Vivien Sansour: Palestinian seeds of survival, shelter, and subversiveness (ep416)
“I fell in love even more deeply with the seed world because it’s a world that looks like it’s dead but actually it is subversive. It is very insisting, quite resilient, and full of life.”
What can grief teach us about being truly alive? And how might seeds, and the compassionate acts of tending to them, be the “helpers and teachers” of mediating our collective grief?
In this episode, we are honored to welcome Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Project—an initiative centered on caring for and preserving seeds as keepers of ancestral connection and models of subversive advocacy.
Join us as Vivien shares about the systemic violence of disconnection and relational severance, the colonial-imperial atrocities inflicted upon Palestinian farmlands and their stewards, the socio-economic pressures turning many historically food-centered farms into monocultural plantations of commercial tobacco for export, and more.
About our guest:
Vivien Sansour is an avid lover of nature and the arts. She has sprouted many projects out of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, including her co-founding of El Beir, Arts and Seeds studio in Bethlehem, the Traveling Kitchen project, and several other collaborative projects internationally. The Seed Library and its associated projects are now located in the village of Battir, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Palestine. As an artist and sought-after speaker, Vivien has been invited to showcase her work at venues both locally and globally. These include the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, the Berlinale film festival in Berlin, and the Chicago Architecture Biennale. Her performance, Autonomia, was selected for the closing of the 2019 Venice Art Biennale.
A culinary historian, enthusiastic cook and columnist, Vivien wants to bring threatened varieties “back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past”. This has led to collaborations with Dan Saladino from the BBC Food Program and internationally acclaimed chefs Anthony Bourdain, Sammi Tamimi and Tara Wigley.
While born in Jerusalem, Vivien was raised in both Beit Jala in Palestine and in the US, and proudly calls herself a PhD drop-out. She is currently a Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellow at Harvard University and is writing an autobiography that weaves together the stories of seeds with her own personal experiences in Palestine and abroad – both involving elements of challenge and triumph.
Vivien attributes her work to the generosity of farmers across the globe because they have “inspired my imagination as an artist and my ability to love science as a practice of observation that can change the world.”
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Mine to Take by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by anisa sima hawley.
Dive deeper:
Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, a project founded and supported by Vivien Sansour
The Travelling Kitchen, a project founded and supported by Vivien Sansour
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Vivien Sansour: My home is a simple place that is very, very complex. And I love that juxtaposition that's always there, like in the tenderness of the space and yet with the ruggedness of the terrain. And I love rocks and how they endure and speak of centuries and histories, and you touch it, you touch a rock and you can feel a whole world of past and future even, and it does feel like everything is alive, including the rock, including the soil, including everything. And not just alive, there's a way to be alive, but then there's a way to really be living. And so even in the midst of so much pain and destruction, everything feels like it's living and it's present.
So the past, the future, and this moment always, always feel like they're right here right now. And I feel it in my feet. I feel it when I sit under a tree. I feel it when I'm just talking to people and even in people's faces or hands. And so it's a beautiful place for me because it feels like a space of continuation. A space where in some understanding, which is one that I carry, there's no beginning and there's no middle and there's no end.
I like that circular notion of where I come from because there's an understanding that everything comes from a whole. Everything feels so connected.
And that's why the interruption of disconnectedness feels so violent not just for our people and our terrain and our bio-habitat, but violent for our human species because it's a place where these links are cut and cut and cut. And in a time when the world is in hospice, we're being also severed from disconnectedness. That's exactly why I fell in love even more deeply with the seed world because it's a world that looks like it's dead but actually it is subversive and it's very insisting and it's quite resilient and it's full of life. So this kind of magical relationship between life and death also kind of fascinated me with seeds.
And then, of course, in the process of living my own life, where I was born under military occupation, where my whole life has always been under threat, like the lives of all Palestinians, I've looked for seeds as a place to take refuge, to be guided, to be instructed as much as it is possible as to how to take shelter sometimes as how to survive sometimes and as to how to live, hopefully one day not just to live as a breathing thing but to really live.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. We previously welcomed Rami Barhoush of the Arab Group for Nature on the show. And he had started sharing about their work with Palestinian farmers and with volunteers protecting and planting olive trees. And I would also appreciate having you offer a background of what people should know when it comes to the plight of farmers and agriculturalists in Palestine. So what challenges do small scale farmers there face that are similar to challenges of other local and indigenous farmers in other regions of the world? And then what are some more place-based specific struggles due to the context of power and control that is present here?
