Transcript below:
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And if you can't do that on Instagram,
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I would recommend following Oregon Educators for Palestine.
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They post a lot of really great stuff.
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And you know,
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you could do it the old-fashioned way and try to remember this tiny URL, or you
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could just look it up on Instagram and it would be there.
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But I highly recommend going to that next Saturday.
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And because this work can involve some
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censorship that comes with it.
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And one of the things that does sometimes happen to people on virtual media is doxxing.
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If you are interested,
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we just want to make sure that you are aware of this service,
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believe me.
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You pay to have all your personal information deleted from the internet so that
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you’re kind of not worried that someone's going to try to find where you live and
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punish you for teaching the truth.
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And with that, we would like to introduce Bill Bigelow.
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Bill Bigelow.
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Howdy y’all.
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My name is Lindsey Ray and I am the local president here of the Beaverton Education Association.
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I just want to say a couple of things before we get started.
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I know that—first of all, before I get into the deep stuff,
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there is food.
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There’s pizza in the back of the room.
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There’s salad.
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There are drinks in the fridge that says Beaverton Education Association.
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Please help yourself to something refreshing.
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Bathrooms are outside that way.
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Unfortunately,
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we do not have gender-neutral bathrooms,
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but there are some bathrooms downstairs that are much,
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much more secluded and private.
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So if you need to use one of those, talk to me or your cohort.
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I think that’s a little—just to pull the stuff out of the way.
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OK.
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So before we get started here,
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before I bring up Bill,
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I did want to just say a couple of things.
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I know that we have a variety of perspectives and lived experiences in this room.
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I know that we have Jewish folks in this room.
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I know that we have Palestinian folks in this room.
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I know that we have Muslim folks in this room.
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I know that we have Christian folks in this room.
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We are arriving here with a lot of stuff.
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And that is going to impact how we experience our time together today.
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I want to remind you that we are all educators and that we are here to learn from each other.
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I encourage you to,
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like anything that we learn about as educators,
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I encourage you to approach it with an open mind.
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I encourage you to challenge yourself.
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I encourage you to challenge others.
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I encourage you to challenge the material and really think through the perspectives
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that we are bringing today and think through what perspectives you are coming into
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the room with,
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and be very thoughtful as you are interacting with someone else, because you don't
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know where they’re from,
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you don't know what experiences they are sharing.
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So just,
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this can be a very delicate topic and I believe that we can talk,
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we can and should talk about hard things and I just want to do that with
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thoughtfulness and respect.
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All of that said, I'm going to introduce—
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Is it your mom?
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Yeah, thank you.
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Well, you should.
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Okay, all right.
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Bill Bigelow was a social studies teacher for a long time,
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long-time OEA member,
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and is currently the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools and the co-director of
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the Zinn Education Project,
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both resources that you all should definitely utilize.
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And yeah, we're just really excited to have him here today.
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It was great to have y’all here.
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I almost didn’t make it myself.
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I was going to my grandson’s baseball game.
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I was going on a Thursday afternoon,
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my grandson’s baseball game,
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at Gabriel Park,
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and I broke my ankle.
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I have no cool thing to develop like that—
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sliding into second base, anything like that.
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But you know,
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so let’s see—first of all, a huge thank you to the Beaverton Education Association.
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So let’s see where we’re going to go.
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So I want to introduce Susana Kassouf.
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Susana Kassouf, who is one of the editors of Teaching Palestine.
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And I also want to introduce Ursula Wolfe-Rochetko—
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Rethinking Schools editor.
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So,
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you know,
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we have an article in the beginning of the Teaching Palestine section,
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the Why Teach Palestine section.
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As a Palestinian-American mother, here is the education I want for my children.
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And she starts off,
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of the hundreds of assignments my children have brought home from school over the years,
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not one of them has referred to Palestine.
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And I think this is a decade over the silence.
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I think I’m probably the oldest one in the room—I graduated from high school in 1969.
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And I don’t think I ever heard the word Palestine in my education.
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And you know, think about the curriculum.
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And when there are silences and erasures, it teaches kids whose lives don't matter.
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And it also teaches what questions are not important.
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And so with the book, we wanted to address that silence.
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And there were five of us that came together in the summer of this last year in Portland.
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And just briefly introduce, it's a very diverse group.
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Samia Shoman is a Palestinian American.
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Samia has family in the West Bank.
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She is a principal, a high school principal at a small public school in the Bay Area.
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Adam Sanchez is our Rethinking Schools managing editor.
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He was a teacher in Portland, New York City, and Philadelphia,
and is Jewish,
and grew up in what he described as a very,
very strongly Zionist family.
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Jesse Hagopian is the editor of our book Teaching for Black Lives.
Jesse worked for Rethinking Schools,
but also the Zinn education project.
And Jesse went on,
I think it's the first African heritage tour of Palestine and Israel in 2011.
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And Susie,
other than my begging you to be part of this project,
do you want to talk about why you did it?
