Palestine’s Intifada: the Process of Liberation is Irresistible

Zeina Azzam:
Good afternoon – good evening – and welcome to The Jerusalem Fund and our educational program, The Palestine Center, and welcome also to our online audience. My name is Zeina Azzam and I am the Executive Director here and I am delighted to have you all with us, and delighted to have our special speaker here today. This is Dr. Vijay Prashad, and he has a most compelling title for his talk: “Palestine’s Intifada, the Process of Liberation is Irresistible.” He will examine the current revolt in the Palestinian territories and offer some historical and political context. Dr. Prashad will also look at how the debate in the United States—by the citizens and by the policy makers—is changing, as many simply do not accept the way the situation is framed anymore. He will add a critical analysis and depth to this framework, offering a more nuanced and informed alternative. And, I think he will situate all of this in international law and human rights.

Let me introduce Vijay Prashad. He is a professor of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of eighteen books and writes about many issues, including the intersections of freedom and liberation struggles in many parts of the world. Vijay is the Chief Editor at Left Word Books in New Delhi. The Hindu, a leading newspaper in South India has selected his book No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism, as one of the top ten best books of 2015. His most recent book is an edited volume entitled Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation. This is a wonderful collection of essays and poems by important writers like Naomi Shihab Nye, Remi Kanazi, Teju Cole, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and many, many others. It explores identity, politics, resistance, the experience of war, the situation on the ground in Palestine, and so much more. We’ve purchased copies of this book and we will have them available for you after the talk in the other room. Vijay Prashad’s next two books are the edited volume, The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution, which is supposed to come out this year, and, in 2017, The Lotus and the Settler: India, Palestine, Israel. He is really quite prolific. He is a journalist for Frontline and The Hindu, which are both in India, as well as Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and BirGun. In the United States he writes regularly for Alternet. I have asked him to speak for about thirty-five/forty minutes, after which we’ll open the floor for discussion, and our online audience can also submit questions to us, @PalestineCenter. Thank you and please help me in welcoming Vijay Prashad.

Vijay Prashad:
Thanks a lot Zeina. What a long and interesting talk you have made me say. You gave the entire outline; do I have to follow every piece of it? Well, I wanted to share with you – on the plane ride to Washington, D.C., I like to read things on the plane, it is a relaxing place, so I decided to read this book in anticipation of the election that is now coming, I guess, in a few months. And so I thought I should prepare and learn about the next president of the United States of America, and so I went and bought this book, which I recommend to you, it is called Quotations from Chairman Trump. Within a few months it is going to be obligatory reading, you might get arrested if you are not carrying it. So now I am going to carry it on my person at all times, just in case. It indeed has quotations from Chairman Trump, almost all of them are from his speeches. You can open it anywhere and there is brilliance. For instance, page 102, I seriously opened this randomly, “I love the Muslims. I think they are great people. I mean, it wasn’t people from Sweden that blew up the World Trade Center.” So this is widely available in, as I say, not so important book stores around the country, and at all Trump rallies.

Writing about American elections – it is a painful business to cover American elections. To be at the rallies of the candidates is excruciating; it is so hard to learn anything…genuinely. You get yelled at a lot – that is one of the problems that I am finding. I don’t know about you, but I am finding that people want to yell at you. In the middle of this entire presidential election, foreign policy is irrelevant. There is of course the “I am going to build a wall against Mexico and make the Mexicans pay for it.” Everyone actually agrees with him: I do not think Ted Cruz disagrees, I don’t think Marco Rubio disagrees. Maybe they disagree on the height of the wall, or who should pay for it. But basic strategy is shared among all of them and I think, and sometimes am convinced that even Hillary Clinton agrees with much of this kind of agenda: super-predator children…things like that. On foreign policy, where is the substantive debate?

There was that moment when Trump attacked Jeb Bush for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, which among certain circles sent that kind of resolved delight through our bodies as we watched that. Never having seen an American politician in a major, mainstream thing actually attack somebody on the Iraq war and say it was a stupid thing to do. I think that is the kind of language he used; it is the kind of language he always uses – it will be in the second edition of this book, the exact quote, it is not in this edition. So there was that attack, but in fact it was not an attack on the Iraq war. There was no substantive policy critique. Why is the Iraq war bad? Well it is stupid, it sent the Muslims to Europe. That is the playground level at which the debate was structured. There was no substantive discussion.

