My Journey Through Israel: Hope and Conflict Seminar

The Hope and Conflict seminar was 5 packed days full of speakers and visits to different places within Israel and the West bank in an attempt to analyze the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians. We heard from people on the right, people on the left, optimistic people, pessimistic people, basically every kind of person imaginable. Throughout the seminar there was no single right or wrong answer to the problems facing Israel today, but everyone had a different opinion and for the most part and everyone had a convincing argument to support their side. One of the speakers said it best by saying if we were more confused at the end of the seminar than the beginning, then the speakers did their job.

Our first speaker was one we know well, Neil Lazarus, we have heard from him a few times before and he is pretty beloved within Otzma. He has a good sense of humor and is a very good speaker. He provided us with an introduction to the seminar and guided us to ask specific questions of all the speakers we encountered. He also said to pay attention to the time frame that each speaker uses (1948? Biblical times? 1967?), because everyone can be right at the same time, if each person is using a different time frame. He also pointed out the conflict Israel has, in being both a Jewish and democratic state, and how Israel has to give up a certain amount of either one of those ideals. He told us to challenge every speaker we meet: ask the left how they plan to keep Israel safe without walls and checkpoints and ask the right who are the Palestinians and what do you do with this group of over 3 million people.

Then we met with Jared Goldfarb, another familiar speaker to us and we drove to East Jerusalem where he explained some of the problems in there and the different borders of Jerusalem. Today, the population of Jerusalem is about 63% Jewish and 37% Arab, with almost half of the Jews who live in Jerusalem in post 1967 borders. This is the basis for East Jerusalem, although the land where Jews are is not really considered to be part of East Jerusalem. It’s the areas with large communities of Arabs; most of who live very poorly, that gets the all the media attention and where conflicts arise. Over the years there has been many discussions about if Jerusalem should be divided and if yes how so. This discussion is ongoing today, in which there are basically 3 options. The first is to divide Jerusalem permanently, into a Jewish city and state and a Palestinian city and therefore it would be part of a larger state. The 2^nd option to have 1 united Jerusalem (either by removing one group of people or re-defining the borders). The 3^rd and somewhat utopian option is for Jerusalem to be a bi-national city where Jerusalem is the capital of 2 nations. Having said that, none of these options are realistically going to happen anytime soon- so the problem of East Jerusalem is something Israel has to deal with.

The Arabs residing in East Jerusalem now are not citizens of Israel; they are only residents of Jerusalem. This means they cannot vote in state elections, get passports, and do not have many of the rights Israeli citizens receive. They have a resident card that allows them to receive their basic needs, and travel within Jerusalem. These communities are generally poor and lacking in important basic necessities such as infastructure. Having said that, the people of East Jerusalem for the most part do not accept Israel as a state, and therefore do not vote in local elections where they can. This is one major reason why they are lacking in things such as infrastructure. Basically, the problem of East Jerusalem is not going to go away, and more importantly it is part of a much bigger problem, the whole existence of Israel and if a two state solution is necessary and possible.

At the end of the first day we met with Steve Israel, who talked to us about the rise Jewish nationalism, as it compared to Arab nationalism. This talk was very interesting to me because for the most part it was information I had never learned before. I have always wondered why only Israel seems to have this perpetual conflict over a tiny sliver of land. The US, Europe, and other western nations all conquered land that wasn’t land originally theirs through a war and the kept the land to make a country, The roots of Israel can trace back to both the Jewish and Palestinian people, but regardless of that in 1948- there was war- the Jews won the war and therefore won the land. However since that day there has been more war and fighting over trying to reclaim the land. The US did that with every state, but you don’t see Mexico trying to take back Texas. The big question is why. What is it about Israel that there is a continuous struggle for survival and why can’t the Palestinians just accept defeat. Well, here’s the answer: Nationalism. During the years leading up to the state of Israel’s creation two huge movements of nationalism were developing. One from the Jewish people who needed a homeland after years of mistreatment culminating in the Holocaust, and one from the people of Palestine, who at the exact same time as the Jews, sought to create a state in their home Palestine after a revolution in Syria. Both the Jews and the Palestinians tried to claim a state at the exact same time, do due external circumstances on both ends, this is the basis for the conflict- as neither group really has any other place to go now.

The next day we met with Eve Harrow, who is from Efrat, the largest Jewish Settlement in the West Bank. She was an educator about as far right as possible, who told us about her experiences living on in the settlement and her thoughts on the political situation. She spent a significant amount of time defending the settlements, and claiming that the conflict with the Palestinians would be worse, not better if Israel were to abandon the settlements. She explained that conflict was based on the fact that the other Arab nations in the Middle East will not absorb all the Palestinian refugees, and the Arab society, not Israel is to blame for the displacement of these people. She went further to explain that the Arab world is corrupt and doomed to fail. The Palestinians want an Arab version of Israel, but she believes that will never happen. If the Palestinians got their own state, she believes it would end also in corruption, not in a democracy, dictated by violence in terrorism. She was not optimistic that peace would ever come between the two populations. Her “solution” is for Israel to work on better PR and to buy time until the Arab world hopefully changes their society. She believes it’s important to stand strong to the Arab communities to show intolerance to any kind of violence and corruption. She claimed that in an Arab, world mutually destroyed destruction does not apply, and that nothing can be left to chance.

