 Ydw i'n cael ei wneud, dyfodol, ffawr, yr unig 10 o amser yma'r unig sy'n gyfrindig y nifer. Mae'n fawr yn strrygelig ac yn ysgrifwyr hyn sy'n im應ent yn lleol iawn. Mae'n hyffordd i amser, mae'n fawr yn gallu ei unig yma i fy ngyrddun iawn. Mae'n fawr yn ei fawr yn ei fawr cynnig yw'n iawn sy'n ei fawr yn ei fawr. am yr ysgolwyd ar gyfer. Ysgolwyd ar gyfer yr hyn oedd o'r ffocws o'r ffeimlu felly o'r rhaid i'r sgolwyd ar gyfer Sois. Mae'n gweithio'r cyfnod o eich rhan o'r ddigwysg ysgolwyddau, cael Olai Soiinka, Forest Whitaker, David Callili, a Claudio Rodin. Fynd y fawr yn gweithio llawdau ym Mhwg Rhunig, ..aeth yna'r Llaneyf yn ymdweud, yn fwyfnod, yn ymdweud yn ymdweud... ..yng Nghymru yw eu gweithio'n gweithio... ..yng Nghymru yn ymdweud ymdweud ymdweud. Fy yw'r Prifysgfa'r Aetrha yn ddwy'r mewn ddweud... ..aethaf o'r hynny yma eich llwyddo'i... ..yng Nghymru. Mae'n fawr o'r digwydd ymdweud ymdweud... ..y'n meddwl â'r llwyddiad... however we think from countries around the world than practically any other university. Our students come from over 130 countries, our staff from over 90 countries. And we pride ourselves on being very special. Not just because of our diversity but because we're a school with subject language and regional expertise and a unique global perspective. Soas is an important place for debate and for discussion around many of the very challenging issues that are facing our world today. And that is why in this our centenary year we have launched our SOAS fundraising campaign Questions Worth Asking. We want our students and our academic staff to keep on asking and answering today's most pressing questions. And if you go on the website you'll see that the questions range from things like is there a solution to the world's refugee crisis, to what happens after war, should we all speak the same language, what makes a global citizen. Through that campaign we're seeking further support for our work for example in relation to scholarship support and we're very proud that with the support of our students this year we launched our student sanctuary scheme. A scheme which provides six undergraduates fee waivers and one postgraduate fee waiver for people displaced from their home country and who do not have access to student finance. And we're very keen to continue that work but also to endow academic posts and to make sure that we do everything we can to get the student experience right. So let me now turn to this evening and before our introductions two housekeeping points if I may. Can I first all ask you to check that your phones are on silent? And secondly if you're tweeting which I very much hope that some of you will do that you will use the hashtag SOAS100. So now I'd like to invite Professor Gilbert Atchard who is the Chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies to introduce our very special guest lecturer this evening. Gilbert, good to you. Thank you Director Ramos and good evening to all friends of SOAS100. This is the Centre for Palestine Studies. This is the fourth annual lecture of our centre which is now five years old. We started with our first annual lecture with Professor Walid Khalidi four years ago and this year happens to be a special occasion. One good occasion if you want or one happy occasion the SOAS100 so we could combine the occasion of the annual lecture with the occasion of the centenary. And another half centenary much less happy the 50th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank. 50 years already since this happened in 1967. And on this occasion I mean it is difficult to find a better speaker, a better guest, a better lecturer than Rajash Hadi whom we will have the pleasure to see and to listen to. Rajash Hadi studied law in the city in London and he belongs to a family very much law related family. His grandfather was a judge in the courts in the British Mandate Palestine and his father was a lawyer. Of course he himself is a lawyer and he is a founder of the pioneering Al Haq which means the right and the loads in Arabic and independent Palestinian human rights organisation founded in 1979 and based in Ramallah in the West Bank. Al Haq monitors and documents human rights violations by all parties and I stress emphasize all parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict both on the Palestinian side and of course on the Israeli side. It has been an affiliate of the Geneva based international commission of juries for over 20 years and is a member of the International Federation for Human Rights and Habitat International Coalition as well as the World Organization Against Torture. It is also part of the Executive Committee of the Euro Mediterranean Human Rights Network and of the Steering Committee of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisations Network. Rajash Hadi is also a writer, a well-known writer who authored several acclaiming books including, I won't read the door list, but including some of the prominent titles, Strangers in the House in 2002. Palestinian walks notes on a vanishing landscape which won the 2008 Orwell Prize, Occupation Diaries which came out in 2012 and Language of War, Language of Peace which came out two years ago in 2015. His latest book which will be on display outside which you could be able to buy outside after the talk is where the line is drawn, Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine, just came out absolutely first time here. The title of the lecture is here, very appropriate to the occasion as I said. Rajash Hadi will speak for about one hour after which there will be a reception. We don't have time for any questions or answers we would have liked but he planned for a relatively long lecture so we'll have the pleasure of listening to him for this whole lecture. I will now further delay, join me in welcoming Rajash Hadi. Thank