 We welcome you to tonight's special event associated with Dispossessed with Defiant, which is an international photo exhibit put together in 2014 by the CJPME Foundation. My name is Brian McIntosh, I'm the minister of this church, and I'm happy to be your host and moderator for tonight's event. Before we begin any further, I would like to share the acknowledgement that we recognize the history, spirituality, culture and stewardship of the land of the indigenous peoples of this region, including the Huron-Wendok, Patun and Seneca nations, and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit, who are Anishinaabe people. This territory, in which we stand and work, is covered by the dish with one spoon walk-and-belt covenant, which is an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Ojibwa and Allied nations, and we seek to live and respect peace and right relations with them as we work, live, play, worship and plan and learn tonight upon their traditional territories. Right up of over 160 photos, the Dispossessed Defiant exhibition downstairs in the gymnasium, if you didn't have a chance to look at it yet, depicts different aspects of indigenous peoples' experiences of colonization and dispossession, and their inspiring struggles to resist such colonization. Spanning over 150 years, the compelling photos of the exhibition capture the experiences of three indigenous groups, indigenous peoples in this part of Turtle Island, the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation, and black South Africans under apartheid. Our sponsors for this week-long photo exhibit downstairs, for whose support our planning group is grateful, include the Social and Ecological Justice Commission of the United Church's Shining Waters Regional Council, Kairos Toronto West, Kairos Great Lakes St. Lawrence Regional Group, and Kairos Canada, the Palestine Network of Shining Waters Regional Council, the Ontario Federation of Labor, and the Unifor Social Justice Fund. Tonight's event and tomorrow's afternoon event, in recognition of it being September 30th, a national day for truth and reconciliation, as well as other program pieces tomorrow morning, form the bulk of the Kairos annual regional fall gathering for our part of South Central Ontario, entitled Decolonizing Hearts and Minds. So we welcome those of you who are here for that entire conference, maybe a quick show of hands of who's here for the Kairos Conference this weekend, quite a number of us, and more to come tomorrow, I believe. Of course we also welcome those of you from nearby churches in Etobicoke or elsewhere, or the general public, if you've heard of it, and are attending, where we appreciate you being here. Tonight's public event focuses on the Palestinian struggle and features Kairos Canada's Palestinian partners who are currently visiting Canada to our good fortune. We are especially pleased to have two people from the Weam Centre for Conflict Transformation in Bethlehem with us, both of whom are leaders in the nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation. And in addition, we also have a Palestinian-Canadian author with us to share his story and how his writing relates to the Palestinian question. I will introduce them all more fully in a moment, but before I do that, a few housekeeping items are in order. We always have to have housekeeping items, right? Yes, we invite you to partake of our snacks during the break, if you haven't already, or linger in this space afterward. We're going to go until about 8.30 here and then open up the exhibit for you to take a look downstairs. And we hope that you will consider doing that if you haven't already. If you need a washroom, there's one just to the right of the bottom of the stairs to my left. And just make a U-turn to the right, you'll find it. As well as separate men's and women's washrooms through the back door directly behind me. Go through that door there and out the back and down the hall. The men's washroom is half the flight down closer to you and the women's half the flight down at the end of the hall. Now please note that we have Robert Massoud, a panelist for our upcoming Thursday evening event with us tonight. And he has a tune products for sale for our purchase during and after this event and that table right over there. Robert, you can wave your hand. People can see you after the event. From that, we'll be to hear from our guests for a time and then to engage you as our audience in a Q&A period following a break, which I'm going to be pretty strict about because we have wonderful guests here and want to hear from them. As we engage our energy in moving forward toward a post-colonial agenda, both here and in Palestine. And I would like now to introduce our guests. First, our two guests from Leon Center, a conflict transformation center, which is a grassroots organization established in Bethlehem in 1994 that aims to improve the quality of relationships and to promote peace and justice, a culture of acceptance and reconciliation in the community. Hara Tare is a researcher, trainer and peace activist with Leon who conducts trainings for youth and women on leadership, conflict resolution, communication, environmental awareness, and gender-based violence. She was the Middle East representative for the Women Peace Program working group in the Netherlands and contributed to the book called A Force Such as the World Has Never Known, Women Creating Change. That sounds good to me. 2013 was that book with a chapter on advocating women's rights in Palestine. Tarek Al-Zubi is a Christian-Palestinian American. You won't hold that against him, right? You're my friends here. He was raised in the little town of Bethlehem. He received a VA in economics and peace studies from Manchester University in Vienna and an MA in international cooperation and development at Bethlehem University. Tarek currently works as the project and youth coordinator at Leon is active in civil society, part of numerous fires which endears him to me as I am as well. I'm glad to know you're a sinner. And has the privilege of being part of the World Council of Church's 12 Faces of Hope campaign. Tarek has been with the Kairos Women Peace Program since its inception in 2018. And finally our guest author, Saeed Tubit Tibi, a writer and lawyer based in Toronto. He was born into Palestinian parents in Kuwait and has lived