The North American students studying at Tel Aviv University seem to be operating on their own calendar this year. Gone are the familiar points of student reference like “the beginning of the semester,” “before midterms,” and “after finals.” Instead, McGill University student Michael Hershfield remembers his arrival in Israel as having been “three days after the Dolphinarium attack.” The reference is to the Palestinian suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv nightclub on June 1, 2001 that left 21 young Israelis dead. Vera Lev of the University of San Francisco arrived for her intensive Hebrew program on July 23, or as she says, “after the Dolphinarium, before Sbarro,” the latter a reference to the August 9, 2001 suicide bombing at a Jerusalem pizza parlor that killed 15 Israelis. Adam Benmoise, a student from York University in Toronto, remembers arriving in October, when the situation was “already bad, but not near the point it’s at now.”
The intifada, now well into its second year, has become a fact of life for Israelis, and the heightened danger of terror attacks has permanently altered the day-to-day lives of millions of people. An abbreviated reference to a major attack–Sbarro, Dolphinarium–immediately evokes a certain point in the year and a certain peak or valley in the timeline of violence. And Palestinian terror in Israeli population centers continues, showing no sign of abating.
Understandably, relatively few foreigners are willing to risk a visit to Israel these days, and that includes college students from abroad. The option of spending one’s junior year of college studying in Israel, long a rite of passage for many Jewish students, seems less and less appealing in the current atmosphere of unrest. As a result, the overseas student programs at Tel Aviv University and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, normally teeming with American and Canadian students, are barely visible on campus.
Still, a committed group of Jewish students from North America are enrolled in overseas programs throughout Israel, albeit in reduced numbers. And the students who enrolled at Israeli universities this fall decided to come to Israel in spite of the intifada that had already been raging since September of 2000. Some students even decided to come to Israel midway through this academic year, long after the violence had seriously worsened.
The students who chose to study in Israel this year have done so despite the warnings, words of caution, and outright protests of family and friends back home. Benmoise says that among his reasons for coming were the presence of extended family in Israel, his desire to study abroad, and his desire “just to be in Israel.” Still, he is quick to point out that he received virtually no support for his decision to come. “There wasn’t one person that told me to go,” he says. The fight over whether to come to Israel or not was most intense with his mother. “Honestly it was a six-month struggle with my mother, and a constant fight,” he says, “to the point where some days we wouldn’t talk to each other.”
Lev, too, faced stiff opposition to her decision to come to Israel to study. “For me to come here, it was a very big struggle with both my mom and my dad,” she says. “It got to the point that even Lev’s father, who lives in Israel, urged her not to come. “His stand was basically that he was old, and that I was just starting my life and career, so why should I endanger myself? I tried to explain to them that I wanted to study here for reasons personal, academic, and professional. But I couldn’t really convince them.”
Anna Melman, a Barnard College student enrolled at Tel Aviv University, was also determined to come to Israel. “I always knew that I wanted to spend junior year in Israel, and I didn’t want anything to deter me from doing that,” she says. “I mean, I did realize that it was dangerous, but I wanted to go. And, you know, I was here over the summer and at the time I was safe.” Melman also cites her father’s influence on her decision to come: “He raised me with certain values, to love Israel, to support Israel, and he understands why I would want to be here.”
As the situation continues to worsen, however, many of the overseas students studying in Israel are facing mounting pressure to return to the relative safety of North America. But while some are considering leaving, many are steadfast in their determination to stick it out.
Twenty-seven-year-old Tsur Mishal is one of the Israeli student madrichim, or guides, in charge of the Americans enrolled in Tel Aviv University’s Overseas Student Program. According to Mishal, the number of students enrolled in the Overseas Student Program is about half of what it would be in a normal year. “There are currently 150 students, of which about 70 percent are from North America, whereas usually we would have anywhere between 250 and 300,” he says. But Mishal proudly declares, “Not even one student has left during the year because of security. Many students are facing pressure, but I think that the students are telling their parents that they are grown people and that they are staying. I hear them talking on the phone and there are lots of arguments. I understand the parents totally. There’s lots of pressure. It’s very different than other years.”
