Israel. Canaan. The Holy Land. Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza Strip. Judea and Samaria. The Palestinian Territories. The Occupied Territories. The list of seemingly innocuous, ostensibly only descriptive phrases could go on and on, each item signaling something different about an underlying narrative, each one imbued with political, sometimes religious, significance and evoking different emotional reactions from different people.
If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that all of the issues surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel’s domestic policy, and more are not easily deciphered. Everything else remains unclear to me, and I think for many of us on this trip. While I am no expert on any of this, I am extremely glad I decided to come to Israel for my last spring break of college. As I’ve explained to a few of my Trek-mates over the last days, I’ve always been very interested in politics, especially the politics of this region. Being here for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deeply engage with the situation on the ground has been, in a word, life-changing.
Several of my fellow Harvard Trekkers have already offered their take on some of our shared experiences this week in a world fundamentally different from the one in which we live back home in Cambridge. Though difficult to pick a few gems from the whirlwind of phenomenal meals, speakers, and events we’ve encountered, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on what I felt were the most memorable experiences of this week on my end while avoiding as much redundancy as possible.
The first night of our trip, we were led to a beautiful vista of Jerusalem by our guide and shared an incredible Shabbat dinner that gave us all the chance to get to know each other and experience the famous hospitality of Israel. Despite the long flight, the energy in the dining room that night was remarkable and set the right tone for a week of camaraderie, sharing, and critical thinking. The next morning, our guide led us to the Mount of Olives, overlooking Jerusalem in all its glory. With Jerusalem’s famous feral cats roaming around us, he spoke of the beauty and challenges of the major world religions coexisting in this holiest of cities. “What is Israel? Is it a place? Is it a concept? Is it a country? Is it Jerusalem?”
As the days passed and we began to truly experience Jerusalem, this idea of Jerusalem and its peoples exemplifying much of what Israel represents compelled me. As we overlooked the Temple Mount from the top of the Austrian Hospice, appreciated the deep religious and historical significance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, this question – “What is Israel?” returned to me again and again. As Danny Seidemann memorably described the conflict over Zone E1, and that in his view we are hanging on to the two-state solution by our fingernails, and that Secretary Kerry’s negotiations are the last, best hope, I thought of this question. As we celebrated Purim in Jerusalem a night after the rest of the country due to Jerusalem being a walled city, and as we bought falafel from a cart and walked back to our hotel through the city after the night’s festivities, this question returned to my mind. I wondered, “What is Israel?” as the American tourist in me hilariously asked an Old City shopkeeper how many “nis” were in a shekel, as a West Bank settlement’s rabbi told us that “the Palestinians are not really suffering,” as one of our trip organizers earnestly wondered which reasonable young Israelis would feel compelled to enter politics, as I learned about water and energy economics and the legal divisions of the West Bank, as I climbed Masada on a sunny morning with a friendly IDF soldier named Yonatan from Queens, New York, as fighter jets passed overhead, as we swam and floated and bobbed in the Dead Sea and its magical mud, as we collectively contemplated the horrors of the Holocaust while walking through Yad Vashem, as we heard from an incredibly courageous IDF battalion commander in the Golan Heights who had seen a bomb explode on the Israel-Syria border he was tasked to defend just hours before, as we drove through the beautiful rolling hills and dangerous minefields of the North, as we sat silently contemplating looking out over the Sea of Galilee on the Mount of Beatitudes, and as we visited an Arab Israeli town and heard from a teacher how passionately Israeli he was but how skeptical he was of a two-state solution. Israel is beautiful, Israel is complex.
From the numerous speakers offering their different perspectives, to the authentic Israeli and Palestinian food and drink, to learning how to navigate both Shabbat elevators and security checkpoints, to celebrating Purim in Jerusalem on one of the most amazing nights of college, this has been a fantastic, thought-provoking, fully engaging experience thus far. After much reflection and contemplation, with a bit of time to process the new thoughts and ideas presented by our supremely diverse array of speakers – from the rabbi and spokesperson of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank to leaders of Palestinian government and society, and many in between – I believe the following. More and more each day am I convinced of the necessity of an equitable, balanced, respectful two-state solution negotiated by leaders in good faith.
But this balanced solution is by no means inevitable; each day it seems more like a dream. There have been moments of pessimism for me at times, as it appears that despite great efforts by both sides in past years, leaders on both sides today are not willing enough to put aside their differences and come together for the sake of peace, prosperity, and the success of their people. Accepting inevitability in any peace agreement would be a manifestation of the most profound naïveté, and would do disservice not only to the efforts of numerous Israeli, Palestinian, American, and other world leaders over the past decades, but also to the thousands of years of history this land and its people have experienced.
Refusing to accept anything other than full re-occupation of Gaza, as Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has called for in recent days, or dogmatically insisting on Palestinian acceptance of Israel as the “Jewish state” without clarifying what that would mean for Arab Israelis, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has done, is irresponsible and hinders peace. At the same time, pretending that blame for the conflict lies on the Israeli side entirely and that the Palestinians epitomize the fairest, rational actors in this entire game, or suggesting that violence is a legitimate strategy to catalyze and blackmail Israel to concede ground in the negotiations, as the Palestinian leaders that spoke to us have done, is grossly offensive and disrespectful to any person who believes in peace, the history of the Jewish people, and the intelligence of any reasonable observer. One of our speakers told us this week that “the most that Israelis are willing to give is still far less than the least that Palestinians are willing to accept.” On both sides, this must change.
Despite all this, I remain optimistic. The more I read and learn and understand, the more I’m tempted to believe in the reassurances that at the negotiating table, the core issues can be dealt with in a logistically feasible, equitable manner that causes pain to both sides but ultimately results in mutual benefit, as any good deal should. While the issues at hand remain very unclear and are in fact only getting more complex and nuanced each day, I’m eager for the rest of this Israel Trek and am already disappointed our departure back home to the United States is coming so soon. I’m deeply grateful to the supporters of this trip and to our wonderful Israeli friends, classmates, and organizers for wearing many hats to thoughtfully facilitate this formative experience and for giving us the rare opportunity to hear from more perspectives than any American observer normally would. I’m very much looking forward to making the most of our last three days here in Israel, which has gone from a concept on a page to a beautiful, complex, human experience in my memory over these last days as a result of my experiences this week.