Everybody of course generally stands with Israel—that is there. On that level, there is no change. I watched Marco Rubio give a speech recently, “I stand with Israel. Israel is our greatest ally.” It’s kind of pabulum, it is like saying “Aren’t we all human beings in this room.” Everybody says it and everybody nods. But it is not America that is nodding anymore. And I do not think the consensus is as clear as these politicians believe. In the same way as they talk about no more taxes, no cutting taxes, I am not sure that the consensus against taxes is as clear in America, because, after all, what other explanation is there for the support that Bernie Sanders is getting, than that people are not convinced that no more taxes is a good idea. In other words the Sanders campaign is a repudiation of the tax-frees or the tax strike that the rich have been on. It itself is a repudiation. So it is not clear that there is a consensus on the question of tax.

There is a hermetically sealed bubble in which this debate takes place. Around things like taxes, or Israel – they all seem to agree. But outside in “main street America” – if we can borrow the populist language – the consensus is no longer apparent. Israel is a difficult subject to talk about, as you all know, in this country. Unfortunately, I do not even know why I started writing about Israel, because it has brought me nothing but grief. I personally – I am not a Palestinian. I don’t have a stake in this in that sense. I’m not fighting for my national liberation. I am not a Jewish-American who has a sense of anger that in their name a certain policy is being enacted by the American government that is also a legitimate interest-based, politics of Palestine… I don’t have that. Ok, you could say that I am an Indian and the Indian government has decided to have an alliance with Israel that perhaps will, very soon, exceed America’s alliance with Israel. We have just promised to buy three billion dollars’ worth of weaponry; and being one of the largest importers of Israeli weapons in the world, I used to argue years ago that India has started to underwrite the occupation. But I started writing about Israel and Palestine long before India was buying arms from Israel. That began in 1998. Writing about Israel in this country is a difficult issue because anytime you say anything that used to go against the consensus, the attack comes heavy and hard.

Recently, I wrote a piece about the knife attacks in Jerusalem. I had done a series of stories in Jerusalem, I had walked around late at night talking to little kids. It is such a beautiful city, you walk through the old city at night and it looks abandoned, then suddenly around the corner come six kids. God knows what they are doing. If I had the sort of Barack Obama mentality I would say “Where are your parents?” “Don’t wear saggy pants.” “Don’t eat fried food.” But I don’t have that mentality, I say “Boy you remind me of myself, being the naughty kid running around the city of Calcutta.” I looked at them, talked to them and wondered, “What are you thinking about the world? How do you understand your place in the world?” Interestingly, of course they want to say to you “Where are you from?” They are so curious about other worlds, I find that interesting – I am going to talk about that in a minute. What I heard them talk about the most is their feeling of immense humiliation from the settlers who have essentially taken over their city and periodically march through the city yelling things, you know, slogans of protest such as “Death to the Arabs,” a very common slogan on a weekend afternoon, when the Sabbath has ended and they march in groups. An Armenian businessman in the Armenian quarters said to me that once he ran out of his shop – he sells ceramics – and he yelled at them saying “What about me? What about death to me? Don’t leave the Armenians out! Not just death to the Arabs, you are discriminating against the Armenians. What about the Christians who are not Arabs just down here…” So these kids articulated this sense of anger and maybe also a little sense of sadness that they were being treated in this way. And of course you have seen these because these travel the social media, these children being checked all the time.

But it is not really the armed forces that seemed to bother them, it was their neighbors. Because after all, in a community, armed forces are expected to behave as barbarians. Your neighbors are not expected to behave like barbarians, and this is barbaric. To have people walk by your shops, walk by your houses, walk by your fathers and mothers and yell “Death to the Arabs.” It is unpleasant. It is so unpleasant in fact that, twice I watched security forces try to stop these marches. You read about this periodically – security forces are actually trying to stop settlers from marching through the old city because they are afraid that it will create a provocation. In that case, the security forces are actually trying to maintain the so-called “order,” that is, the order of occupation, rather than the disorder of this kind of humiliation. So I wrote this piece about the knife attacks, and of course a million emails go to my employer. And interestingly they all say things like “He should be punished. Punished.” What an interesting word. Not “He should be argued against,” but “He should be punished.” What do they want me to do? Get on my knees and march down the row of Cavalry? What is the basis of punishment? Why should you be punished for saying “This is what children said to me?” Because how can you justify knife attacks? You have to be punished because you justified knife attacks.

Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, made a series of speeches where he said the author of the knife attack is not the Palestinian leadership, but it is the occupation. That was the UN Secretary General. He was viciously attacked by the Israeli leadership, viciously attacked to such an extent that the Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon – no great outspoken person on many issues, if you know the career of Secretary General Ban, he is a very mild Secretary General, given the balance of forces in the world and the institution he has to manage and the donors he has to deal with, he is a very fairly neutral kind of character, having sort of drifted through his tenancy as Secretary General. This man, Ban Ki-Moon, took to the New York Times editorial page – I don’t know how many of you read this – but he wrote an op-ed whose title was “Don’t Shoot the Messenger, Israel”. That was the title of the Secretary General’s piece. He got attacked for that as well by the way.

There is a series of factual statements that need to be made about the nature of the occupation. Recently I went to Williams College at the invitation of the Students for Justice in Palestine, and I started to talk about this, and the room was very crowded, and a group of people came obviously to argue against the position, and at the question and answer section, they started their argument. They began to say, justifying the knife attacks, and kept saying, “An eye for an eye.” Of course, I always reply with the Gandhi line, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” It’s an irritating line, because it doesn’t [make the whole world blind], it just makes two people lose one eye each. And they have another eye to see with. So, you know, it’s not entirely true. Anyway, maybe if you keep taking out eyes, you go blind. Some of these aphorisms are quite silly. Anyway, one young man started asking me passive questions. You know, “Palestinians have always refused a peace deal.” So, I said to him, “Have you asked this question to anyone before?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “How many times have you asked this question to somebody before?” He said “Many times.” I said, “Have you ever had a productive discussion?” He said, “No.” I said, “Why do you want to ask me the question?” And he sat down.

So, what I want to say, why I have done this, why I have talked about the knife attacks, is because I think the time of having those discussions is over. I think that moment of actually talking about resolution 194, resolution 242, this map, that map, this discussion, this agreement, what happened in Lisbon, what happened in Oslo, what happened here, what happened there, why did Arafat do this, this time is over. This is not the moment to have those discussions again. Having those discussions is basically a circular futility problem. You get into a loop where nobody gains, everybody articulates their positions, angers each other and walks away. The real debate is not this. It seems to be the real debate is whether there’s an occupation or not because actually a lot of people believe there is no occupation.

A lot of people who believe there is no occupation believe therefore international law does not apply. So, then the discussion is utterly different. If you don’t believe there’s an occupation of Palestine, then to have this discussion about the Palestinians as a people and the occupation and the right to resist is meaningless. It’s fruitless. They are merely internal terrorists. They should go away. They should go to Jordan. They should go to America or go somewhere else. They shouldn’t remain in Judaic Samaria. If that is the debate, then that should be the debate to have on the world stage because 99 percent of the world believes there is an occupation. We need to establish that this is the discussion to be held, not the discussion about who betrayed which agreement. If there is an occupation, then you need to take the next step. And I think the Israelis are well aware that the avenues are closing—that if they are going to recognize, if they are forced to recognize [that] it’s an occupation, then the two pathways that have been provided over the last 60 years are essentially closed off. And they are closed off not legally but politically. Pathway number one, which was by U.N. Resolution 194 is the one-state solution. In other words, this major resolution was about the right to return. If you acknowledge the right to return, you have people return to Palestine. They return to ‘48. They return to the occupied territories. You no longer are going to have two states. That’s a one-state. You know, there’s no way for anybody that’s traveled in that region, for all the Palestinians, to return to the West Bank. It’ll be a very congested West Bank. What will you do with the settlers? I’m coming to that in a minute. That’s the one-state solution and that’s totally foreclosed by the right wing in Israel.

