Lani Lanchester: [00:00:00] I had been having this amazing trip so far. I was very excited and I said something out of my excitement that was very naive, very naive and ignorant. I said to my friend, there must have been something righteous about 1948. And he stopped the car, and he said righteous, righteous, 530 villages were destroyed.
They killed men, women, and children. There were massacres, and there were rapes, righteous? They bear, They plant trees over the destroyed villages now to hide the evidence. Okay. So, I’d never heard any of this before, this was a complete shock to me, I never heard any of this.
And so, I knew I was supposed to listen. So I just said, tell me about that. And he was angry and he was frustrated. What I heard though, was how difficult it is to have Who [00:01:00] are good people, who don’t know about the hurt that he and his family have gone through.
Narrator: Welcome to Learning to Listen to Palestine, where stories come alive and hearts connect. Each week, your host, Lani Lanchester, will dive into the untold histories, powerful narratives, and insightful interviews that bring us closer to understanding Palestine. Ready to be educated, empowered, and motivated?
Let’s get started.
Lani Lanchester: Welcome to Learning To Listen To Palestine. I am so glad all of you are here. And today, I’m going to invite you to come on this journey with me to Learn To Listen To Palestine. I’ve written a book called, Learning to Listen to Palestine. And this last week, I met with a pastor, a friend of mine, he’s a retired pastor and a friend.
And he went through my book with me, and shared with me [00:02:00] his thoughts on it. He really appreciated the book. He said that it was really spot on with message that we need to hear. However, he said, some of us are going to have trouble hearing it. And I can relate to that, because I used to be a person who had trouble relating and hearing stories about Palestine?
I’m going to tell you, all about that and why that was. And some of you maybe like me, or like I was, and some of you may know people who have trouble hearing stories about Palestine. So, we’re going to talk about what we’re going to do about that. But one of the things my pastor friend said to me is, you’re going to have to address October 7th.
We are so focused on October 7th. So, ready? Here it goes. October 7th was a terrible day. Hamas attacked village with innocence there, women and children, and they attacked a music festival, and this was a terrible thing. They took hostages and that was a very bad day. However, I want to remind you all of [00:03:00] something.
If you’ve been with me on this journey so far, and if you were here with me last week, if you did not hear last week’s story, podcast, I ask you to listen to it. Because last week, we met a woman from Gaza, and her family came from Gaza. She left when she was very young. But her family is scattered from California, Egypt, Texas.
And the family that she left, that remained in Gaza, they’re all dead. And all of that happened before October 7th. So, I want us to branch out and to learn to listen to the stories before October 7th, after October 7th. Because there’s so much more to learn about Palestine and Hamas is less than 1% of the population.
So, once we learn about the rest of the population, perhaps we can begin to learn to love our neighbors as we should. Learn to love our enemies as we should. I’m going to start [00:04:00] this story with, I, at one time, was a person who had a really hard time hearing stories. I thought I knew everything about Palestine, to be honest, and I didn’t think I needed to know anything more.
I read a lot of books, and I listened to a lot of news. But I had a friend, when I worked at the University of Texas, there was another professor who worked there and I respected him in every way. And we were friends, but he wrote a book about Palestine, it had Palestine across the front of it. And even though I would read everything I could get my hands on, I never read his book, and I distrusted him a little bit because he wrote that book.
And I never bothered to learn what was in it, to learn if he had something important to say. So, that was me. Not that long ago. So, what happened? And that’s where I would like you to join me on some of my stories today. It started some time back, [00:05:00] I have a friend that we met on social media, who is from Nazareth, and he and I used to exchange stories and things like that. And at one point, my heart was broken.
My daughters weren’t talking to me. And so, I had this broken mother’s heart and I didn’t know what to do. So, I was going to go to Hawaii to sit on a beach and cry. And my friend from Israel, he said, why would you do that? Why would you go to Hawaii to be miserable? It’s a good point really, isn’t it?
So he said, you need to come to Israel, walk in the steps of Jesus, go on a pilgrimage. And if you need a beach to cry on, we have a beach. And I went, I thought about it and it sounded like something I always wanted to do, and I prayed about it. And interesting was, I thought I really heard God telling me to go.