“My mom still calls me everyday, three times a day,” says Lev. “She can’t sleep. It’s so nerve-racking for her; she’s so paranoid about it.” While Lev stresses that she understands the worries of her friends and family, she feels that much of the concern is misguided. “Here you live in this world where you don’t really follow the news,” she says. “You hear about attacks first-hand from people. In the U.S. all you see is CNN, and just how the media represents the entire conflict. It’s ten times worse than it actually is.” Hershfield calls this phenomenon “the CNN effect.” In Hershfield’s opinion, the media’s effect on the people back home is enormous. Because parents and friends are so worried, they seek any information that they can find on the situation. The result is that they become obsessed with often sensational news reports.
None of this is to say that the students at Tel Aviv University aren’t at all scared. Clearly the terror attacks, some of which have occurred in central Tel Aviv and in coastal suburbs close to campus, have made the students more wary. “My apartment is overlooking the university, and every time I hear the bus go by I get a little edgy,” says Benmoise. “And now, after what’s happened this last week,” he says, referring to the double terror attacks in Netanya and Jerusalem on March 9, “I have sort of moved out of the desensitized phase, and I am much more cautious.” Lev, too, describes herself as “more cautious.” Citing the same events, she states emphatically that “the violence has definitely escalated.”
But the students at Tel Aviv University are well aware that it could be worse. “We’re not even in Tel Aviv. We’re in the Ramat Aviv bubble,” says Benmoise, referring to the posh suburb just north of Tel Aviv where the campus is actually located. Lev doesn’t take her location for granted either: “While we are in Ramat Aviv, I am so thankful that we are not at Hebrew University.”
Situated on eastern Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is, along with the adjacent French Hill neighborhood, a mainly Jewish enclave in an otherwise largely Arab part of the city. While the campus itself is generally considered fairly safe, French Hill has been the site of several attacks over the last year, and several public bus lines have gone so far as to alter their routes, circumventing parts of eastern Jerusalem for fear of attacks.
These days, however, the largely Jewish western side of the city seems no more safe. West Jerusalem has been the site of some of the most deadly terrorist attacks of the past year and a half, as Palestinian terrorists repeatedly target its crowded downtown commerci
al areas. Given the nature of the recent violence, it matters little in which side of the city one resides. Living anywhere in Jerusalem can be quite unnerving.
Not surprisingly, the atmosphere among North American students on Hebrew University’s campus is quite different from that at Tel Aviv University. At Hebrew University there has been a slow exodus of North American students as the violence worsens.
Gloria Dror is the academic advisor to undergraduates at Hebrew University’s Rothberg International School. She says that 603 undergraduates studied at the Rothberg School in the 1999-2000 academic year, the last year before the outbreak of the intifada. This year, however, undergraduate enrollment peaked at only 130 students, around 95 percent of whom are from the U.S. and Canada. Dror puts the current number at below 100, given a drop-off between semesters and a trickle of jittery students heading home since then.
There was a time when Dror’s job was quite a bit easier. Faced with students unhappy with their roommates or irked by a particular professor, she could usually come up with a solution. Nowadays, she feels powerless confronted with students who want to leave the program and return to the relative safety of the U.S. or Canada. “I don’t convince them to stay,” she says. “It’s not my place.”
In any case, for a student who has narrowly missed a suicide attack, or who loses sleep worrying when the next bomb will go off, no amount of counseling can convince him or her to stay. Instead, student visits to Dror’s office have begun to take on the air of a formality, where a student expresses his or her desire to leave, and Dror starts the paperwork. “They don’t come in to ask me anything,” says Dror. “There is no discussion.”
One student who decided to leave Hebrew University is Shira Karp from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Karp’s father and mother, a Reform rabbi and cantor respectively, were in Israel with the Central Conference of American Rabbis the week of March 4. After an attempted suicide bombing at a popular café on Jerusalem’s Emek Raphaim Street, and the deadly attack at Café Moment, also in Jerusalem, that killed 11 people, Karp’s parents decided that she was coming home. “I was never going to make the decision to go home on my own,” says Karp. “I told my parents, ‘Give me the decision and it will always be to stay.’ But I also told them in the beginning that if they drew a line in the sand, and demanded that I come home, that I wouldn’t cross it, that I would come home if they wanted me to come home.”
Which is exactly what Karp is doing. “I am really going to miss all my friends, and I am really upset that I am giving up a semester of school,” she says. “But in some ways I am relieved to go home because living here is very stressful.” Until Karp’s parents arrived, she went out quite a bit, but was never quite able to put her mind at ease. “Every time I go out I have to convince myself that although it might be dangerous sometimes, it’s safe tonight. It seems silly, but that’s how I get through it.” Uncomfortable with the escalation in violence, and yet unwilling to call it quits, