BIRMINGHAM — Under the title “Peace, Palestine and US Policy – 1948-2008,” Friends of Sabeel-North America held a three-day informative conference about the Israeli occupation of Palestine at the First Presbyterian Church from Sept. 25-27.

Over 500 attendees were treated to presentations that featured world-renowned authors and activists including scholar Ilan Pappe and journalist Chris Hedges, and held workshops that included Arabic calligraphy and Palestinian food and art.

What gave the conference great credibility is that most of the main speakers were Jews who grew up in Zionist homes, before going to Israel only to discover the nightmare that Palestinians have been living.

“Palestinians under occupation don’t have the right to go to work or school,” speaker Anna Baltzer told the audience. “Israelis have road blocks that prevent them from being able to reach their work places or schools in a timely manner. Children have to wake up at 3 a.m. to reach their schools by 7 a.m. Everything is a struggle for the Palestinians.”

Baltzer spent two years living with Palestinians under occupation and documented the hardship of everyday life there in photos and stories published in her book “Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories.”

She received a standing ovation from the audience at the conclusion of her narrative slide show that opened the conference on Thursday. Her slide show included photographs taken by Palestinian children from a program that she participates in called “Re-plugged,” in which she takes Palestinian children under 16 who live in refugee camps and have no identification cards into 1948 Israel to visit their grand parents’ villages, Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea. They document their trip with photos they bring back to their parents.

Baltzer showed maps demonstrating how the separation wall is not erected to protect Israel from suicide attacks, but to make life hard for Palestinians, as it has uprooted over a million olive trees, and separated Palestinian villages from each other.

“A trip that used to take 10 minutes to go from one village to another now takes over three hours going around the wall and the road blocks,” Baltzer said.

Equally intense was a presentation given by Susan Nathan, a British Jew who moved to Israel 10 years ago from England, and who grew up in South Africa and fought apartheid and was imprisoned for a year and half for sheltering blacks in white territories.

“When I was stopped by the Israeli police and interrogated for hours for taking a walk with a Palestinian on the beach, it was apartheid all over again,” Nathan said.

Nathan was once punished for having a relationship with a black man in South Africa and later had to sever a relationship with a Palestinian man because authorities made it impossible for them to meet. She moved to the Arab village of Tamron, near Nazareth, where she lived among Israel’s Palestinians and published her book “The Other Side of Israel.”

Unemployment in Tamron reaches 40 percent among men and 80 percent among women. The red tape for a Palestinian to obtain a building permit is so complicated that many build without permits and Israel uses that as an excuse to bulldoze their homes.

The most anticipated and widely publicized appearance was that of reknowned historian Ilan Pappe, author of several books including “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” which put him on top of the hate list of the Zionist movement in America, which launched a campaign against him that resulted with his book being withdrawn from the University of Michigan’s library in Ann Arbor.

“Zionism was born by two impulses. One: The Jews must have a safe haven out of the persecution of Europe. Two: Jews must have a different kind of life,” he said.

“The Holocaust gave them the reason why the world would be willing to look the other way and allow a Palestinian genocide,” said Pappe, who was born in 1954 in Haifa of German-Jewish parents who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Pappe described occupied Palestine as a big prison being run by prisoners — the Palestinian Authority. If these good-behavior prisoners do a good job in policing the other prisoners by cooperating and silencing voices of descent, they might be rewarded by a state, he said.

Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, Director and President of the Sabeel Center in Jerusalem, established in 1991, is leading a non-violent, grassroots movement that he calls “The Palestinian Theology of Liberation.”

“It is imperative for the world to liberate itself from the choke hold of Zionism,” Ateek said, “then and only then, Palestine would be liberated from its occupation.”

“We are a Christian organization inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, working with Jews and Muslims to achieve peace and resist in a nonviolent way,” Ateek said. “We have grown into an international organization where we have Friends of Sabeel all over the world in the US, UK, Canada, Scandinavia, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and Ireland.”

 Sabeel Center is a non-profit organization supported through charitable donations and church fund raising. The group publishes Cornerstone, a quarterly publication that highlights their activities and achievements. More can be found on the web at www.sabeel.org.

Ateek is pessimistic about the prospects of achieving a Palestinian state under the Bush presidency.

“Anytime the US government tries to pressure Israel into giving concessions to achieve peace, the Zionist movement creates enough internal problems for them to keep them busy.”

Chris Hedges, once a mainstream journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent over nearly two decades for the The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and currently for The Dallas Morning News, confirmed to the audience not only the bias of the US media towards Israel, but the deliberate act of deception of the masses and the blackout of factual stories that reflect the reality of the sufferings of Palestinians under occupation. He received a standing ovation from the audience when he told his story of resigning from his position with The New York Times when he was informed by its management that he could not speak against war as it “impedes the impartiality of The New York Times as an objective newspaper.”

“Anybody who speaks the truth in this country will be attacked and ridiculed,” said Hedges, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of Amnesty International’s Global Award for Human rights Journalism. Hedges confirmed that while international edditions of magazines such as Newsweek might carry a factual pro-Palestinian story, it will be totally eliminated from the US edition. He narrated to the audience many stories that demonstrated the strong grip and influence of the Zionist movement on mainstream media.

Other presentations included one given by journalist Phyllis Bennis, author of the book “Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer,” and a panel discussion that included Dearborn Imam Mohammed Mardini, Rev. Don Wagner and psychiatrist Joel Kovel, whom all agreed that Judaism, Christianity and Islam carry a mandate for justice that is integral to the essence of the three religions.

A handful of demonstrators from the Zionist Organization of America demonstrated outside the Church on Maple Road, waving signs denouncing Sabeel as an anti-Semitic organization.

The conference concluded its functions with an empowering speech given by Ateek, titled “What can we do,” in which he urged the attendees to speak out against injustice, share their knowledge with their communities and friends and write their representatives in Congress. He also invited the audience to attend Sabeel’s International Conference to be held in Nazareth, Nov. 12-19. g

Journalist Chris Hedges addresses a crowd at First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham during a conference held by the Palestinian rights group Friends of Sabeel on Friday.