So, I was excited and I felt a change in my attitude because, instead of going just [00:06:00] to sit and be miserable, I was going to do something that I really always wanted to do. But my father was concerned, because rather than going as a tourist in a tour bus with a big group and security and all that.
Here I was going on my first trip abroad, to a foreign country, and I was going by myself. I was going to rent a little car and just drive around to different places that my friend suggested that I should go while I was there. And I was just going to do this on my own. Because that was actually my plan, is I wanted to be alone for a while.
My dad was concerned. Can you imagine? He’s a good dad. He was worried that I would get mixed up in something. There’s so many fearful things when you hear about Palestine, and, Israel, and the, wars, and the rockets, and the things that were happening there. So I’m like, but dad, I’m an American. What could happen, right?
And to just pacify him to, ease his [00:07:00] concerns. I decided, well, I did a Google search of Israeli-Palestinian conflict involving Americans. And you know what? I found a hit, with a woman who is exactly my age. I was 51 years old at the time. And what I found was the summer before I learned the story about a woman named, Shireen Abu Akleh.
She was a Palestinian Christian, who from, I believe, Jerusalem originally. And she moved to the States. She got her citizenship here, and she worked here for some time. And then she moved back to Israel, because she felt called to tell the story of, what was going on in Palestine between Israel and Palestine.
And the summer before, she was in Jenin, so she was press. And so, just as you could imagine, she has her press jacket on with the blue press across the chest. She had her press helmet on blue with press across the top. And she was with [00:08:00] another reporter, and she did just as she was trained to do. She and the other reporter walked down the middle of the street, and down to the other end was an Israeli armored vehicle.
And so, they were walking slowly down the middle of the street, both with her hands showing, walking slowly, and the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force targeted her and shot her in the head. They denied it for a while, but in the end, they had admitted to that, yes, it was their bullet. It was a sniper fire because it wasn’t 1 shot, it was 8 shots at a tight formation. And they would not hand over the person who did it for any sort of punishment, and I’d never heard of it.
This happened just this summer before, you know, and the thing that really surprised me is at the same time, this during the same time period, there was a basketball star who went to Russia with illegal cannabis, [00:09:00] and we heard about this all the time. So, what I saw was there was a problem that I didn’t understand.
There was a problem with the press, why wasn’t the press reporting this? She was press, and it was caught on camera, and it was investigated, and it was proven that it was a murder, and why, why wasn’t the press covering this? They were all over this story about the basketball star, every newsreel was showing it Over and over and over again.
But we didn’t hear anything about Shireen Abu Akleh. So, that surprised me. Next it was the America, she was an American citizen. I thought if I got in trouble going abroad, even if it was doing something illegal, like illegal cannabis, that we would be doing everything we could to get our citizen out of harm’s way.
The US government did nothing about a US citizen being murdered abroad. There was a semi-investigation where they said, [00:10:00] they really didn’t see anything wrong. Well, It was proven it was wrong. It’s just, there was no justice. So, our government was not calling for justice for Shireen, that surprised me.
And you know what else surprised me is the IDF. IDF stands for Israeli Defense Force. I has always thought that Israel was this place, where people who were at risk living someplace else, did not have safety living someplace else, would could go there and live in safety. And the IDF was Israel Defense Force would give safety and security. But it didn’t for Shireen, and it didn’t follow up, and fix what happened in any way.
So, I was shocked. I didn’t know if I should even go to Israel. I prayed about it and just ask God, should I even go? cause I was, I was shaken, I didn’t understand. Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about Israel was wrong, but I clearly heard God tell me to go. And I asked why? And [00:11:00] he said, to listen, so I went.
So, that’s how I started my journey, is I started my journey with this confusion and with questions, and everything I thought I knew was wrong, and so I was prepared to listen. And I’ve learned a lot of things as I was on this journey. Everywhere I went, it seemed like I would meet a Palestinian. At first, it was Palestinian Christians and towards the end of the tour, I met Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims.
