There is only one way of ending this. It's ending occupation, because occupation has
become the cancer that is eating the lives of both people.
What the occupation did for us, it reduced us into animals, in a way that sometimes I'm
ashamed to say that I'm an Israeli.
This is a huge bluff of the Israeli establishment, that every criticism of its policy is anti-Semitism.
Sometimes I feel pity for the Israeli mothers, because they are thinking that their soldiers
or their sons are victorious soldiers, but they should come and see what their soldiers
are doing here.
Twenty-five years ago, I made a film called Palestine is Still the Issue. It was about
a nation of people, the Palestinians, forced off their land and later subjected to a military
occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country
in the world, including Britain. But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend, the United
States. So in 25 years, if we're to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed.
What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated
for so long, they've risen up against Israel's huge military machine, although they themselves
have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed
desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But for Palestinians, the overriding routine
terror day after day has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives
as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous
Israelis united in the oldest human struggle to be free.
Just April, troops and tanks of the Israeli army attacked Ramallah and other towns in
occupied Palestine. This was reported as an incursion to stop terrorism. In fact, it
was also an attack on civilian life, on schools, offices, clinics, theaters, radio stations.
Systematic vandalism is typical of one of the longest military occupations in modern times.
Even the culture ministry was destroyed. The director, Liana Badri, a distinguished novelist
and filmmaker, showed me the devastation shortly after it happened.
This is the administration room. We had a lot of files here. You can see that everything
was broken. It was the best place in the ministry.
What you did here was promote projects for Palestinian culture, basically. Filmmaking
projects for children. Exhibitions, book exhibitions, painters' exhibitions, festivals, dance, folklore.
We had a lot of projects. Now we don't have anything to begin with. We don't have computers,
equipment, furniture, and we have this feeling of humiliation.
The smell is awful, isn't it? The smell is awful, yes.
This is a bag of shit, and the shit smeared all over the photocopier.
Two. So they just ate and defecated in the same place.
And they're putting them on the photocopy, putting shit everywhere, even on the walls.
And you can see that we have two toilets in every floor, but they didn't use the toilet.
All the time they were making it on the floor or anywhere, as you can see.
We have a look in this room in here. Good grief.
These are children's drawings, aren't they? Yes.
This is a room specialized for children's work, children's paintings, and children's
culture, and to encourage them to paint, to let them express themselves, to make competition,
to write competitions. But you can see how they destroyed everything.
They don't respect anything. They just want to come and destroy, and this is the systematic
terrorism of the Israeli state. For the Palestinians, this cultural vandalism
means a deliberate intention to destroy them as a nation.
The heart of the conflict here is a struggle for land, for the hills and valleys of Palestine,
for precious water and fertile soil. During the early 20th century, the great
majority of the population of Palestine were Palestinian Arabs.
In 1948, Israel was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust. For the Palestinians, this
meant the loss of 78% of their country. Today, they are seeking only the remaining 22% of
their homeland. For 35 years, that homeland has been dominated
by Israel. In 1987, the Palestinians rose up in what
they call interfather. History will surely call it a war of national liberation. They
fought mainly with slingshots against tanks and planes, and they were put down with this
kind of brutality, Israeli soldiers deliberately breaking the bones of prisoners. Some of the
soldiers later insisted they were carrying out official Israeli policy.
Two years ago, the Palestinians rose up a second time. This was hardly surprising.
In curfews, people live under a form of house arrest. Without notice, they can be locked
inside their homes. Their ordinary lives are a maze of controls, roadblocks, checkpoints.
This is how I remember apartheid South Africa. The hidden effect is the same, humiliation
and anger and death. This Palestinian woman knows how devastating
the impact of checkpoints can be. Last October, she was about to give birth to her second
child, and she and her husband set out for the nearby hospital. They were stopped at
an Israeli roadblock where they pleaded to be let through.
The first time she was given birth, she was about to give birth to her second child.