Vivien Sansour: So obviously there's the global challenge for farmers all over the world, for growers all over the world who are challenged by big corporations, who are challenged by all the greed that comes with seed companies and chemical companies that are literally trying to kill us by pushing down our throats, chemical inputs in farms, greenhouse farming, and also all the different new kinds of seeds that are genetically modified, that are not really healthy for our system or not just our physical system, our bodies, but our ecosystem. And monocropping. So this is obviously a global problem and there's been quite a push for it, sadly. And so you see this problem from farmers in Mexico who are fighting to keep their heirloom corn alive, to farmers in the Midwest in the United States and in the South, to farmers in India, to farmers in the Caribbean, everywhere. I mean, in Hawaii, wherever you turn, sadly, these entities that are trying to change the way we eat in order to fulfill their profit needs or desires. It's not a need necessarily. Yeah, so there's that, of course. And Israel celebrates itself as a pioneer in the world of genetic engineering and agricultural technologies. And so what that means is that we as Palestinian farmers become the lab rats for all these Israeli companies that are producing all kinds of things and trying it out in our fields and on our lands and with our seed varieties. And so this is one obvious major problem. And then of course, all the restrictions of movement.
Today, as I was, just before I got on the phone with you, I was on the phone with a farmer in a village outside of Birzeit. And what we were trying to figure out and manage is if we're going to plant some of our cover crops this year under the olive groves, in the olive groves, how can we protect from settler. You know, from settler attacks, settler violence. And we were discussing how can we make sure it's safe for the farmers to go there to plant and then to come back and to harvest and then to tend to the crops. I mean, very basic thing, like literally just accessing your plot of land is a big challenge. It's not just a challenge, it's life-threatening. It can be literally life-threatening. And just this last month, we lost a farmer who was just down picking his olives in peace with his family, and then a group of armed settlers, which most of them are armed, if not all of them, came down and pushed him, kicked him, and then shot him and left.
For us to farm is to risk our lives. It's that literal.
Not that you're only risking your lives even when you're growing, say, in a greenhouse and you're exposed to chemical inputs, which that's another issue where Israel dumps a lot of also illegal chemical inputs into farms, like chemicals that are illegal in other places, including Israel itself.
And they sell it to our farmers in their greenhouses. And so we have rates of cancer that are very high on the rise, particularly in rural areas, rural areas that were known for people to live very long lives. Today, people die very young. A dear friend of mine and farmer is now suffering with a brain tumor. Because he lives in a village that has a lot of suddenly greenhouses full of chemicals that are used for chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, all of that. And his village, for example, is a village that used to be a village that relied primarily on soil and sun-based agriculture where they also grew a lot of what we call Ba'al varieties, which are varieties that are grown with no irrigation. And it's a system of cultivation that our ancestors developed over thousands of years. So the word Ba'al refers to the Canaanite deity of fertility.
So we're talking about more than 10,000 years ago, we've had this practice of growing food with no abuse of the natural terrain, but actually working with it. To grow Ba’al seeds is to also know a whole system of how you grow this stuff. There's a whole system of knowledge. When it rains, what do you do? How do you prepare the soil prior? How do know, take care of the plant during, how do you store the seed, all of these things that are created through understanding that we are just part of the collective creation for to produce our food. We are not the dominant species, but we understand and we bow and we the stars, the sun, the rain, all of it, the soil, everything in the soil, the seed itself, we're all co-creators. And that's how we put seed in the ground and we always put seed in the ground and we say, may we eat and may we be able to feed others. But to go back to the point, this kind of agriculture is disappearing. It's disappearing because like I mentioned there's been a push also for agribusiness, for monocropping, all to serve obviously the big companies and the profiteers of companies whether it's in Israel or development agencies, foreign development agencies including USAID and others, European agencies, that claim that they want to help quote unquote the Palestinian farmer, but what they have been doing is pushing this form of agriculture, which is destructive.
And in pushing Industrial Ag, they've really destroyed our biodiversity. They've destroyed also the agency of the farmers who have been the guardians and the carriers of this biodiversity. And they've destroyed the multitude of seed varieties that we've had in this the fertile crescent.
We are the center of diversity for wheat and barley. Today we only grow two varieties of wheat from hundreds and hundreds of varieties.
