Jumpoff

"They will not escape from one another. They will not find peace in treaties, or in victories. They will find it, if at all, by looking into each other's eyes." --David Shipler, "Arab and Jew" __________________________________________________ I am sitting in a hostel in Tel Aviv, feeling completely sapped and floating on my own after a ten-day Taglit-Birthright trip through Israel. Since I have several free days in Israel before having to figure out my way to Amman for further travels, I should have plenty of time to sift through my loads of notes and share my experiences and thoughts on the tour. Besides being a fascinating experience, birthright is a relatively minor--but still controversial--component of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role played in it by the United States. I guess the best context I can provide for the hopefully coherent mass of text to follow is that I was often saddened and upset by the information the tour shared about the hardships of the Jewish people, and was equally saddened and upset by so many things that I know were not said about Israel's direct role in the hardships and oppression faced by many Palestinians. __________________________________________________ I still have mixed feelings about the idea of Zionism in and of itself that probably will remain mixed--everything is so complicated here--but I don't know if the concept is even worth debating at this point. I have, to be sure, learned not to doubt the genuine attachment to and passion for the state of Israel felt by its Jewish residents, and even felt a tinge of it myself on more than one occasion...it's an amazing and impressive country in many ways. In turn, even as an outsider, I was increasingly embittered by the need felt by many Israelis to regard Arabs who have long lived in what is now Israel as only a faceless 'other' that are only as important as their resistance to a state that was imposed on them--let alone by the predominant unwillingness of Israelis to face their own continuing misdeeds and injustices towards those who have called this place home since before the Zionist movement. It's not so much that I see Israel as the full fledged 'bad guy'--its people have been victimized too--as much as I see it as a country that has done a number of unquestionably unjust things over the last six decades but, atleast through the lens of birthright, appears too proud--almost fanatically so--to fully acknowledge them or reflect on them. The reasons for this approach are not so hard to explain (and the history, of course, is miles away from black-and-white) but, in my opinion, it is very hard to justify as righteous or productive. I don't pretend to be able to put myself in the shoes of anyone in this region, and I'm still very green on the dynamics here--I basically just have a lot of thoughts from the trip that I want to express from this nascent, but hopefully somewhat objective, perspective. ___________________________________________________ I should note that I really appreciated my time with the people I met on birthright and found the shared experience really fulfilling, even if my perspective on it was a bit different than most of my fellow travelers. I grew to respect and care for almost all of the Israelis I spent time with on a personal level, and in a way feel some guilt in criticizing the country about which they are so passionate. After I finish disseminating my birthright tour and the rest of my time in Israel, which will likely be far more than anyone wants to read but not enough to really say everything I want to say, I hope and expect the rest of my six-week trip will be far less heavy handed, and that I will be able to write about that as well. This is really supposed to be a vacation too.