Today has been absolutely surreal. I woke up at 7am on a @birthrightisrael trip... and by 3pm I was standing on a street corner next to the Tel Aviv stock exchange with my luggage, trying to process getting kicked off the trip. facebook.com/shira.leah1/vi…
Basically, throughout the entire trip it was pretty standard right-wing propaganda. *Literally* every single time an Arab or Palestinian was mentioned in a story, it was to talk about someone who was a crazy terrorist murderer who likes killing Jews for fun. Every. Single. Time.
Eventually, Emily (who's an immigration rights organizer) got fed up when they drove us past the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank *for the 4th time* without acknowledging that it existed, and she asked if the wall we were passing was the West Bank separation wall.
He said yes, and launched into a monologue about Palestinian suicide bombers and put 100% of the blame on them. Emily and I asked him about the lack of nuance and whether we'd be getting any perspectives from any Palestinians, or people who advocate for Palestinian rights.
He said "I don't know of any program or person who could do that", which is obviously absurd. It was getting very tense, and then he noticed that the conversation was being recorded and he went from 0 to 100, got in her face, and things escalated dramatically.
This is in the context of a trip where people were openly filming all the time, including 15 seconds before this particular conversation started, with no issues at all. Anyway, at that point other people on the bus intervened and calmed things down.
At our next stop a bunch of Birthright trip staff members pulled Emily, Shira and I out of the group and told us that we had to leave the trip immediately, for unspecified reasons.
The woman in charge told us that they had rebooked our flights home for today, and we had 2 choices: either we could get in a car with them and drive straight to the airport to leave the country, or they would cancel our flights home. Either way, we couldn't stay on the trip.
The wildest part was, they had no explanation for why we were being kicked off. They said we violated the trip rules and regulations, but refused to say which rule or regulation we had violated by asking questions on the bus about things we could see out the window.
What they did say, repeatedly and explicitly, was that our desire to hear multiple viewpoints and perspectives was incompatible with the trip, and as a result we were done with the trip because it wasn't possible for it "to meet our needs."
I can't think of anything less Jewish than to kick someone off for asking questions, for wanting to hear a multiple perspectives, for caring about the freedom of everyone who lives in Israel/Palestine.
Demanding that young Jews keep their values quiet in exchange for plane tickets is not a gift, it's a bribe. People like Sheldon Adelson, the largest donor to both @birthrightIsrael and Trump, want to buy off our generation with plane tickets. No thanks.
Two days ago our Birthright tour guide told our bus that Israel had "never occupied any Palestinians." 24 hours later we were in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair, and saw with our own eyes how living under occupation is crushing families in the West Bank. It was bad.
Nicholas Kristof wrote about this village in 2010, in an article you should definitely read. The injustice is so obvious in Umm al-Khair, and it reminded Kristof that, "we must not lose sight of the most basic fact about the occupation: it’s wrong."
nytimes.com/2010/07/01/opi…
nytimes.com/2010/07/01/opi…
In a nutshell, these families were forced to leave their homes in the Negev in 1948 by the Israeli army. They ended up near Hebron, and purchased land for 100 camels (not cheap at all). In 1982, Jewish settlers suddenly appeared and built a settlement in the middle of their land.
In Kristof's words, "the Jewish settlement of Karmel, a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business." We saw that. 
Their neighbors, though? "Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren’t allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won’t permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets." We saw that too.
Every time the villagers build even one-room homes, the Israeli government comes in and bulldozes them, with no warning. Auwda's home has been bulldozed twice, his brothers' 3 or 4 times.
If they want to build or fix their home legally, they need to apply for a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration. Who is sending the bulldozers in the first place? The Israeli Civil Administration.
I don't know how you could visit Umm al-Khair without being convinced that the occupation is real, and it does incredible damage to the Palestinians who live under it. But this village's determination and hope is just as real and incredible. I think they'll make it.
