 Hello, and welcome to today's program. My name is Bob Scheibel. I am Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at the University of Southern Maine, and I am also the Chair of Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, also known as MVPR. I am here today with three members of MVPR who went with me and my wife and one other person. There were six of us all together. We went to Palestine this past October for an almost two weeks of olive picking during the olive harvest season. So let me introduce the other people that I will be conversing with today. To my immediate right is Christy Hammer, and Christy is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine, or I believe it's a associate professor if you want to get it right. And next to her is Eve Sawyer, and Christy is from Scarborough. Christy is a musician. No, Eve is a musician. Eve, Eve, I'm getting it all mixed up. Eve is a musician from Portland, and next is Kathy Kenes, who is an elder law attorney from Lewiston. Now, we went on this trip with about 50 to 60 other people from, I believe, eight different European countries to pick olives. Before we begin our discussion of that, though, I want to say just a word or two about Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. Our mission, you can read in full on our website, and you can find us by just Googling Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. I also urge you to go to our Facebook page. We have over 350 members of our email on our email list, and we have, I think it's close to 700 likes on our Facebook page. Both of these are places that you can go to stay informed. You will find our mission there, but I also want to say a couple of other things about MVPR. Our primary mission is to educate the public, to educate ourselves, and to educate our public officials about the true story behind the Israel-Palestine conflict. Too much understanding of that conflict is based on talking points that Israel and Israel's propagandists have been putting out ever since before 1947. And most people seem to understand what they understand comes from the movie The Exodus. There's a very different story to be learned, and our aim is to learn that story and try to propagate that story. We also are engaged in selling Palestinian olive oil. Palestinian farmers have a very difficult time making a living. That's what all Palestinians do due to the extreme restrictions put upon commerce, put upon land, put upon water availability on Palestinians by Israel. So we sell Palestinian olive oil. Also, I think that next late summer or in the fall, we'll be taking another trip to Palestine. If you happen to be interested either in helping Palestinian farmers and enjoying some of the best olive oil on the planet, or if you're interested in making a trip, you can find my name and my phone number and my email address on that website. My name is Bob Scheiber. Okay, let's start talking about our... Oh, and also I want to mention that MVPR is very pleased to be a member organization of Portland Media Center, formerly known as Cable News Network. They're now Portland Media Center, and we're very pleased to be a member of that organization. Now let's start our conversation. Christy, I'll start with you. Could you tell us and tell your audience what made you want to make this trip? Well, I've studied Israeli-Palestinian issues for about 30 years. My dissertation chair was a Palestinian, and I also knew that conservatives and moderate Christians in the U.S. were going to the church not to criticize Israel. And so I really knew I had to see things for myself, and I really did. For example, the Swiss cheese variety of the settlement placements that ripped apart all the Palestinian land by putting them in a very kind of chaotic, patterned way over all the Palestinian land. So just seeing the devastation of the Palestinians and the Ukrainians is, I needed to see it for myself. You know, let me just say in connection with what you just made. On the back of this card, I don't know if this is this card, I don't know if the cameras can get it or not, perhaps not, but it's a card which shows the green on the far left is how much land was occupied in 1927. And each square rectangle going over to the right shows how much land the Palestinians were steadily losing due to Israel's encroachments upon their land. But on the back of it, there is a statement by Ariel Sharon in 1973 and here's what he said. We'll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and across the West Bank so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States nobody will be able to tear it apart. So you saw that in action. Okay, let me ask Eve. What made you want to take such a trip? Well, quite a different reason from Christie's. I found out that the olive oil that MVPR was selling was fabulous and also had heard a lot about the strenuous life and the horrors that the olive growers were going through and I figured, okay, here's one tiny thing that I can do. I started using the Palestinian olive oil exclusively and I used a lot of olive oil in my cooking. I can testify to that because she's one of my main customers when I put out an order. And the bottles are beautiful. I love giving Palestinian olive oil to people. It's very welcome gift. So when I heard through another organization that you could actually go to Palestine and pick the olives, I immediately was just, oh my gosh, how do I do this? How do I do this? I've got to do this. So I looked and looked and did a lot of research and then I found out, oh, I can go on this trip. It was going to cost X amount of dollars, which that was going to be hard. So I went with Bob and I said, you know anything about this trip? And he knew something. He got in touch with me, though, about two weeks later and said, Eve, I found another trip that's much less expensive. Yay! So I jumped right on that. I