The Palestine Laboratory

Abstract

When I rst started reporting on Israel/Palestine in the early 2000s, it was the early days of the internet and mainstream media gatekeepers rarely allowed more critical voices against Israeli occupation to be heard. I grew up in a liberal Zionist home in Melbourne, Australia, where support for Israel wasn’t a required religion but certainly expected. My grandparents had ed Nazi Germany and Austria in 1939 and came to Australia as refugees. For them, although they weren’t avid Zionists, it made sense to view Israel as a safe haven in case of future strife for the Jewish people. Despite this sentiment running through the Jewish community in most of the world, I soon became uncomfortable with both the explicit racism against Palestinians that I heard and knee-jerk support for all Israeli actions. It was like a cult where opposing voices were condemned and cast out. I remember my Jewish friends during my teenage years, who mouthed what they had heard from their parents and rabbis. Few of them had been to Israel, let alone Palestine, but the dominant narrative was based around fear; Jews were constantly under aack and Israel was the solution. No maer that Palestinians had to suffer to make Jews feel safe. is felt like a perverted lesson from the Holocaust. I’m now both an Australian and German citizen due to my family’s escape from Europe before World War II. I’m an atheist Jew. By the time I visited the Middle East for the rst time in 2005, I still held illusions about Israel and Palestine. I said I believed in a two-state solution and the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. I don’t support either now. In the years aer that initial trip, I reported from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, documenting the increasing Israeli stranglehold in Palestine. I lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020