Lee Kaplan went undercover in San Francisco to see how the International Solidarity Movement (of Rachel Corrie fame) trains its ‘Freedom Summer 2004’ volunteers before they travel to Israel. New recruits are first encouraged to deceive Israeli security at Ben Gurion Airport regarding their intentions for visiting the region:
If they ask you questions such as ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know there’s a war?’ you should reply, ‘I thought it was better now.’ Or say, ‘I had my ticket for a long time and my Israeli friends said I should come.’ If you are Jewish, know your Hebrew name if they ask you what it is. Know your story. Wear your Star of David especially if you are Jewish.”
Then they get assigned roles:
We were told once we were on the West Bank and under the Palestine Authority we were to attend another mandatory two-day training session where we would be assigned to “affinity groups.” She then began making a bulletin board of how we were to function by setting up rules. The first rule was “Confidentiality.” Volunteers would be assigned to unknown affinity groups where they would function as teams to disrupt the Israel soldiers in military zones.
‘Wretchard’ at the blog Belmont Club makes an astute observation regarding the ISM’s cult-like psychological tactics:
I can see how it would work. The volunteers were asked to lie from the git-go at the airport so that psychologically they would consider themselves outlaws from the first. The next step would be actually break the law. “Once we were inside Israel we were told we could make our way to the West Bank even though we were also informed that to go there is illegal … We were assured the “ISM corps” was working on legal proposals to challenge the Israeli government at every turn if illegal entrants were discovered.” From that point on, [they] belonged to the International Solidarity Movement. Alone in a foreign country, on the wrong side of the law, the “volunteers'” only lifeline would be to cling to the Palestinian “affinity groups” so that the psychological dependence would become a physical one. By the end of this process the “Freedom Volunteers” would be anything but.
Yet many media outlets persist in calling the ISM ‘peace activists.’
