i've traveled half way around e world to haifa, israel, to visit one of these groups. if you want to start your own scientology mission you first have to pay the church a fee for its trademark and then you pay for the right to license its material. auditing, the training manuals, et cetera. and then, you would pay the church and portion, a percentage of the fees that you bring in for these services, usually about 10%. it's kind of like a mcdonald's. now, imagine if your local mcdonald's decided one day it didn't want to have anything to do with the corporation any more, that it had failed in meeting certain expectations of its customers. and so, it was simply going to become independent. it would still sell big macs and use the secret sauce. but it just wasn't going to have anything to do with the corporation any longer. that's what's happened here at the drawer center. >> the drawer center started as a scientology mission specializing in training auditors. >> this is where people come to study auditing. >> an auditor administrators a specific set of routines and quest

had a connection to the state of israel in the sense that i lived on a kibbutz for many months in haifa, and it was very powerful experience for me, something that i will never forget. it was there that i saw and experienced for myself many of the progressive values upon which the state of israel was founded. i think it is important for everyone, but particularly for progressives, to acknowledge the enormous achievement of establishing a democratic homeland for the jewish people after centuries of displacement and persecution and particularly after the horrors of the holocaust. but as we all know, there was another side to the story. with regard to israel's creation. a more painful side. like our own country, the founding of israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, be palestinian people. over 700,000 people were made refugees. to acknowledge this painful historical fact does not delegitimatize israel any -- [cheers and applause] -- any more than acknowledging the trail of tears, what settlers did to native americans, delegitimatizes the u

because they're not just thinking about tel aviv and haifa, they're thinking about the heart and elfak. if we don't think about the women who are living there, if we don't think about the economic divide for people, then we're forgetting that there's something that unites people that has to do with the desire for peace, but they need to have the band width to pursue peace. so while we have governments that we don't fully believe in, support or feel can lead us, you know, across the divide, that maybe it's time for us to all be investing in the grassroots and building. >> we are the pushback. that's right. >> yes. >> can i say something? um, yeah, i just want to lift up your point of, i also deeply believe in the grassroots. from j street u i learned community organizing and that's something i'll hopefully take on for the rest of my life. to respond to your point barry and bring us back to a larger conversation around what actually this community and the leaders of this community need to be doing, what's going on, on campus right now, j street u and those in the center of the conversati