I was raised in a secular Jewish home in a Jewish neighborhood in New York City. My mother was born in Tiberias, Palestine, to a Jewish Family; her parents made aliya from Beirut a few years earlier. Arabic was her first language, and it was the language she used all her life with her mother and sister. My father was born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Debrecen, Hungary, and grew-up in a Kosher home. I was attracted to Judaism during my Bar Mitzvah training, but was turned-off by the hard-line views of our Conservative Rabbi. I married a secular Christian.

My parents were Zionists in the sense that they supported a homeland for the displaced Jews from Europe. I was too young to know at the time, but I am sure my father would have followed Martin Buber and Hannah Arndt in supporting a Jewish homeland, but not a Jewish state. Nevertheless, after Israel declared independence, my parents bought Israel bonds and paid for trees to make Israel green. My parents did not visit Israel until about 1980 (long after I was an adult with my own family) and they did not send my brother or me there as a rite of passage.

I was always proud of my Jewish values and heritage, and American Jews who did well and became national, scientific, and artistic leaders. But I was never a supporter of a Jewish state – any religiously based nation seemed to me out-of-place in the 20th century. Through my 40-year career as a research geologist, through the 6-day war and the Yum Kipper war, I took no interest in Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict other than my general interest in the news.

In 2001 I went to a symposium at UCLA about the Israel-Palestine conflict put on by Open Tent where I heard David Pine of Americans for Peace Now (APN) speak. David talked about ending the occupation including withdrawing from settlements, and making peace through Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. That made sense to me. In fact, David's speech was the first thing I read or heard about the Israel-Palestine conflict that made sense. I was unaware there were other Jews who thought about Israel as I did. I started to talk to David and even did some work for him. That opened the Jewish peace camp literature to me.

Since the Open Tent event, I became more and more involved in the Jewish peace camp. The next big change came when I met Dick Platkin and others in LA Jews for Peace, who tied the Israel-Palestinian conflict into U.S. imperialism. I was already opposed to U.S. imperialism, and when the connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was pointed out, it made a lot of sense to me.

My belief is that the United States unconditional diplomatic, military, and financial support of Israel is propping-up the occupation. As long as U.S. support is unconditional, Israel will not change; Israel will talk about peace but will continue to undercut advances toward settlement of the conflict. Israel wants to manage the conflict and control the land, rather than settle the conflict by giving-up its supposed claim to the West Bank (that it calls Judah and Samaria) and ending the occupation. Unconditional U.S. support enables that goal. And even U.S. support cannot make that goal sustainable in the long-term.

The only way for the Israelis and Palestinians to break out of their despair is for the U.S. to make its support of Israel conditional on progress toward a negotiated peace. The leaders of Israel are not suicidal – when U.S. aid is conditional on achieving peace, the Israeli government and people will find a way to make peace.

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