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Sure, yeah.
You know, I'm Arab American, but I didn't grow up knowing about Palestine either.
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And so it wasn't until I made a really good friend who was Palestinian and learned
about her experiences and her family's experiences,
and I started to realize it was happening.
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So I'm really grateful that Bill brought me in.
My personal connection,
I went to an educator's delegation during the first intifada in 1989,
and stayed in East Jerusalem and
spent a lot of time in the West Bank.
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Ramallah,
Nablus,
Bethlehem,
and also went to,
and by the way,
it was an odd thing being in an educator's delegation at that time because Israel had
shut every single school in the West Bank,
every single school,
kindergarten through university.
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And it was really kind of an extortion, a kind of political extortion, stop the intifada,
stop the strikes, stop the, you know, the activism, and you can have your education back.
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I was also in the Dabeya refugee camp in Gaza, where the Dabeya began.
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So, golly.
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Now I'm a history teacher, and so I think it's helpful to go to the roots of anything,
And so I want to share with you an activity that is included in the book called
Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine.
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And Jewish Voice for Peace has a helpful expression.
They say that how we explain the violence today depends on when we start to talk.
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I mean, a lot of people want to start talking on October 7th, 2023,
and that began, that triggered the massive assault in Israel,
that has to date killed well over 50,000 people,
museums, mosques, neighborhoods.
But,
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But where I want to start this off is when Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire.
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And it was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1560 to 1917 when the British invaded
during World War I.
So just like here,
over 400 years.
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And so we're gonna do this activity that actually Suzy and I did last year at Grant High School.
So let me just give a little bit of
of history, a little context beforehand.
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So the activity, the walls of the activity are basically 1882 to 1920.
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1882 was the first violent immigration to Palestine.
There were pogroms in Russia.
And so that's when the first Zionists began coming to Palestine.
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There were Jews in Palestine, of course, but there weren't Zionists.
In 1896,
Theodor Herzl,
kind of the father,
the founder of Zionism,
writes a book called The Jewish State.
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And then the very next year, 1897, in Basel, Switzerland, is the first world Zionist Congress.
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And then,
travel up to 1917 when, as I said, the British invaded.
It was incredible.
You know,
one of the things,
I don't know,
one of the things that gets left out of World War I was just the utter brutality of
World War I.
There are some,
I was reading today,
that there are some estimates that 30% of the people involved died in World
War I.
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So it's important to keep in mind,
though,
that at the time of the invasion of 1917,
there were fewer than 10% of the population of Palestine were Jews.
And a lot of those were not Zionists.
So it's important to keep that in mind,
because that will help kind of shape what Zionists end up demanding after World War I.
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But for the purposes of the activity,
We're going to look at that 40-year period from 1882 to 1922,
the beginning of the British Mandate given by the League of Nations.
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So that's kind of the walls of the activity.
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So in the activity, we're each going to try to become an individual, an actual individual.
Some of us are going to be Zionists.
Some of us are going to be Palestinians.
Some journalists,
and a whole bunch of us are going to be people who are neither Palestinians nor
Zionists but are part of the story.
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And so I call this activity a kind of a hybrid mixer mystery.
So some of you have done mixers before where you take up the role of individuals.
The mystery piece of it is trying to land on how we can explain,
how can we look at that 40-year period and explain
where they looked at the seeds of violence in what's going on today.
What are the through lines between that 40-year period and today?
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So we're gonna pass out roles.
I'm not gonna read it, actually.
We're gonna pass out roles,
and so if you can read them a couple of times,
or maybe even three times,
underline them.
It'd be great if you could turn them over.
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We asked students to turn them over into
just write down what are the most important things about your individual if you
want to communicate to them as you go around.
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But read the rules a couple times.
And we'll try and kind of not commit to memory, but get the essence of the rule now.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Who did I miss?
Does anybody not have a role?
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I'm happy to hold a baby if you want to participate in the activities.
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Okay.
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I've got to do these days.
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Okay, now I know you all can read.
Can everybody hear me?
I just, I feel it.
But let me go through these.
And one of the things we like to do is,
if you can help somebody else out,
we'll check for a star or something.
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So for example, Elie Sersuk, a wealthy landlord from Beirut, not a Zionist,
So I would check the first one,
find someone who supports Zionism,
who's the person right away who supports Zionism,
or bad.
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Find someone who,
two,
find someone who opposes or is critical of Zionism,
who's the person,
why are they critical of Zionism or opposing?
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Three,
find someone who identifies as a Palestinian,
who is the person,
what are the most important concerns that they have?
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Find someone who's from Great Britain,
or who has an opinion about the British role in Palestine.
Who's the person?
What do they think about the role of Britain?
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Find someone who has experienced injustice.
Something they think was wrong and unfair.
Who's the person?
What is the injustice that they experience?
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Find someone who believes that they worked against injustice and included more fear.
Who's the person?
What do they do?
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Seven, find someone who is not born in Palestine.