And then of course there is, lack of access to water. If you are a farmer and you want to grow irrigated, crop, that is very, very difficult. Even in places where the water already exists in the villages, like in villages, like the village, which is a village in the Jordan Valley, the water actually runs through the village. There's there's, there are these springs that come out of the mountain and they feed the whole village. Israel diverted this water. The Makarot, which is the Israeli water company, installed pumps that pumps out the water from underneath people in the village and close the pipes so that if you are even to take water you can be fined or arrested. So now the water runs through the village, but the people in the village are not allowed to use this water and they have to go and drive and buy water while this water is irrigating agribusiness Israeli settlements, like next door to them and basically on their stolen land. So, these are just, I'm giving you, I said I'll try to be brief, but these are just some of the many ways in which the Palestinian farmer has been under direct attack. And I think it's a very intentional attack because the way we have survived a lot of the Israeli oppression and aggression has been through having a lot of food sovereignty throughout history.
And so when Israel was founded and in its continuous attempts to destroy the native people, the Indigenous people, our people, they've had to destroy our food system. And this is not new, all colonial powers that we know, including Europeans who came to the United States or what's today the United States have also done the same. They've destroyed Native Americans' foodways, they've severed people from their land, they've killed their Bisons, they have turned their lands into natural reserves and pushed them off in reservations, which is exactly what's happening to Palestinians today. We are forced into small basically camps of open-air prisons that are called cities and towns and we're separate from our lands. There's also of course the fact that we're not allowed to build anything on any land. Like if you're a farmer and you want to build a shed Israel comes and destroys the shed.
All in the meantime, agribusiness settlements that are subsidized by the state of Israel continue to grow in massive and disgusting forms that are destroying the biohabitat on so many different levels. So I always think for the world that claims to care about ecology, if you don't care about Palestinian life and you think we are animals, fine, we're human animals. I'm proud to be a human animal. But supposedly you care about animals, but fine, don't even care about that. But like, maybe, maybe you can care about the ecology that's being completely destroyed.
Kamea Chayne: I want to honor and hold tenderly what an especially difficult time this is for you and for everyone with personal ties to these events. My heart really breaks over and over again with every story of loss that I hear.
I also know these questions warrant days-long discussions or even entire books to address. So we really appreciate the overviews that you're offering us here in our brief time together.
In terms of your work with the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, you shared that it is in part a work of grief. What more can you share about this sentiment, this relationship between heirloom seeds and grief?
Vivien Sansour: It's funny, I've been thinking about this a lot since the seed library took off, which is now 10 years ago. But of course, I didn't think that somehow we were preparing for this kind of mass genocide. I mean, we knew we were being eradicated slowly, but surely.
But what we're witnessing today is partly unsurprising considering how much undesired and under attack we've been. And I remember as a child I always wondered like, why have they not killed us all already? Like, why are they torturing us? And I still think that. I still think why are they torturing us before they kill us all. But I think today Israel is getting even a more like carte blanche to just kill and not have to even engage in any, even performance about the fact that they are committing genocide. But why is that relevant to your question? Because we are these seeds, you know, we are not something separate from our seeds and our heirloom seeds are us. And when I earlier was telling you about our different systems of cultivation, that….
Our heirloom seeds are literally part of us and we are part of them in the sense that we are an extension of these seeds because they are the product of a lot of care and a lot of years and a lot of efforts of co-creation that led to what is today, our food.
And it is not just a cliché when people say you are what you eat, you are what you eat. And our seeds are just like us experiencing their extinction or their murder, their attack that's been ongoing and increasing. And so the relationship is that our stories are connected to the stories of our soil and our seeds. And so with each story which holds the story of a whole village sometimes or a whole family. There is a lot of grief as much as there is life because when we talk about, for example, our watermelon or certain cucumber, like we have a village called Wadi Fukin, that's famous for people used to pride themselves on this white cucumber and particular families have held these seeds for so many generations, people go to them. And so when you see that the elder of this family passes or that the fact that the people in Wadi Fukin can no longer farm the way they used to and thus the white cucumber becomes a threatened species, you start to understand that actually, you know, that we are really, us and the seeds are going through it together and that we need each other. And so in the process of fighting for life and also having to mourn a lot of life, we become very intertwined. And so to talk about the stories of seeds is to talk about the stories of people because we are all seeds again.