in Canada since 1993. His writing frequently engages the immigrant experience and his Palestinian background. His collection of short stories entitled Her First Palestinian was published just in 2022. It was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Fiction Prize. Saeed's book is available for purchase at the publisher reduced price of $20 dollars this evening and we encourage you to consider purchasing it following this event. So a lot further delay as I say we're going to hear from all three speakers for about seven to ten minutes and then we're going to have a re-break and we're going to come back and have a dialogue. So I start with Han. Good evening everybody and thank you for your interest in this event and for your warm support as well. First of all I would like to say that before coming up into this sanctuary I had visited the exhibition downstairs and really it is a heartbreak to see all this kind of suffering injustice and violence against people. The disposition and the displacement of people it is really unfair for humanity and for human rights all over. For me as a Palestinian I say that it's always there like two narratives to hear. The first narrative you hear it from one side and the other narrative you hear it from the other side and it has been never ever that the two sides agree on the same narrative and this has been taking us so long to reach an agreement to reach injustice peace because no one agrees with the other. For me as a Palestinian I would say that my narrative is so simple that during the British mandates there was the Palestinian people living happily in their homes taking care of their gardens and their kids and their families and then they have been kicked out of their houses their homes and displaced all over the world. Now there are so many Palestinian refugees descendants as well all over the world and in our refugee camps in Lebanon in Syria in Jordan and in their own homes as well as refugees because there was the NAPCA in 1948 where people has been forced to leave their houses the NAPCA in 1967 where also people had to move from one area to another to become refugees. The other narrative says that no we have the right to come to this land because this is the promised land the land of honey and milk so how can we figure this out it is a problem but I would say that to reach a resolution to have a peaceful agreement and it's just this one not only peaceful because we can have peace but this peace can be just this is what we really want so in order to do this I would say that we have to forget about the past let's forget about our narratives and say that we really extend our hands for each other to talk about the future the future of our people the future of women the future of the youth they need to live and they deserve to live in peace in security and in safety everybody talks about security and we as Palestinians as women we deserve to live a decent life a life full of dignity respect for humanity for me I work with we are and I'm placed in East Jerusalem I work with women in East Jerusalem their story is a bit different from Palestinian women in the West Bank of course the sufferings there and but it is a bit different I'm a Palestinian woman from East Jerusalem as well and I feel like other women from East Jerusalem that I work with I feel that I am status I do not know who am I okay yeah so a I don't know who am I because I do not have a clear identity I hold the Jordanian pastor to travel and I'm not Jordanian I travel through Tel Aviv airport holding the Lasseh Paseh and I'm not an Israeli citizen the Palestinian pastor because if I ask for the Palestinian pastor they will ask me to leave Jerusalem and for me to be in Jerusalem this is my dream and I want to give it up here comes the importance of the women which really enlightened the minds and the life of women I worked with these women were so hungry for such activities for such workshops and there was a lot of success stories of these women that we were with this is really a thank you for Kyros for having this program and for the six years that has been really full of activities full of new stories where women has been empowered with capacity building leadership and reconciliation where this is very important that women has been taught that forgiveness and reconciliation is very important therefore we we had to know that charity begins at home and if we do not start with ourselves with our women who believe in reconciliation and peaceful approaches then we cannot reach a peaceful solution with our partner I would call them partners so therefore projects like this women of courage really it is as its name women of courage and I'm really happy to share one story maybe because I only have two minutes one success story of a woman who has been exposed to domestic violence by their siblings this woman had at the very beginning she used to come with different colors on her face on her arms and she won't say anything at the very beginning she usually wears long sleeves so that she wouldn't show but then I noticed through the training that she there's something with this woman and I kept like okay nothing and say okay come on tell me what's wrong and she said that her brother beats her because for many reasons she he doesn't want her to go out he doesn't want her to participate in activities but then when we talked to her and referred her to a social worker she was really empowered she was able to stand very powerful in front of this violence she has been exposed to and by the end she said no to violence and she was there and she is now a human rights defender this is a great story and thank you I think my partner yeah I'd like to echo some of the things that have been given and specifically direct them of course towards the organizers and helpers of this venue and event and of course to the Kairos staff and office who have been partners with us long before we had the funding from global affairs for this program so to begin this talk I'm going to contextualize just a little bit of the reality and I apologize usually it's like giving you a depression pill but I hope towards the end of this conversation we can talk about some of the positive changes and I can include some of the work that we are doing at VM because there is always hope and I think if there wasn't hope none of you would be here listening to