Rutie Atsmon
75
When you go into a Palestinian village, how do you feel people react to you... to your presence, before they talk to you?
It's very different from place to place or from people to people. Basically when we come to visit, people know that we are coming because people in the village invite us, we don't just appear in a place. So it's organized, and usually people remember us from before, either through the magazine, or through humanitarian aid that we deliver to the villages and camps. Or they hear from Windows members in the village about our activities and who we are and what we do, so they are not surprised to see us, and they look forward to it and have a lot of questions. A lot of the questions are, "How come you don't stop the occupation, how come you cannot? Why don't you go out into the streets and make a change?" Part of what we try to do is to explain that we are so limited. The rules of the games are different, there are so many reasons why the situation is like that, and we do raise a voice and we do demonstrate, and we do all kinds of things, but it's not like we can stop the occupation tomorrow morning. So there are always questions, from the Israeli side too, about the violent attacks, about the support for that, whether people really support the violent attacks on Israelis and why, and can't they see that it's not helpful. People try to understand why people do support these kinds of things.