And everywhere I go, they’d ask me, why are you here traveling by yourself alone? And I’d say, I’m here to listen. And it was like a password, when I said that, I had this happen many times where, the person I was talking to with lock eyes with me. And like, they understood something, they’d pull up a chair for me and they say, wait right here. And they’d go get me tea or coffee. And then we would talk, we’d talk about everything for hours.
We would talk about culture, food, family, the things that are going on. I tell a little [00:12:00] bit about, what’s happening in the United States and in California. And they’d tell me all kinds of things. But I also heard, some of these things that disturbed me, that I just didn’t understand. I heard about police brutality. I understood police brutality. Because that year, we had George Floyd, where he was killed when a police officer put his knee on his neck. And so, that guy died and that was in the news all the time.
And it was tearing our country apart. This one man, his death, but in Israel’s a little bitty country. And this stuff happens a lot more than it happens in the States. And I was just hearing just a few stories at this point. And I couldn’t imagine, how does this little bitty country hold together when one thing like, what happened with George Floyd was tearing us up?
I’ve later learned that, israel is held together by extreme oppression, but that’s getting farther into the story then than we’re at just yet. I did meet my friend [00:13:00] when I got to Nazareth and he was very excited to take me to a certain church called, The Church of Beatitudes. This is where Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes. And it’s really a beautiful drive.
So, we were driving up this windy hill. Can you imagine? And if you look off this direction, you see the Jordan Valley. And if you look off on the other direction, you see the sea of Galilee, and over here is the Golan Heights. And over there’s the Valley of Megiddo, and I was in awe.
I had been having this amazing trip so far. I was very excited and I said something out of my excitement that was very naive, very naive and ignorant. I said to my friend, there must have been something righteous about 1948. And he stopped the car, and he said righteous? 530 villages were destroyed. They killed men, women, and children. There were massacres, and there were rapes, righteous? They bear, They plant trees [00:14:00] over the destroyed villages now to hide the evidence. Okay. So, I’d never heard any of this before, this was a complete shock to me, I never heard any of this.
And so, I knew I was supposed to listen. So I just said, tell me about that. And he was angry and he was frustrated. What I heard though, was how difficult it is to have people. Who are good people, who don’t know about the hurt that he and his family have gone through. This is such an amazing, I mean, a huge hurt. So, later I did a lot of research, trying to learn if this was true, because I didn’t know if, I mean, I didn’t doubt my friend at all.
I just didn’t know if there was some sort of exaggeration. I knew there was a war in 1948, but I didn’t. I’ve never heard that there were so many villages destroyed. I had always heard this term, a land without a people and a people without a land. That’s some of my Zionist [00:15:00] upbringing. you see, I was raised as Zionist, and that’s why I had such trouble hearing things.
I had all of these things in my head that weren’t quite true. And it’s difficult to figure out what’s true and what’s not true. It’s kind of like having a beautiful garden and pulling up the weeds. And then, there’s so many weeds in the garden and if you pull them up, maybe you’re going to pull up something that’s important.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what was true, what was not true. So, I went home after this trip and I studied for a year. And it was very difficult to find anything out about what happened to the Palestinians in 1948. I did learn about villages being destroyed. I did learn about some of these things he talked about.
There were a lot of eyewitness testimonies, but an eyewitness testimony has a little bitty view. It doesn’t show 530 villages being destroyed. so What I found is learning about 1948 is difficult because it’s the information is [00:16:00] buried, until I discovered Ilan Pappé Now, this is a book by Ilan Pappé called, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. And I actually had trouble finding this book. It was difficult. Let me just say, and now it’s readily available on Amazon, but for a while there, it was not after October 7th. I think a lot of things that said Palestine on them possibly weren’t available. don’t know exactly what happened there.
However, once I got the book and I started studying, it’s very interesting what Ilan Pappé came up with. Now, let me tell you who Ilan Pappé is, because this is amazing. He’s an Israeli. He’s an Israeli historian, who grew up in Israel, in Israeli schools in Haifa. He served in the IDF in the 1970s.
And in the 1973 war, he served in Israel. And after the war, he continued studying history. And he studied abroad and as he studied history, he started working on his [00:17:00] doctoral thesis. He said, when you study a doctoral thesis, you want to study something new. So, you don’t write right about what everybody else is writing.