you very much. The plan had its core, the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, following the lines of the 1947 partition scheme with East Jerusalem as its capital. The question of refugees and refugee compensation to be resolved according to the principles laid down in the UN Resolution 194 regarding the right of return. The plan had the support of some 50 Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, it was neither accepted nor even considered by the Israeli government which had since the start of the occupation been dodging one peace offer by the Palestinians and the Arab states after another. In the words of historian Aviraaz, practicing a policy of deception. The PLO which was just emerging and finding its feet did not respond to this initiative. As time passed, most of the PLO supporters of the plan were assassinated by Israel. Amongst whom were my father, Isam Sartawi, Saeed Hamami, Naeem Khadir and Ezid Din Qalaq. Now, 50 years later, it is what the PLO and most countries of the world are calling for. How much suffering we would all have been spared had it gone through then. A quarter of a century after my determined if type of strewn typing of my father's proposal, there was a time of hope in the world and hope looked like it would pay us a visit. David Bowie sang at the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1987 and contributed to bringing it down. Then, on November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw, the wall finally fell and the citizens of the German Democratic Republic were free to cross the country's borders. Meanwhile, in apartheid South Africa, positive developments were taking place which culminated in elections being held on April 27, 1994, where all citizens of whatever colour were given the vote. The hateful apartheid regime of South Africa ended. The great demographic fear of the black majority if the vote is given to every citizen of the country proved unfounded. The question I want to pose here is why didn't these two hopeful events that resulted in the resolution of long lasting endemic injustices inspire the Israeli government to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories, resolve outstanding issues between Palestinians and Israelis, and usher in a lasting peace. After all, in the midst of the Palestinian intifada, there was new thinking on the part of the PLO which declared its commitment to an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. A related question that I want to ask is why didn't the world put its weight to make this happen? There might not be a single answer to these two questions, but I shall try to propose some pointers. When I asked Israeli leftist friends why wasn't the end of apartheid in South Africa an inspiring event to Israelis, I got two different responses. The first was that the whites in South Africa had lost whereas we Israelis have not. The second, more convincing answer, was that the Israelis do not see their situation as a kin in any way to apartheid and so they do not consider it would have a similar resolution. Some of you might already be wondering why I ask these questions when the answer is obvious. Did the world not make an effort to get the parties together in 1991 with the convening of the International Peace Conference in Madrid in the presence of Arab states and Israel? And did this effort not eventually end in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords celebrated by the famous handshake at the White House Sloan by Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat repeatedly shown on TV screens the world over? But before I elaborate why I believe these were illusory hopes, I want to go back to the second answer given by Israelis where they explain the lack of a positive inspiration by distinguishing between apartheid regime in South Africa and the situation in Israel-Palestine. To understand how the Israelis see the history of their state and how different this is from the way Palestinians see it, I want to go back to the formative event of 1948, the year of the establishment of Israel and reflect on the word necbi. The Arabic word for defeat is hazime, but this was not the word chosen to describe what happened in Palestine in 1948, so why is that? A defeat usually means that the society or nation is set back, its values put in question. It might take it many years to collect itself and rebuild what it lost and rise again. This is what happened in 1945 to Germany and to Japan after the Second World War. To different extents, both had either all or part of their territories occupied by the victorious nation or nations, and both soon made it into first straight powerful nations. But the cause of Palestine was different. The case of Palestine was different. Palestinians experienced an utter dissolution of their nation which was forced out of its homeland and fragmented into parts, one part in the Gaza Strip under Egypt, another part in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Jordan, and the rest scattered in refugee camps in surrounding countries. Yet they were not defined within the UN Refugee Convention as refugees. Palestine seized to exist. To describe what we felt the Palestinian nation a word stronger than defeat was needed. That word was necbi, catastrophe. In Hebrew, there is still no word for the greatest catastrophe that the establishment of Israel caused the Palestinians, and recently its commemoration was made illegal by law. Israel described the war in 1948 as its war of independence, and this was long before the culture of post truth had emerged. By doing so, the country is claiming that it got its independence from the British. Yet it was the British who in the Belford declaration of 1917 100 years ago promised the land that had a majority of Palestinian Arabs to the Jews, and it was