Excerpt
SUMMARY: Corey Gil-Shuster covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new way. He asks the world what it wants to know from and about Israelis and Palestinians, goes to the streets of Israel and the West Bank to get the answers and posts the unedited responses on YouTube. NewsHour contributor Justin Kenny recently followed along with Gil-Shuster to produce this report.
JOHN YANG (NewsHour): We look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of Canadian-Israeli Corey Gil-Shuster. He runs The Ask Project.
Gil-Shuster solicits questions from the Web and then hits the streets of Israel and the West Bank to ask serious and at times provocative questions. He posts the answers, unedited, on YouTube.
“PBS NewsHour” contributor Justin Kenny recently followed Gil-Shuster and produced this report.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER, The Ask Project: If you were driving on the highway and there was a Palestinian on the side of the highway that seemed to need help, would you stop and help?
CHEN SHIRAK, Israeli from Tel Aviv: If I'm by myself in the car, I won't stop to anyone. It doesn't matter if it's a man, a woman, in the middle of the road. If I am with someone, like my husband, and we see something, maybe we will stop.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: My name is Corey Gil-Shuster. I run The Ask an Israeli, Ask a Palestinian Project.
If you were driving on the highway and you saw an Israeli on the side of the road that needed help, would you stop?
SAMI HABASH, Palestinian from Ramallah: Why not? Some day, he will help me. But if I saw — if I see that he is shooting, I will shoot back.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: The project is about finding out what Israelis and Palestinians really believe and think about the conflict.
People from all around the world send me questions through e-mail. I choose the questions, and then I go out to the streets of Israel and Palestine to ask random Israelis and Palestinians to answer the questions themselves. I don't edit any content out of it.
DURA, Palestinian: Most, the majority, they want two states, an Israeli state and a Palestinian state.
RISHON LEZION, Israeli: They are very primitive. And they cannot build a country like we did.
WOMAN (through translator): For sure, the Israelis will be destroyed because Palestine is not their right.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: Destroyed as in killed?
WOMAN (through translator): They should be killed, yes.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: What are you willing to compromise for peace?
DROR, Israeli: Everything. My pants.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: The question is, don't you think Israel is committing suicide by holding onto the West Bank?
NOGA TARNOPOLSKY, Israeli from Jerusalem: I think that's a really bad question.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: OK, why?
NOGA TARNOPOLSKY: Because it's a leading question.
COREY GIL-SHUSTER: A lot of the questions I get are what I call gotcha questions. They're a little bit over the top, or exaggerated, or have a very overly simplistic way of looking at the conflict.
And I ask them exactly that way, or try to as much as possible, because I think it's interesting for Israelis or Palestinians to hear what people from outside think. And I want them to answer in an honest way.
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