And that's why grief is something that cannot be avoided. It is part of this truly sad and powerful journey that we are on right now.
And so for me, I've allowed seeds to be my helpers, if you will, or my spiritual teachers in trying to mediate my own grief. And there was a lot of grief also for us as a community around how much of our beauty has been damaged, has been busted, has been taken away, and in some cases also appropriated. And so the seeds become a way for us to remember that we are beautiful, remember that wow, we also offered something to the world. Oh wow, we also come from something really deep and ancient and gorgeous. And much of it is also dying and we have to become not just better farmers in the world, like better mourners, better grievers because you know yesterday I had a really hard conversation that really broke me where I had to speak to a young man from Gaza and who's here in the US, sit together and say, your world, the world that you grew up in and you knew is gone, is, has been destroyed.
There's no way to dance around the fact that his school was bombed, all his familiar places have been bombed, his friends have been killed.
And so there's no way to dance around it. And so we had to name it. I had to sit and say, it is gone. And now we have to learn how to, you have to learn now how to be the life, how to be the seed for new life. And most importantly, the Ba'al seeds that I've been telling you about, these heirloom seeds that we grow every year—and I hope we can continue to grow forever—when we harvest the seeds, we save them and we store them in ash. And we've always done that and we do that to preserve them. But I find it quite amazing and symbolic also that maybe these seeds also remind us like, you know, they sit there in the ashes of things and their kin that have been burnt to death. And then they have to figure out a way to come back to life. So it's a constant conversation and it's not an easy one, but I think it's the one we must have and the one we can't escape. And the one I think, not just Palestine, I think everyone in the world should be having because you know, it's true that we are being bombed and killed, and there are other people being killed in the world. We really have to sit down and ask ourselves some hard questions as a species. What kind of people do we wanna be? And what are we gonna do, you know, in order for us to move forward, if we're to move forward? Or should we just die a meaningless death. I hope the seeds can offer us a bit more of a meaning.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, definitely a critical time to hold up a mirror and ask ourselves these difficult and important questions about the meaning of life and what world we want to create for ourselves.
As we carry forward this thread of agriculture, could you shine a light more on the issue of food insecurity for Palestinians, as in what you know your people have experienced firsthand and what it has to do with political and military power of the state of Israel?
Vivien Sansour: It goes back to what I was saying earlier. We went from being producers who are very self-sufficient. I grew up in the 80s and the 90s, particularly like in the first Intifada, our first uprising. We didn’t go hungry because we were very much still connected and able to maintain our small terraces, share food, produce our own food. We did not rely so much on imports. And then the Oslo Accords happened, which they called them the Peace Accords, which nothing peaceful about them. They were another form of Nakba for us, of catastrophe. And they made things impossible in terms of maintaining food sovereignty. And so what happened, and I say food sovereignty because food security, I think people just use that to say, oh, people are eating, but what are people eating, you know? So what that did to us is that it pushed neoliberal policies that transformed these productive entities from little farms to little shops and little factories to now, people who are in debt, people who are dependent on donations, people who are reliant on imports, also that Israel dictates what we can and what we can't eat. And most importantly, we became basically prisoners in this wall because they built walls around our towns. And we are now reliant on whatever Israel lets in in terms of food. And of course, they're going to let in their products. Really terrible products. And that created a dependency on our oppressor, a dependency that we were forced to adopt through this so-called peace accord that linked our economy to theirs and in participation with the Palestinian Authority, which is an extension of the arm of the occupation really.They are basically doing their dirty work for them.
And so in that way, we became completely reliant. And so that puts us in a dangerous situation. Again, right now, you know, like hummus, chickpea, we have heirloom chickpea and you know, we grow chickpeas, this is our staple food for our falafel, for our hummus, all of it. Now it's mostly imported from Turkey and other places and with the war in Ukraine, for example, it became even more expensive. Wheat became more expensive, so bread became more expensive because suddenly we are now importers of flour. We, the center of diversity for wheat and barley, are importing flour for our bread. So that itself is so tragic and made us not just lacking our sovereignty but unable to control any part of our food supplies because also our lands were taken away and the areas where we did produce more, for example, wheat, you don't have that kind of space anymore. You don't have that kind of, you know, access to those valleys is very, very difficult due to settler violence. And of course, all these policies that were put forward to really punish the farmer and turn the farmer into a day laborer.
