A Beautiful Image that sums up the delegation.
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We visited the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. I had never visited a refugee camp before and did not know what to expect.
When we arrived we were treated to a performance by several dozen children of Dabke, a traditional Palestinian dance, at the Shoruq community center.
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The clock tower in Jaffa stands three stories high. The same number of generations my family has been exiled from Jaffa.
Walking down each road, I could not stop thinking of my grandparents. Have they been on this road before? Did they walk by this building too? When I saw the clock tower, I thought only of my seedo (grandpa in Arabic).
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Through meeting Palestinian families and farmers, we have seen many realities of being a Palestinian here. Very often laws of legitimacy change at the drop of a hat. The early days of the delegation included meeting with the Nassar family at the Tent of Nations near Bethlehem.
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The olive tree is a Mediterranean tree that can live for thousands of years. It is at the core of culture, cuisine and economics in Palestine. The oil is both sacred and nutritious, the wood is useful and it’s branch is a symbol of peace and abundance.
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The striking thing about all these people is their positions about their commitments. They invest 120 percent of themselves in creating new visions of what the Palestinian future might be like. Hardly naïve, each deliberately chooses not to run, not to fight, not to despair, but rather to resist by raising their chins and going forward driven by their visions of better life inside—and outside— the occupied territories.
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Today we visited Canaan Fair Trade, which produces, markets and distributes organic olive oil, wheat and almonds grown by Palestinian family farmers.
Fida Abdullah, the Canaan Account Manager, gave us a tour of the production plant and she told us about it’s history.
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I've been struggling with processing all the information we're receiving and all the emotions the emotions I'm feeling. There are many ways to address this. Sometimes we need to dive into our emotions. Sometimes it helps to step back and look at the situation logically.
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We have seen destroyed houses and villages, climbed the barricade of rocks to get to the Tent of Nations farm, witnessed the checkpoints, and the apartheid roads. How dare Israel justify its blatant system of apartheid in the name of anyone??? Children learn from what they see and these conditions are insuring a generation of children inducted into hate by the actions around them!!!
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The idea of a Jewish State never made sense to me. True, my parents had been anti-Zionist socialists, but I also learned, as did everyone growing up in the US, about the un-breachable values of democracy and the separation of church and state. Zionism never jived.
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We are walking down a steep path toward the ruins of the Palestinian Village of Lifta with Umar of the Israeli NGO Zochrot. The sign points to ‘En Neftoah (Lifta). Umar describes this as Judaization - the replacement of Palestinian names with biblical names that both erase Palestinian history and support the Israeli claim of historic entitlement to this land.
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