said, I'm going. Sign me up. I cannot wait to find out how the olives are picked. Meet the actual farmers who I've been supporting in this tiny way. And I got to meet and stay with a family. And we're going to come back to that. And I want to say that the way I was able to tell Eve about this other tour group was that our next guest told me about it because my wife and I had gone with another group in the past. It was an excellent tour, but it was a good bit more expensive than the one we went on. Excellent. So Kathy, Kathy Keynuts, would you tell us what made you want to take this trip? Well, this was my third trip to Palestine. And so having been there two times before, I've left a bit of my heart there. Once you have gone to Palestine and you meet the people and you see how beleaguered they are but how hopeful they remain in the face of the occupied people. It's heart-rending and it's also heartwarming. So I'm sure I will be back again maybe next fall again for more olive picking. But my initial interest in Palestine happened maybe 12 years ago or so. And mind you, I was born and raised practically with a holocaust on my mind. Life coffee table books of the holocaust. I read Leon Yuris. I read Anne Frank. I saw every holocaust documentary that I could see on PBS and whatnot. I actually, I lived and dreamed the holocaust in a way. And there came a point though when there was a debate going on. It was an online discussion about Israel, Israel, Israel good, Palestine bad. And it hit me like a lightning bolt one day that there's something missing in this narrative. Nothing is ever so black and white. And so I started searching for another narrative and I found a professor, Juan Cole from University of Michigan. He has a wonderful blog. He's a Middle Eastern professor. He was my starting point. And from there I started reading by Alon Pappe, who is an Israeli historian. He wrote the book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. He was a professor at Haifa University at the time he wrote that. Right. So he's an Israeli and he has written a bare bones, you know, highly footnoted account of how Israel came into being and how it involved tearing apart Palestine. And so I took my first trip with a Lutheran group. I'm Lutheran. And it was a bunch of Lutherans on a tour bus going through Israel and into Palestine. And the leaders of the group were a husband and wife minister couple who had served in the Lutheran church in Jerusalem for five years. So they gave us a really good inside look at what was going on in Palestine. And from there I knew I had to go back and I did a stint a couple years later doing legal research in Hebron. Hopefully I'll talk a little bit more about that. I'll come back to that later. And so again, you know, having been there having seen the plight of these people I've always been someone who's kind of for the underdog, which kind of explains how I was so entrenched in the Israel narrative. But having seen now the victimization of Palestinians I can't help but want to continue spreading the word and doing what I can to just help raise awareness because without that nothing's going to change. You know, I have a very similar thing in my story of how I got interested. My daughter, I grew up Southern Baptist Judeo-Christian tradition, very pro-Israel and our daughter was going to school down in Boston. She was taking some courses in the Middle East. And she came home one weekend and she was talking about her course in the Middle East. And I said to her at one point, Jamie, you're starting to sound anti-Semitic and you know that that is not okay in this household. No, no, no, I'm not really. So my wife and I decided to go to research it, to study, because in a way we wanted to be able to guide her. And when we started reading, we just went to the library and plugged in on the computer Israel-Palestine conflict. I remember saying, and we remember saying to ourselves mind, there's another whole story here that we've never heard before. So sometimes it just calls for people to be open to beginning to learn. Christy, let me ask you. What do you feel like you really learned on this trip? What did you take away from it? What are some things that struck you most? Well even highly educated people, highly educated academics they all were warning me, you know, we're going to Palestine, Middle East, be careful, it's going to be dangerous and the subtext was definitely it's those Palestinians with their rockets and throwing stones and you know, I was never once even the middle of the night with Palestinian gangs going by me, going back to a hotel, like I would be maybe in places in the U.S. Palestinian youth gangs. The only time I was ever nervous is when I was in the olive fields and it was right up next to the settlement as they build them, right up next to the Palestinian olive groves, they can say oh, we got to take this grove, security barrier or buffer. And I saw two people right on the other side of the fence, two settlers and I saw a glint of metal and I know that we got confirmed that they're all given guns, the settlers even if they come there and they don't have youth serving in the military that get the guns. And it's worth emphasizing that the settlers have guns, the Palestinians only have rocks. Have rocks. So I saw the glint and it turned out to be them just carrying a ladder. But that was really the only time I was nervous was the settlers. And it's the Israeli soldiers are really the ones that are the locus of violence and it's all against the Palestinians. I just wanted to clarify sometimes people may be watching this and go the settlers, what the Palestinian settlers? These are Israeli settlers that needs to be clarified the settlements. I also found that that's the only time that I felt a little bit not at ease when we were picking and I could see the settlement right there within like an