Melisse Lewine-Boskovich
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What are the times that you get most angry?
When there are lynchings, naturally.1 When there are these disgusting, barbaric things that these people who I'm promoting-see I'm promoting the Muslims and the Palestinians-- and when they go and do something totally despicable like that, I lose credibility. I really do, I lose credibility in the eyes of everyone else I know. Now, I'm working promoting them, but the truth is I'm trying to fix my own society, we're repairing our own karma, but a lot of it has to do with promoting their side to people who don't want to hear about it. Some of my reactions are not very complicated. Some things get complex, but some things are most basic and I'd even say in a way very Neanderthal, primitive. I don't even want to get sophisticated about it. I like the simplicity. The work with Peace Child is the opposite. Every word you say has ramifications, it's on a sophisticated level; it's not primitive enough at this point. It was more so, but it's gotten very sophisticated. I'll give you an example: there was this discussion about whether I should tell new staff whether it was mandatory to go to this B'Sod Siach conference as part of their entry into Peace Child. I had no problem saying that it was mandatory, but Halil and Rula were in this big debate about whether it should be mandatory or not and what that meant... it's only the oppressed minority that worries about using that word. I didn't think about it. There are certain things that if you want to work, you have to do that, and that, number 1, 2, 3, and 4. So I start thinking about things that to me seem so clear and obvious but sometimes they are much more complicated.- 1Lewine-Boskovich may be referring to an incident on October 12, 2000, in which two Israeli army reservists were lynched in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank. She may also be referring to the lynching of four American contractors in Falluja, Iraq in March 2004, about six weeks prior to this interview.