Regarding those meetings with other organizations, quite often I would head to a meeting and find a foreigner, usually from a Western nation who had just arrived in the West Bank, but would be the “knowledgeable” resource person I was supposed to look  for to gain insight into the current situation. I sat with one expert lauded by a previous team for her knowledge on local communities only to be told by those in said local communities that she barely interacted with them and kept a ‘healthy’ distance when it came to village visits. Yet these “gatekeepers” are deemed better resource persons than the people they supposedly represent.

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