the British who worked throughout the British mandate over Palestine from 1922 to 1948 to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in accordance with the terms of the mandate. The real reason why Israel makes this claim, I propose, is because the new country wanted to position itself within the group of decolonized nations. Without delay, the newly established country proceeded to reinvent a history that excluded any recognition of the presence of the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants of the country, forcing out most of them and erasing any sign of the former presence and history in the land. As has often been noted, the conceit goes that prior to the return quote-unquote of the exiled Jews, there was nothing there. The Palestinians who happened to be on the land had only come when the first Zionist colonization began because it created economic opportunities for them. Otherwise, the land was fellow, empty, desert, waiting for 3,000 years for the return of its original and true owners, the Jews, to arrive and populate it. It is no coincidence that this terra nullius is the exact justification given by colonists throughout history the world over. In other words, in 1948 there was an attempt at rewriting the entire history of Palestine. It was akin to year zero, after which a new history begins with the ingathering of the Jews into the historic homeland Israel. The conceit of an empty land did not only apply to 1948. Consider the words of the famous song Jerusalem of Gold written by the Israeli national poet Nomi Shamer shortly before the liberation quote-unquote of East Jerusalem. Where she describes East Jerusalem in June 1967 as I quote, an empty place without residence. The water wells ran dry. The market square is empty unquote. In her eyes the Arabs were merely transparent figures. But this view is not exclusive to Israel. Many in the world go along with the belief that Israel is not a historical country established 69 years ago by a UN resolution, but rather a biblical state that was not established by historical or legal events rooted in the modern 20th century. Much derived from this ahistorical view of Israel. If it is 3000 years old then it has not taken anyone's land. It did not need to empty the land of its Palestinian inhabitants and take over their place. The destruction of the landscape and memories of a whole nation after 1948 in Israel is well documented. I did not experience it first hand as did my parents and their generation. But I see it happening now in the West Bank where public land and places with significance and meaning to those of us living there, hills, springs and wadis, as well as archaeological sites that do not show any evidence of Jewish settlement are being systematically destroyed or renamed. Because our memories and attachment to the place is not recognized by the Jewish settlers who are intent on transforming the land to reflect only their own. It all derives from the refusal to recognize the neck bay. That is why in a more protracted manner the neck bay continues until today driven by the same attitudes and ideology. Sometimes the refusal to recognize Palestine is so outrageous. It is almost funny. As when member of Kineset Annat Berco said, Palestine does not exist because there is no letter P in Arabic, forgetting that the Arabic name is Philistine. The Israeli version of what happened in 1948 is the dominant narrative of the events of that year. It was against this story supported by the most popular of books of the Bible and with the sympathy from one of the worst atrocities in modern history, the Holocaust, that the Palestinians had to tell the world their version of what befell them in 1948. To this day, alas, we are still not successful in getting this across. We have no voice. This first neck bay was a more central and formative experience of my life. I was born after it occurred in Ramallah to which my family was exiled from their coastal home in Jaffa. All the talk I grew up, as I grew up, was of the lost land and the shock and horror of what happened to them. As I was growing up evidence of the impoverishment and suffering was all around me. The second Palestinian neck bay started soon after 1967 with the occupation by Israel of the rest of Palestine. From the early 80s, when I began following what Israel was doing with the establishment of settlements in the occupied territories and bringing its people to live there, I could not imagine that it could end in any other way than as apartheid. I was not alone in thinking this. In 1976, Yitzhak Rabin, who served as Israel's defense minister during the first Intifada and as its prime minister during the negotiations and signing of the Oslo Accords, gave an interview in which he compared the 60 settlements in existence at that time as, quote, a cancer in the social and democratic tissue of the state of Israel, unquote. He was critical of the Israeli settler organization Gush Omonim, block of the faithful, who initially spearheaded the settlement movement in Israel, describing it as, quote, a group that takes the law into its own hands. Because he said because of the Arab population, I don't think it would be possible to settle over time unless we want to get to apartheid with a million and half Arabs inside the state of Israel, unquote. Israel's Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, appointed in 1981 by Prime Minister Minahim Beigun, had other thoughts and a very different attitude to settlements than Rabin. He was not worried about the presence of Palestinians in the occupied territories and was planning to deal with us similarly to how the apartheid regime dealt with the black majority. Indeed, that year, Sharon secretly visited South Africa. While he was being briefed about the country, he told his aide that what he most wanted to