Palestine,
never before that.
in some sense, it's the
worst event in history,
where there was
a deliberate attempt
to extirpate a whole people,
by mechanical,
scientifically designed,
violence.
So in that sense,
the project that
led to the creation
of the Jewish State,
arose out of deep trauma,
unspeakable trauma.
And the world supports Israel,
because the world either feels
remorse for the Holocaust or
a kind of guilt complex,
or is happy to
get rid of the Jews
and let them stay
in another country,
and we don't care
about the Palestinians.
But the whole
settler colonial system
was created here
before the Holocaust.
Many of the methods were taken from
British colonialism,
from French colonialism,
from settler colonialism
in the States.
This is like any
other colonial project.
It's only that it's the latest one,
and it's the longest-standing
ethnic cleansing
in the history of the 20th
and 21st centuries.
So it's fed by a stream of trauma.
But after all these decades,
you can't talk
about trauma anymore.
It's simply colonialism,
pure and simple,
and it's an apartheid state.
You can only beat them down
by brutal force,
and you can only get rid of them
by brutal force.
That's what happened,
and that's what
continues to happen.
The indigenous population
was brutally treated,
forced off their lands...
This whole occupied territories
where we're speaking now,
is like a giant reservation,
literally with walls around it.
So there was mass expulsion
of the indigenous people in 1948,
and then mass expulsions
in '52, in '67...
The Jews coming here
was an invasion,
was not meant in order
to include Palestinians
in one good society,
but to exclude them.
Around the time that I hit 15, 16,
the first intifada began and
I started hearing about things
and noticing things and,
and realizing that,
there was something very wrong.
You know, I didn't
have much information,
but it was clear to me
that Palestinians
were fighting for their freedom,
and we were killing them.
Following the first intifada
from '87 to '92-93,
both PLO and Israel
agreed to start negotiations.
And the negotiations
brought us to a reality
planned by the Israelis.
Most of the world thought
that the Oslo Accords
were a normal or natural
corridor to a peace agreement
with Palestinians,
while a Palestinian State
would be the end of this process.
People expected Israel
to put a halt
to its colonialist drive.
Palestinians made a very severe,
very serious compromise,
agreeing to have a state
in 22% of the land.
We'll have a state,
we'll put a halt
to this occupation,
to the cruelty
that comes with occupation,
to the bloodshed.
That was the expectation.
So what Israel did with,
after, with Oslo,
it did just the opposite.
This space had Israeli spots,
Israeli pockets,
in the form of settlements.
So the general understanding
was that these spots or pockets
will be removed.
And within these 30 years
since then, almost 30 years,
instead of having
Israeli enclaves removed,
what happened is that
you have Palestinian enclaves.
That's when they
closed off the West Bank,
because there was
this idea of separation.
Palestinians here,
Israelis here,
that was the Israeli
definition of peace.
It's like basically
apartheid, separation.
So then, any Palestinian,
suddenly, from one day,
needed a permit from
the military authorities
in order to come into Israel,
and also in order to come into
occupied East Jerusalem,
which is the heart
of the West Bank.
You know, the religious heart,
the economic heart,
the cultural heart.
In one day, you needed a permit
to go there, from the military,
which is not easy to obtain.
A child born in Palestine
will face challenges
from the very beginning.
You learn that there
are no easy games
for children in Palestine,
because everything,
it's under the,
the permanent threat
of the occupation.
There are schools like Hebron H2,
that children going to school
will need to cross
several checkpoints,
will need to cross
in front of settlers,
who will be
very violent with them,
and they will receive
tear gas a lot of days.
You are welcome in Nabi Saleh,
a small village northwest of
Ramallah, 20 kilometers.
We are here since a long time,
we don't know when.
That village is named Deir Nidham,
they are our cousins.
We all own this land together
because we are the
same family, TAMIMI,
and this is Nabi Saleh.
In this dry place
they build the
settlement of Halamish.
In terms of settlements,
there are different
kinds of settlements.
The largest settlement and
the second largest settlement
are both these cities
built by the state
in the West Bank
for ultra-orthodox Jews.
The state-sanctioned settlements
will be built strategically.
So here it's like
around Jerusalem,
because they're trying
to cut Jerusalem off
from the rest of the West Bank.
And then there are
other settlements
called 'illegal settlements',
even though
under international law,
all settlements are illegal
where basically
a group of settlers
will come to land,
and it can start with a tent,
you know, it can
start with a house.
