"Lots and lots and lots of houses of just ordinary people have been completely and utterly destroyed, and people are living in the rubble," she said, speaking in the garden cafe of her Gaza City hotel. "Some of them are struggling in tents, and some are just sitting in what remains of their homes."
Walker said her decision to visit Gaza, along with members of the U.S. anti-war group Code Pink, was spurred by the recent death of an older sister. She said she felt a connection to Gazans who lost loved ones in the war.
"I wanted very much to be with them and to bear witness to what is happening to them, this horrible, catastrophic, terrible thing," she said.
Walker does not say it explicitly, but it's clear she has been moved on the issue of Palestine. She makes reference to having been indoctrinated by a classic Zionist text – the film Exodus. The AP article continues:
Walker said she believes Americans have mostly been exposed to the Israeli narrative since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and know little about the plight of the Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled their homes at the time.
"We were indoctrinated to the song in that film Exodus, you know, `This land belongs to us, this land is our land,' meaning the Israelis, the Jews, and for so long, we were told that nobody lived here, that it was a land without people, for a people without land," she said.
At the beginning of the war in Gaza Phil referred to it as "the anti-67 war." The 1967 war was a defining moment in establishing many American's affinity for Israel and the film Exodus, which came out in 1960, helped prepare the ground for this relationship. This era is passing. The war in Gaza led many to rethink their beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and jettison past assumptions. Today, Exodus looks dated and silly. There is no going back to Paul Newman's Ari Ben Canaan, a new understanding has been created.
