Israel has always meant something to me. When I was young, my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, used to talk about Israel as the one protection our family and Jews everywhere had against persecution or murder in the future. When I first visited Israel myself, sponsored by a program called "Birthright Israel" that sends young non-Israeli Jews on a ten-day all-expenses-paid tour of the Holy Land, I saw nothing to make me think that Israel was anything other than a peace-seeking democracy. My image of Israel was of a tiny victimized country that simply wanted to live in peace but couldn’t because of its aggressive Jew-hating Arab neighbors.

I came to question my view of Israel during a trip through the Middle East. At the time, I was teaching English at a university in Ankara, Turkey on a Fulbright grant. During vacations, I traveled around Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, despite frantic warnings from my grant sponsors and the State Department. I was warmly welcomed everywhere I went, particularly in southern Lebanon where I was taken in by several families of Palestinian refugees. One family in particular not only showered me with hospitality and warmth but actually accepted and respected me to an extent that I had rarely experienced even in my own communities back home. Through my friendship with the eldest son, Mahmoud, and his parents, siblings, and neighbors, I began to hear a different narrative about the state of Israel from the one I had heard growing up as a Jewish American.

My new friends told me stories of past and present military attacks, house demolitions, land confiscation, imprisonment without trial, torture, and government-sponsored assassination. It seemed that these atrocities were not carried out for the protection of the Jewish people, as I had previously been taught, but rather for the expansion of Israel beyond its legal borders at the expense of the rights, lives, and dignity of non-Jewish people living in the region. It was hard for me to believe that Israel could act so unjustly. Questioning Israel in any way felt like a betrayal of my grandmother.

Nonetheless, it became important for me to decipher my own "truth" about the conflict through research and personal witnessing. I read books written from different perspectives and attended presentations by local activists reporting back on their experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a place where my Birthright Israel tour bus hadn’t stopped. To my disappointment, I began to see that Mahmoud and his family had been right; there was far more to Israel’s past and present policies than I had been told. I also began to realize that the question coming up most for me and the activists I met was not whether or not my grandmother’s Israel had a right to exist, but whether or not it had a right to be expanding its territory and control through systematic human rights violations. After extensive research, the following aspects of the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories became clear to me:

• Israel has been occupying the the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the 1967 War, ignoring the Fourth Geneva Conventions and over eighty United Nations General Assembly Resolutions.1

• The Israeli military controls the movement of the nearly four million Palestinians through a system of checkpoints, roadblocks, and segregated roads.

• The Israeli Army exercises virtually unchecked freedom to detain, threaten, arrest, imprison, torture, and even kill Palestinians, often without charge or trial.

• The Israeli government sponsors the transfer of Jewish Israeli citizens from Israel to Israeli colonies in the Palestinian Territories known as settlements.

• Israeli settlers suffer no legal consequences for building new settlements or expanding existing ones on internationally recognized Palestinian land, or for threatening or physically attacking Palestinians.

• The Wall—or "Security Fence"—that is currently under construction by Israel in the name of preventing terrorism in fact weaves through, not around, the West Bank, with the primary effect of separating hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians from their land and from each other.

• Denied legal citizenship anywhere, Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories are nonetheless required to pay taxes to Israel, which has an annual GDP over fifty times that of the Palestinian Territories, and an average annual income of more than US$20,500 compared with $750 in the West Bank and $550 in Gaza.2

• Every year, billions of American tax-dollars are funneled to the Israeli military, which uses most of the money to purchase American-made weapons.

As an American taxpayer, I feel responsible for the role my money, government, and country play in the violations of international law and human rights. I feel doubly responsible as a Jewish American, since Israel’s violations are being carried out in the name of Jews everywhere. Although I have never been religious, Jewish culture and history have always been a part of my environment, and identifying as a Jew has never seemed so much a choice as a fact. According to prevailing Jewish law and explicit Israeli law, Judaism is based on heritage, not faith or religious practice. I am a member of the "community" that Israel claims to be protecting through these violations of international law and human rights.

In the Fall of 2003, I decided to go to the Occupied Territories to see the situation for myself. I applied and was accepted to work with the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS), a grassroots peace organization dedicated to documenting and nonviolently intervening in human rights abuses in the West Bank, and supporting the nonviolent movement to end the Occupation. This book is my narraration of the five months I spent working with IWPS in the West Bank. It documents both the situation on the ground as I observed it and my personal emotional and intellectual journey piecing together my version of "the truth" about the conflict.

I have tried to describe as accurately as possible what I saw in the West Bank. I do not claim that my presentation of the situation is unbiased—I cannot deny having strong opinions about the issue, which will inevitably be apparent in my narrative—but I have tried to keep my editorializing to a minimum. I also do not profess to offer a broad synthesis of the Arab-Israeli conflict or even of life in Occupied Palestine. As a foreigner voluntarily working in a specific part of the region for a relatively short period of time, I cannot begin to understand what it means to be a Palestinian living under the Occupation. These accounts represent no "side" but my own. They are the observations and recordings of one woman’s experience living and working in the West Bank.

A lot of details in this book are repeated—dozens of Palestinians detained at checkpoints, threatened by settlers, taunted and harrassed. I have not shied away from these details. It is my belief that to understand the effects of the Occupation, one must look not just to the dramatic moments of violence that are represented (or misrepresented) in the news, but also to the small, everyday acts of violence and humiliation, and next to them the small, everyday acts of resistance and human dignity. If my accounts feature too many frustrating details of delays, searches, and abuse, I can only say that this is the nature of life under the Occupation.

Although I think it is important to talk about the controversial pre-1948 through 1967 history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I have tried to avoid discussing pre-Occupation history in my book. I did this for two reasons. First, I’m simply not an expert or any kind of authority on the subject. Second, arguing over the conflict’s complicated history tends to divert attention from the urgency of the current situation in Occupied Territories. Many people who strongly disagree about the past and future of Israel and Palestine can agree that the Israeli government’s current policies of occupation and annexation are a step backwards for peace, from the point of view of international law, human rights, justice for Palestinians, and safety for Israelis and Israel.

This book was primarily intended for American and other Western readers uninformed about the current situation in Palestine, but I believe it is suitable for readers worldwide, regardless of their political beliefs or previous knowledge of the subject. For readers completely unfamiliar with the conflict, I have included a very brief outline of the region’s history in Appendix III. Appendix IV outlines the details of Barak’s offer at Camp David II and explains why it was not as "generous" as most Western media sources portrayed it to be. The only other times I discuss historical events are when they are revealed to me through personal encounters in Palestine.

When I use the word "Palestine," I am referring to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Similarly controversial or important words and terms have been highlighted in the text and are defined in the Glossary. Highlighted peace organizations like IWPS are described in the Resource Guide. Some names have been changed for privacy or security, some quotations were re-constructed from detailed notes, and very minor alterations were made to chronology for the sake of coherence. Other than that, all reports are true to the best of my knowledge.

I don’t expect skeptical readers to immediately accept my claims about Israel and the Occupation. My hope is for readers to react individually to my stories and to begin to form their own opinions about the situation. Readers who don’t want to take my word for it don’t have to—there are dozens of international, Israeli, and Palestinian groups organizing tours of the West Bank. A list of these and related organizations can be found in Appendices I and II: What You Can Do and the Resource Guide. These appendices also provides resources for further research on the subject, as well as ways that you can join the international nonviolent movement for a just peace in Israel and Palestine.

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