“I could live with having my home being destroyed once a year,” Awdah Al-hathalean tells me as he paces around the International Community Center of Umm Al-Khair, a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank. “My friend’s house was demolished four times in the last year.” As he walks, I sip sage tea from a small glass cup and look at pictures of Awdah’s uncle. I hadn’t expected to be in Umm Al-Khair that night. But two days earlier I had walked off my Birthright-Israel trip along with seven other Birthright participants. Birthright, which since 1999 has sent more than 650,000 young Jews like me on free trips to Israel, claims to be an apolitical trip intended to put young Jews in touch with our history and culture. Over the course of a week, however, it became clear that Birthright was advancing a political agenda, both hiding and supporting Israel’s military occupation of Palestinians.