Victoria Martin-Iverson

Soft brown eyes flicked furtively towards the guard’s room, then back to the ripe luscious strawberry she had carefully placed on the table’s edge. She waited for the guard’s laconic indifference to blend into the certainty of distraction, then secreted the treasure in her loose pocket. “For my friend,” she confided, while a hint of defiance momentarily lit up eyes that for most of our visit had spilled out a lifetime of sorrow and loss. “My pregnant friend.”
Jewish Identity & Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel By David Landy Zed Books, 2011, 272 pp., $49.95 Just over a year ago, I attended the launch of the radically Zionist “Friends of Israel” (supporters of the state of Israel as an exclusively “Jewish” state) at the charismatic Christian Victory Life church in Perth. I did so openly as a member of Friends of Palestine. I sat with my Palestinian scarf draped around my Jewish neck and listened nervously to more than two hours of speeches.