Then we met with an advisor to Israel’s foreign affairs, who spoke about the situation in Israel. He summed it up by saying things are never as bad as they seem and things are never as good as they seem, they are always some where in the middle. He pointed to all the inherent dangers in the surroundings: Hezbollah has 70,000 missiles, some of which can reach Tel Aviv, the corruption of the Arab society including mistreatment of women and lack of any kind of innovation, threat of Iran, etc. However, he also pointed out Israel has many regional alliances because of the treat of Iran and that Israel’s economy is thriving. In contrast to their neighbors, Israel is at the top of innovation, with things such as electric cars, water saving strategies, and more. Overall, he thought that the prospects for success between Jews and Palestinians were slim, and that things would carry on as they are for quite some time, He explained how the media distorts the situation and exaggerates it from either side of the scale.

We spent Shabbat on two of the Jewish settlements in the Judean Hills. I, along with half of the group stayed in Tekoa, where we all had different experiences. Arielle and I stayed with a family from America, who was one of the first 7 seven families to settle the land. They were very ideological in their choice to live in the settlement. There are all kinds of families that live in these settlements, some are just there because it’s a nice suburb close to Jerusalem where you can raise a family, and some people are there because they want to claim the land and make sure nobody else is living there. My family was very much the latter, as they were very attached to the land and the belief that it belonged to the Jews. We had a very interesting discussion with the father of the family, where he described why he thought it was so important for Jews to live in the Settlements, and how he would never leave his home. He gave us a tour of the settlement, showing us the nice areas with new houses, and then the places where some people were still living in temporary housing (a caravan) waiting for a permit to build a house. The building freeze has left many people without homes in these settlements, and they are forced to live elsewhere or stay in tiny mental caravans. Overall the place was very nice though, and looked like a small suburb from the states (with the exception of the giant mountains and Jerusalem as your backyard).

The family themselves were very nice and totally American. I love all the Israelis and their customs, but it was a refreshing dose of home to have a weekend of American stuff. We ate Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Philadelphia cream cheese, played monopoly and spoke English all weekend long. Their house even looked American and was filled with lots of English books, foods, and the Jerusalem Post. Overall it was a really great Shabbat, and a great experience in the West bank. I really enjoyed spending time with the family and in the community. After my time spent on the settlement, it is hard to imagine them ever leaving—I am pretty convinced that at least the major settlements are there to stay. They are wonderful communities, with people from all kinds of backgrounds living together under one common purpose, to live the homeland of the Jewish people.

After our experiences on Shabbat, we met with the extreme left. First we met with an organization called Rabbis for Human rights (which Eve Harrow called Rabbis for Arab Rights), who fought to ensure that everyone had basic human rights. The person we spoke to came off quite strong, as we toured through the Hebron Hills into a Palestinian “settlement”. We saw group of Palestinians who were living in tents without a lot of basic necessities. These people had a Palestinian citizenship, which currently is like no citizenship at all. Some of them were willing to be Israeli citizens if it was offered to them and some of them where not. No doubt it was sad to see people living this way, but I have to wonder whose fault is it really and could they live somewhere else if they chose to? The rabbis for human rights believe that the way to peace is through helping the Palestinians and giving equal rights to everyone. They believe the Palestinians have rights to their land and Israel should help them rebuild the houses that were demolished, and be apart of the Israeli society. They believe that in order to have peace, Israel needs to promote more positivity towards Arabs, so they have a better impression of Jews and don’t want to kill them. Personally, I don’t know how realistic that is, and in general this person’s argument came off a bit strange, but it was interesting to hear an opinion that went completely against what we had heard before.

Then we met with another organization on the left called Breaking the silence. This organization was really interesting and eye opening for me. This organization was made to inform the public of the mistreatment of Arabs enforced by the army. The organization is made up of soldiers in the settlements who have come brought attention orders they were given that were morally wrong and difficult. The mistreatment of Palestinians within the West Bank by the IDF is what they focused on with their stories. The soldiers wrote how about how they were ordered to use non-violent terrorism such as shootings in the air and constantly searching houses to terrorize the Palestinians. They also did little to nothing about settler violence against Palestinians, but were told to shoot any Palestinian that attacks a settler. Even the terminology is biased as a settler attacking a Palestinian is called a quarrel and a Palestinian attacking a settler is a terror attack. Overall they explained that the IDF has a political force in the territories to try and remove the Palestinians

Then we heard from an Israeli-Palestinian citizen of Israel and talked to us about the relations between the state of Israel and Palestinian Israelis. He explained the Palestinians have a strong connection to the land that Israel is on and that will never cease to be a problem. He also discussed how Israeli Palestinians are not equal to the Jewish citizens, as they face bias and prejudice everyday. He discussed the fears he believed affected both the Israelis and Palestinians and then ideologies of how to work together and live in peace. His solution to improving the situation was for each side to acknowledge each other’s existence and work from there to create policies that help lessen the fears of both sides. He argued to lessen the use of walls both literally and figuratively.

The last place we visited was the “hope” part of our seminar where visited a community outside of Jerusalem that was half Jewish and half Arab living together peacefully in one community. This community, Neve Shalom, was a community for people to live together as well as learn together. In addition to their elementary school in which all the children learned together, they had another school called the school for peace, which brought Arab and Jewish high school students together to create a dialogue about the conflict and engage in serious discussions. This community was on one hand very pleasant and full of hope. On the other hand it was very small and not very representative of the whole society, especially the people who are engaged in the conflict. The idea for such as community is a great one, but unfortunately the only people in currently reaches out to are the people who already believe and peace.

We concluded our seminar by having a mock Camp David discussion, where we all were assigned a country (Israel, Palestine, or America) and an issue to discuss with each other. On some issues agreements were made and on some they weren’t, but it was interesting to see how hard it really is to come to agreements on these issues that neither side is really willing to give into. We saw how difficult it was and will be for the governments to ever create a peace treaty. Overall the seminar was very interesting and filled with tons of information. I don’t know if I am more or less optimistic for peace after hearing everyone’s point of views, but I do know that is much more complicated and difficult than anyone can imagine.