She was about to give birth to her second child, and she was about to give birth to her
second child. She was about to give birth to her second child, and she was about to give birth to
When we arrived at the French hospital, he said my son was dead.
Stories like Fatima's seldom make headlines,
and yet many similar cases have been documented.
Palestinians try to lead a normal life, but life is never normal.
During Israeli military operations, curfews stop everything.
Ambulances are denied access to the sick and wounded.
Children are stopped from going to school.
The Israelis claim this is necessary for their security.
If that's true, it's clearly not working.
And the security of Palestinians is almost never mentioned.
You feel all your life that you are humiliated.
You don't control yourself, you don't control the area you are breathing.
I don't want to talk about planning for anything.
This is something we don't even dream about.
Plan to next hour or next day what we will do.
This is something we don't even dream about because our destiny is not in our hands.
It's in the hands of the others who decide how we will live, how we will get married.
To come and live with my husband in this country, I had to take the permission of the Israelis.
It's not enough that they took our land and they are not allowing us to have our own state,
but also they are controlling every detail in our life.
Some Israelis have spoken out. More than 500 soldiers have refused to serve in the occupied territories.
We are, they've said.
Like the Chinese student who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square,
we are the conscience of our country.
Ishai Rosensve is one of them.
I really think the real story of the occupation is there in the checkpoint.
But I cannot forget this kind of picture, you know, five in the morning, quarter to five in the morning.
Hundreds of, a line of hundreds of people waiting, you know, to pass in the checkpoint
and you're standing there and you see their eyes, the humiliation, the frustration, the hatred.
With them you are the occupation. You have all the power. They have no power.
You can at every second take their ID and then they are, you know, they have nothing.
Because without identification you can, you know, every soldier can arrest them.
You are the man that stand there, keep them without rights, without freedom.
The world often sees the issue of Palestine through the tragedy and horror of suicide bombings.
An expression of despair by powerless people against an oppressor armed with modern weapons.
The first female suicide bomber struck in January 2002.
Her name was Wafa Idris, the only daughter of a family of refugees who had driven out of their home near Tel Aviv.
She was 28, an ambulance volunteer.
And then we had a friendship between them.
And what happened was that she was in operation, she was surprised by us.
What makes an ambulance volunteer a carer become a suicide bomber?
Of course, she came home and told us that today there is a witness.
She was going down to the ground, the Egyptians were going out, the refugees were going out of her place.
Of course, this is the kind of thing that affected her.
In some cases, even after she was born, she would be an orphan.
Of course, when she was born, she would die as a child.
She died three times in the hospital.
I expect this to be a strong benefit for our people.
The suicide bombs are presented to the Israeli public as an insane act by an insane people
with whom there is no chance for peace.
Instead of putting a wider analysis, which would say there is a way out of the suicide bombs,
while everybody condemns them and rightly so, there is a way out of it.
And the way out of it is to provide the circumstances in which these young people would find
avenues of hope instead of avenues of despair.
There is, I would say, an orchestrated campaign to silence that kind of analysis inside Israel.
Suicide attacks against civilians are clearly crimes, and they are used by extremists.
But the extremists rely on the brutality of the occupation and the despair of their young volunteers.
Some extraordinary Israelis are brave enough to recognize this.
Rami El-Hanan is one Israeli father who knows about suicide bombing.
On September the 4th, 1997, his daughter Shmada was killed by one.
She was 14 years old.
She was a child of peace. She was full of life, a very laughing girl, a very good student, dancing,
everything that little girls do.
It was the first day of school, and she was going down the Ben Yhuda Street,
which is some kind of a mall, to buy some books for the new year with two girlfriends of hers.
One of them, Sivan Zagrad, died with her, and the other, Daniel Abiman, was very, very severely wounded.
Rami is a graphic designer and a former soldier. His father survived Auschwitz.
His grandparents, six aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust.