But as soon as they build it
on private Palestinian land,
there will immediately
be military guarding them,
a road paved to them,
electricity connected,
water connected.
They'll be provided
with everything,
and the military
will protect them
from the Palestinians,
whose land they stole.
Because they have water,
you see how it's green?
You see how the settlement is green
and the village is dry?
There's a swimming pool.
They have irrigation
for their land.
We haven't had
running water since 1980.
They give the settlement
24-hour, day and night,
running water.
But we have 12 hours weekly.
We pay a big price, five times
more than the settlement.
As a Jew, I could
come to Israel right now.
I could move to
the occupied territories.
I could claim citizenship
overnight!
But not only would I be
granted citizenship,
if I moved into the settlements,
I'd be immediately granted
six times as much
water annually
as a Palestinian resident
of the occupied territories.
Because there is no water,
the farmer and the
owner of the land
stopped using their land
and they have an Ottoman Law,
since the Turkish:
if you don't use your
land for three years,
the government
can take the land.
For that, they took a lot
of land by this law,
and changed it from private
to be a public land,
and then they give it
to the settlements.
Recently, the commander
of the military said
that the settlement enterprise
and the military are one.
When the government can't
do something legally,
it will do it
through the settlers,
and then support them
to legalize it.
First of all, you can buy
an apartment for much cheaper
than you would if it
was inside Israel.
You get a quality of life
that you would not
be able to afford
inside Israel.
So the state will make it
as comfortable as possible,
in order to encourage
the takeover of the land.
Colonies, historically,
function this way.
Taking control over
land of people,
by all sorts of legal acrobatics.
They invent laws
and then they say that
they're implementing
according to the law.
But the laws are basically
laws of an occupier,
and of a colonialist entity.
And then in order
to guard the loot,
they have to create
the myth of security,
and they settle Israelis
in land not theirs,
and they have to
protect the Israelis.
And then they need more land
to protect these Israelis.
And from time to time they kill.
And when Palestinians resist,
there are wars or
what they call operations,
military operations.
So the security is
the explanation for any
of their actions,
or any of their thoughts.
They said, 'We build the wall
for our own security.'
The wall is illegal
under international
humanitarian law,
and also transferring population
to the occupied
territories is illegal
under international
humanitarian law.
And they say,
'We don't care about
international humanitarian law.
We only care about
our own security.'
This house was built in 1964,
and I have a demolishing order
since 2010 for this house.
And there are 14 houses
in this village, Nabi Saleh.
Any time, in the day or night,
they will come
and destroy the house.
This is a type of silent
ethnic cleansing in Area C,
that's just by demolition order.
Half of the Palestinian
people are in exile,
are not in historical Palestine.
Half of them are in
the rest of the world,
mostly in the Arab world,
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
since they were expelled in 1948.
And then, within the area
occupied in 1967,
so that's the West Bank and Gaza
and the Golan Heights,
there are refugees from 1948.
So, 80% of people in Gaza are
refugees from what's now Israel.
And I think that
within the West Bank,
and in a way, also Gaza,
what's really important for me
is that they are redundant,
according to the
Israeli politicians,
and greater public, Israeli public.
Gaza has disappeared
from calculations,
from, from, they are not here.
Gazans do not go out of Gaza.
But also in the West Bank,
the process is
to condense Palestinians
into the enclaves,
which I mentioned before.
Life in Gaza
is extremely challenging,
because it's the worst example
of an ongoing human
rights violation,
happening in front of
the eyes of everybody,
with two million people
completely under siege.
It's like an open-air
jail controlled by sea,
by air, by the wall.
They do not allow you to bring
certain medicines in Gaza.
And when you ask, 'Why?'
They will answer,
'Security reasons.'
But can you explain to me
how this medicine can be a threat,
and how you can ban
a medicine from entering Gaza,
under the explanation
of 'security reasons?'
And they will say,
'Secret file, security reasons.'
When we would protest
at the Gaza fence,
during the Great March of Return,
it was basically Israelis that would
come to the fence and protest;
we would coordinate
with Palestinians
on the other side.
We had big Palestinian flags
and they would see us,
so it was like supporting them.
You know, people got beaten
upon the Israeli side,
and on the Palestinian side,
people were being shot in the head,
systematically.
Over 180 protesters
were killed, murdered.
There were children killed,
medics, people in wheelchairs.