eighth of a mile away. And it needs to be pointed out in connection with what you're saying, that one of the reasons they like to bring internationals in to help with the olive picking is that it is seen as a protection for the Palestinians because sometimes the settlers will harass, throw stones, even shoot at Palestinians in their own fields. Steal the olives, cut down the trees. They're much less likely to do that when there are internationals that are present. One other point of clarification, just I think a lot of people don't understand what a settler is in this context. The settlers are people who have come into what was designated as Palestinian land and they have squatted and the Israeli government has talked about it. And they would initially turn a blind eye when they would set up tents or maybe container trucks. But as soon as they pour cement under Israeli law, they can't be kicked out. So now in the West Bank, which again was designated as Palestinian territory by the United Nations, there are over 500,000 Israeli settlers and encroaching, stealing, building roads across Palestinian land. Many people say that there will never be a two-state solution now, because this has been allowed. Yeah, it's as people have used the analogy of Swiss cheese. It really is very difficult and I had the experience of my last trip there, my wife and I, this was our fourth trip of having lunch one day with the managing editor of Jerusalem Post, which is a very conservative newspaper, and I asked him if he thought they were still a two-state solution possible. And he said, yes. I said, well, how, with all of the settlements cutting things up, and he said, well, we'll just build tunnels underneath the settlements and the people can reach each other through tunnels. Which is like telling that the Palestinians can live like moles. Let me ask you, Eve, what was, what did you live with some people there, your family? You might want to tell us something about the family you lived with and what you took away from this trip. Okay, it was a couple, Palestinian couple who had grown children who were out away from the country. Not sure how they got out. Well, I know they had to actually travel to Jordan because the Palestinians are not allowed to use the Tel Aviv airport. Is this true? I mean, I heard that and these people said, yes, we have to travel and it's very difficult. We have to go into Jordan, the next country over. And even getting to Jordan they have to pass through Israeli checkpoints to get in there. Yes. That was horrific. I'll just digress here for a moment. Going through these checkpoints, I just couldn't believe. I'm not used to seeing people with guns standing there and coming up on the bus and okay, so show us all your passports and things like that. I just thought, but the Palestinians go through this not just once a day, but if they're working in Israel and having to come in and out they have to go through these checkpoints and oftentimes wait in line for hours, not able to get to their job on time. Sometimes even getting from one West Bank place to another they have to do that. Yeah, right, even in their own territory. So anyway, George and Nahtiman were wonderful to me. Oh my gosh, Nahtiman went out of her way to make the most wonderful food. She found out immediately that I was a vegetarian. The first night I was there I'll never forget, after we had a lovely supper together they came and dumped a huge bucket of olives and sticks and leaves on the table and we spent the next hour chatting together and picking all the leaves and the sticks out of those were their olives. They had told me this was the extent of their crop that year because they only had something like three or four trees left and they used to have 100 trees. Those trees were all stolen, taken away, whatever by you know who, the Israelis and so that was my first experience with oh my gosh, those were your trees, that was your land. Yes, but there's nothing we can do about it. There are no laws that protect us from their coming and taking that away. There was just an article in the Israeli Times a conservative Israeli newspaper this was just a couple of weeks ago that 100 ancient olive trees were burnt down by Israeli settlers. Yeah, this kind of thing happens and people will say sometimes well I have to have these checkpoints because they're so dangerous. They would not be dangerous if they did not have settlers living in their midst, stealing their water, taking their land, arresting their children anybody's going to be dangerous when you do that to them and it needs to be noted and very clearly that in everybody's mind except maybe the two minds of Donald Trump all world leaders and Netanyahu those settlements are illegal. They are not recognized as legal settlements. So they are illegal, the settlers themselves are armed. So it's not an easy place for Palestinians to be as you keep saying in their own land. Kathy would you I know you spent some time in and you there was a person named Layla that you met but would you begin by telling us you know the story about how did it happen in Hebron that it got divided, that so many soldiers came in, what was that about? Hebron is just a tragic story. Hebron is in the heart of the Palestinian land and I 25 years or something ago there was a small group of fanatic religious fanatic Israeli Jews who decided that they were going to come and squat in Hebron and they did it by staying in a hotel and then not leaving, they just refused to leave and like all the settlements in Israel started they were doing something that the government kind of would say about but then once they got firmly entrenched the Israeli government would do nothing about it and so little by little you know there was a dozen and maybe two dozen and maybe a hundred of these people and there was a very, very ancient mosque, the Abrahamic mosque