International Solidarity Movement

And so then your work is simply taking a step to shrink the gap to making that reality happen.

And that's what I experienced, that embodiment with both international solidarity movement.

And that was one.

The other piece that I came from working with Great Plains Action Society indigenous-led project in Iowa City.

so just wanting their land their houses of a thousand years and just wanting to bring their sheep and make milk you know so many of them just said yeah the way we do this is community connection to land and connection to God however you hold it God loves buddha dao and it's just like those three things just seeing how much strength

they have those communities and

and you know what's happening just having read it and and heard stories but to be there you know the first night the first family we stayed with international solidarity movement is all volunteer So it's all run by volunteers.

There's no, it's outside of the nonprofit industrial complex.

So I was going out and visiting camps after they'd been shelled.

reporting on women giving birth at checkpoints, actually went out with the International Solidarity Movement and tried to stop houses being demolished.

So a huge amount of it was also things that I had lived and going through the checkpoints and experiencing the...

When I first arrived in Ramallah, there was one checkpoint between Ramallah and East Jerusalem.

I had only traveled to Palestine and Israel in November of 2002.

So soon, you know, I had only recently fully... entered into the Israeli-Palestinian thing, right? But it captured me immediately once I had, because I've traveled there in the middle of the Second Intifada and volunteered at least part of my time there with the International Solidarity Movement.

And so that was a, I'd been activated in a different way, but also having grown up not Lutheran, but in the assemblies of God, I was raised Pentecostal in Oklahoma City.

I knew that I also had to start confronting Christian Zionism.

He lived in the area of Massefer Yatta, which is under massive threats of settler violence, state violence, which we will start to understand as he articulates in this episode as one of the same mechanism, and has been the subject of much violence, ethnic cleansing, and terror campaigns.

If you're interested in participating in this work, there is lots of opportunity to get involved, whether through the International Solidarity Movement, Jewish Center for Nonviolence, or other organizations.

My guest today, of course, is none other than Sam Avraham Stein.

Sam, in addition to doing this work, is documenting this work in real time on his Instagram page, which I will leave a link to.