Informing people - people keep writing me ‘thank yous' for what I send them and I think, "How could anyone thank me for sending this?" I give presentations abroad when I'm traveling, and I've done a number of interviews. I support BDS - boycott, divestment and sanctions. If my youngest son heard that he would blow his top - it would certainly impact him. It will impact everyone in my family, but if I have to weigh and measure, I don't see anything else that's going to help. We have to put pressure on the government to bring about change, and I think the only way this is possible is through boycott, sanctions and divestment.
If I have to weigh and measure the situation now, the next four years are just around the corner.
Twelve wars have killed enough people on both sides - in Lebanon, in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank. I want to bring about change. I want very badly to bring about change. And, even if it's not going to happen in my lifetime, I want to feel that I will have had something to do with this. When I go abroad and give presentations, I talk very little about the Palestinians unless I'm doing a Q&A and am explicitly asked questions. I talk about the cost of occupation on Israelis - the cost of expansionism as a policy, and of ethnic cleansing,
on Israelis. That cost is very great. I feel that this is one of the more important things I do.
Funny, Gideon Levy
and I were at a conference once, and he missed what I said because he missed his train. In the morning, I talked about the [Occupation's] cost to Israelis, and in the afternoon, he said Israelis don't pay anything for the Occupation. So I went and talked to him and he agreed there is a cost. When 80,000 Holocaust survivors live under the poverty line [in Israel], something is wrong.
There's of a lot of money that goes into the Territories and into expansion. There's no lack of funds when it comes to expanding in the Territories;
but, there is a fifth of the people working in Israel live under the poverty line. When a quarter of the people in Israel live under the poverty line, when Holocaust survivors live under the poverty line, when one of every four children lives under the poverty line
- something is wrong. Tremendous amounts of money are being thrown away, whether on the wall, on [bypass] roads, on colonies
or on expansion, and people don't know about that.
But Gideon Levy was right about one thing: [Israelis] are not aware of what's happening and this is because they are kept in a constant state of fear. We are living under a constant state of attack here. We are the eternal victims, not the victimizer, right? There is something true about that. We are in a constant state of war; with all the talk here, it's either about the past wars, the present one, or the one to come, you can never get away from that. I don't remember a year that I have lived here that hasn't had some war on the horizon.