I mean it’s a funny thing, people say, American politicians will say Hamas [must] recognize Israel. It’s a normal thing that they say. How many of you have read the Likud charter? How many have read it? Only you have read it? What kind of people are you? Only two people. You’ve got to read the Likud charter; it’s fascinating. Likud does not recognize Palestine at all. It talks about, it defines Israel as from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean [Sea] and going all the way down to the Negev, whatever, the whole thing. It’s basically greater Israel as what it understands its vision to be. And it doesn’t see any place for a two-state solution. It is committed to one-state that has got no Palestinians or, if there are Palestinians, they’re subordinate. And in fact they are no longer needed. Palestinian labor has been completely supplanted by contract labor from Thailand and other places. How many of the Kibbutzim in northern Palestine have any longer workers coming from Jenin? You know they don’t. They come from Thailand. I mean it’s always interesting to understand that […?] in Lebanon can look out at the workers that come up to the line. You know the blue line working, and they’re all Thai. You know, they’re all from Thailand. So, the one state that is greater Israel, doesn’t actually require Palestinians. They’re not needed any longer, not as cheap labor or anything. So, the one-state solution is totally foreclosed by Israeli politics. It has nothing to do with Palestinian politics. We can talk about that later, whether there indeed something today called Palestinian politics. But the Israeli politics forecloses the one-state solution; it doesn’t exist in its imagination. It’s impossible. Okay, so you have the Justice Minister and some people say, “Oh we hate this government.” There always good people… Of course, there are good people in the country. When he [referring to Donald Trump] becomes president that doesn’t mean all Americans are like him. But it’s still going to set policy. He’s still going to build a wall that is 500 feet high and make the Mexicans pay for it. He’s still going to do all of this. You can yell and scream all you want, “Not in my name, I hate him, I’m not him.” But you are. As long as he is president, he is your president. You can’t disavow. So, obviously, there will always be people inside of Israel saying, “This government is not my government.” But, this Justice Minister is for now your Justice Minister. And she as you may have already known has tried many times to put forward a bill in the Knesset, which is to have Israel formally declared as a Jewish state cause Israel has this ambivalence about whether it’s formally a Jewish state or not. Okay, so that’s the end of that world. It’s finished – the one state where Palestinians, Israelis, you know, will all live together. I don’t think it’s possible, politically. It’s possible morally, I grant you that. It’s a moral idea. You know, when people write about the need for a one-state solution, I would see that not as a political idea but as a moral idea.

The second solution, which is the established U.S. policy, is the two-state solution, which is the established U.S. policy after Oslo. That’s Resolution 242: withdraw from the 1967 lines and let the Palestinians build a state—with even the Chinese recently reiterating this point with East Jerusalem as the capital, not Ramallah, but East Jerusalem as the capital. [The] Chinese Premier was recently at the Arab League where he made a very important speech reiterating, confirming that China is behind the two-state solution with East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state: that is the two-state solution. The flag is right there, it is all prepared and ready. But friends, where is the possibility of two states when East Jerusalem is barely under any Palestinian control, where the West Bank, the Jordan Valley, the most productive agrarian area, is entirely captured by settlers, by Israeli military positions? How can there be a two-state solution when, let’s forget Gaza, but the West Bank has the appearance of Swiss cheese? There is no possibility of a two-state solution. It is a mockery to talk about a two-state solution. And to think of Ramallah as the capital is a surrender of, in fact, the designations of Oslo. It is worse than Oslo because at least there it was East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian State. Edward Said called Oslo the Palestinian Versailles. This is actually even worse than [that]. I can’t think of another analogy. That’s one of the great things about Edward Said, he could come up with these things in 24 hours. He wrote an essay in the London Review of Books called The Morning After. This was just after the Oslo Accords were signed, and he said it is the Palestinian Versailles. Wow, what a way to break with Yasser Arafat, boom. That’s a tough statement to have made. Anyway, the two-state solution – it is ridiculous to even imagine that it is possible. It is ridiculous. And I am not even considering Gaza.