How do you distinguish the feelings of anger that any father would have felt at losing your daughter in such circumstances?
I'm not crazy. I don't forget. I don't forgive.
Someone who murders little girls, anyone who murders little girls, is a criminal and should be punished.
But if you think from the head, and not from the guts, and you look what made people do what they do,
people that don't have hope, people who are desperate enough to commit suicide,
you have to ask yourself, have you contributed in any way for this despair, for this craziness?
It hasn't come out of the blue. The boy that his mother was humiliated in the morning at the checkpoint will commit suicide in the evening.
The suicide bomber was a victim, the same as my girl was, of that I'm sure. You have to understand where these suicide bombers come from.
Understanding is part of the way to solving the problem.
Few people have been betrayed so often as the Palestinians.
Before the Second World War, the British ran Palestine as a mandate.
They had promised the Palestinians an independent state, but they also promised Palestine to the Jewish movement known as Zionism.
In 1948, when the state of Israel was founded, the Arab world revolted as Palestinians were expelled from their homes or forced to flee in a blitz of fear and terror.
Three quarters of a million people became refugees.
Israel's military hero, General Moshe Dayan, later admitted, Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages.
There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population.
While Palestinians were denied the right to return to their homes, anybody who could prove they were Jewish had the right to settle in Israel.
In 1967, Palestinians once again fled their homes during the Six-Day War when Israel occupied the remaining 22% of Palestine, describing this as an act of self-defense.
To the Palestinians, it seems that Israel's colonizing never stops.
This looks like a medieval fortress. The Israelis call it a Jewish settlement.
In fact, it's part of a network of armed colonies that by one estimate effectively control 42% of the occupied West Bank.
Many of them dominate and intimidate Palestinian communities.
They are illegal under international law and have been condemned by the United Nations.
When I came to West Bank and saw all these settlements, Israeli settlements, on the tops of the hills surrounding all the cities,
so you feel that they are over you, they are superior.
And you are the ant, the insect, you know?
And you know this is your land, it's nobody else's land, this is our land.
But still, they are the ones who are on the tops, and they have all the weapons, and they control also everything in the West Bank.
This is Moise Dan. He's taking me to a Jewish settlement in the south of the country in Palestinian Gaza.
Shalom. I see this is all electrified fence along here, isn't it?
Electrified barbed wire. I mean, this is almost a constant state of war, isn't it, really?
I mean, if you could have to put up something like electrified barbed wire.
Yeah, it is today. The barbed wire is new because of the situation where Jews are driving home on the road,
and some guy who is supposed to be a Palestinian policeman shoots the car up.
The Israelis bring with them a version of apartheid. We pass this road being built for the sole use of Jewish settlers and soldiers.
Until it's opened, these Palestinians must wait hours for the few settlers to drive by.
Isn't that striking you as remarkable that there is a road for only one ethnic group of people, a Jews-only road?
It doesn't always like that. It is now.
It is now. The reason is because about a year and a half ago, a school bus was blown up, an Israeli school bus,
as it was traveling from Qvardaram by Arab terrorists.
So we decided that the best thing to do would be to create some kind of separation.
That doesn't seem to be any doubt that the majority of people deeply resent the presence of this settlement.
Look, I don't know what the actual people, Arabs who live here, feel and think.
On a political level, they, I'm sure, would prefer not to be under Israeli rule.
But in terms of raising their families and supporting their families, this is, I think, one of the best solutions for them.
For 35 years, the United Nations has voted on this best solution.
Almost unanimously, it has called on Israel to respect international law and get out of occupied Palestine.
Inside the settler's fortress is a surreal middle-class suburb,
dropped into one of the most overcrowded and porous corners of the world.
One of the strategic aims here is the control of water, which is precious in the Middle East.
While Palestinians often don't have enough running water, sometimes none at all in the heat of summer, the settlers seldom run out.
And the symbol of the occupation is this wall.
The thing that is striking about this settlement is that it's like a fortress.