What's their connection to Palestine?
Why do they care about what happens to Palestine?
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Find someone who has something in common with.
Perhaps it's something important to agree on.
Maybe you have some concerns, some more hope.
Who's the person?
What is it that you have in common?
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Okay.
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So just some ground rules.
You know, everybody knows that role plays can be indications to stereotype.
And so one of the things that's important to question is that we don't do accents.
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We're not acting just now.
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If you're trying to meet their concerns or their issues.
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I'll tell you, look, I've been a teacher since, what, 1978?
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And it works best, you've actually worked best if people speak in the high voice as your character.
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I know there's some people who are doing that,
I really respect that,
and students who are comfortable.
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Sometimes kids will try and group up, you know, they'll kind of try and cluster up.
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And this is a very low threat. Actually, nobody's making any presentations, anybody else, you know, it's just a one-on-one. All the stories are coming from one-on-one conversations, and so I encourage kids not to.
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What else to tell you?
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It's not a race,
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So sometimes people try to turn it into a race to see who gets done the quickest.
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Ideally, you're going to have eight conversations.
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Very important, you can only use one person per question.
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So there will be times when other people will have multiple ways to go to the question.
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This is one person per question.
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My wife will be a question.
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This is going to be a hard question.
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But she likes to say,
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She likes to say,
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There are no pains and pains in this activity.
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So what if it means we're tempted to remain seated and decking your subject?
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Except if you're me, I can do it.
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Let's see, what else do I need to tell you?
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Oh yeah, so there's 17 roles.
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There's more than 17 of us in here.
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That's the Twilight Zone.
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You know, you can't meet yourself, so if you do, just pass on by.
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Somebody,
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I was doing this activity in Eugene last weekend,
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and somebody said,
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How long does this take?
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And you know, I tell you the truth, I really don't even know how long it is.
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But one of the reasons why I do it,
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Why I do it as a teacher,
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Is so that I can kind of keep my finger on the pulse to go through to see when kids
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Are kind of getting to the point where,
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Okay,
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They're almost at age,
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Trying to kind of wrap up.
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So I encourage you to kind of do this activity with students to do that.
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So again, the idea is to, well, you don't have to actually, well, go ahead, keep it in mind.
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We're gonna be looking again,
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When we get back,
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When we sit down after this,
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We're gonna be thinking about two things.
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We're gonna be thinking about really extraordinary people we get,
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Or people we anger at,
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Or whatever,
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And we're going to be thinking about those through lines.
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We're going to be thinking about what was going on in that period that we can take
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Back to today.
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Not questions about the history,
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But are there any questions about the activity we can make up before we read?
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Yes?
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Do you encourage students to kind of speak off the cuff based on what this is
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Instead of just reading to each other?
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Yeah, that's a great, that's a really good question.
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So yeah, absolutely.
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I do encourage kids to not read.
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These to each other, or especially not to an opportune happen where Hitler was handed.
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It leads to purpose.
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Yeah,
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So,
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But on the other hand,
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Yeah,
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If you can stay within character,
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Within the kind of the boundaries of the material,
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And again,
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All these are real people.
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That's the other thing, too.
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Look, these are real people that we're talking about.
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But if you can kind of go off the role that you're in a little bit,
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But stay within the legitimate information.
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Anything else?
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All right, let's get up and mingle.
…..
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Okay, so
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A couple questions that I'd like you to think about and write about a little bit.
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I've raised them before.
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The first one is think about a couple people you've met who just made an impression
on you in one way or another.
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Either they really angered you,
or they delighted you,
or they're somebody you,
you know,
man,
I've never heard about them.
I'd like to learn more about them.
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And then the second one,
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think about,
this is a big picture one,
think about what did you hear or gather from this 40-year period?
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That is a seed of violence that feels familiar.
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It somehow, you think, connects to what's going on today.
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So, take a few minutes and just write a little bit on that.
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One of the things we do when we do a mixer is to,
partly it's just kind of a calming thing down for people who get very hot.
And the other thing is it's more democratic because it gives everybody something in
front of them that they've thought about,
they've written about,
and so when they talk,
either in a whole group,
or they talk in a small group,
they've got something to say.
Okay, so take a few moments and do that, and then...
To clarify,
you're writing from your perspective,
not your character.
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with me.
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Thank you.
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Okay, why don't you—well, first of all, let me just answer a question somebody raised.
They said, you know, can we get all the biographies of this?
The answer is yes.
First of all, the activity is described in the book.
It's also described as the Zinn Education Project.
And all the roles and all the student handouts, they're all presented.
Just go to zinnedproject.org.
Then you can just kind of Google it, too, and it's also described in the book.
(01:01:20):
Why don't you turn to the folks around you,
and I'm not sure,
it might be a little bit too much to do a whole table,
but maybe cluster around three or four people,
and just talk to folks about what you came up with.
Thank you.
….
((01:05:18):
Let's talk about individuals.
Let's talk about some individuals who made an impression on you, one way or the other.