The snipers would be behind,
there's like this artificial hill,
and they'd be hiding
behind the artificial hill.
The protesters were
right in front of them,
they could see exactly
who they were killing.
And they maimed,
like shot, over 6,000.
When Palestinians demonstrate,
live ammunition
is considered legitimate.
People always had
kind of this dream, like
what would happen if Gazans
would all just, en masse,
get up and just march to the fence,
you know, march home,
to their land beyond the fence.
And then we got the answer:
what happened,
when they got up and they marched,
is that they were shot in the head.
You know, they were killed, en masse,
and nobody... cared.
The world would see it happening,
week after week,
the UN said it was a war crime,
and no one did anything.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened,
week after week, people murdered.
So, it's hard to
it's impossible to argue
for nonviolent resistance.
Which is tragic, because of course,
if people could take that route,
they would.
So, I decided to study journalism
because I was
filmed while I was beaten up,
and nobody raised a hand
from the camera crew,
from the journalists.
And for me it was like,
I want to be that journalist
that gives you a hand
in the middle of the beating
so I can take you out.
There have been clashes in
the old city of Jerusalem.
There's been clashes here
where we are now, Ras Al-Amoud.
I was working
in the old city of Jerusalem.
Yeah, you kill people in a war.
That's what happens, everywhere.
Look around the world.
Yeah, people get killed.
And that's why?
That's why! That's a war.
But you're killing
Palestinians today.
We're not, we're not
killing them for nothing.
So nothing is happening?
Are we just killing them for nothing?
Maybe if they hear my narrative,
and they see the similarity,
and they see the closeness,
and what the Palestinians are,
then they can stop, you know.
And then you can open the hearts
of people inside Israel.
Because words
are everything, right?
So the use of the word
'resistance fighter'
versus the use of 'terrorist,'
makes a very big difference
on our nervous system.
and how we accept it,
and the level of rage that we,
we experience when
we hear those words.
We're so dehumanized
by this instrument and machine,
to the point where they can come
and they can exterminate you,
because to them,
you're nothing but a rat.
You're nothing but
something that can be killed,
you're not a human.
And that's what
creates a Holocaust.
You dehumanize first,
and that is a learned lesson.
You dehumanize them so that
you get people to the point
where they act in a group
against a minority group.
And they,
the Israelis couldn't see us.
They can't see us.
The image that was given to them
was that we're sitting there,
with the guns, in our schools,
waiting for the Israelis to come.
No, Habibi.
We're sitting in our homes
waiting for the guns to come
and attack us while
we're in school.
But if we had the chance,
we'd be in theaters,
we'd be playing,
we'd be doing these things,
and we would be living
like a normal life.
But they couldn't see us.
The military intelligence
echelon knows
that if the Israelis
in Tel Aviv hear my voice,
and hear the songs
of Gazan children
singing in the streets,
it might make an Israeli
in Tel Aviv think twice
before pulling the trigger
in the face of that child,
when they come to the point
where they need them.
And I was arrested
for my journalism work.
I was arrested for
doing investigative stories,
and collecting the stories
of the last freedom fighters,
who were fighting
the end of the intifada.
And immediately I was
at gunpoint, stripped,
stripped in front of them.
It was my worst fear
materializing in front of me.
It was the demons
that I was so scared of
when I was 15
and I saw that dark evil,
EVIL place, that I went back to.
This is why you boycott Israel,
because they're criminals,
because they're terrorists.
There is a procedure called
'Administrative Detention',
which means that
someone is arrested,
and they are considered
a security risk.
It's not because
they did something,
it's because there's fear
that they will do something.
So it's all based
on secret evidence
and they're like,
'We have to hold this person'
for reasons that cannot
be disclosed to them,
or to their lawyers,
with no time limit.
You get an administrative
detention order
for up to six months,
and then when that
time is finished,
it's either renewed
or the person is released.
And even when the person
is finally released,
when you are in
administrative detention once,
if anything happens
in your village or your city,
it's very, very likely
you'll be taken again
and again and again.
Torture in Israel is,
like in Israeli laws,
it's only legal
in certain circumstances,
but because those circumstances
are not clearly defined,
you know, who's going to question?
Nobody questions the Secret Service.
The Secret Service runs the life
of Palestinians and Israeli judges
would not dare to question.
If they decide this
person should be tortured,
this person should be tortured.
You know, as Israelis,
we have rights, we have a trial,
they have to prove
that we're guilty.