Found documents that were just recently unsealed in the early 1980s, and these were documents from 1948 from the Israeli war of independence. And what we, from the Palestinian side, call the Nakba Nakba is Arabic for war. the catastrophe. And over the course of this show, we’re going to be learning more about the Nakba. What happened during the Nakba was nothing that I had ever heard before.
But what was interesting about Ilan Pappe, he’s, an Israeli. And so, you would think that he just wasn’t really interested in telling the truth. And once he got these documents, he saw things that he had never heard before. Just like me, I had never heard this stuff before. He’d never heard the term Nakba either, isn’t that interesting?
[00:18:00] Because he had been in segregated schools with just Israelis. He didn’t go to school with Palestinians. He said that in his book, he studied original documents such as Ben Gurion’s the prime minister of Israel, his journals, the military orders between the IDF and it, back then, it wasn’t called the IDF, it was called the Palmach, which also means defense force.
And then the Ergun forces, anyway. So, and how coordinated this was. And what they would do is, they would encircle a village, and This is the interesting thing too. It didn’t start in 1948 like we’ve all been told. It started in 1947 and this was a very organized effort. And what they did, is they wanted the land for themselves. And there were was a certain amount of land that had been allocated to Israel, to [00:19:00] the new Israeli Country that was fully populated with people, with Palestinians.
But the Palestinians were going to have to be under Israeli rule. The Israelis didn’t want the Palestinians there. Because they wouldn’t have a majority. So, they needed to force the Palestinians out. So, they would encircle a village, leaving one open side, and they would go in and they would dynamite a few houses with people in them.
They would pull out men of a certain age, and they would kill a few of them, shoot them in front of the other villagers, terrorize them and force them to flee. And this is how they ethnically cleanse village by village by village by village.
So by night, May 14th, 1948, the date that we know of, as the war of independence of Israel, most of the ethnic cleansing of Israel was already done. What we’ve always heard as Zionists, is that seven nations came [00:20:00] in to wipe Israel off the map. This newly formed country, and it was a miracle that they survived.
But this is not telling the full story. The full story is that, Israel was already at work, ethnically cleansing before May 14th, 1948. Most of the work is done, and when these nations came in, they came in disorganized and Israel was very organized, and most of the ethnic cleansing was already done.
This was the, So, As I said, I’d never heard this before. And I got a lot of eyewitness testimonies. And one thing that you can say about this book is, sometimes people try to say that my story is one sided. This comes from an Israeli, Ilan Pappe is an Israeli and this is not one sided. He has interviews from Israelis, from Palestinians, from the countries [00:21:00] around, he has interviews from the UN observers from 1948, and it’s all in there.
So, if you ever feel like you’re just really want to understand the Nakba, you need to read Ilan Pappe’s book. And it’s interesting, because Ilan Pappe, who said in the 1980s, when he first looked at these documents, he was very cautious. He didn’t want to Say anything that was untrue. He was very cautious about what he reported, slowly revealing things.
But by 2006, when he wrote this book, it had been 25 years. He knew what he was talking about. He knew what the right thing to do was. He was a professor at a university in Israel at that time. And he had to leave his country for writing this book and he has not been able to return.
So that’s how important this was telling the truth about the Nakba was to him. So, here I am, learning about these things and this is very [00:22:00] difficult, this is devastating to me.
Narrator: Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss an episode show by clicking the subscribe button now. Don’t forget to check out Lani’s book, Learning to Listen to Palestine. Now back to the show.
Lani Lanchester: so we started this podcast talking about October 7th, a really bad day, but I want to tell you. About my worst day that really got me started on writing the book, Learning to listen to Palestine. And got me understanding what I had been listening to over the previous year in researching. And well, October 7th was a really bad day.
And every day since, October 7th has been a really bad day for Israel and Palestine, especially in Gaza. But my bad day was October 14th. In October 14th, I got a call from my mom. My dad had had a surgery earlier that week [00:23:00] and he had been in the ICU, and I found out that he had had an episode at the hospital that day, the night before, and I needed to get to the hospital to see my dad, and this was really bad.