I would like to start us out.
I met this person in the U. The world of Palestinians were murdered.
And I really found her story inspiring in a sense that she was able to do this
recording to raise the lines about how these Zionists are coming into Palestine.
And I especially really enjoyed the fact that she took all of the Zionist poems and
translated it and was able to proliferate their plans across Palestine so they
could really see how terrible they are.
Somebody else?
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Oh, yeah.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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I think this was, in the beginning, Elias.
Him was a very interesting position in the whole situation because he's not
living in Palestine,
living in Beirut,
essentially just a wealthy person who has acquired somehow a lot of land in
Palestine and was selling it off to Zionist individuals or organizations.
And that was just very striking to me because I always had an assumption that,
especially in the beginning of this,
conflict that the people involved had a strong stake on either side sort of just
struck me as someone who was sort of self-preservationist and was like,
I can,
I personally can get rich if I just kind of work between these two groups of people.
That was just surprising.
Yeah, of course.
And,
you know,
other people like an absentee landlord,
they own,
as I was telling some people,
he owned one plot alone of a 70-square-mile.
and uh and so of course he benefited tremendously from designers because he was
able to sell them and uh and you know and the more people who came the more the
prices were driven up and at some point, of course, um it was the Ottomans who were
expelling
Palestinians from the land after the Zionists had bought it.
Sometimes it was the Zionist militias.
Later, it was the British.
And so, but, as Elliot said, he never had to get his hands dirty.
Yeah.
Well, he took advantage of this 1858 Ottoman land code.
which allowed him to register the land.
The land had been,
you know,
like in Mexico,
where other people might own the land,
but actually,
peasants,
it's inalienable.
You can't sell it,
you can't,
your family has been there for generations,
and you're gonna be there for generations.
Well,
in this instance,
you know,
no,
the Ottoman land code allowed him to buy,
to own,
to dispose of it as he owned it.
Well,
not only did they say,
I mean,
not only did they let it happen,
but then did they,
you know,
they were sometimes the gendarmes in removing Palestinian peasants to make room for
the Zionist immigrants who had come from Europe.
Yeah?
So, Shukri Asali was the district governor of Nazareth,
and refused to approve the land sale or gift title for the land to the Zionists.
And then went forward to write newspaper articles warning that the Palestinian
government was on the Zionists.
So two things really struck me about this person:
one,
a female governor in 1910 was really personally striking to me,
and then two,
said in my life I had a choice I could become a successful government functionary
and not block the vote, or I could stand up for the house. I'm not sure it's a sheet
but maybe I, I guess that's my own personal work here so Shukri I thought was my own
gender, how about that? But you're right, yeah, yeah, absolutely um
Who else?
Who else has any questions?
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Yeah.
I didn't hear the whole story about the son of Arthur Jones.
Yeah.
Oliver?
Yeah.
Arthur Jones.
Yeah.
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So incredibly,
I mean,
what's more kind of famous in terms of Palestine history than the Balfour Declaration,
where the British said,
yes,
we're going to align with the Zionists.
Balfour himself was a Zionist.
He was a Christian, but he was also an anti-Semite.
And when he was the Prime Minister,
he supported the Indian Act to get rid of,
to keep out undesirable.
Well, who was the undesirable?
They were Jews who were trying to escape pogroms in the rest of Europe.
And so one of the motives,
not the only,
one of the motives of the British supporting Zionism in Palestine is,
yeah,
go to Palestine,
don't go to Britain.
And so that was...
Somebody want to take that up?
(01:12:14):
It's the ancestral home of the Jewish people.
Thousands of years Jews have lived there uninterrupted.
If you look at the Dome of the Rock Mosque,
the Wailing Wall is the wall of the Temple of Solomon.
no matter where Jews are in the world when they celebrate Passover,
they say next year in Israel.
It's our homeland.
It's the place that we're connected to.
I mean,
no different than if you were born in New York,
and you say I'm a New Yorker,
but thousands of years ago.
So it's, go ahead.
(01:13:02):
And just to like, as a Muslim, you have a connection with Saudi Arabia.
This is what we go for.
This is given the right to go and just...
Okay, so... Let's not get into it.
Well, I have a very quick question.
I have a very quick question.
So, Saudi Arabia is the holiest place for Muslims, correct?
Okay, so my question to you is, if Canada invaded Saudi Arabia and took Saudi Arabia,
and held Saudi Arabia for a thousand years, maybe.
Would you ever stop fighting to take back Saudi Arabia, your most holy place?
Okay, and that's why the Jews fight for Israel.
I appreciate that.
(01:13:50):
One of the interesting things about this, did anybody meet Yusuf Castel?
Let me just read a piece from his,
because the Sephardic Jews,
the Jews who were in Palestine at this time,
the Jews who were in Palestine were not Zionists.
And in fact, let me just read the passage from him.
There were joint compounds of Jews and Muslims.
We were like one family.
We spent time together.
