After Shaul's speech, representing "my comrades and not just myself," he was bombarded by hostile questions from Israel supporters in the audience. Shaul handled them with strength and ease. (Q. "Do you know of a counterpart organization where Palestinians question their moral decisions?" A. "I really don't care—I am an Israeli who has to raise his children in Israel...")

Just as gripping to me was the discussion that took place after the event between Rachel Glaser, the campus coordinator of the rightwing Zionist Organization of America, and the students who had organized the event.

"What did this accomplish? What did it accomplish?" Glaser barked at the organizers.

"It achieved something important," one of the Jewish students said. "People perceive pro-Israel groups as monolithic. They think that we are not able to take responsibility for the bad things that happen."

Fine, Glaser said, but the students should have organized "a panel," in which Shaul was just one voice. "Have someone else," she said. (Just as the New York Theatre Workshop wanted to "contextualize" the Rachel Corrie play with pro-Israel voices.)

It was one thing to have Yehuda Shaul give a talk inside Israel, Glaser said. "Outside of Israel, you're playing with fire."

This chilling statement was a candid expression of the goals of the Israel lobby. A member of a Jewish organization was saying that it's OK to have a wide-open discussion of these issues in Israel, but it's dangerous to have such a discussion here. Why? Because America is the mainstay of support allowing Israel to continue its policies in the Occupied Territories. The Israel lobby fears that Americans, if left to their own devices, will abandon Israel, out of indifference, or antisemitism. So Americans must be influenced—in this case by having the information they get about Israel/Palestine vetted, and by pressuring Jews on campus to toe the party line.

I bring this up because Glaser's group, the Zionist Organization of America, is now trying to have the Jewish group that sponsored Shaul's tour, the Union of Progressive Zionists, kicked out of a consortium of campus groups that promote Israel's image on campuses. Why? Because (per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) "Jewish money should not be spent on programming that provides fodder for Israel's most virulent critics."

This is shameful news. Jews are better than this, America is better than this...

What am I talking about? What is Breaking the Silence?

I met Yehuda Shaul last summer in Hebron. Raised Orthodox in Jerusalem, Shaul was a sergeant in the IDF serving in the Occupied Territories when he woke up one morning a couple of years ago and realized he did not recognize the person in the mirror. Everything he had been told was right and wrong as a boy had gotten blended into nothing. He had done hideous things that would make his parents and friends vomit if they knew about them, and he had curtained off these actions and been numbed to it all. He began talking to other soldiers and formed an organization, Breaking the Silence, to describe what Israeli society was forcing its youth to do for the occupation. He read history and came to the awareness that all military occupations become corrupt in exactly the ways that Israel's is: humiliating the occupied, depriving them of human rights, let alone civil and democratic freedoms.

Shaul is this week wrapping up a five-week tour of the U.S. notable for the unbelievable photos he shows, taken by IDF soldiers, that document abuses. For instance, pictures taken by Israeli soldiers of other soldiers treating handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees as mannequins to do monkeyshines with.

The amazing development is that some of Shaul's college events have been sponsored by Hillel chapters, the on-campus Jewish organization. (This according to Tammy Shapiro, who heads the Union of Progressive Zionists, which also sponsored portions of Shaul's tour.) At some universities, the Hillel chapter declined to sponsor Shaul; and he was sponsored there by Palestinian groups. But (Shapiro notes,) at the U. of Wisconsin, the Hillel staff and leaders had a special meeting with Shaul, to hear what he had to say. At Columbia, a largely-Jewish group called Pro-Israel Progressives, which is related to the College Democrats, sponsored Shaul.

I find this amazing because it shows the discourse really is changing. And who is changing it? Youth. Shaul hasn't met with any congressmen; Lantos and Pelosi already know what to think of the occupation—no problem—so they won't meet with him. But these American campus organizations are tired of their role as cheerleaders for Israel. They understand that there is truth in the progressive understanding that occupation is crushing Israel's soul. Can American Jewish youth break the logjam on the Israel lobby? Well they can help.

Israeli progressives will lead us, as they feel greater freedom to discuss these matters. Here I would point to the comments of two other members of Breaking the Silence who visited the U.S. a year ago. "My commanding officer told me that public opinion in the U.S. is the most powerful weapon that Israel has," said Noam Chayut. "Public opinion here enables us to do many things that in my opinion are bringing us to our social destruction." To which his friend Avichai Sharon chimed in: "It's about time you know what you are enabling."

Their insight recalls a statement by the black South African poet Dennis Brutus. When he was in prison under apartheid, a jailer said to him, "The African National Congress will never win, you know why—because the U.S. is on our side." (Thanks to James North, author of Freedom Rising, for that.) The Israelis have placed a similar wager on our endless support for their injustices. They have been enabled so far by a stiffnecked, fearful and obedient Jewish leadership here. What a beautiful thing if it is idealistic Jewish youth that at last brings down this moral house of cards.

Then the door opened and a group of international volunteers came in. I heard European accents, and a tall black man with a tan haversack walked across the room and took the seat right beside me.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"South Africa," he said.