Any Palestinian would be
taken to a military court.
First of all,
you're kind of assumed guilty.
A Palestinian is dangerous
because he's a Palestinian,
he's the enemy of the court.
The conviction rate is like 99%.
I was put in the dungeon.
So, you just basically get,
you know, they close your eyes and
you're driven into the underworld.
And it was terrifying,
it was one of the
most terrifying things
I ever experienced, and I wish
that nobody in their life
would ever experience it.
It's a closed room,
and the walls are gray and piercing,
so if you try to sleep on the wall,
it's like pointy.
Then you only have the hole,
which is for ventilation,
through which the people
who walk the earth
will be able to hear you,
if you shout.
And my way of therapy,
and my way of calming
myself down, is singing.
And I made a party
in that prison cell.
The dehumanization process
also does the racial
profiling. So for them,
even the soldiers that were
grabbing me were saying, like,
'This is the first time
we get one of those.
Why is this one here?'
Because I was dressed differently.
They go with the profile
that they expect
the Palestinian to look like.
You can't be a Palestinian
and dressed like this.
Because it's, it's a lot
about perception.
They can't see me as a human.
The more human I look,
the weirder it gets
for them to torture me.
I had my period when I
got into the interrogation.
And of course,
they use that against you,
so they let you bleed.
It's that humiliation of
keeping you in a seat
while you're bleeding
in front of this man,
and he asks you questions.
And I was like, 'Okay, you
can keep me in my blood.
I'm completely fine with it,
but I need to take a shower.
And if I don't take a shower,
I'm just going to zap out of
answering any of your questions.'
So I thought I was negotiating
my well, myself into a shower.
I get taken to the shower.
It's a very small room,
so it only fits your body.
You can't escape the water
that comes from the top.
And I didn't understand it
when I got in,
I could hear the guys say,
'We heard a woman,
we heard a woman.'
And I was like, 'Okay.'
And I was saying,
'Yes, I'm a woman.'
And they started immediately,
all of them shouting,
'It's okay!'
because they were all so scared
that they brought
their mother or sister
to be tortured in front
of them, which Israel uses.
So they all immediately
were in a panic state
that I might be one
of their mothers and sisters.
And they were shouting,
'Stay strong. Stay strong.'
And I was like,
'I'm in the shower, this is wh...'
And then the burning
water comes down.
And then I understood
was going on.
So, it was first
burning hot water,
and then it goes
to cold water and it's like...
I was just trying to get out
and I'm in a wall.
You can't get...
It's like a grave.
And you're trying to get out
and all I could hear was like,
'Just be strong!
Don't let them break you.
Just be strong,
keep going! We're with you.'
And I could hear them
and that was it.
There was nothing in the
universe that I wanted more
than to get out of that.
Because the way that they do it
is they strain us physically.
So, it is three nights,
but we don't sleep.
So it lasts forever.
They arrested me
nine times in my life.
The worst one in 1993,
when they arrested me
and took me to
the interrogation center
for around a month,
they...
start torturing me by shaking.
They make your head
all the time moving,
by using their hands,
by using their [fists]
I went into coma for ten days,
I woke up paralyzed,
and they continued
the interrogation.
They moved me to
Al-Moscobiyeh prison.
Then they isolated me
in an Israeli criminal cell
for around a month.
And then they released me
in this bad situation.
And the same day,
they killed my sister.
She went to see my nephew,
he had a trial in the
Israeli military court in Ramallah
with her little son, 12 years old.
They detained the son, the child.
She asked, 'What you are doing?
Where are you taking him?'
She was in the front,
in the entrance
of the court and
the hall of the court.
One of the employees
of the court, a female,
started beating her, pushing her.
A group of settlers
started beating her,
they pushed her down the stairs.
She fell on her head,
and they killed her
in front of her little child,
12 years old.
This is part of our suffering.
We don't like to appear,
to show ourselves as victims,
to victimize our issue also.
Because we believe it's part of
our duty and responsibility,
to resist.
the word 'trauma,'
in the way that we use it,
and I use it
in my therapeutic work,
is just not adequate
to encompass what's going on here.
When we try to talk about PTSD
in this kind of context,
it does not apply to
this situation, because PTSD is
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This is not 'Post,'
this is not a 'Disorder,'
it is a traumatic,
ongoing situation,
that breaks
the soul of the people!