know about was the ban to stands, how they are structured and administered. He was obviously planning for a similar fate for the Palestinians, those of us who were living in the West Bank and Gaza. He invited one of the ban to stand presidents to visit Israel where he was met with great pomp and ceremony. This president also visited one of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in his speech called this a historic day. It was then that I realized that Israel was learning from the apartheid regime and that the future they planned for us was similar to the homelands which apartheid South Africa designated for the black population. In time, I was proven right. When Israel's ally, the South African regime of racial discrimination fell, Israel did not get the more optimistic message that it was possible for Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews to live together as the blacks and whites now do in the democratic regime whatever its problems. Instead, it learned to avoid the mistakes of the white regime that they figured had led to the failure of the system of apartheid, that is the dependence of the economy on black labor. Thus, in the early 90s Israel proceeded to reduce the country's dependence on the Palestinian labor by closing the borders between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza for Palestinians and importing workers from abroad even though it was more expensive for them to do so. Through the Oslo Accords, Israel managed to further the implementation of the apartheid model. This it did by repackaging the occupation without ending it, transferring civilian matters to a newly created Palestinian authority while keeping the majority of the land under Israeli de facto sovereignty, controlling the borders, and creating banter stands for the Palestinians with a security fence subcontracting certain powers to leaders it did not choose and yet in some way it did by assassinating those whom it did not like. But why was Israel so unprepared for peace and why did it not use the opportunity of negotiations with the PLO to arrive at a real peace with its neighbors who at that time were willing to make peace with it. After Israel's victory in 1967 in the 1967 war, the Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Diane declared, we are now an empire and proceeded to act with imperious arrogance. Some might say Israel is still drunk with victory. Rather than use the Oslo negotiations to make real peace with its enemy, the PLO, Israel prepared and managed to get its adversary to sign a surrender document. The PLO on its part was unprepared for the negotiations, was feeling vulnerable and was determined to re-establish itself in Palestine whatever the cost. An Israeli professor of law and a friend pointed out to me that Israeli legal advisor to Rabin conducted these negotiations as if he was a lawyer doing a real estate deal when after the land is sold and the deal completed the two sides are unlikely to meet to ever meet. How inappropriate this approach was to Israel and Palestine who are fated to live side by side. The failure to seek a real peace in Oslo is not the only reason why Israel was not and remains unprepared to make peace. Peace would mean a restructuring of the myth on which the Israeli state has been established and possibly large amounts in compensation for the dispossessed Palestinians and of course sharing the land with them. There is also the possible loss in the event of peace of some of their most lucrative export of weapons and weapons systems. Beyond this commercial consideration there is another matter. The war footing that Israel is continuously fostering perpetuates the fear that acts as a glue that holds the various contradictory strands of Israeli society together. In this Israel is different from apartheid South Africa where in South Africa the master race was homogeneous in Israel it is polarized politically economically and socially. On August 30th 2016 the former Mossad Israel's external security service chief Tamir Pardu said that quote the greatest danger Israel faces isn't external but rather the divisions within Israeli society. He continues, if a divided society crosses a certain threshold you can reach phenomena such as civil war in extreme cases. The distance between the present day situation in Israel and the civil war is growing smaller, he said. Uri Avneri the veteran journalist and former member of the Israeli parliament commented on this statement by explaining that quote in Israel we have a lot of socio economic problems but the division between left and right almost solely concerns peace and the occupation. If one wants an end of the occupation and peace with the Palestinians one is a leftist. If one wants the annexation of the occupied territories and the enlargement of the settlements one is a rightist. He then added a lot of Israelis have begun to talk of two Jewish societies in Israel. Some even talk about two Jewish peoples within the Israeli Jewish nation. What holds them together he believes is the conflict, the occupation, the perpetual state of war. Others have pointed out that it is not that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been forced on Israel rather it's the other way around. Israel keeps up the conflict because it needs the conflict for its very existence. I tried to show why the end of apartheid in South Africa and the fall of the Berlin Wall did not inspire the Israelis. The second question I want to try to answer is why did the world not put pressure on the country to make peace such as by imposing sanctions on Israel. I have been involved in the struggle for Palestinian human rights since 1979 and have witnessed a change to the worst in the reporting of the Palestinian reality. The establishment media seems to favour a distorted view of balance rather