Our mothers shared their thoughts with the Muslim women and vice versa.
Our children played with the Muslim children in the yard.
And the children from the neighborhood furnished the Muslim children who lived in
our compound protected us.
They were our allies.
When the mother died,
there was a Jewish mother breastfed Muslim babies,
and Muslim mothers breastfed Jewish babies.
(01:14:39):
So the interesting thing about Zionism,
and I'm not going to dispute anything that you said,
but just as a historical fact,
the interesting thing about Zionism,
all the Zionists were Europeans.
There was not a single... I don't think you can make a blanket statement.
No, the Zionist leaders.
The people who came as... To the leaders.
But what I can say is the Jews who were in Palestine were not,
that's not where Zionism originated.
And all the Jewish congresses,
and you can check this out,
but all the people who were delegates to the Jewish congresses were not from what
we call now the Middle East.
And so it was that, that was the movement.
So I'm not disputing anything about the connection that you're talking about.
And the Jewish right to self-determination is Zionism.
That's all it is.
The Jewish belief that we should have a homeland.
Not in exclusion of anyone.
But that we should have a place where we can go because Jews were not taken in anywhere.
(01:15:41):
And they had nowhere to go.
(01:15:44):
So they went to the place that we've been connected to for thousands of years.
(01:15:47):
That's Zionism.
(01:15:48):
The belief in self-determination, the belief that we should have a home.
(01:15:53):
What else can we say?
(01:15:54):
And let's not get into a back-and-forth, but what else can we say?
(01:15:57):
Have people met Zionists here?
(01:15:59):
Is there anything else we can say about the Zionists that we’ve met?
(01:16:02):
What I noticed in my connection with other people,
(01:16:08):
as well as my own character,
(01:16:10):
is this feeling that was amplified because they had their own bloodshed or fear.
(01:16:22):
That was interesting to see.
(01:16:24):
Because from my character, which my character was Joseph, what was his name?
(01:16:30):
Bah, Iraq.
(01:16:32):
Yeah.
(01:16:34):
Zionism was like this pathway to escaping.
(01:16:39):
But then what he came into was still a power imbalance based on religion from his perspective.
(01:16:44):
So that was an interesting thing to reflect on once he had reached Palestine in 1918.
(01:16:50):
Joseph Rice is an interesting guy.
(01:16:52):
I read his autobiography to prep for this.
(01:16:57):
And really, he's a small c-com.
(01:16:59):
And they’re coming, and they believe in the possibility of a different society.
(01:17:03):
You know, they're feminists.
(01:17:05):
Women challenge them in the kibbutz.
(01:17:07):
It's one of the first kibbutzim in what would become Israel,
(01:17:10):
but what would become then Palestine.
(01:17:15):
And yet, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with Palestine.
(01:17:21):
Actually a principle.
(01:17:23):
In Zionism and the Second Aliyah,
(01:17:26):
the conquest of labor,
(01:17:27):
the idea is that we're going to do it all.
(01:17:28):
This is our new society that we're building.
(01:17:31):
We're not building it with the Palestinians.
(01:17:34):
We're not building it with Arabs or Muslims or Christians.
(01:17:38):
We're building it on our own for ourselves.
(01:17:43):
He's a really interesting guy, and that's a really interesting movement.
(01:17:47):
But it’s not ecumenical.
(01:17:49):
It's not connected.
(01:17:51):
It was not democratic.
(01:17:53):
And of course, they didn’t want it.
(01:17:56):
They didn’t want them not to speak because there were so few of them.
(01:18:01):
Yeah.
(01:18:02):
I’m wondering if you could speak to,
(01:18:04):
I think part of the context to remember about someone like Joseph Barats creating a
(01:18:10):
kibbutz in Palestine.
(01:18:13):
And maybe you could speak to this a little bit, Bill, is
(01:18:16):
He was doing it on stolen land.
(01:18:19):
He was doing it at the cost of Palestinians being evicted from their very homes on
(01:18:23):
that same land.
(01:18:23):
I wonder if you can speak to the Zionist militias,
(01:18:26):
because this isn’t just creating a new homeland.
(01:18:29):
It’s creating a new homeland at gunpoint.
(01:18:33):
Yeah,
(01:18:33):
so I think somebody like Brut probably didn’t experience it as stealing someone
(01:18:39):
else’s land.
(01:18:40):
Because the land was actually,
(01:18:43):
there was a middleman involved who had bought the land from the absentee landlord
(01:18:48):
and then had given it to people in the woods.
(01:18:51):
And they just wanted to farm and do the work and do all the labor together.
(01:18:58):
So they weren’t there to steal,
(01:19:00):
but nor were they there to cooperate and to be connected to any of that.
(01:19:05):
So the land gets transferred
(01:19:10):
I mean, you're right.
(01:19:10):
There were Zionist militias who were expelling Palestinians from the land.
(01:19:16):
But there were also the Ottoman soldiers who were doing that.