For me, personally,
I accompany sometimes
cases of children,
that have been terribly
mistreated by the army,
going to visit them
in the hospitals and seeing
how they're
physically hurt and harmed.
And they will ask me,
'But why? I was just
going out of the school.'
They started throwing tear gas,
they started shooting.
Some of them have
been shot in the legs.
You know how many
children and teenagers
got completely disabled
because they are shooting them?
- Let him go! Let him go!
It's, it's a boy.
It's just a boy!
After I got released,
my post as a journalist was changed
from covering the West Bank
to covering Israeli stories.
So I would go to Sderot,
and be with the settlers
who are getting bombed,
and I would have to
report their story.
For me, from my childhood,
I was very much influenced
and I was obsessed
with the Holocaust,
with Apartheid South Africa,
African-American Native struggle,
and for me it was
the curiosity of,
how could someone
get to that point?
So I wanted to experience
things through their eyes.
I don't know how it can be, like
how you can
ease the pain of this one
and ease the pain of that one
and stop the instrument,
the big destructive
machine, which is
causing all this pain to both.
And when you
understand the Holocaust,
it gets so much even worse.
It gets so aggravating
in your cells,
to understand that
somebody could go through
what they've gone through,
and come back and
perpetrate it again.
You know, it's infuriating,
because I do understand trauma.
I understand that it's a cycle,
and that it starts there.
But, I can't understand
the mentality of those
who created the regime
in the way that it is created,
because it is exactly
the same operation,
it's exactly the same beliefs,
it's exactly the same
notion and the same evil,
that created the Holocaust
and allowed it to happen.
And now it's happening again.
It's people that
perpetrate the same cycle
of hate and violence
over and over.
Whether it be incarnated
in this body as Israelis,
or be incarnated it as Hitler
at his time and the Nazis.
You just need
the power that's evil,
that's able to control,
and that's supported by
the US and the Europeans
and the White people,
who also want the domination
and want the colonization
and can't smell
the breath of the earth
and the Native
coming back to life.
People see the
Palestinian violence,
they don't see
the Israeli violence.
They don't see
that the Israeli violence
is the root cause.
So Palestinians live
in permanent discrimination,
institutional discrimination,
which is also violence.
So let's not exceptionalize Israel.
We see a system, a world system,
where violations
perpetrated by Western countries
are tolerated.
That is why
the Israeli right wing
always aspires
to war, to have wars.
Because a little war in the area,
we'll be able to do something
that we cannot do in 'normal times,'
we can do it during wars.
And instead, the world watches
how Israel's completely
taking the space of Palestinians.
The remaining space of Palestinians,
and does nothing.
Why? Because Israel sells weapons.
Because Israel is such
a high-tech nation,
develops weapons, develops
surveillance techniques,
and because Israel has such a
security pact with America,
that they are so such allies.
All these reasons!
And when they want,
they use the pretext
of the Holocaust.
But it's a pretext.
Because if they
really cared for us,
really, because of the Holocaust,
they would have done anything
to bring sanity
back to this place.
But it's insane
because it won't be...
I don't know
how long it can continue.
There's a biblical
phrase, which says,
'Don't covet the possession
of your neighbor.
The land will vomit you out.'
That's what the
Jewish prophet said.
This is not sustainable.
But it's going to
do a lot of damage,
a lot more suffering,
before it's over.
I'm not pro-Palestinian,
but I'm pro-truth.
And the truth is,
the Palestinians
have been oppressed
and suppressed
and murdered and controlled
and dispossessed for decades.
That's just the truth.
And I don't like it,
as a human being.
In terms of antisemitism
that's just one of the biggest,
most pernicious
concoctions of modern ideology.
Not anti-semitism,
there's genuine anti-semitism.
I've experienced it as an infant,
I experienced it as a child,
I've seen it.
It's got nothing to do
with supporting
Palestinian rights, nothing.
The charge of antisemitism
is simply an attempt to intimidate
well-meaning non-Jews,
who might be really uneasy
about what they perceive
is happening here,
and it's an inducement
to shut them up.
Who wants to be accused
of being associated
with one of the worst
crimes in human history?
And I just invite anybody
who wants to find out,
visit!
Look at that ugly wall,
look at the settlements
on the hilltops,
look at the attacks
that the settlers make
with impunity
on Palestinian lands,
how they burn down
Palestinian olive groves,
how they desecrate
Palestinian wells,
daily!
Come and visit!
See for yourself!
