Intruders

Since you ask: the girl who got mixed up in the demonstration today, the one who arrived late, is called Sandra, and she’s from Los Angeles. She came here as a civil rights volunteer, an activist. There was no other reason for her to come—she wasn’t a tourist or an immigrant or part of an exchange system. Her parents, she said, were Zionists—fundraising there and holidays here, as she put it—so, of course, she had to take the opposite line. She said she’d swallowed all the Zionist propaganda until she got to college and started reading the papers and hanging out with people who knew the truth about the occupation.
It was a mistake to let her into our group. It’s difficult to keep people out when they want to help—there aren’t many volunteers these days—but I still think we didn’t need her. She could have gone to a demonstration in town, or gone back home to the States to wave banners against wars somewhere else. In a focussed group like ours, we need people who know the background, who understand the issues and who’ve lived with them for years, not someone who got involved with us on a kind of moral safari.

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