I mean, this is like a Berlin Wall.
Like the Berlin Wall. Very bad. We don't feel comfortable.
We live here. I'm here for 15 years without these walls, fences and everything.
We live very normal. This last year changed all the rules in the area. Everything was changed.
The justification for taking somebody else's land is biblical.
That God gave them Palestine and God, not the history of others, is their witness.
I'm here because it's obvious that's my place.
It's not something in my hands that we can give it back.
Not me, not any politician or anybody or parliament or whatever.
Because it's a movement. It's something that came 3,000 years ago when Moses brought us here.
And we have in our mind the dream of building a temple in Jerusalem.
It's something a lot bigger than religion.
We want it in, though, if there's no compromise. Doesn't that mean conflict?
Where? Life is full with conflicts. I don't know what to say.
I know. Maybe I'm saying something too strong.
It's one-zero game. We will fight. The conflict is here. We will fight.
It's one-zero game, not to kill each other, but it's us or them.
On the other side of the wall is the reality of Palestine.
At yet another checkpoint, people are waiting and waiting.
Let me just take you in a journey from Gaza to Chanyounis.
This normal journey usually takes 20 minutes to reach from Gaza town to Chanyounis.
But after this checkpoint, this journey sometimes takes people from 4 to 9 hours.
People, as you see here, waiting to go from Gaza to Chanyounis
to guarantee the security of the passage of two or three settlers.
Two or three settlers will drive along here.
In the meantime, all this traffic has to bank up.
Exactly.
How long will these people be here, do you think? Just as a guess.
These people will stay till tomorrow morning because the road is closed now.
It will not be reopened until tomorrow morning, 7 o'clock in the morning.
Dr Elfarar's family used to own land near this crossing.
The Israelis confiscated it and demolished a home.
And this is typical of what happens almost every day in occupied Palestine.
They demolished my house and another 26 houses the same night.
I call it terrorism, here I call it terrorism.
How long did your family live there?
Maybe back to 900 years.
We were in the same place.
I feel angry. I feel devastated.
I feel abandoned by the world. Let me be frank with you.
I feel that nobody is taking care of us.
This is Gaza, just a few miles down the road from the affluence of the Israeli settlement.
The contrast is extraordinary.
Almost a million Palestinians are trapped behind electrified barbed wire and roadblocks.
Always waiting for invasion, their defences are pathetic mounds of sand.
Fear has a permanent presence.
Waiting for the invasion is worse than the invasion itself.
Because you are waiting, you don't know when, where and how they will hit or come in.
The first time they bombed in Gaza, I was still in another flat.
And we had children, many children in the building.
And I heard all the children and their mothers screaming and crying.
The half-built buildings of Gaza are a testament to the hopes raised then dashed
by the talk of an independent Palestine.
Without Israeli permission, most people can't leave and they can't return.
They can't get the jobs, their produce can't get to market.
Most struggle to live on about a pound a day, a poverty compounded by an Israeli policy called closure.
You see, for Israel to sustain this unsustainable occupation,
it is transforming every city and every Palestinian town and village into a prison, basically.
Surrounded by tanks, surrounded by walls, surrounded by fences.
And it's not like they're building a border between us and Israel.
It's building borders inside West Bank and Gaza,
between our cities and towns for the sake of their settlements.
They are obliging us to be occupied people and not citizens.
United States, Mr. Prime Minister, has been proud of its association with the State of Israel.
Rest assured that the security of Israel is a principal objective of this administration.
I want everybody to know should I be the president of Israel is going to be our friend.
I'm going to stand by Israel.
Israel's occupation of Palestine would not be possible without the backing of America.
In the oil-rich Middle East, Israel is America's deputy sheriff,
receiving billions of dollars, along with the latest weapons.
F-16 aircraft, bombs, missiles, Apache helicopters.
Today Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world, and it has nuclear weapons.