So what remains? What remains is there is no possibility, and hence [there is] frustration. And in fact, this is what animates Ban Ki-Moon’s speeches and that op-ed that he wrote. If you have a permanent occupation – per UN statement on colonized countries 1960s, 1960, you know, the statement on colonization of 1960 passed by the U.N. general assembly, occupied people have the right to resist. You have young kids running around, knifing innocent people as they walk by. That is the nature of an occupation. That is what is going to happen. This is not a statement of normativeness. This is a declaration of reality. If there is no exit for people, this is where they will be. When I was in Ramallah recently, some leftist young people asked me “Will you talk about the Indian left?” cause I have written a book about Indian left. And I said “Sure.” You know, we discussed this at lunch time. They quickly booked the Edward Said hall, actually, which is in the center of Ramallah. And I show up there. The room was packed with people who have come from essentially the slums of Ramallah. These are young people and they listened to, you know, this drawing on about leftist strategy in India and all the debates—you know, boring as can be. But, these young people stayed the whole time. And then at the end, they came and they stood around and they wanted to ask the following, they wanted to say, “What do you expect us to do? How could we build a political organization? Every day we get killed. Today we are going because of bodies coming back of somebody who was being killed. You think we can think about strategy?” They were furious with me; but, you know, in a fraternal way. They were not angry with me. They were angry with the impossibility of building a productive politics. I kept saying to them, “Be careful, don’t do stupid things. You can’t have an entire generation wiped out. You know, at least the children of stones fought in the way they did. You are not the children of stones now. I don’t know what to call you. But this is too dangerous. If every day one young person is getting killed here, there, running aimlessly with a knife at somebody, getting shot, this is not politics. This is a suicide of a people.” But this frustrated them. They kept saying, “What can we do?”

And I’m afraid this is where we are. We’re at a point now where there is no leadership for these young people to create a political dynamic. We here are stuck in old boring arguments about who did what to when, etc. But let’s stop and think about how we can help in some way to provide space for these young people to derive their own politics. What would it mean for them to, you know, produce their own politics? Let’s spend time listening to them. Let’s spend some time as writers channeling what they’re saying to people around us. So they begin to understand that this is not a question of terrorism versus the innocents. This is a question of young people utterly suffocated. In the Letters to Palestine introduction, I write when you take a pillow to someone’s face, when you suffocate them, they’re going to fight back. They cannot be expected to lie back and die as you suffocate them. These children are the children of the pillow in my opinion. They’re fighting to move the pillow from their face and all they’re getting from the media around the world is belittlement and the title of terrorist. But, we’re not seeing it from their point of view. I’m just going to pivot a little away from this.

And I hope we have a discussion. I’m not going to talk for much longer, maybe just ten to fifteen minutes – pivot from this, back to the United States side. Why can’t we make this kind of claim about these people? The discourse of terrorism in America is very strong. And the peace movement in America has taken a pacifist position, meaning we want to say that violence is bad in all cases. I’m utterly sympathetic to that. I’m not a proponent of violence. Violence leads often to great destruction. There was a young Indian political figure who was killed at the age of 23 by the British government. His name was Bhagat Singh and Bhagat Singh was sitting in prison. You know, he took some bombs, then threw them into a legislative assembly in 1931, somewhere around there. And Bhagat Singh in prison wrote a series of reflections on violence, on the role of Gandhi. And he wrote a line that’s basically etched in my brain. He said “Peace” or “Nonviolence” – nonviolence not peace – “Nonviolence is necessary for mass movements. Violence only in times of terrible necessity.” So, nonviolence is necessary for mass movements, [and] violence only in times of terrible necessity. There’s a difference between what he’s saying and what these kids are saying – although, I’m not sure if there is a great difference. I think the first sentence doesn’t make sense to them, that is to say that nonviolence is necessary for mass movements. I think both the concept of mass movements is gone and the concept of nonviolence is bewildering. I think it is violence in terrible necessity that frames their politics. That is what is [on] the horizon; it’s collapsed on their heads like the pillow.

