Observations from a November 2025 Study Tour
The heat has been turned up immeasurably in the West Bank, where a majority of the non-diaspora Palestinian population is finding it ever more difficult to live. The physical, psychological and spiritual violence from "religious settlers" reached a record high two weeks before Center for Global Justice member Bob Datz embarked on a long-awaited study tour.What he witnessed among Palestinians had a ring of dispair yet without resignation, despite daily harassment, sadism and government policies explicitly intended to remove an entire population.
Bob, a secular Jew from the US living now in SMA, traveled as a 50-year sympathizer with the ravages of the Occupation. Yet there were still surprises in the levels of post-Oct. 7 malice reaching down to the individual level. Bob's presentation will include the results of interviews and incidents that were a part of the study tour sponsored by the Israel-based International Coalition Against House Demolitions. He can place these fresh events into the trajectory of the more than century-long exponential rise of Zionist audicity and criminality. But ultimately it is the daily task each Palestinian to sort through the often-fatal, continuously demeaning events and find a future worth reaching. After four generations of Occupation, it's a challenge that Palestinians generally handle with more grace than most of us could muster, and certainly more than the immigrant mobs that threaten them will ever know.
Bob left broadcast news for print journalism in the mid-1970s, working in the alternative press and on the headquarters staff of the United Farmworkers under Cesar Chavez. After a stint in book publishing, he worked as a newspaper journaliist in New England for more than 40 years. He moved to San Miguel de Allende in retirement. A previous Global Justice Center presentation on takeaways from the 1970 massacre at Kent State University was based on that experience as a freshman and the fallout of campus repression that flourishes today over the issue of Palestine.He eventually earned his BA in journalism and, in recent years, an A.S. degree in Environmental Science.