our stories and maybe continuing to be involved in supporting this work as you do so thank you for your continued work so you see here three Palestinians with different citizenship one without any citizenship and with all that comes different rights you have myself a Palestinian of the West Bank you can only access the West Bank and when I talk about access here I talk about consistent access not access that requires you to jump through the many loopholes of the very different legal systems including the military legal system you have another Palestinian with Jerusalem residency who can access more of the land but doesn't have any voting rights beyond her local municipality and then you have a third Palestinian living here in Canada who's been to Palestine once she told me before the break who I believe doesn't have consistent access to Palestine because he's dependent on the Israeli authorities decisions and this doesn't just extend to Palestinians but it extends to those that we are officially or in some formal capacity connected to my mother is an American thank you for not taking that against me and she's been married to my father since 1990 and since 1990 they have applied for family unification and she was denied entry in 2019 for quote-unquote this is a literal citation or a reference to what the border control told her because she married a Palestinian man we have now paid a sum of 70,000 shekels which is close to 20,000 Canadian or sorry 20,000 US dollars to entitled her to come into her own home areas A and B of the West Bank only when Israel grants her permission for a maximum of 90 days my brother's married to a Palestinian woman who has no citizenship or residency as her family fled during the Ottomans and then her father left later before the Palestinian Authority was established and she's in that same position but yet we're all connected we all continue to work and strive for justice in Palestine and elsewhere when we talk about the Palestinian population we're very young 70% of our population is under the age of 30 and 87% of our youth wish to immigrate they don't wish to immigrate because they no longer like Palestine or Palestinian food it's because they no longer see a sense of security for themselves for their livelihood for their families in Palestine and of that 87% there are of course those who wish to immigrate permanently and temporarily but what it does is it allows this majority and this young energy and we always say the youth and the children build the future and so it seems we're building our future elsewhere if this continues in this trend when we talk about women especially young women women youth those between the ages of 18 to 35 especially those a little older from 21 to 35 they are the most educated demographic with the highest unemployment rate when we talk about the economic system in Palestine it has been stifled by the continuous practices by the Israeli military occupation when we talk about moving from one area to the next it took us around 45 minutes to get to this venue in Palestine that would have been a little bit longer as we go through each of the many checkpoints if we are allowed to cross them and so when we talk about the basic freedoms the right to movement the right to expression the right to build on your land I live in area a which is under the Palestinian authorities rule and I work in area C which is under Israeli military occupation and that means if I wish to build or if the center wishes to develop it's programming and needs to change its infrastructure to match that programming it is dependent on Israeli licensing and permits which are very difficult to come by and so we see land shrinking population increasing the economic situation continuing to deteriorate the average Palestinian received 2,000 shekels which I apologize I'm not too familiar with Canadian dollars so it's all going to be US dollars but it was right around 550 US dollars a month in the 1980s today the average salary is still 2,000 shekels a month but if you're able to receive access to work on the Israeli controlled territories or in Israel that now jumps up to 5,500 as a minimum and not as an average and so when we talk about the walls the settlements which make for the building of a Palestinian state less viable and almost impossible is largely constructed by Palestinian workers because we are given the choice and remember I said this is the depressing part so forgive me again we are given the choice between working towards our economic security and livelihoods or working towards our dreams of sovereignty and independence and it is difficult to work towards both and if you go down to the exhibition you can see that Palestine has been occupied long before Israel but that Israel's occupation formally began in 1948 and the situation continues to deteriorate so having to choose between the two it seems that one's economic security is more viable and is more helpful but we are not hopeless and we are not helpless we have friends who on a Friday night in Canada are willing to leave their homes to come and be depressed by us and we have a community that continues to inspire us and so this is part of why we have continues to work and serve the Palestinian community we started working in 1994 with conflict resolution within the Palestinian territories and even far beyond before the creation of the wall when we were able to traverse some of the quote-unquote borders through that program we found many reoccurring conflicts and we wanted to go from being reactive is my 10 minutes up okay perfect I'll speak much quicker we were able to go from being reactive where there is conflict mediating into becoming proactive how can we mitigate and limit the rise of conflict in our communities so it's a lot of conflict relating to women women's rights relating to women receiving equal inheritance equal say and it's important to say that the role of women has been diminishing in our territory since the 1960s since the 1940s and we attribute that as a direct reaction to the deteriorating situation there's this desire for sovereignty that has not been manifested or realized and so when gone unconscious it turns into the cycle of violence internally part of this internalized oppression and men begin to control women women maybe the children children become more violence beat the dog in the neighborhood