I left journalism
and I joined human rights work,
because I thought
that I could expose more.
We started going to protests
in the village of Nabi Saleh.
We would walk together, march,
and we would be tear-gassed,
we would be shot
live ammunition, rubber bullets.
But the special thing that
happened in Nabi Saleh is,
the confrontation
moved from the distance
to the face.
Free, free Palestine!
I would see it
and still get surprised
every single time:
How could this
soldier just shoot me?
How could they be this aggressive?
And then when the
exposure was closer,
for me, it was confrontation
with the soldiers with my words:
I could speak Hebrew,
and I understand where
these soldiers came from.
So I used that to try
to speak to the soldiers,
and the commanders
were far more
aggressive towards that,
because they could see
that the soldiers could listen.
They were confronted
by a line of women...
Of course, as I told you,
profiling and faces and colors.
Nabi Saleh people's
skin is lighter.
For the cameras, the reason why
they got all the
publicity from the world,
that village,
is because they're White!
And White people were able
to see themselves in them.
And there were girls
with their hair out,
it wasn't the conservative
look that you imagine.
So for Israel, this image that
they had bought and created,
was getting destroyed
by this bunch of young children,
women, who are going
out to these protests.
You guys, a whole army occupying
civilian people who are armed
only with their voices,
their flags, and their conviction!
The only thing I would do
in the protest is chant.
From the beginning 'til the end.
Because I am the chanter
and the one in front,
they started targeting my legs.
So I was shot in the legs
with the tear gas canisters
over and over and over
when they can get me,
and I would still keep going
because I always believed
that my body was,
you know, titanium...
Ironic.
I had a scarf on me.
One soldier pulled
the scarf from one side,
the other soldier hit my legs,
and I was lynched, basically,
I was hanging from the scarf.
I heard the,
but I didn't know
what was happening.
And this commander and I
were very much at lock.
I had my camera and I was like,
'I want to film you,
and show your face
to the world, as you do this.'
He was like,
'You want to show my face?!'
His eyes got red,
and he was hitting
all over my body
and I didn't move or flinch.
I was just holding the phone
and I was like,
'Okay, keep hitting,
keep hitting, keep hitting,
keep hitting. Does this
make you feel better?
Does hitting me
give you that peace?
Keep hitting. Do you
feel better now?'
And he couldn't,
and he just kept hitting.
Eventually, someone
came from the soldiers
and pepper-sprayed me
straight in the eyes,
and that's when I broke.
And then I was taken to
the Palestinian hospital
in Jerusalem, Al-Mutala,
and immediately, I saw one doctor,
I looked into his eyes and I said,
that I can feel something
happening with my fingers,
that I get this weird sensations
that started dropping on me.
And he immediately
asked for an MRI,
and they were saying...
The doctor said that
it's the end, you know,
that 70% of my spine is gone,
and it's just a matter of
the last living cells to die.
So I started going
to look for a doctor
that comes in
the same energy sphere,
and I found Barzily.
So I was like,
'I came to you because I know
that you have some research.
You think into robotics,
you can think outside of the box.'
And he's like,'Okay,
so what do you want?'
I was like,
'I want you to do the surgery.
I want you to fix this.'
And he's like,
'But there's nothing to fix,
you know, it's like the spine.'
And then he told me
'What we can do is
what we do for other
people, which is
put a titanium box
that holds your spine
so that your neck doesn't crash,
but the spine itself,
nobody can fix what was cut.
I was so angry that they would
get me to the point of being
broken and paralyzed.
It was like, khalas.
The anger was...
every time I would meditate,
the anger stops it,
the fear stops it,
every time. It's so automatic.
and very natural,
the way our brains work. It's like
this fuse comes up,
the nervous system gets activated,
and you shut down
the healing abilities.
I got to that point where
my left side
was completely gone.
I was just on
the walker-wheelchair,
and I was like, 'Okay.'
I called him and I was like,
'Hi, today's the day
I'm coming for the surgery.'
It was exactly
as I had visualized.
After six hours, I opened...
When I woke up,
the first thing was
to open the thing
they put closing my mouth,
'cause they didn't
want me to speak
for three days,
and I just wanted to make sure
that my voice was still there.
And I started singing
in the hospital,
and they would come a
nd they would close my mouth,
and I would like open it 'Aaaaah!'
Three days I was walking.
And I did my walk of power.
And I told them,
'Khalas, I'm off the hook.'