We saw an Apache helicopter circling in the sky above our heads, then shooting a missile.
The rockets fell just 200 meters from our house. All our windows were shattered.
I had a child in front of me, my daughter, who was 11 years old, shivering from fear,
worried, frightened to death, and I could do nothing to protect her.
And you don't know whether in the second minute you or your daughter will be dead.
That feeling of impotence is undescribable, and I will never forget it.
This has bombed damage in Gaza. Although America is Israel's main arms supplier,
it's not widely recognized that Britain also fuels the conflict here,
even though it condemns Israel for its illegal occupation.
During the first 14 months of the Palestinian uprising, the Blair government approved
230 export licenses for weapons and military equipment to Israel.
The categories these covered included large-caliber weapons, ammunition, bombs,
and vital parts for military aircraft that almost certainly included
American-supplied combat helicopters. You may have seen these Apache gunships on the news,
firing missiles at densely populated areas. Tony Blair has said, and I quote him,
we are doing everything we can to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
As much as they humiliate us and kill us and destroy our land, destroy everything we do,
our schools, our organizations, infrastructure, everything they like to destroy,
but this gives us more power to continue and resist.
In the news we get, only the Palestinians are described as terrorists,
and yet the Israelis have a long history of terrorism,
both before and since the founding of the Jewish state.
At least three Israeli prime ministers have been involved in campaigns of terror.
The tragic scene is like a serious incident during the Blitz.
The hotel housed the British Army headquarters and the Palestine government offices,
and casualties were very heavy.
The commander of the terrorist group that blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946
was M'naiq and Bagan, 91 people were killed.
M'naiq and Bagan was Israeli prime minister in the 70s and 80s.
He once described a massacre as a splendid act of conquest.
Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister until 1992.
He had been a leader of a Jewish group called the Stern Gang,
and carried out a string of assassinations.
When those Israelis, who are now famous names,
committed acts of terrorism just before the birth of Israel,
you could have said to them,
nothing justifies what you've done, ripping apart all those lives,
and they would say, it did justify it.
What's the difference?
I think of now as an international community, come to a new understanding.
I think after September 11th, the world got a wake-up call.
Because terrorism today is no longer the mad bomber,
the anarchist who throws in an explosive device into a crowd to make a point.
Terrorism is going to move from the present situation to non-conventional terrorism,
to nuclear terrorism.
Before we reach that point, we have to remove this scourge from the earth.
And therefore, whether you're talking about the struggle here between Israelis and Palestinians,
the struggle in Northern Ireland, the struggle in Sri Lanka,
or any of the places where terrorism has been used,
we must make a global commitment of all free democracies
to eliminate this threat from the world, period.
Does that include state terrorism?
No country has the right to deliberately target civilians,
as no organization has a right to deliberately target civilians.
That's what Israelis have been doing for years.
The present Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been involved in terror.
In 1983, he was found indirectly but personally responsible
for a civilian massacre by Lebanese militia in two Palestinian refugee camps.
At least 800 innocent people were murdered in cold blood, most of them Palestinians.
What about Israeli terrorism now?
The language of terrorism you have to be very careful with.
Terrorism means deliberately targeting civilians in a kind of warfare.
That's what the terrorism against Israeli schools, coffee shops, malls has been all about.
Israel specifically targets, to the best of its ability, Palestinian terrorist organizations.
When an Israeli sniper shoots an old lady with a cane,
trying to get into a hospital for her chemotherapy treatment
in front of a lot of the world's press, for one,
and frankly we'd be here all day with other examples, isn't that terrorism?
I don't know the case you're speaking about, but I can be convinced of one thing.
An Israeli who takes aim, even an Israeli sniper, is taking aim at those engaged in terrorism.
Unfortunately, in every kind of warfare, there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed.
Terrorism means putting the crosshairs of the sniper's rifle on a civilian deliberately.
That's what I just described. No, I can tell you that did not happen.
It did happen, and I think that's where some people have problem with the argument that terrorism exists on one side.
Your definition is absolutely correct about civilians, and those suicide bombers are terrorists.
If you mix terrorism and counter-terrorism, if you create some kind of moral obfuscation,
you will bring about, not just a problem for Israel,
but you will bring about a problem for the entire Western alliance,
because we are all facing this threat.
It's hard to see the difference between what the Israelis call counter-terrorism and terrorism.
Whatever the target, both involve the killing of innocent people.
This is what happened when Prime Minister Sharon sent tanks into Bethlehem earlier this year.
We had a day before a private hospital director who was going from the hospital in Al-Qadr to Bethlehem to get supplies for his hospital.
His plate number was known to the soldier, his name was known to the soldier, and they knew that he is the director of a hospital,
but he was shocked by a high-volocity bullet.
In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, recognized Israel's right to exist,
and Israeli sovereignty over 78% of Palestine. It was an historic compromise.
And in the early 90s, a breakthrough for peace seemed possible.
It was in this room in a Jerusalem hotel that the first direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials took place in 1991.
These led to further meetings and an agreement in the Norwegian capital, Oslo,
that set up an autonomous mini-state in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.
For Yasser Arafat and his people, it was seen as a beginning, but the reality was different.
What the majority of Palestinians got was a classic colonial fix.
Arafat and his elite got the trappings and privileges of power, while the mass of the people got what one Israeli journalist called
the autonomy of a prisoner of war camp.
In July 2000, the two sides met in America to reach a final agreement,
but among the issues they discussed was a profound disagreement about just how much land was on offer.
Israel's Prime Minister at the time, Ehud Barak, claimed he'd offered the Palestinians almost all the occupied territories back
and said that Arafat had rejected this.
In reality, the Israelis were expanding more and more illegal settlements on Palestinian land, even during the negotiations.
Add to that the special access roads with their checkpoints,
and the Palestinians say that all that was left was a group of colonies with their borders patrolled by military bases.
It's very important to understand that from a Palestinian point of view, they were asked to sign in the end of the day a document
which did not relate even to one of the central issues for which they had been struggling for more than 100 years.
They are left eventually with an offer of 10% of what used to be Palestine.
The Israelis who dictated this offer in the summer of 2000 are not even talking about the proper state.
They are talking in that area of a stateless state, I would call it, a Bantustan, with no genuine sovereignty,
with no independent foreign economic or political policies, with no proper capital,
and at the mercy of the Israeli security services and the Israeli policy.
Not only that, but there is now documented evidence that the Palestinians had made an extraordinary offer to the Israelis,
conceding even more of their land, but this was not news at the time.
If there is no justice for the Palestinians, there will be a reckoning in the young generation.
Peace be upon you, and God's mercy and blessings be upon you.
My name is Khalid Dahlan. Today we will meet with each other, me and you,
Dr. Dahlan runs a project for children in Gaza. He asked these boys to draw anything that was on their minds.
Most of these children are traumatized by the fear and violence of the occupation.
The majority of our children exposed directly to the attack or to the bombardment by the Israeli army is traumatized.
Many, many symptoms, children became anxious and depressed and make, for example, sleep disorder as nightmares or sleepwalking or something like that.
Many, many children, they cannot concentrate well to study.
Nearly every drawing is a violence. Nearly every family in Gaza had lost someone,
either to an Israeli jail or to violence.
Dr. Dahlan's goal is to help the children keep the last thing that belongs to them, their sanity and their life.
There is a conflict between the Israeli soldiers with the tanks and the Palestinian kids who threw stones and they cry,
La ilaha illallah, there is no God except Allah.
What children in other parts of the world would draw as fantasy, they draw here as real life?
Yes, war and violence. This is a good thing to protect the children from the mental disease.
I don't want my child that I've been working on having for 15 years to come and when he's 10 years old,
he goes to a settlement and he wants to kill his parents.
