My education really begins

I hope you've been enjoying my picture updates. This one's a doozy.

Tonight I will have been away from home for three weeks. I will have:

• done two loads of laundry
• eaten six falafel sandwiches, three shawarma wraps, around 150 calcium gummy bears (the recommended amount is two/ day-that should be only 42 since I’ve arrived, but I pop those things like candy)
• felt occasional bouts of homesickness
• experienced Tel Aviv nightlife
  
• swam in the Mediterranean twice
• gotten a tan I doubt will ever go away
• bought a pair of bright red and gold sultan pants that feel like a gauzy diaper (FINALLY!!!!)
• been frustrated by the lack of public transportation and nearby open grocery stores through three Shabbats
• learned basic conversational Hebrew “Mah nishmah?”
• finished two books (Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, both of which I highly recommend)
• and generally, I’ve come to really enjoy being here-going to Ulpan, meeting new people, traversing into downtown’s fresh produce shouk in the chaos right before Shabbat, and discovering each quarter of the old city by stumbling into narrow alleys and suspicious archways.

I feel like these past three weeks have really flown by. Even though this place doesn’t really feel like home yet, it’s a strange, yet comforting feeling to know that I’m not just a temporary tourist, but I live here, and I have the next five months to make it my home.

After my post several days ago, I realized that what to me felt like an innocuous diary entry was actually very alarming to my family and close friends. I got several phone calls from various family members and worried friends and some really sympathetic emails reassuring me that I had all the support in the world, and that the loneliness and homesickness were easy hurdles to overcome, and nevertheless were all a normal part of being a new place. Thank you for all your concern, and thank you for the kind emails. Thank you for all the calls and for pledging to send me ramen. They’ve all really helped me remember why I’m here, and they’ve encouraged me to climb out of this rut and take this experience, all the good and the bad, head on.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot, why Israel? The overall reason why I wanted to come to Jerusalem in the first place was to experience life in the holy city; were the tensions really there? In fact, Israel was never on my list of places I wanted to go to; as a Middle Eastern studies major and a lover of Arabic, I thought I would be studying abroad in Cairo or in Amman or Beirut. Israel never even crossed my mind, until my mom’s friend suggested it, and I looked into the Hebrew University program. Even then, I was still unsure, but I decided it would be the most interesting choice because I would be able to hear the perspective of the Middle East’s social pariah and underdog. I wanted to hear its take on the development of modern Middle Eastern history and try to understand this side’s bias on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The few Israelis I have talked to have been adamant-you do not enter the Arab areas including the Muslim quarter in the old city and the highly concentrated places in East Jerusalem (where the university campus is actually located-we’re right next to the West Bank) unless you are Arab or Muslim. When I ask why, they shake their heads in disbelief and say it is dangerous. I wonder how they can say this when they walk through the same university halls as Palestinians and Arab-Israelis, take the same classes, and drink coffee in the same university cafes. Maybe the university is a utopian no-fire zone for intellectual liberation, but otherwise an unrealistic bubble to a world where Muslims and Jews can co-exist but don’t dare intermingle.

More than Israelis, I’ve been able to talk with many American-Jews mostly from the big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. From them, I’ve learned the most. For instance, having grown up in Los Angeles and always hearing about the influence of the powerful Israel lobby in Washington, I thought I could always safely assume that almost every white person I met must have been Jewish. I forgot how big America is, and that there was a whole lot of land and people in between Los Angeles and New York. I forgot that most of those people have not met a Jewish person once in their life, and most of those people are why George W. Bush has been our president, twice.

To me, Jewish included the more orthodox Jews I saw walking every Saturday to temple in Hancock Park and in Encino, and it also included the mostly secular Jews only by culture and their bar-mitzvahs at my high school. I thought Jews were always a significant presence in any community not because of their “jewishness”, but because of their wealth and power. So when I interned at a Middle Eastern cultural center two summers ago and learned more about the Arab-Israeli tensions, I immediately sympathized with the underdogs-the Palestinians, being bullied by the Israelis and mostly by the rich Jewish Americans funding the strong US-Israeli "special relationship".

for more information about this, read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201627_pf.html

I never knew that Jews make up less than 1% of the world’s population, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense because Judaism is not a religion that encourages conversion and missionary work. It’s a religion and a culture for an exclusive group of people born into the community-“God’s chosen people” or what have you. I didn’t know that Jews were still discriminated and persecuted against even in college campuses and more “cultured” metropolises like Los Angeles and New York. I heard personal experiences by American-Jewish students here about having swastikas drawn on their mailboxes and garage doors, being attacked by pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli liberal fanatics at school to the point that the United States Supreme Court had to intervene in the UC system (http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=897 & http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1184 & http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1207238156184 ), and having rocks thrown at them while walking from the Student Village to the university campus by young Palestinian boys.

This gives me a whole different side and perspective to the issue. I have always been more inclined to the Palestinian side. I’ve read books sympathetic to the Palestinian plight like Road to Martyrs’ Square and am currently reading Dishonest Broker. But now, I am more able to sympathize with the Zionist dream to have a homeland for the Jewish community to feel safe in. However, I’m still unconvinced by the methods of bringing about this safety at the expense of the Palestinian livelihood and liberty.

One side of the argument is that Israel gets a lot of flak for its human rights abuses, but no country-including the United States (Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib) is perfect in that respect, so Israel should not be unduly condemned for its treatment of Palestinians, and pro-Palestinians should not accuse pro-Israeli Jewish-Americans of cruelty under the pretense of human-rights. The other argument is that the Jewish occupation is causing a Palestinian tragedy in a form similar to apartheid; this is not just a human-rights abuse, this is a mass scale atrocity that some say hearken back to Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. However, moderates on both sides will agree that pro-Palestinians should not retaliate against the Jewish community through violent means with or without adequate knowledge of the situation, and being pro-Palestine does not mean antisemitism; anti-Israel does not mean anti-Jew. Ultimately, the line of violence should never be breached, and extremists on both sides are wrong.

I’m really grateful that even in this short amount of time, I’ve been able to hear the other side of the story, even if it is just the beginning. It’s really surprising to me to hear that Jewish people in the states face hate crimes just like any other minority. But I think that even those hate crimes done to Jewish-Americans would have been done to any minority whether they be Muslim, Asian, Hispanic (even though they’re no longer in the minority in Los Angeles). Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way dismissing or justifying these injustices. I still have to admit though, I think it’s far more difficult to be a Muslim or of Middle-Eastern descent anywhere in the world than it is to be Jewish these days.