Live From Palestine paints a picture of courage. It challenges conventional media accounts of violence in the Occupied Territories. It shows members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) acting non–violently and with great dignity in the face of appalling cruelty. Those three themes—courage, putting the truth on record and dignity in response to cruelty—reverberate through the pages of this book. These themes also depict the actions of world citizens—Palestinians and young people from many countries in alliance with Israeli peace activists—who used non-violent techniques to protest against injustice, to resist the weapons of the Israeli military and to inform others about acts of solidarity on behalf of the Palestinian people.

In a world searching for material comforts, courage is a rare commodity. Yet members of the ISM movement gave rare displays of that quality. On March 16th 2003, as on other occasions, Rachel Corrie with ISM colleagues was standing in front of Palestinian homes to stop their destruction by the Israeli military. She was crushed by a nine ton caterpillar bulldozer. She died from multiple fractures and internal bleeding.

Non-violent protest represents a way of living characterized by humanitarian values in which means and ends are inseparable. Mahatma Gandhi also stressed that a life of non-violence required reserves of mental and physical courage and he explained why reliance on weapons and other means of violence to dominate people or to destroy them was cowardly. Live from Palestine depicts non-violent stands sustained by courage, versus violence fuelled by cowardice.

From their diaries and in their chapters, each of this book's authors informs the world of Palestinian people's experiences of oppression and of the Israeli army's brutal responses to non-violent protest. The diarists' stories are significant. They challenge the views of a mainstream media which produces one sided, oversimplified albeit convenient versions of events: terrorists, militants and extremists are always provoking a reluctant Israeli military. In a chapter entitled "Ravaged Childhood," a more complex and discerning picture is given by psychologists working for Medicins Sans Frontieres. They had witnessed land being confiscated, olive groves being bulldozed and homes razed to the ground. They say that at first this violence and humiliation seemed little different from conflicts they had witnessed in other parts of the world. Then they reflected that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there is one major difference. Human rights abuses have been legalized by the Israeli government but remain illegal elsewhere.

Live From Palestine not only challenges the manufactured consent of mainstream media but also confounds the stereotype view of history that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. In Australia we have learned to be suspicious of such stereotyping. For centuries, until the Mabo High Court decision of 1994, the consensual story of Australia was that until the British arrived, this was an empty place—terra nullius. In terms of the development of a people's self respect and identity, the myths of history can be as lasting in their effects as the stealing of land and the subsequent refugees' experience of homelessness.