the dog bites the old person the community in that cycle continues so part of what we try and use disrupt that cycle say enough is enough and so we work with women on social economic and political empowerment understanding that if a woman isn't able to live independently which often time is related to her economic security then she is only socially empowered in theory we also focus on male allyship because we believe we are interconnected as Palestinian men Palestinian women as Palestinians Canadians indigenous we're all related to each other and our liberation is tied we work with you because our youth no longer know who they are and they wish to leave their disconnected and we believe we can build a better future for all of us without having anyone to be uprooted especially in a history where so many have already been uprooted and we work with citizen diplomacy and because I'm lacking some time I will say part of our citizen diplomacy is welcoming visitors is being able to bridge across the continents across the many divides that separate us to say come see and we know you will act and we welcome you and we believe in reconciliation and I will stop there thank you very much I experienced in 1962 an experience in the holy land not having a visa to Israel at the time I was in East Jerusalem Jordan and at that time I took a shower I had shampoo in my hair when the Israelis turned the water off and of course at that time from the hotel one can look out over the bright lights of Israel it was like living in East Berlin it was a real shame but I experienced going out to Badeleum about three miles I guess it was from Jerusalem which of course was in Jordan as well as the Jordan River and the Dead Sea which I tried to swim in and so on it was really an experience that was heightened by the fact that I went to a place outside the city wall where apparently there was a cave and a Hong Kong where they figured that Christ may have been buried within that cave it was run by a Palestinian Christian by the name of Matar who very kindly offered me cool water which was wonderful his son studied at the Ontario College of Art and I got in touch with him when I came home the following year in 1963 he reported to me that a knock on the gate had occurred his father went to the gate opened it up an Israeli soldier machine gunned him and killed him thank you for your story to start mentioning at the end there it's a really good experience of many I will say that your tourism experience is probably somewhat typical of people in this part of the world who go on Christian tours and so on to the Holy Land and they're not shown the reality of the situation on the ground they're shown the holy sites and the places where there isn't a kind of daily experience that you would see of struggle or violence or insecurity or hardship on the part of the Palestinians at all and they come home and everything was wonderful anyway I'll ask for another comment and question John I know you know what you're dealing with it's a danger your comments have to do with that there's sort of an ignorance about Palestinian understandings in North America for instance but you must be aware showing that the Christian churches in North America have almost foul silence about the truth of what's going on in Palestine that the Christian church in North America in fact has the pious views about the text of scripture but this is entirely the gospel about Jesus who said the king of life is not about countries in the land and that ancient history that they try to generate now there's such an anomaly there's such a huge cast of understanding for Christians who think through these things and who want to honor the gospel of Jesus as to why Christians are so adamant in seeing just one side of this of this current religious conflict and seeing only Israeli truth and never, never seeing the truth of the Palestinians I mean there are two sides as it's a trouble but we're blinded here in North America with what happens in churches the piety, you talk to the tourists we both follow the footsteps of Jesus and as we do there we but we don't listen to the words of Jesus or follow Jesus when it comes to the truth of this king is not a political one this king is not about the things that we make our kings out of which is money and power and weather, the whole thing but remember the majority of the potential Christians are Trump supporters of all things so you're coming up with a hard battle to try to keep Christians on but my question is, what do we know thank you what do we know or think about that about the Christian church which is so pervasive in North America that has such a horrible story about these truths and that's 100% true to me it's no secret that the evangelical church has one of its driving dicta the idea that Israel, the kingdom of Israel has to be prosperous in the land of Palestine and that drives it and also it's a very powerful lobby group in the United States I didn't, if I sounded like I was trying to oversimplify that wasn't my intention this is a multi-factor situation there's many reasons why we only hear one narrative one narrative is highly privileged over another one that I think from where I sit is more of a question of who's driving American government who's funding American government who's controlling American government who are the likely presidents that you see historically people like George Bush and his father those are people who sympathize with that but in terms of popular thought the average North American person who is not necessarily part of the evangelical church even they have a sense of confusion the people who are part of the evangelical church essentially they're essentially a lost cause their dogma is such that Palestine can't exist but everybody else those are people who are suffering from an absence of the right narrative yeah they're sticking in the house well thank you again for that question I just want to add to the answer I think we oftentimes forget that the church is not infallible and we have both good and bad we have our partners from South Sudan where the church is really spearheading progressive movements in society and helping people but we also have a church in Canada that was promoting residential schools for the indigenous communities or running some of these residential schools I think one of the issues for us is the