And that is sadly what happened. And today our struggle again is to just, you know, put a seed in the ground is really revolutionary because, you know, it is literally life threatening. You know, we've planted crops in areas in the mountain, for example. We don't know if we're going to harvest them, but we continue to plant them. We've had our crops burned. We've had our trees uprooted, we've had all kinds of farmers arrested, people killed. So when you talk about food security in these kinds of circumstances, it almost feels like an absurd conversation because nothing is secure. Your life is not secure. And so that's, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but that's what we're dealing with.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate all of this. And perhaps this is another example of what has been disrupting Palestinian food sovereignty. But in a documentary highlighting your work from a few years ago, you shared about how large swaths of farmland in Palestine have become monocultures of tobacco when they used to be diverse vegetables and food crops. Can you share a little more about the context of what has happened there and what Palestinian farmers and activists have been working on to counter this trend to in fact, grow for more food to reclaim greater food sovereignty?
Vivien Sansour: Yeah, I mean, this trend is related again to the Oslo Accords. Palestinian farmers and activists have been working to counter this trend—to in fact grow more food to reclaim greater food sovereignty—which again is linked our economy to the Israeli economy, meaning, for example, the price of cigarettes went up. And as you know, I mean, it's a very much smoking culture and cigarettes and alcohol. So what started to happen is that companies, and tobacco companies came to farmers and said, instead of you growing sesame and okra or whatever you're growing and working so hard and hardly making money, why don't I just pay you rent for your land and I grow tobacco?
And that started to happen. There was a big push for it because also companies were making money, were making money from tobacco. And so that increased the number of whatever farms that were left, whatever land space that was left became now tobacco fields. And that also of course destroyed the soil. And there you have it. Like we have, again, we go back to the same thing, which is also global. How companies come and take over and transform biodiverse, lush terrains into monocrops that destroy everything. And that's what's been happening. And obviously the tobacco is, this is not sacred tobacco, this is commercial tobacco that is destroying the physical body and the earth that is under our feet.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this added context. As we speak right now in December of 2023, Palestine has been in the news a lot due to what many notable human rights lawyers, activists, and organizations have been naming as textbook case of genocide, backed by global powers like the United States. I know you recently had an experience of having an award retracted after submitting the speech you wanted them to read remotely on your behalf. And at the same time, professors, scholars, students, actors, musicians, journalists are being fired or punished left and right for calling for ceasefires and peace and for speaking out for the basic human rights of the people of Palestine.
And I've been really trying to understand why standing up for the basic human rights of Palestinians feels different than, say, the Black Lives Matter movement. As in, Black Lives Matter was co-opted by a lot of corporations and politicians who wanted to look like they were aligned superficially for reputational purposes and supporting in more performative ways while actually contributing little to material and structural and systemic changes in support of Black Communities.
So, it is a social movement where many establishment institutions tried to associate themselves with in order to at least look like they care about Black liberation. But it feels like the topic of Palestine has been taboo, and that even calling for ceasefires gets people fired or smeared in some way. What would you like to add to this? And what would you like to tell people who are not really familiar with what's going on, but want to develop their own critical lenses as they go about consuming media content to try to understand better?
Vivien Sansour: First I wanna say, I have no energy or interest in explaining myself to anybody. Meaning, we are paying with our own bodies and if people can't see that and cannot stand against that and don't have it in them to really ignite their own humanity, then I feel very sorry for them because then I feel even in our death, we're more alive than a lot of people. And so I have no interest, desire or energy to explain my humanity to anyone.
Having said that, I think in terms of, I think you mentioned the ecological movement and people in the different movements. I wanna address particularly people who are in the ecological movement because these are the people who have claimed over and over to be a community, you know, to say that I don't see them. I mean, there are very few people whom I love and respect who have been courageous and who have stood side by side with us and have continued to support our work and be partners with us in our work. But there are few compared to all these people in all the fancy conferences that they love to invite me to as a token because it was cute or cool to invite a Palestinian woman to speak. But now when push comes to shove, they're nowhere to be found. In fact, you don't hear from them. You don't hear anything. So I really challenge their hypocrisy and their really dishonest claim of care for the world and for the environment.