Working on trauma in this context
is extremely challenging,
because as we were saying,
you are not in a situation
where the traumatic
situation has happened
and now people have a safe space
where you can work on that.
So you need to understand,
that working on trauma will be,
in a context of ongoing
traumatic situation.
You cannot make a normal life,
if you are all the time
in touch with the pain,
and the sorrow and the grief.
And especially with...
a lot of these
processes are completely frozen,
because it's impossible
to deal with them.
They tell the mothers not to cry,
and I would always feel that
there's something wrong with it,
but I also couldn't cry,
because I didn't want them
to ever see us as weak.
I didn't understand that
vulnerability is courage,
it takes time until
you understand that.
That itself is traumatization.
It is survival.
They have to do it.
You know, they can't
show any vulnerability.
They'll get eaten alive.
But that suppression of emotion
comes at a cost.
The occupation is created...
Colonization in a way,
it's created in order to keep
you in a state of fear.
If they release the state of fear,
then they release
their control over you.
Because if we don't feel
the fear, we break through.
And the Palestinians,
we got to the point of
breaking that fear barrier.
You have the people
who are ready to go,
because there's this feeling that
there's nothing
we can lose anymore.
You know, if
there's nothing to lose,
then you're ready
to sacrifice everything,
and you let go of the fear.
It was always that
I had my true line,
I didn't have a problem to stand
in front of an Israeli,
or a White international person,
and explain to them
why a Palestinian
would go and do a
a suicide attack.
It's very simple!
You push people to that point!
There's nothing more to it!
If you get a person
to want to kill themselves,
there's a reason why this person
wants to kill themselves,
in the most
atrocious, painful way.
There's a reason behind it.
You must have killed, maimed,
pained them, their families,
to get them to get to that point.
So don't ask me why
they want to get to that point,
where they would use
so much hate and anger
and release it in that way.
Ask me where the pain came from,
and I'll tell you why people act.
Don't ask the person
who's in the cage,
why they're hitting the cage
and breaking their arms,
trying to be free.
Ask the person who
put them in the cage,
why they're there?
I don't imagine my presence here
will do very much.
I hope to help train
some people in trauma work,
to help support their people.
It makes a difference to people,
when others
hear them and see them.
It does not change
their situation,
but at least one can be what the
Jewish psychotherapist
Alice Miller called
'an empathetic witness',
who can validate,
and say to people
'You are not alone.
We can't do much
to change your situation,
but we see it, we get it,
and our hearts are with you.'
So I hope that'll
make some difference,
some small difference,
I should say.
I begin by thanking Ashira
for inviting me here.
This is my third time here and,
I was first here
during the first intifada,
and I cried every
day for two weeks.
And I'd like to explain
a little bit about
why it's important
for me personally to be here.
I was born in 1944, in January.
So my grandparents were killed,
sent to Auschwitz
concentration camp,
and they died there.
And my mother and
I came this close,
to the same thing
happening to us.
When we're under threat,
there are three
natural responses.
The first one is to ask for help.
If there's no help available,
then there are
two other responses.
One is to fight,
or the other is to run away,
and to hide.
But what if there's no help?
And what if you're
too small to fight back?
And what if you can't run away?
Then your body, not you,
nobody does this deliberately,
but your body goes into
what's called 'freeze'.
When you freeze, you go numb,
and that's the way of the body
protecting you from the pain.
The reason you didn't run away
is because you couldn't,
the reason you didn't fight back
is you couldn't,
and your organism
had the wisdom to freeze you,
as the only way to protect you,
and if it can't
protect you from the situation,
at least it can
protect you from the pain.
Just two weeks before
you guys arrived,
I had inflammation in my,
in my finger here, and my foot,
and then I went and
I did blood tests
and they said that there
was rheumatoid arthritis.
Oh! So in my experience,
these inflammations
have to do with
the body saying 'No'
somewhere where you didn't,
so the body protests
in the form of inflammation.
Anger is an inflamed emotion.
When it's not expressed,
it'll show up in the body.
There's something
that keeps arising
Yeah.
And you keep
choking it down, yeah?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I see that
I didn't cry for
about 20 years or something.
Under conditions of occupation
and resistance,
there's this natural tendency
to believe that
I have to be strong,
that I can't have any problems,
that to
feel shame or to feel helpless,
is a sign of weakness.
And I mustn't be weak,
in the face of the
oppression.
I healed only when the knife
was away from my throat.