than pursue a search for truth and exploration of the facts that could illuminate the situation. I will give only one example. During the Gaza War of 2014, I was interviewed by the BBC Today programme. I noted that Gaza is still occupied by Israel, which is an incontrovertible fact under international law. Instead of asking what are the implications of this, the programme brought in Dore Gold, whose words in denial of this fact concluded the programme. Rather than expose the deception, the BBC was propagating it, and in my naivete, I thought its mission was to educate the public. As a consequence, after ten years of blockade, there is hardly any international pressure on Israel to lift its siege on the Gaza Strip. Here is how one recent visitor to the Strip describes conditions there. Gaza is cloaked in desperation. You feel it the minute you cross the border. It's like travelling to another world. Already at the crossing, you see seriously ill people, mainly cancer patients, waiting in line in a hall. They are hoping for some compassion and permission to cross the border and receive treatment. By the way, the treatment they seek is not only in Israeli hospitals but in Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem. You go by car and see ruins, thousands of destroyed houses, factories in ruins, sewage flowing through the streets. More than 60% of the inhabitants are unemployed. There's terrible poverty. There is simply no money, not for food or for medication and not for warm clothes for children. People light fires in order to stay warm. It's quite common in Gaza to see a fire outside a tent standing next to a ruined house. Water sources are contaminated. Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster. This failure by the establishment media to educate the public about the prevailing situation in Palestine is unlikely to change. Nor is the government's bias or even infatuation with Israel, whether in the United Kingdom or in the United States. The present Palestinian Authority's strategy is to abandon the armed struggle in favour of international diplomacy, including suing Israel for war crimes at the international criminal court. Instead of encouraging this, the United States has warned Palestinian leaders that suing Israel in the international court would trigger severe steps by the US administration, including the closure of the PLO offices in the American capital, and an end to economic aid to the Palestinian Authority. During his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump ditched decades of diplomacy and solid principles of international law when he told his guest, I'd like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit. And yet despite the power of the Israeli Empire and its 50-year-old attempt at imposing on the world its status in the occupied territories, is not that of a occupier, but the fulfilment of the wish of the Almighty, the world continues to refer to it by its correct name, occupation. UN Security Council Resolution 2334 reaffirmed quote that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law, and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and the just, lasting and comprehensive peace, unquote. The resolution also called upon all states to distinguish in the relevant dealings between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied in 1967. A most bizarre situation has arisen, whereby the gulf between the reality on the ground with more creeping annexation into the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the global recognition of the Palestinian State, which has 90 embassies around the world and denunciation of settlements as illegal, this gulf is forever growing wider. Those who claim that realities on the ground are making the Palestinian State unviable are not taking into consideration that as time passes, the State of Palestine, legally speaking, is becoming a reality. How will these two parallel realities be reconciled? Could Israel be betting on the collapse of international law? It might well be so. Daniel Reisner, who served as head of the Israeli Army's International Law Department, proposed that, quote, if you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. An action that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries, unquote. As proof, Reisner cited the targeted killings Israel conducted continually until the practice was, in his words, in the center of the bounds of legitimacy, unquote. The Israeli government's latest attempt at legitimization takes the form of a new law passed by the Knesset. The law retroactively legalizes government expropriation of privately owned Palestinian land on which settlements or outposts were built, quote, in good faith or at the state's instructions. In effect, it makes the illegal legal. This situation interests and worries me greatly as a lawyer and a believer in the role of international law in helping preserve peace in the world. As a writer, what engages me is the extent to which the present reality brings the worst in all of us and turns us, Israelis and Palestinians into racists and killers. The disparity in the power of both sides make Israel the greater violator by a magnitude. The majority of these violations are well reported. What I find most unpalatable is the extent of the meanness and utter Kafkaesque absurdity that is so often displayed by Israel. I will give only a few examples. The Israeli authorities refused to allow children from Gaza, however young they are, to come for cancer treatment at the hospital accompanied by their mother or any other relative, unless they are over 55 years of age. These children are in a particularly difficult condition and desperately need their mothers. It is so tragic one pediatric nurse told me and so sad a 50 year old cannot possibly be a mother of a young child and they need