And the only way, the only way to stop all this suffering, now I will say it on both sides too,
is to have a Palestinian state according to UN resolutions.
When will Israel agree to negotiate with the Palestinians,
not for what they call a few Bantastans on the West Bank, but for a state that is as peaceful, as secure,
above all as independent as Israel itself?
Do you want Israel to concede the terms of that negotiation up front on television?
Or is it better to agree to the general principle and then sit with the Palestinians in a face-to-face negotiation
once they stop violence against us?
What about this, the general principle then of a state as independent as Israel?
We do not need a string of adjectives to agree to. You agree to the principle?
Well, that's a fair principle, isn't it? What's a state worth if it isn't independent?
What we're speaking about is our willingness to negotiate with the Palestinians, their self-government,
and we are willing to create a Palestinian self-governing entity, some call it a Palestinian state,
which will address the real needs of the Palestinians.
What right have you to create somebody else's homeland?
Well, we are being asked to negotiate that. We are willing to be part of that.
We're willing to make a contribution to that.
We are not going to up front go into details about its geographic configuration or its powers.
That's part of the negotiation.
I support sanctions, selective sanctions on Israel because I tell my friends here and my colleagues,
I would rather have you pay an economic price than pay the price I think you will pay in terms of human lives.
The stronger party in the conflict, Israel, has to understand that there is a price for going on with the policies it carries.
What do you say to those fellow Israelis who will inevitably come up with the view that in the end
we're going to be pushed into the sea? This expression will be pushed into...
By whom? By this mosquito?
We are the most powerful power in the Middle East. We have one of the greatest and most powerful armies in the world.
In this last operation, there were four divisions, armoured divisions, against some 500, 2000 armed people.
It's a laugh. Who will push us into the sea?
Until recently, Israel has enjoyed almost an immunity from criticism among Western politicians.
This has been largely due to a fear of being labelled anti-Semitic, a fear manipulated by the Israeli government and its foreign lobbies.
I think the Holocaust memory does not allow any moral criticism of anything that Israel does.
Europeans, in particular, and the outside world in general, are not allowed to voice criticism on Israel.
Unless, again, what Israel is doing is akin to what the Germans had done to the Jews.
If you do criticize Israel, you are immediately charged with anti-Semitism.
This is a huge bluff of the Israeli establishment, that every criticism of its policy is anti-Semitism.
And criticizing your government, your country's policy is today, I think, the only patriotic thing one can do.
The Israeli government denies it, but Palestinians fear that there are plans to take all of Palestine, trapping or expelling them indefinitely.
We are not against the Jews. That's why I have Jewish friends.
We are against, politically, the governments of Israel and the army of Israel who denies our rights.
And I hope, I hope, to have peace here with the Israelis. But with dignity, this is very important for us.
With dignity, it means with our full rights.
The Palestinians will never be destroyed. They will never disappear.
We are not the red Indians. We will not be cancelled from history just like this, no.
It is not surprising that the Jewish people of Israel should feel insecure.
No one should ever forget that the most devastating genocide in human history happened only two generations ago.
But a true sensitivity to that awful memory comes from the same basic humanity that recognizes the suffering of the Palestinian people and the courage of their endurance.
The truth is that Israelis will never have peace until they recognize that Palestinians have the same right to the same peace and the same independence that they enjoy.
Recently, that great voice of freedom, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asked this,
Have the Jewish people of Israel forgotten their collective punishment, their home demolitions, their humiliations so soon?
Israel's own dissenting voices have not forgotten, and those who speak out in this film honor the best traditions of Jewish humanity.
If Rami, the man who lost a young daughter in a suicide attack, can understand the root cause of the violence here, isn't it time that others broke their silence?
The occupation of Palestine should end now. Then the solution is clear.
Two countries, Israel and Palestine, neither dominating nor menacing the other. Is that impossible? Or is history to witness the consequences of yet another silence?
Thank you for watching.