I wasn't able to heal
when it was here because,
your body doesn't let you do it.
And I just want
to try to bring that
to some of the
people that I encounter
and the lives that I touch here.
Palestinians here
are super creative.
From this love,
from this resistance,
from this hope that
they keep on having,
and you really don't know
where it comes from.
Because we can't go into Gaza,
it was my dream to be able to
work with the children
there, because
Gaza is the biggest
ghetto on Earth.
That is the strongest cycle.
These are the children being
born into prison
without any options.
And they're the most creative
beings on Earth
to be able to survive!
If you want to learn
resilience, it's there.
So when I came to approach to work
with children in Gaza,
what am I gonna, like,
teach them?
They can teach the Universe
how to be resilient.
So what I do is active meditation,
where the children just
release somatically
what is going on,
and we build resilience.
I went into the room
with the kids,
and the first thing was that
they were shouting in a way
that I could not control.
And I was like, 'Okay,
let's shout together, you know.
We need to shout
our anger and rage and pain
and get it out!'
So why not? That is the healing.
And I saw what happened
after the shouting
and the calming down
and they were like,
'Please, Miss, we don't
want to shout anymore.'
I was like, 'Okay, so
what do you want to do?'
'We wanted to do Dahiya.'
What the Bedouins do is a dance,
and they stand
in a circle, everyone,
and they just clap
together in unison.
And they do a sound,
'Ha-hi-hi, ha-hi-hi,
ha-hi-hi,
ha-hi-hi, ha-hi
I was like, 'Ah, voila!'
You know, like
yogis around the world,
breathing exercises,
and we're sitting here
native to the land,
from prior to any occupation,
doing 'ha-hi-hi'
and coming together
as a circle in celebration.
So that's us!
And the chants and the singing
and this culture, the people
they've come to occupy.
Our families in
Jerusalem brought the...
brought Jewish immigrants
into their houses,
to keep them safe
and protect them,
not because
it's your promised land,
but because
we will take care of you
and put you in our houses.
Because we're that!
And that, in our sayings,
we're so naive,
that's how we got occupied.
We let them in.
And we welcomed them.
And still we welcome them.
But stop...the killing.
And I can understand the psyche
that they need to be safe too,
they have a homeland.
Yeah, I mean, it's understandable,
everybody wants a homeland.
Something has to change,
here.
Something has to change here.
And I hope I can just
be part of that.
So what we're seeing here is that
indomitability of the human spirit.
Not easy,
and it's punished,
but it persists.
I remember when I just
started going to Gaza,
I was always surprised to see
people laughing.
It has become such a norm,
Israeli injustice and Israeli...
the pain that Israel
inflicts on people,
that you know how
to separate, you know,
like people live
in compartments, you know,
ok, so there is a compartment
of trauma and of injustice.
But at the same time,
people know how to go to the,
to the weddings
and to laugh and to dance.
So people who lost
20, 25 members of their families,
I cannot say
they were not traumatized,
but I see the health in them,
I see the strength in them.
We don't ask for people...
you know, we've
finished this chapter
of the Palestinians pleading
for the world to
come and rescue us.
We can rescue ourselves,
if you at least stop supporting
the machine, you know.
If the machine is ostracized,
then we can keep going,
because nothing in the world
is going to stop
the people in Jerusalem.
Nothing in the Universe
will stop them.
But we need...
you.
We need you,
if you can't be our voice,
just to, at least,
not put a penny,
that goes to the bullet,
that shoots...
our children.
For how long are people
going to be able
to sit in their homes
and watch this documentary,
and watch the people
and the children suffer?
Palestinian and Israeli,
because you don't want
your children to go into
the military and hold the gun
at a nine-year-old.
Either way you look at it,
you can't accept it,
you can't accept that it's this.
Your brother and your
sister being in chains
will not make this experience
on Earth acceptable.
Your chains, will be still
held by my chains,
and unless I am free,
you won't be free!
If I must die,
You must live
To tell my story
To sell my things
To buy a piece of cloth
And some strings,
Make it white
With a long tail
So that a child,
Somewhere in Gaza,
While looking heaven
In the eye,
Awaiting his dad
Who left in a blaze
And bid no one farewell,
Not even to his flesh,
Not even to himself,
Sees the kite,
My kite you made,
Flying up above
And thinks for a moment
An angel is there
Bringing back love.
If I must die,
Let it bring hope,
Let it be a tale.