their mother. A new Israeli regulation now allows visitors to security prisoners to bring in five photographs to give to relatives in prison. One of the photos that one relative brought was of five members of his family. Upon inspection the visitor was told he could only take in that one. Asked why he was told because it counts for five photos since it shows five figures. A 32 year old Palestinian who lived with his ailing mother in a West Bank refugee camp wakes up in the middle of the night as soldiers burst into the house. They shoot him 11 times claiming he threatened them with a knife and lock his mother Fawziye in the bedroom. Fawziye asks, imagine what you would feel like if soldiers entered your house and killed your son before your eyes. You wake up and see that your son is gone. The head of the finance ministry department that enforces planning and construction laws, Avi Cohen, lives in an illegal West Bank settlement outpost. Cohen's job includes issuing demolition orders for illegal construction inside Israel. The recently appointed Israeli high court judge, British born David Mintz, lives nearby Ramallah in the illegal settlement of Dolev. While Palestinians in Israel have to build illegally in one sweep on 22 January 2017, the Jerusalem municipality approved permits for 566 homes for the settlement. The land of Pescadzeev, Ramot and Ramot Shlomo on Palestinian lands. About half a million Arab citizens in Israel live in about 100,000 buildings erected without permits in Arab locales throughout the country. But then there is a method in that if Palestinians live in unlicensed homes, the family will constantly live in fear that its home will be demolished. This is how Israel rules by keeping people feeling they're in violation of the law and so feeling guilty and under threat. This way we Palestinians are easier to manipulate and govern. These are but few examples of the inhumanity Palestinians living under occupation and in Israel experience. I can attest that after living for 50 years under Israeli occupation, the level of anger, frustration and anxiety has only been on the increase. And this is how I, an older man with a plenty of occupation experience feels. How would it be for the young and vulnerable? I could go on and give many more examples of much worse atrocities, cruelty and violence. But what is the point? Suffice it to say that the situation we live under brings the worst in all of us. The sad fact is that Israel did not want peace, not in 1967, not in 1978 at the time of the Sedat's visit, not in 1993 at the time of the Oslo and not in 2016 when, as revealed last month, Secretary of State John Kerry presented a plan for a regional peace initiative including recognition of Israel as a Jewish state that had the support of Arab countries because Israel does not want to give up the territories it occupied in 1967 or recognize Palestine as a nation. This continuation of the conflict has brought the worst elements in their society and in ours to be in control, a heavy price to pay. Had Israel wanted to live with its neighbors in peace, they would have used the occasion of their control over a significant segment of Palestinian society that extended for 50 years, a quarter, half a century to show how it could have been between the two sides, how they could live together and benefit from each other and prosper. Had Israel wanted peace, it could have taught its own people Arabic, the language of the people in the region to which it ostensibly wants to belong rather than hone its expertise in recruiting collaborators who helped to kill more Palestinians or assassinate Palestinians inside and outside the territories who called for peace with Israel, it could have encouraged those calling for peace and coexistence. Instead, it was greedy for land and its leaders were full of hubris. Their policies ended up encouraging violence and ever more increasing violence, extreme violence as Amos Gilad, the director of the political military affairs bureau of Israel's defense minister once told American officials, we do not do Gandhi very well. When I was close to the end of writing my new book where the line is drawn crossing boundaries in occupied Palestine, I came upon what the prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu said and I quote, In the end, in the state of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all. I'll be told, this is what you want to protect the villa? The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the state of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts, unquote. As I read this, I was confronted with the recent events of the ever more common killings and brutality. I went into despair about our future in Palestine, Israel. But as a writer, I felt I should not allow myself to be swept by the worst emotions and instead look to the future and hope to influence it. I asked myself the question, how should I react? Should I succumb to anger and despair at being compared to a wild beast and respond by thrusting similarly disparaging epitaphs at my enemy? I decided against all this. I recalled what Raymond Williams has said that quote to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. I also found myself in agreement with Rebecca Solnit wrote that quote, the time when you don't need hope is when your hopes have been fulfilled, unquote. And ours, alas, haven't been. We are in desperate need of hope. And bringing about change and hope, writers and thinkers surely have a role to play. Not only by analyzing what is taking place as I just did, but also by imagining how it could be different. In this way, writers can ultimately tilt the balance and encourage the victory of those with positive, creative energy rather than the negative energy of terror, violence and hatred. In my book, I wrote about a long-term