So much going on here! One week until I am officially a resident of Tel Aviv! Work is good and busy - Noah is here and we went to hang out in Jaffa, which comes alive at night with his friend from TAU on tuesday. It was so beautiful down there! Currently working on a grant, and this is really difficult...now I see why people get legit paid to do this work. This weekend I am going on a J Street U trip to Ramallah and then friday night Noah, Robert (the friend, he is from Berlin) and I are going to Haifa to stay in a norwegian guest house and see the city. I'm excited! It's a really interesting place - a mixed city, right on the water.
I wrote this message to Nolberto, who is currently interning in Mexico City not sure what he is doing but anyway - whats up. Thought I would post it here. Wrote this a few weeks ago.
Being in Israel is a constant moral struggle. It is way to easy to live in Tel Aviv and love it (the ocean, the gorgeous Israelis omg, the style, the endless beautiful cafes always full of impossible chic people) and not even acknowledge that there is a conflict – but that does make it easier to understand the apathy plagueing so much of the Israeli public. So many people live here in the middle, sheltered from the lived reality in the north, south, east and west. The Prawer plan (the Bedouin thing) is heartbreaking – and the bedouins are fairly unorganized politically. The left-y people I work with hope that this will spur them into action. It’s also interesting of course to see the Palestinians take up their cause. My internship is with an org that works with youth – Israeli jewish, Israeli arab, and Palestinian from the west bank – and to see them is really inspiring. On our retreat one of the Israeli jewish girls said “once we learn to treat the Palestinians with respect, we will treat the bedouins with respect as well” – a simple concept, but so incredible that this can be articulated by a 15 year old and not a politician. But again, this is tel aviv and most people here think like this (and don’t act on it, thus the political climate we have now). Elana (also a mac student) is working at a similar org but in Jerusalem and she told me how she was canvassing and invited some Israeli jewish girls to an event to meet their arab neighbors (from east Jerusalem) and they laughed at her and walked away…those are the moments that I personally understand what blatant racism looks like. for my other internship (journalism) I’m writing about how Israel basically bullied some Eritrean asylum seekers to go back home to Eritrea (where they will be forced into military slavery, basically) from unlawful imprisonment, but then in my research find an article of how one IDF unit refused to send Sudanese refugees back across the border to Egypt because they knew the horrible treatment that waited for them there…it’s all quite difficult. But what I keep reminding myself – and will repeat again and again – is that the Israeli government does not enjoy widespread support of it’s citizens, and many citizens are unaware of these things (and when they are, they often act – there are protests all over about the prawer plan). Also, the amount of orgs doing incredible work is great (but underfunded). Combatants for Peace and Bereaved Families Circle are two of my favs – but it sucks that people must already be traumatized and damaged to open themselves to the other side. This does not excuse them – but this is a country with citizens like any other – concerned with schooling for their children and the insanely high cost of living. Perhaps because I am jewish and grew up with this jewish victim rhetoric, but I see trauma and residual trauma in both sides (both, as if there are two. There are at least five if we count the African immigrants and the Bedouins and this is ignoring the ultra orthodox and the druze) – mainly stemming from fear, forced violence, and ignorance from purposeful lack of information. It’s hard to accept, but people can only react and act from a place of their own reality – and here this is an extremely skewed reality, but can I really fault people for ignorance when the government works so hard to maintain it? One israeli jewish 16 year old told me that as part of the pen pal program that my org runs, he learned for the first time that suicide bombings are condemned by Islam – and it was clear that this is the moment that the Palestinians were humanized for him. Similarly, Palestinian kids at Elana’s org thought that the Torah mandated us to hate Arabs – and was surprised to learn that it does not. I like working with an org to work with youth – because they learn that they have partners and friends across the green line – especially important for the Israelis who are coming to terms with the reality of their military service…it will undoubtedly influence their behavior in uniform (one kid said “to refuse to go is the same as to go and do bad things. At least if I get sent to the border, I will treat the arabs better”). One of the hardest things for me here is to accept the way that people here live and think – and that even the most basic things (like understanding that no religion orders people to blow themselves up) that I understand intrinsically as a result of my childhood are huge realizations for people kept forcibly apart.
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