(01:19:18):
And later on, there were the British soldiers who were doing that.
(01:19:21):
But it had been Palestine.
(01:19:24):
It had been Palestinian.
(01:19:25):
And then it was becoming Zionist through the purchases and through the expulsion.
(01:19:35):
Well,
(01:19:35):
I also find it interesting that when Safri June had been in a hotel or given a
(01:19:45):
choice when we were talking about the church in 1992,
(01:19:59):
because he felt like there was a community, a community, a community.
(01:20:08):
And there was a diversity of beliefs, but still were a community, right?
(01:20:15):
So I find it interesting that this experience kind of thing
(01:20:22):
pushes out of their own home,
(01:20:25):
their own homeland,
(01:20:28):
and then,
(01:20:30):
you know,
(01:20:31):
it didn’t require,
(01:20:34):
it didn’t require a separation between Jews.
(01:20:44):
Well,
(01:20:45):
that’s why,
(01:20:45):
like,
(01:20:45):
there are a lot of Sephardic Jews who thought,
(01:20:48):
man,
(01:20:48):
you,
(01:20:48):
Zionists,
(01:20:49):
you are messing with us.
(01:20:50):
Because we've got this cooperative situation going.
(01:20:54):
Not that I don't want to romanticize it,
(01:20:57):
but the violence,
(01:20:59):
the pogroms,
(01:21:00):
they were not going on in Palestine.
(01:21:02):
They were not going on in Jerusalem.
(01:21:04):
They were going on in Europe.
(01:21:05):
They were going on in Russia.
(01:21:06):
They were going on,
(01:21:07):
you know,
(01:21:07):
When Theodor Herzl talked about the discrimination against Jews,
(01:21:11):
he wasn't talking about what was going on in Palestine.
(01:21:13):
He was talking about what was going on in Europe, and that's what they were escaping.
(01:21:16):
But the Jews who were there in Palestine
(01:21:19):
It's like, wait a second.
(01:21:20):
You guys are coming in, and you're going to get all these people.
(01:21:25):
They're going to lump us all together, and they're going to come after us, too.
(01:21:30):
Yeah?
(01:21:30):
I was going to say that the Zionists that I met in this exercise did not have the
(01:21:37):
Jewish people's best interest...
(01:21:47):
Okay, let me play a little bit of that, okay?
(01:21:50):
Because it takes somebody like Theodor Herzl,
(01:21:53):
and,
(01:21:53):
you know,
(01:21:54):
we're in the Jewish state,
(01:21:56):
and...
(01:21:56):
I agree with him,
(01:21:58):
so...
(01:21:58):
Oh,
(01:21:58):
yeah,
(01:21:59):
okay.
(01:22:00):
But he's not...
(01:22
(01:22:02):
One of the...
(01:22:03):
Maybe let's move into the second question about threads that we see.
(01:22:08):
Theodor Herzl was not... He was not going after anybody.
(01:22:12):
He was...
(01:22:15):
He was trying to... He made a conclusion that there was no place safe in the world to go.
(01:22:23):
And so we have to have that.
(01:22:26):
And so he was not,
(01:22:28):
he was not,
(01:22:29):
you know,
(01:22:29):
going anywhere to exploit anybody else or steal from anybody else or anything like that.
(01:22:33):
However, he also wasn't even thinking about where he was going.
(01:22:38):
And he was, you know, he was...
(01:22:42):
They called themselves colonialists.
(01:22:44):
And they were going to somebody else's,
(01:22:47):
and they knew that at some level,
(01:22:49):
but,
(01:22:50):
and they were going to take it.
(01:22:52):
But they didn't go to take it.
(01:22:53):
They didn't go with any kind of animus.
(01:22:58):
But let's go back to the... what are some of the threats?
(01:23:12):
And that's what it seems to be.
(01:23:13):
Everyone keeps getting kicked off of the same land,
(01:23:17):
whether it's the peasants who are farming land that somebody then stole from
(01:23:24):
somebody else.
(01:23:24):
So this whole region,
(01:23:41):
It's just changed hands over and over and over again for thousands of years.
(01:23:49):
Oh, I'm sorry.
(01:23:49):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(01:23:50):
Into Babylon.
(01:24:02):
Persecution literally every century since Judaism began.
(01:24:07):
And so if someone were to lead this activity in the classroom,
(01:24:11):
and someone asks a question about Balfour,
(01:24:14):
he wasn't a feminist.
(01:24:15):
He was taking care of himself.
(01:24:17):
And he was taking care of Britain.
(01:24:20):
And he admits that.
(01:24:21):
He wanted to get them out of the UK.
(01:24:23):
So if you're not super educated on this topic,
(01:24:26):
and you're not well-researched,
(01:24:28):
a kid could walk away from her classroom uneducated with a very skewed view on the
(01:24:35):
topic because you can't answer the question with fidelity.
(01:24:39):
And that is why I'm sitting here today.
(01:24:41):
I am very upset.