In the west, it’s very difficult to explain this to people because as you start explaining it, you get the classical response that you’re justifying their violence. And particularly if people don’t accept there’s an occupation, then the right to resist is not legible to people. So, we have to find a language that is, that enables us in the context in the west to talk about the conditions of these young people, honoring their actually quite miserable condition. I’m not an idealist of people’s conditions. You know, I think it’s a miserable place to be. We need to honor that place from which they are speaking and yet be heard in this context. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to translate that. I know I said earlier that the consensus, pro-Israel consensus has cracked. And that a larger and larger number of people have now started to reconsider the need to, you know, support Israel for various reasons, whatever it might be. Some of it, most definitely, is the belligerence of Israel over the last decade. The bombing of Gaza has in a sense sensitized people to the immense crime of the occupation – 2009, 2012, 2014, they were punctuated bombings. By the way, the American government is not always sensitized by mass bombing. Our allies Saudi Arabia, of which I am going to talk tomorrow at the Saudi Summit, has been bombing Yemen since March 26th of last year and I don’t think I have seen even one demonstration, apart from Code Pink doing a few things, anywhere in the country. All the pro-Palestinian groups should be out there making the comparison to the wars on Gaza. The vigils that are held when Israel is bombing Gaza…there are often vigils in cities. I don’t see why there are not vigils against Saudi’s war on Yemen, particularly given that in the middle of this war, the United States has been resupplying Saudi Arabia, which human rights organizations have said is complicity in a war crime because American cluster munitions are used to bomb civilian sites in Yemen, hospitals, schools, etc.., and I think both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have cautioned the United States. The European Union has forbidden resupplying Saudi Arabia but that stricture from the European Union is merely moral, it is not binding, countries do not have to accept that. So England is going to continue to resupply. So, I agree that Americans are not always sensitized by violence, some of that is that there maybe has not been sufficiently a Yemeni solidarity movement. The Palestinian solidarity movement has been building for six decades, so it has a more robust…which is why it should take up the cause of Yemen as well; in solidarity with the poorest Arab country in the world being bombed by the richest Arab country in the world.

But these last few wars have sensitized people to some extent. This has been also because of the useful work of organizations across the country that have become, I think, more open and bold. For instance the group JVP, young Palestinians across the country creating little groups, everywhere you go there is some group being more brave in coming out and saying even a simple thing like “I am Palestinian and this is who I am.” I think this will change the consensus. So, after the Gaza war in 2014, I asked these people to contribute to this book and it was amazing. I have done books before, I have tried to reach out to people, important writers saying, “Will you sign a solidarity thing..?” Even in 2009, that was the last time I tried to do this, people were not willing to put their names to things, important American writers not willing to put their names to things, they felt they had too much at stake. This time, about 80 perecent of those I asked said “I’ll do it.” And the happiest thing was to have Junot Diaz write the forward. This guy is a McCarthur genius. He is a National Book Award winner. He is like every young reader’s dream writer, am I wrong? I mean people just love Junot. Firstly, when he talks…if you get a chance to listen to him speak, he is extraordinary. You have to deal with the fact that he says [expletive] and [expletive],…that’s how he talks. Sorry, I don’t know what the PG level is. But he is so funny, which is why the title of his piece is so great. It is called Americans are so Deranged about Palestine and I just want to read you the last bit to give you a flavor of it, and I am not going to bleep anything, I can’t bleep anything. He says, “If you are occupying other people’s [expletive], guess what? You’re [expletive] up. That’s that. And that’s a tough thing for people to stomach, because we live in a country that is currently occupying people’s [expletive] land. Perhaps Americans are so deranged about Palestine because Americans are thinking ‘if we give up here, these [expletive] Indians are going to want their [expletive] back.’” But maybe they should get their [expletive] back. Since 90 percent of us don’t own anything, I don’t know how much it would hurt us.” This is a famous American writer who says “I am going to go right into the question of occupation. I don’t want to discuss resolution this and resolution that, or map section C, 3 21 B and LMD and this and that. I am just going to go right to the heart of the question, do you think it is occupation or not?” And that makes people rattled and they think.

This was good, the poetry is good, and the reason this is important, [is] why I no longer want to write books that go through the arguments and systematically dismantle them, I am not interested. Why? Because I am not interested in the head anymore, I am actually interested in the heart, because I think that is where the problem lies. That there has been a corrosion in the American soul when it comes to this issue, that the soul has corroded, it has become either corroded or it has hardened into iron. So I am not interested in talking to the head. I want to ask people, “Do you agree that it is occupation?” If they say there is no occupation, I walk away from it. I am too old to have that argument anymore. There’s another 50 people that I am going to talk to over there who don’t have that hardened iron in their soul. I want to go and talk to them. I want to ask them, “Is there occupation?” They say, “I don’t know, what are you talking about?” Well let me tell you a story. Why do we, as people interested in this issue, always go and talk here? It is time we avoided these conversations. We need to go over there. Thanks a lot.