amy: let's bring simone zimmerman into this conversation. tell us about your upbringing.lk about your allegiance to the state of israel, how it was instilled with you, and then talk about your transformation. >> absolutely. i grew up in a jewish community where the holocaust was a formative part of my upbringing and i saw defending the state of israel as a core part of what it meant to keep the jewish people safe. so much so when i met anti-zionist jews, anti-zionist israelis, people who are fighting apartheid when i was a college student at uc berkeley, i could not believe those people existed. they were an anomaly to me. the more i met those students and, more importantly, met palestinian students, learned about their lives, about what it means from the moment you were born to live under a system that deems you lesser, less worthy, that you have to live under occupation and dispossession just because of who you are and where you were born, i very quickly ran out answers that felt moral and logical to me to answer the hard questions i was hearing from the students about