And to actually highlight that, you know, it's all about convenience. The Western world in particularly and the ecological movement in the West in particular, well first of all, you know, it's not the other countries that have destroyed the ecology. It's actually right here. And yet we were for many years continue to be lectured about the environment. We are shamed about so-called the environment because they care about the environment and we don't. When all the while the truth is they're just so much trying to go back to a world that they've destroyed. So when people talk about, oh, like, they want to buy their whatever fancy food in their fancy markets, they love to hear about a farmer in Hawaii that they, you know, supported, blah, blah. But actually, oh, God forbid they actually have to take a stand or do something real about it.
You know what I mean? These worlds that they claim that they're creating already exist. They're being destroyed and they're not standing by them. And so I feel massively betrayed by this so-called community, and I no longer consider it a community. It has revealed its failure and it's really lack of commitment to a different world. In fact there was, I had a person who I thought was my friend, who claimed very progressive politics, who called me and I was like, hey, where have you been? I haven't heard from you, because in the midst of this genocide. And at some point he said, I mentioned a protest, a big protest that was happening. And he said, oh, I haven't heard. I haven't been watching the news. I'm trying to stay off of Instagram. I just don't want to bring violence into my home because I'm too busy right now with things going on. I'm trying to like start a family, blah, blah. And it felt so disgusting to me. Like, oh, I'm so sorry. This came at an inconvenient time for you, but do you think it was convenient for everybody in Gaza or everybody in Palestine that oh, this is the day we are gonna be slaughtered.
There is no convenient time for this, but it's not convenient and it's better to just, or easier to close your eyes and find justifications not to be active because it's again, it has a cost. I think it was Noam Chomsky once, I think he said like, when you start to sympathize with Palestinians and the Palestinian cause, you start to have Palestinian experiences. So you start to see people who, if they stand for the truth in a society that loves lies, there's a cost, whether you're Palestinian or not. So it's important to remember also that this is not about Palestine. I think this moment is about , what Palestine is doing, is like really putting in a big way in everybody's faces the hypocrisy of this society, the decay of this society, the decay of this numbed human existence where everything is just performative and there's no substance.
You know, I think it's pushing more refined truth and people don't want to talk about the truth. And so they buy into these CNN stories about October the seventh and everything started on October the seventh, forget about the 75 years we've been under occupation, we're just going to talk October seventh and it came out of nowhere. And it's, I don't know, I have no answer to, for example, the videos I've seen about peoples. I just saw a video today of these Israeli soldiers who have destroyed a neighborhood, completely leveled it. And then one soldier decides to propose to his girlfriend soldier on the ruins of someone's home. And he says to her, oh, here we will start our own home. Like what kind of sickness is this? There's a sickness and the sickness is produced by a society that has supported a lot of death in general. Like it's just so many lies and so much death. I'm just rambling on.
But I think you asked me about people if they wanna learn more, I think that's wonderful. I think for people to learn more, they don't even have to learn much about Palestine. They can dig into learning about what's happening in their local community. And I bet you there'll be a link to Israel because it's all part of the same violent system and they all are connected to each other. And when you go to your school that's underfunded or you send your kid to a school that's underfunded and then you look at Congress sending more billions of dollars to Israel maybe then you will care about what's happening. Educate yourself about how your world here is creating the world there and vice versa. I think the idea that this is only happening in Palestine is not only false, it's also misguided.
The truth is what's happening in Palestine is actually happening here.
Because if it weren't for the policies that are happening here, what's happening in Palestine wouldn't happen. Israel would not exist one more day without the full support of billions of dollars and military aid going to it from the United States with our tax dollars.
And not only that, you know, that we are not like going in the streets and going to our communities and our houses, like we don't have proper healthcare, you know. People here should ask questions about that. Who's training the police in all these cities? Just look into your own pain, your own story, your own community, and you'll understand its link. And so it's time to really make these links and understand and dare to look at really what's happening and the complexities that are urgent to understand in our own lives and how it's all connected, whether it's what we eat, what we buy, what we drink, and where we go to school. These are all important questions right now. And I think people should dig deep and not take everything they hear on particularly mainstream media as truth, because it's not. And we know from before that they've always lied because the media works for, you know, the media has been co-opted by government. So, do you trust Biden? I don't.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have additional links and references from this conversation in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Vivian, thank you so much for joining us today in spite of this gravely difficult time. We're so grateful and honored to have you here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers as we close off?
Vivien Sansour: Wisdom. I would say, I mean I am not better than anybody to give wisdom, but I will say that