"Do you know about apartheid?"

"I lived through apartheid."

"How does this compare to apartheid?"

"In Johannesburg we had access to all the roads; they do not have that here," he said. "There were times we couldn't use the roads but those were exceptional occasions. We did not have these checkpoints. We carried papers but we were not constantly having to produce our papers as I have seen happens here. Our schools were inferior, but at least we could go to school. Many of these children are harassed on their way to school or are not allowed to get to schools. I have been here only three and a half weeks--but in my opinion, it is worse than apartheid."

"Worse than apartheid:" the words of Gosiame Choabi, an official of the South African Council of Churches.

I'm sure some people will seek to "contextualize" what Choabi said. They will talk about suicide bombers, or about the massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, or the big picture of Arab dictatorships with no free speech that surround Israel, or the fact that apartheid was in every city across South Africa, not just occupied territories. All true. But they will never be able to explain away the conditions I saw for myself: the expulsion of Palestinians from the center of their second largest city to make room for a small group of religious nuts who have confiscated land and houses and buildings in the old city out of messianic beliefs, and the support for separation and confiscation and harassment through the government implementation of checkpoints and curfews and patrols and settlers-only highways, guarded by heavily-armed soldiers, roughly one soldier per settler.

When our group of 8 Jews, seven of them Israeli, walked around the ethnically-cleansed marketplace, the religious nuts threw rocks at us.

And if anyone wants to challenge this account, I will produce the Israeli woman who said that seeing this was as important for her as seeing Auschwitz. Or the young Israeli man who said that seeing a video in the Arab man's house of settler girls waiting in a line outside the Arab school to throw rocks at the Arab girls and kick them and beat them so that they would abandon the school building, which is near a settlement, made him so nauseous he wanted to run out of the place and vomit. And most of all I will produce our group's leader: Yehuda Shaul, burly and inspired and 23, who served again and again as a soldier in Hebron and in whom the Army produced a kind of soul murder, in which he was brought by degrees to shoot indiscriminately into Palestinian neighborhoods every night at dusk as a means of stopping the violence—a soul murder that Shaul is trying now to undo by leading weekly trips to the scene of his service and by collecting testimony of other soldiers as part of an organization called Breaking the Silence. What a Jew!

There are two obvious questions about what I saw. How does the grotesque treatment of Arabs impinge on Israeli society generally? How does it affect Arab attitudes?

As to Arab attitudes, the effect is devastating. Whatever anyone says about the Arab "street," I have had many conversations here with privileged Arabs and I can tell you that they feel Rage. Rage and despair. There is a Palestinian magazine trying to be like New York Magazine, called This Week in Palestine, a glossy magazine with ads, and every article in there is a description in English of inequity, and a statement of rage. Every article. Enough about the goddamn street; across the Middle East, yes, Arabs are stifled in traditional societies, but they are acutely well informed about the occupation. This is America's problem. It demonstrably played a part in Osama Bin Laden's twisted cosmology and it is resented by the Shiites of Iraq who would volunteer to be martyrs on behalf of Sunnis in Palestine. Marty Peretz and Alan Dershowitz like to talk about how little Israel's Arab neighbors have done for the Palestinians, beyond lip service. But remember that we didn't do much for the blacks of South Africa in a material way, didn't bring the children of Soweto into our homes; yet it was distant lip service by Americans, among them many angered middle-class blacks, that played a crucial role in transforming South Africa.

And what about Israeli society? How much awareness is there of what I saw? I asked the Israelis, and the young man who had wanted to vomit, Amnon Aaronsohn, 25, spoke with passion: "Israelis don't know about this, they don't want to know. And if you tell them about it, they say, Well there must be a good reason for it, and that is the end of it." The woman who had spoken of Auschwitz said, "The majority of Israelis think this is for their own security, the rhetoric is so forceful."

I said, "Well there is good reason for that, terrorism." But she, who has monitored checkpoints for the human rights group Machsomwatch, said that the separation and humiliation go so far beyond national security questions, and are a "bureaucratic torture, preventing schooling, health care, any ways of normal life."

I understood what Aaronsohn had told me, later, when I was on the beach in Tel Aviv. Israel is a beautiful country; and in many ways Israeli society is miraculous. It sprung up so quickly, to a European standard. But Israelis have generally blinded themselves to the apartheid in the back yard because if they did acknowledge it they would have to do something. This complacent blindering recalls the American south during the civil rights movement, or the founding fathers during slavery. They avoid the information. The newspapers say little about it, and I see that it is impolite to use the words "occupied territories." You hear the words administered territories, Palestinian areas, or Judea and Samaria.

And meantime their children at 18 are forced into the service of governing the Arabs and poking the old men at checkpoints, and asking them for their papers. Yehuda Shaul said that when you give a teenager a gun and power, it changes him, he is not ready for the moral gray area he enters, he is soon abusing people, as the horrific testimonies on the Breaking the Silence's website show.

Irreversible corruption. When will progressive Americans deal with the facts brought forward by brave Israelis, and address this tragedy that our government underwrites?