So, I was getting ready to go, and I was hurrying and knew that this was very serious. And the phone rang and I answered it. And it was my work and I found out that my boss and my friend, who had been battling cancer died that day. And she and I were the same age, and such good friends. And I cried and I made the sound I just fell apart.
I cried so hard and I couldn’t move forward or back. And I made the sound like, keening sound, and I didn’t know what to do. Cause I had to get to see my dad, but I couldn’t drive like that. So, I reached out to my friend, my Palestinian friend from Nazareth. And I told him what happened and he said only prayer works at these times.
So he was praying for me, so I pulled it together and I got in the [00:24:00] car and I started heading to Tracy to see my dad at the hospital. And to give me encouragement, I turned on Christian radio, to try to strengthen myself. But what I heard was this, if I were Netanyahu, I’d carpet bomb the whole thing, I’d squeegee it clean and start over.
And then, the radio host started talking back and forth, women and children would be killed and that would be awful. And they started trying to back off it a little bit, but then they pushed forward into it and they leaned into it and saying, yes, women and children would be killed. But that’s a necessary evil to send a message to Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran.
And I was devastated here. My people were calling for a genocide. And I knew by this point from my studies that if my people would support a genocide, it was going to be a genocide.
So, my heart broke.
I got to the [00:25:00] hospital my dad coded five times. and he died with my mom, my sister and I beside him praying over him. And over the next few weeks I had, we had all this support from church and family and friends as we were mourning for my dad, but at the same time, what had been said on that radio show started to happen.
And at that point, as I was praying God told me that I was going to have to learn how to overcome bitterness. In order to do what he had for me to do. So in the next few weeks, I’m going to talk more about this. There is stories of how Palestinians helped me overcome my bitterness as they were going
So I encourage you to join me on this journey. We have just begun this journey together and by the book learning to listen to Palestine and bring others on this journey too, because this is more than just [00:26:00] a book of stories. Each chapter has a story or two and has research about what I’ve learned about Palestine.
Because of the things that were revealed to me it, the back of it is full of notes and research and articles and other places to find out more information. If you have learned anything today, I encourage you to get this book. Also, if you will get two books and share it with, share one with a friend and send me a copy of your receipt, I’ll send you one of these in the mail.
You can, what this is, is an olive wood heart. This came from Bethlehem. A friend of mine that I met on my travels in Bethlehem has a shop where he makes these beautiful carved olive wood art pieces and He sent me some of these and what these are this is olive wood that was grown in Palestine and by Palestinians on Palestinian land And then [00:27:00] the prunings go to my friend’s shop and he carves this beautiful wood.
So what I encourage you to do is I love to hold these. It’s perfect to fit in my hand. As I pray and I pray for Palestine, I pray for what’s going on there. I pray for the Christians who have been asking for the, Western church to hear them and to pray for them and to help them to hear what’s going on.
What they’re going through. We want to pray for the everybody the Christians, the Muslims who are seeking God, who are trying, calling out to God in their distress of what’s going on with them. And Will the West here. So, I pray that you will learn to listen to Palestine again, if you order two of these books, they’re available on Amazon send me an email and with a copy of your receipt and your address, and I will mail you one of these very happily.
As so you can [00:28:00] pray for Palestine. please share this book. Um, We want to humanize the Palestinian people so we can learn to love them as our neighbor, as we were taught to do. and come on my journey with me and I’ll show you just how to do that. My email address is lanilanchester@gmail.com. That’s L A N I L A N C H E S T E R @ gmail. com.
Narrator: Thank you for tuning in to this enriching episode of Learning to Listen to Palestine. I hope today’s stories and insights touched your heart and opened your mind. If you found value in our conversation, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this podcast with friends and family. Your support helps us reach more listeners and foster a global community committed to understanding and peace.
Don’t forget to explore our book, Learning to Listen to Palestine, for a deeper dive into these poignant narratives. [00:29:00] And if you’re inspired to take action, join a local group or start one at your library to engage with Palestinian stories firsthand. See our show notes for inspiration. We’ll be back next week with more profound stories and thoughtful discussions.
Until then, remember to listen, learn, and build bridges. Keep the conversation going and stay connected. Thank you for being part of this journey.
