My name is Mathias Leroy. I'm 28 years old and I live in San Francisco, California. I have been a born again believer since March of 2003. I go to a small but filled Pentecostal church here in the city, of the Church of God denomination. I am an organizer with a peace and justice group started up out of the church a year ago by one of the junior pastors and I. Our group is called Third Way Peace and Justice Fellowship. Our website is www.thirdway.cc. We are the local branch of Pentecostals & Charismatics for Peace & Justice, www.pcpj.org....

I was raised Jewish. My mom is Israeli and my dad is Jewish from Chicago. I lived with my mom and step-dad and brother for many years in the Canary Islands in Spain, where I grew up. I went to college at a Quaker school, Earlham College, in Richmond, Indiana. I was raised to be militantly pro-Israel as both my mom and grandmother are. I grew up hearing them say horrible things about Arab and Palestinian people, and I was told these things by them. My mother and grandmother would always say that the Arabs should be annihilated and that they were ignorant and stupid and were bloodthirsty murderers. When I was young, I thought like that too. When I came back to the U.S. from Spain, in high school, I saw a lot of racism and economic and social oppression here, and I am still in shock today. I saw that many in the Jewish community were in general very supportive of the system which I feel to be oppressive, capitalistic, greedy, and racist. I was looking for the radical leftist Jewish community like that of the nineteenth and early 20th centuries that I so much identified with, but instead I found a community in which many I felt had sold out and assimilated into the oppressive system that their forefathers had fought against. A lot of the kids in school would look down on me for being a leftist, and these were the same people who were so militantly anti-Palestine and pro-Israel.

Because of what I felt in my heart to be right, and because of the example that I saw of those who were so pro-Israel and feeling the hate and racism, I felt that their position on the issue of Israel/Palestine had lost credibility in my mind. This is the example I continue to see- arrogance, hate, self-righteousness, racism, and outright support of capitalism, the U.S. government and system, and the Republican and Democratic party dictatorship, all of these which I feel to be oppressive to working people and people of colour here in the U.S. and abroad. Therefore, I decided that perhaps the Palestinian people were in fact being wronged in some way, and I decided to research their views. It was in college that I really learned a lot of the Palestinian view, or at least the Palestinian Christian view. It was in college that I became friends with a group of Christian Palestinian students who had attended the Quaker Friends school in Ramallah, and it was from them and professors and others in the Quaker/ Mennonite/ Brethren and peace and justice circles connected with the former, who had experience living in and being in Palestine/Israel, that I learned about what the Palestinian people wanted and about what was happening there. I must stress that my friends and the people I knew were in no way anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. Many were actually Jewish themselves. The summary of what I had learned was this; The first people in Europe to think up the idea of the Jewish state were people who grew up during a time and in a society where it was the norm to believe that European society and people were biologically and culturally superior to non-Europeans, and that it was the duty of Europeans to educate and raise to civilized standards the uncivilized, savage, poor, inferior, darker skinned people of the world.

In the writings of Theodore Herzl ( parts of which I myself have read) and other prominent Zionists of the late 19th century, this mentality is very common, and there is that idea that European Jewish people would go to Palestine and create a Europeanized state and would do the Arabs the favour of civilizing and raising them to superior European standards and out of their supposedly backward, miserable, uncivilized ways of life, and would do them the favours of giving them the low-wage and menial labour jobs to work to build the Europeanized "superior, civilized" society. In the U.S., this mentality was called " the White Man's Burden", regarding the same mentality of Whites toward African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, and other people of colour. It is evident to me that, just as my grandparents in Chicago had, that European Jewish zionist leaders held these views as these views were the dominant views in Europe at that time, and so they, like most others, believed it, not necessarily out of malice, but out of ignorance. The Palestinian and other Arab people found out about this, and, of course, did not want to be treated as such, and so had their objections. When the Zionist movement began to move people to Palestine, and more settlers came in and these ideas were now being acted upon, again, not necessarily maliciously but out of ignorance, that the Arab people began to oppose it more, especially after they were constantly disregarded about it and not listened to.

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