(01:24:42):
Just so you know.
(01:24:44):
Yes.
(01:24:44):
Well, even starting in the late 1800s, Jews were second-class citizens in the Ottoman Empire.
(01:24:51):
Let's think about the Zionists who came.
(01:24:54):
So...
(01:24:55):
Their parents were not from there.
(01:24:59):
Their grandparents were not from there.
(01:25:01):
Their great-grandparents were not from there.
(01:25:04):
Their great-great-great-great-grandparents were not from there.
(01:25:09):
So the claim, the claim is a biblical one, going back, you know, a long, long time.
(01:25:14):
But the people who are actually there,
(01:25:16):
who were displaced in really recent memory,
(01:25:20):
are the Palestinians,
(01:25:21):
people who are living there.
(01:25:22):
And they were displaced.
(01:25:38):
Another through line?
(01:25:39):
Can I take us in a?
(01:25:41):
Okay.
(01:25:42):
So I don't quite have it fleshed out, so I may be able to help clarify it.
(01:25:48):
I'm thinking about the idea of Zionism as a theory and Zionism as practice.
(01:25:55):
And seeing that then and now.
(01:25:58):
How Zionism as a theory that Jews need a safe place to live,
(01:26:06):
doesn't bring you safety to participate in doing this.
(01:26:12):
So that's what I'm really struck by what it's like.
(01:26:16):
Just the suffering that's caused by trying to get something that you really want in
(01:26:20):
a way that's hurting other people doesn't actually get you what you want.
(01:26:25):
So that's...
(01:26:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(01:26:28):
Other, yeah, I wanted to get a quote.
(01:26:32):
Yeah.
(01:26:34):
One of the through lines that's coming up for me
(01:26:39):
of safety to security in many ways,
(01:26:45):
many definitions of classical,
(01:26:47):
as holding equivalence or holding equal weight with the concept of a nation.
(01:26:53):
One of the things I heard from Herzl was talking about regarding Jewish people as
(01:27:00):
the most persecuted nation,
(01:27:02):
but being without a nation,
(01:27:05):
without a place like their own
(01:27:08):
and how that place would infer security, or that place would infer safety.
(01:27:16):
And I see that as a green line,
(01:27:20):
or like a seed of violence,
(01:27:23):
that nations exist as violent enforcers of a certain brand of or facade of safety
(01:27:33):
and security.
(01:27:35):
I think that's why.
(01:27:38):
Yeah.
(01:27:40):
You know, I wanted to leave a quote about the safety piece.
(01:27:45):
This is in 1929.
(01:27:47):
This is from Ruth, according to Conan, to which I am a journalist.
(01:27:55):
We had been in Palestine for 12 years without having even once made a serious
(01:28:00):
attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people.
(01:28:06):
I believe that it will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow
(01:28:10):
for a long time.
(01:28:12):
This will be done first with British aid, and then later with the help of our own bayonets.
(01:28:17):
By that time, we will not be able to do without the bayonets.
(01:28:21):
The means will have determined the goal."
(01:28:24):
So that idea that, well, if you do it this way, there will never be safe.
(01:28:32):
and say more about
(01:29:01):
about what that cultural history is.
(01:29:04):
And like you said, I was not taught this when I was a student.
(01:29:12):
I was not taught this in college.
(01:29:14):
I was not taught this when I was actually.
(01:29:21):
and there's that empty hole,
(01:29:22):
and right now we are talking and talking and talking about Zionism,
(01:29:25):
but what about the Palestinian,
(01:29:27):
whatever point in this history we're left out of conversation,
(01:29:31):
right?
(01:29:32):
About these natives who have been living there instantly with Sephardic Jews in peace, right?
(01:29:38):
Those are the stories that are on there.
(01:29:42):
I just want to add a historical detail that I learned from my character,
(01:29:46):
who's one of the leaders of the Palestine Arab Congress.
(01:29:51):
And he points out that the Balfour Declaration,
(01:29:54):
like,
(01:29:54):
Palestinians are not mentioned literally once in the entire declaration.
(01:29:58):
So, like, the intention to erase the indigenous population, like, he points out several times.
(01:30:10):
have been for many, many generations.
(01:30:12):
And then,
(01:30:12):
um,
(01:30:12):
he also points out,
(01:30:13):
which is like another through line,
(01:30:16):
um,
(01:30:16):
he's kind of speaking like the World War I has just ended,
(01:30:21):
and the British,
(01:30:23):
um,
(01:30:23):
are off the time,
(01:30:24):
like early 1920s maybe,
(01:30:28):
um,
(01:30:28):
talking about how Jewish,
(01:30:30):
it's called immigrants here,
(01:30:31):
but I would say Jewish settlers are,
(01:30:34):
you know,
(01:30:34):
encouraged to come to Palestine,
(01:30:37):
and then they can get Palestinian citizenship,
(01:30:39):
without even ever having set foot on the land,
(01:30:42):
the Palestinians who were,
(01:30:44):
had to,
(01:30:45):
you know,
(01:30:46):
it was before the Nakba,
(01:30:47):
but like had to flee because of World War I,
(01:30:50):
um,
(01:30:51):
can't return to the land that they were born.
