John Petrovato and Jonathan Elsberg will present some of their experiences on the West Bank today in a lecture entitled, “What We Saw in Palestine.”

The presentation, at 7 p.m. in Campus Center room 163, consists of photographs and short videos.

Elsberg, a University of Massachusetts graduate student and employee, spent two weeks in the occupied West Bank participating in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), assisting Palestinian emergency medical personnel and school children.

Petrovato, a co-owner of The Raven Used Books, located in Amherst center, spent six weeks in Palestine in October and November of 2002, also as a participant of the ISM.

“The reason why I went over there was to try to better understand what was going on,” explained Petrovato. “It’s confusing to those here in the U.S., you get pieces of details through the media, and you can’t really put it together unless you really do some research on it.”

According to Petrovato, the motivation for the event is educational.

“We’re just trying to present what life is like every day in Palestine,” he said. “People can draw their own conclusions from that. We want people to be critical of what’s going on, and you can’t have an opinion on what’s going on if you don’t know, and most Americans have no clue what’s going on.”

Petrovato said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not about two sides battling each other.

“I hate to be so harsh – the conflict is about ethnic cleansing, Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestine.”

According to Petrovato, 400,000 Israelis have been transplanted from Israel to Palestine, and Israeli settlement is the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Petrovato said that every Palestinian he met condemns suicide bombings.

“I’ve never seen suffering by the hands of the state like I had there, the brutality of the Israeli military to civilian children,” he said.

According to Petrovato, Israel has many documented human rights abuses, including “unlawful killings, torture, making medicine inaccessible because of military checkpoints, using Palestinian citizens as human shields, preventing children from education.”

The ISM is an international Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian and international activists working to raise awareness of their position. The event is free and open to the public.