Anna In The Middle East — Jewish Activist: U.S. Should Stop Aiding Israel

DALLAS, Texas So what’s the deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis?

Why haven’t they found peace yet?

It’s been 60 years since the Jewish state was created.

You’d think by now they would have resolved whatever issue they’ve had in dispute.

So what’s the hold up?

Does it have to do with religion?

Nope, not according to Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American woman who worked with the International Women’s Peace Service, a human rights group based in the West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

“Basically, we did two things. We are there to document human rights abuses in the region as well as support non-violent resistance to the occupation,” she said of IWPS.

To Baltzer, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has had more to do with land than theology.

The 28-year-old Fulbright scholar explained in her “Life in Occupied Palestine” talk at the Dallas Peace Center recently that she first began questioning the Israeli occupation when she was an English teacher in Turkey over four years ago.

While staying with families of Palestinian refugees, she was told of “an utterly different version of the history and present of Israel/Palestine from anything I had ever heard or learned growing up as a Jewish American.”

“I didn’t know what a Palestinian was. I didn’t think they existed,” Baltzer admitted. “I was shocked by what I learned. I didn’t believe it. I thought it was lies and propaganda, but it planted a question mark in my head, and I decided to do some of my own research.”

Or, in the words of fans of the movie “The Matrix,” she took the red pill and “went to see for her own eyes what was happening.”

“Of course, I found that there’s a lot going on that we don’t hear about in the mainstream U.S. media,” she said.

What she saw was the systematic usurpation of land legally owned and operated by Palestinians.

And the Palestinians, of course, don’t like it.

There are about 11 million people who self-identify as Palestinian, though a little under a half of them still remain within their homeland between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The rest of them scattered around the world, starting in 1947 when the United Nations proposed a plan to give 54 percent of their property for a Jewish state, as long as the native population was unharmed through the process.

Unfortunately, what followed was exactly the opposite. From 1947 to 1949, Zionists (people who advocate for a Jewish-only state) forcibly expelled just over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.

And ever since the Green Line of the Occupied Pale