friendship with Henry, a Canadian Jewish immigrant to Israel. A friendship that despite many trying times of anger and alienation continues to be a source of pride for me. Our friendship has extended over 40 years. In its course were many ups and downs, anger, expectations that were not met, jealousies and disappointments. But despite all these, our friendship held up. In the book, it isn't put forward as a model nor as representative. Yet the description of the challenges and prevails that we went through in the course of our long relationship that extended over most of the occupation might help bring out the varied phases that the occupation itself went through and negate the belief that the way it now is between the two nations is how it always has been and will be. The truth is that it has not always been so bad between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Israel, nor has it always seemed so hopeless. When the prospect of Arabs and Jews ever living together in peace is discussed, many despair that after all what has happened between the two sides, they can never come to renounce their hatred of each other. Others point out to the time before Zionism when Arabs and Jews did live together in peace in Palestine. Yet it is not as though a time will ever come when there will be no prejudice or that there ever was at such a time. There need not be love and there will always be prejudice. We do not have to follow President Trump who says we will only allow into our country those who love us. Even when two religious communities like the Palestinian Christians and Muslims live together as we do in Palestine today, there is prejudice. But this does not mean that we cannot live together and live very well together with mutual benefit and excellent coexistence. Likewise, there is prejudice between Jews and Christians in the UK and between the Mormons and other Christians in the US and between the blacks and whites in South Africa. And yet these different religious communities and races live together and their coexistence is not premised or conditional upon the removal of the prejudice. Life simply has to be organised around it. The problem arises when there is fear of the other, which is what we have in Palestine Israel between Jews and Arabs. It is this feeling of insecurity that causes tensions and eruptions. But people are capable of learning to live together while keeping the prejudices under control. This leads me to think that the belief that the two sides can never live together in Palestine and Israel and therefore solutions of exclusion and high walls as proposed by Mr Netanyahu are the only answer is total rubbish. What we do need is to find practical arrangements for Palestine, Israel and Jordan to cooperate as many states in a region that should not be geographically divided. Israeli Jews, among others, are adept and skilled at devising practical arrangements to organise society. They have long had to deal with this in their own fractured society. The options are many, but only if there is a will to find them. At present there is no incentive. The occupation is beneficial to Israel and the country continues to be unconditionally accepted throughout the world even while it oppresses another nation. The continuation of the occupation has to become a liability before this can change. That is why the boycott, divestment and sanctions strategy is a source of hope. At the end of my book I wrote that quote in our small way the friendship between Henry and me exposed the lie paddled by Netanyahu and his followers to Israeli people and the world. That the Arab is the fulfilment, is the fundamental and eternal enemy of the Jew. That the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews cannot be resolved diplomatically and that Israeli people have to live forever by the sword. As if to confirm that the writers can indeed play a role in ushering change, I received the following letter while I was writing the book from an Israeli high school teacher in Tel Aviv. I want to end by reading to you from this letter. I read all your books that are available in Hebrew, it goes. A strong feeling of loss awakened in me while reading them. I believe that not only the Palestinians lost their homes, lands and collective life and culture during the 1948 but also the Jews lost partners for a better life and most of all our humanity. The 1967 war was a second disaster on both of us. 49 years of despicable occupation. You are of course the main victims of it. But we are also paying the price of violating your basic human rights. We have lost our humanity once more. This is why I teach the history of the Nakbe and about the occupation. I believe we the Israelis must take responsibility for what we have done and continue doing. We must find a just solution and to do that we must acknowledge our wrongdoings. As you probably imagine, it's not an easy task to achieve in Israel but it is possible. For me the most effective way to do so is to work with youth. Most of them keep an open mind because they still haven't been drafted to the army. For an Israeli soldier acknowledging our crimes might mean a total breakdown of his identity. After all, looking at the mirror and recognizing a perpetrator can bring an identity crisis. But the effect of this acknowledgement on high school students is different. They are free of personal guilt although they do feel collective guilt because they never served in the army and they never expropriated land. They blame the older generation, us the grown ups for lying and deceiving them, for sentencing them to hatred and war and for turning them into perpetrators. It is pretty amazing to watch how it's possible to open their eyes to reality and help them deal with this process courageously. All the best. Adwa, thank you Adwa and thank you all for listening.