(01:30:53):
And like, that's still true today.
(01:30:56):
And that was first true because of what the British enforced in New England, and so,
(01:31:05):
And I think if we're looking at the true lines, one of them is the partnership to the Empire.
(01:31:12):
All of this only happens because of the Ottoman Empire,
(01:31:15):
the British Empire,
(01:31:16):
and let's face it,
(01:31:17):
the U.S.
(01:31:17):
Empire, because this war against
(01:31:27):
I just wanted to piggyback on what you said.
(01:31:30):
I was.
(01:31:31):
And it really struck me as I was going around and talking about how similar almost
(01:31:38):
every Palestinian story was,
(01:31:40):
every Palestinian voice I heard seemed to center around this idea
(01:32:23):
So I was Arthur Rubin.
(01:32:26):
And,
(01:32:27):
you know,
(01:32:28):
thinking about the different things I've heard,
(01:32:30):
you kind of can't talk about this without talking about Zionism.
(01:32:35):
So Arthur Rubin helped organize the second rising up that happened from 1903 to 1914.
(01:32:41):
So organizing this huge migration of Jewish folks to Palestine.
(01:32:47):
with the stated intent of acquiring land and with the stated intent of not having
(01:32:55):
an Arab labor force and the conquest of labor.
(01:33:03):
So Jewish folks working Jewish land and apartheid, like separate.
(01:33:12):
So I think you can hardly talk about one without the other.
(01:33:25):
So I know why Palestine wasn't mentioned in Gopal,
(01:33:28):
because the Gopal Strip was controlled by Egypt,
(01:33:32):
and the West Bank was controlled by Jordan,
(01:33:35):
and Northern Israel was controlled by Syria.
(01:33:38):
There was no Palestine mentioned because there is no Palestine.
(01:33:42):
It was created in 1948,
(01:33:44):
there were no Palestinian people there.
(01:33:46):
There were people of many different Arab ethnicities that lived in that area,
(01:33:51):
but there was...
(01:33:52):
Who's the first king of Palestine?
(01:33:54):
Who's the last king of Palestine?
(01:33:56):
So I think we got to hear a lot from you today, and I think it's time to hear from others.
(01:34:00):
I apologize.
(01:34:00):
I was just saying, I was answering the question, why was it mentioned in Balfour?
(01:34:04):
You're still denying the existence of Palestinians.
(01:34:08):
Yeah, well, I think, I think, you know, there's, uh, uh,
(01:34:13):
There's a historian,
(01:34:15):
Rashid Khalidi,
(01:34:16):
who has written a lot in costume and identity,
(01:34:19):
And would you read that?
(01:34:23):
Sure.
(01:34:23):
So, you know, I sort of don't want to leave it here, but we need to leave it here.
(01:34:29):
Susanna Kasuf,
one of the editors of the book,
wants to take you on a bit of an excursion and interaction with some
of the incredible visuals.
(01:34:51):
He called the kids and said, "Oh, finally, finally, finally, this book."
(01:35:25):
I want to acknowledge,
like,
for some of us,
hearing,
"There is no such thing as Palestinian,"
it's like, what are these beautiful things to hear?
And it's true that there's never been a country of Palestine.
And we talked more about that in the world's life.
But the Palestinian identity and the heritage shared by Palestinians and the
connection to the land of Palestine is so visceral and real.
And this whole workshop is about acknowledging that truth,
that Palestinian life matters, that Palestinians exist.
And so that's something we're not going to fudge on today.
(01:36:04):
Okay.
(01:36:05):
So, like those said, around the room, we have snippets from the book.
You'll see them all around.
There's,
like,
other pictures around the room,
so,
of course,
you can see the kind of through line.
I don't want us to forget this one.
I almost skipped over this one.
I think it's so beautiful.
This one makes me feel really good.
(01:36:21):
So maybe first, let's come help.
And I'm going to pass out sticky notes right now.
And just grab a few sticky notes with you.
And you're going to go around the room.
(01:36:32):
What time is it?
(01:36:36):
We're probably only going to get to read maybe three or four posters.
But you're going to go around the room, and we're going to have a styled dialogue.
So on this video, we're just going to write your thoughts.
(01:36:46):
Now,
if I was doing this with students,
I might have a session starter like,
"I see,"
"I feel,"
"I wonder."
You're welcome to use that.
Or you can just kind of write them yourself.
You can respond to the poster itself, but you can also respond to other things other people
write.
(01:37:00):
We want to respect everyone's time, but I also want to make sure we get to talk a little.
So why don't we just walk around, try to get to, like, maybe three or four posters.
We'll pause, and then we'll kind of discuss.
Okay?
(01:37:12):
Any questions about that?
All right.
Thank you all.
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