Guest Blog by Greg Barrett: From Jerusalem

Greg Barrett is part of our band of pilgrims in Israel and Palestine. He’s been interviewing people who have experienced the occupation in ways that don’t typically get much if any coverage by the corporate media.

Only when Right equals Might will peace be found
In witnessing the inhumane imbalance of the Holy Land, generated primarily by Zionists and their U.S. tax dollars, one book repeatedly springs to mind: “Power versus Force” by Dr. David Hawkins.
I don’t need to dissect Hawkins’ theories on applied kinesiology to explain. Authentic power is a partnership bound up soulfully in honesty, peace, cooperation; it’s mutually coordinated and mutually beneficial. Force, however, creates counterforce. Always. As Hawkins writes in his 2002 bestseller, “Because force incites polarization, it inevitably produces a win/lose dichotomy; and because someone always loses, enemies are created. Constantly faced with enemies, force requires constant defense. Defensiveness is invariably costly, whether in the marketplace, politics, or international affairs.”
Yesterday I interviewed a 48-year-old Palestinian Christian who was arrested as a 20-year-old college student. He had been involved in a protest of Zionist policies that made the protesting of Zionist policies illegal. No kidding. Until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 it was illegal for Palestinians to protest the occupation of their land. They were not allowed to even fly the red, white, green and black of the Palestinian flag, much less to throw a rock at Israeli Defense Forces. In 1982 this Palestinian, now a soft-spoken father of four, was a student leader who dared to throw a stone during a protest of Israeli occupation. He said his ensuing arrest and interrogation lasted thirty-six days and included beatings, nakedness, scalding water, freezing water, and an anxious moment of near strangulation.
But the memory that moved him to tears yesterday wasn’t about the physical torture. It was about the inhumanity forcefully applied. Denied food for three days, he said his IDF interrogators cuffed his hands behind his back and set a bowl of yogurt on the table in front of him. They were bored and wanted to be entertained, he suspected. The imbalance of power that had left a young Palestinian alone with an army of grown men was supposed to reduce him to behaving like an animal. To eat he would have to lap at his food. Recalling this, his eyes welled up. “I was starving, starving,” he said.
“But I didn’t eat.”
Might equals right? We desperately need to reverse illogical thinking.