Where It Started
Hebron May 2023
So this came up in Facebook memories not that long ago. I was reminded that I have known for a long time that what was going on in Palestine was wrong, but I clearly didn’t take it that seriously.
What had happened on that September 23rd so many years ago? Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) formally submitted the Palestinian application for UN membership. A quote from the letter said the “State of Palestine is a peace-loving nation and…accepts the obligations contained in the Charter of the United Nations and solemnly undertakes to fulfill them.”
That day I had probably seen some news story in which Zionist-paid (or influenced) talking heads said that such an application was premature because of Hamas blah blah blah. The extent of my activism at the time was to post an ALL CAPS statement on what was then Twitter, and in 2011, it was not nearly as influential as it is today.
This is not to downplay doing at least a small action like sharing such a thought with your circle of friends. It is to say that had I really known what was going on, I would have found such action entirely inadequate.
May 2023
For some time I had wanted to visit Israel and Palestine, primarily because I am a Christian and the holy sites are important to me, but secondly to get an on-the-ground sense of what’s really going on. I’ll talk more about the other places I visited in future posts, but today I want to focus just on my visit to Hebron, as I was privileged enough (because of my dark blue passport) to see both sides of the city: I ate lunch with the Palestinians but also visited the Israeli settlement and their museum. I listened to Yishai Fleischer say that the solution to this issue was for “the Arabs to leave” as they have “plenty of other countries to go to.” I heard Palestinians tell me what life was like each day under occupation.
At the same time I was reading Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Here’s the strange thing. I had bought both of those books in 2007, surely after some article or speech from someone who had told me to look into the issue more deeply. But sixteen years would elapse before I did read them. In that time, how many innocent men, women, and children were murdered while most of the world stood by (including myself)?
The tours that I took were with a fantastic organization, Abraham Tours, which featured Israeli and Palestinian guides who put aside their disagreements to create tours that allowed visitors to literally hear both sides and decide for themselves, while giving economic benefit to those involved. They were, in their own way, working for peace, and I’m so grateful to have been able to learn with them.
At the same time, I tried to moderate my tone when I asked questions. “I’m here to listen and learn,” I kept telling myself, “not to lecture.” And yet I did manage to get into semi-adversarial conversations in Hebron and Sderot and Jerusalem in which I was probing to find out if any of the Israelis were troubled by the realities of the Occupation. They often were not and were confused as to why anyone would see them as anything other than “the good guys” who were “making the desert bloom.”
So I came back from that trip somewhat angry and in any conversation with friends or acquaintances who asked what I saw in Israel and Palestine I vented anger about the Occupation. But that anger was still unformed, unfocused. I had lots of sense impressions and personal experience, but I didn’t know the history.
October 2023
October 7th happened and I am (still) not someone who follows the news closely, but what had happened was so dramatic that everyone was talking about it. As soon as I heard “beheaded babies…mass rapes…babies in ovens” I had finally had it. Someone had to push back against these obvious lies.
The only platform I really possessed was a YouTube channel that I had been uploading to since December 2020. Before then I just uploaded the occasional video of my nieces or nephews or a concert or lecture. For almost three years I had simply pushed a record button and spoken off-the-cuff about a book I had just read. I didn’t want to get fancy with editing or props. It was just a labor of love (don’t judge the sound or videography of the earliest videos too harshly!).
While I had reviewed some nonfiction books before, I hadn’t really done something too political (pace a video on Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints) but really “enough was enough” I thought and I did a short video on The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. I uploaded it and didn’t think too much of it, as I had maybe 300 subscribers at the time and I was happy if a video got more than 100 views.
The video took off almost immediately and my subscriber count started rocketing up. While I had already planned to do three videos on the Palestine/Israel issue, I didn’t think they would get so much attention. It was an entirely new level of work to try to keep up with the comments that were flooding in every hour.
While some of the comments were nasty, many were filled with helpful suggestions on other books I should consider reading and one day I put together a list and ordered about 60 books, of which I’ve read 40 so far. As they arrived I had to think about how to sort and read them, and concluded I had to understand 1917 first, then 1948. Without understanding that, everything else would be pointless.
For the rest of 2023 I dripped out content on Palestine as I tried to ramp up my reading to match what I needed to record. I was enamored by Tom Segev’s writing in One Palestine, Complete. I was astonished by what I read in Benny Morris’ 1948. And I shook my head over and over as I read Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage. I also had to veer substantively from my usual casual “chat about a book” ten-minute summary to sometimes script out and plan multiple-part videos. For example, my reviews of Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited were in two parts that added up to almost two hours of talking and reading.
As far as viewership numbers were concerned, no one cared too much about my non-Palestinian book reviews. So, I had a mission for the new year.
2024
I decided that out of every four reviews for 2024 I would give three to the Palestinian issue. And since my channel had gotten monetized mostly on the back of the first two reviews, I wanted to give a portion of the proceeds (still as yet, not much, as I’ve also had to hire two staff to help with thumbnails and shorts) to a worthy charity and I found one in the PCRF. As the project gets out of the red and into the black we will be able to donate more.
But as the year wore on I realized I couldn’t continue to mostly speak about Palestine on my personal channel. I needed to create a separate project, which is what this is. Palestine Bookshelf will, over time, feature reviews of all the books and reports I have read on the issue. I may also review films (just did a stream on The Occupation of the American Mind this weekend).
We are launching on October 7th, 2024 and I’ll blend entirely new reviews of the Palestine books from my original Stephen Heiner channel with books and reports I have not yet reviewed. My Stephen Heiner channel will continue on with its original mission of reviewing books from many different genres, but with a much larger audience than it started with this time last year.
I hope you’ll join us on this journey of learning. We owe it to ourselves and to the Palestinian people to find out the truth about what has been happening in this ancient land since 1917.
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