church and political interests in some places run toe to toe and I think I was sharing this with you before but as a Palestinian community we do have the word Israel in the Bible but we do not recognize it as a political construct we said recognize it as the people of God but there's one other thing especially looking at the New Testament for Christians how many times there were phrases along the lines of truth will set you free give on to Caesar what belongs to Caesar but the other thing is this truth is very important but I think sometimes the church tries to hide the truth when in some churches I should say when that truth is not in line with its interests and what it teaches and sometimes it does it because it is ignorant to what is happening and it doesn't know any better but I think one of the things we learn and I know tomorrow there will be a paddle on conflict transformation reconciliation and I want to say that in the context of our work truth is the utmost important ingredient to a healthy and effective reconciliation process if that truth is not out there it's very easy for anger to fester and anger can break down communication when it becomes the mode of expression it can also be anger can be that which incentivizes us to bridge but it can also break down the communication and so I think as it relates to churches we do have a long way to go but I think we are slowly getting there and we see in Canada so many of the churches especially within the past couple of years that have worked on their structures that have worked on their policies on what they say on Palestine Israel so that it is in line with a greater truth one that holds the narratives of the marginalized and the oppressed and that is more expansive than limited Thank you Eric I saw a Robert's hand so I'm going to give you a Robert's hand do you want to come down here Robert? You can be heard Is it okay? Thank you for the title but it can also be our first post in because it is a societal thing and what it comes down to is this concept of narrative and I believe the idea of narrative is actually the wrong idea to be working with because narrative is really built on an agenda to go some place specific so as Palestinians we cannot compete on narrative what we need to do is tell our story our truth story which is not a narrative because narrative is about injecting a certain agenda to lead people to a particular place a true story is just to share the truth the truth of what happened in history the truth of today the truth of our reasoning what makes sense to you what do your eyes see a narrative is not about what do you see it's about let us interpret what you see so as much as I live in narrative and work with it as we all do we also need to move away from the constrictions and the restrictions, limitations of narrative because the Palestinians will never compete on narrative if we just don't have it so if we could start thank you so my question is what are we going to replace that with? so I don't want to get into philosophical discussions of what constitutes narrative and not narrative but when I say narrative it doesn't necessarily mean that the narrative isn't true like 100% can be true but a narrative can also be false and what we see in this world now is where you have so many different people with so many access to platforms with so many different media is a conflict of narratives all over the place and so to say that my narrative is true is not novel everybody says that their narrative is true it's just from my perspective, the Palestinian narrative happens to be true so we have to figure out how to make that narrative or if you want to call it our true story how to make that true story more prominent more widely accepted more easily spoken about that's why for example marrying it or aligning it with things like the indigenous narrative is the right way because it's something that people understand and something that most right thinking people agree with whereas that kind of easy way to tell our story, our true story has just not been there before I think you're right that we can't really sometimes complete our narrative with the other narrative but at the same time we can tell our real stories and document them because we are in need for such stories and we don't have that they are just oral and present a huge or a real documentation of these stories of our people who has been displaced who has been obliged to leave under threatening and under the violence that they have witnessed so telling the story documenting the story and repeating the story is very important there we have to move from here and say that why should we only continue to debate about narratives that can be a truth or it can't be but as you mentioned that we know that our story is right so let's move continue and move into the future what are the needs of our people how can we really talk about a sustainable peace if we have a partner of course I have to throw in the fact that the planning team of this entire weekend and the whole weekend the exhibit wanted to use this photo exhibit that talks about the three people so we're talking about Afrika Indigenous people here and Palestinians because it directly compares their narratives of this possession right and I think that the narrative in Canada has changed rather dramatically I would say in the last 20 years since the truth and reconciliation commission of course there's a lot of ignorance still I mean I'm not saying we're making tremendous progress but I think that certainly the churches and others have taken in the truth of the Indigenous experience of dispossession in this land and can now maybe see with a little more clear eyes and open ears what the dispossession that has occurred elsewhere is about and what that results in in terms of oppression and hardship and exploitation and so on so I think that that's why we wanted to have this exhibit in the first place right is to compare these three narratives of dispossession and say that we still have a long way to go both here and in Palestine but look what happened in South Africa I mean they still have their challenges but they're moving forward in a way that we hope we eventually will hear and that Palestinians we hope can as well and the other thing is that the truth and reconciliation commission's report in 2015 was a reason they put truth first right