and according to Israeli lore biblical lore, I mean none of this is really proven that mosque sits atop the grave of Abraham and so a lot of the fanatic who is a prophet for both the Muslims and the Jews and Christians and some of these very fundamentalist Israelis feel like this is our land you know it should be ours not Palestinian even though it's in the middle of the West Bank so people were worshiping in the mosque one day I think this was around 30 years ago and a fanatic Jewish guy who's actually an American Baruch Goldstein came in with an automatic gun and bowed down 30 worshipers and so the survivors in the mosque mobbed him and ended up killing him well that outraged the fundamentalist Jews in the area and so the army moved in and did they move in to protect the Muslims that were gunned down? No they moved in to protect this little pocket full of settlers and ever since then they have created barriers they shut down the main street of commerce it's called Shuheda street we have pictures I have pictures on my blog it's unbelievable all these little shops they are bolted shut from the front even though they're still owned by the Palestinians they're bolted and they can't get in unless they crawl over the roofs or come in from behind and so this whole street of commerce has been shut down and there are checkpoints all over this city now as a result and there's a lot of violence I mean there's a lot of anger you could understand if you're home if you're a shop was you were no longer able to go there there are sections of the marketplace that still functions where there are Israeli settlements looking down and they would throw garbage throw urine and just do everything they could to make the lives miserable so the Palestinians have erected nets over the street and you can see the garbage collecting that is thrown down by the settlers it's it's just absolutely tragic Hebron is one of the biggest population areas of Palestine and it's again it's in the middle of the West Bank but they are barraged they're harassed their daily lives are made just miserable let me ask you something what do you say to people who say well why don't these Palestinians just leave I mean if their life is so miserable there why don't they just leave where are they supposed to leave and a lot of them unfortunately have and for anyone who's a Christian this should be a really sad reckoning that there used to be a very substantial population of Christians in Palestine that is by the way where Christianity began less people for that exactly one of my acquaintances there is a Lutheran minister who has started all sorts of social service organizations and even a university for the arts in Bethlehem he's written books about it and he makes that point you know he is probably a descendant of Christ or one of the disciples and so many of these people as it was a lot of the Christians in Palestine were very comfortable middle class and so a lot of them had the means of leaving when things got really hot and bad and so it got and many many can't and particularly in the the camps the refugee camps and we visited one of them on our trip and these people are just they're living in poverty and they're in the third generation and people will say why don't you just leave where are they supposed to go they don't have the means of leaving and they're not it's not like they're just always welcome in surrounding countries but there's another factor here which you mentioned in your blog and that is many of them don't leave because that is their homeland it is their land it is where they have lived or their ancestors have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years so to tell them just leave especially when we know that many of the Jews that have come in in the last decade or so have come from places in Russia or the former Soviet Union states and many of them are not even Jews that has come out but Israel accepted them as Jews because they wanted to increase the number of Jews in there and those people have no connection to the land and so there was a farm that you went to and I hope we might have a photo that we can show of that there's a farm that we went to we went to about five of the farms and they were around Bethlehem almost all of them were encroached and there's one of them where the wall goes completely around it and there's this big steel door that's their only method of getting in and out of it so I want to we're rapidly running out of time here but I want to say something about this issue and how we learn what we learn and why we do what we do there are those who think that we do this because we're somehow anti-Semitic that could not be further from the truth and I am very pleased to say that MVPR's work has been richly informed and enriched by many many Jewish activists in this country and from Israel we have had Jewish rabbis Jewish journalists, Jewish former army people historians, scholars and about about 80% of what I know I know and what I've shared with others comes from Jewish thinkers and there are so many Jews in this country today and in Israel who are working on behalf of justice and prosperity for both Jews and for Palestinians You should mention Jewish Voice for Peace Oh yes, Jewish Voice for Peace a huge powerful organization with such wonderful people in it, yes, Jewish Voice for Peace but may I say the other side is I believe many many Jewish liberals educated will say things to me like they can't even go there to criticize Israel so there's just as many Jewish people in the U.S. that really need to say we're going to have to wrap our time up we appreciate your listening and remember you can go to our website Maine Voices Palestinian Rights to find out about buying olive oil to find out about our mission for good resources and also to find out about a trip to Palestine thank you for joining us and thank you my fellow guests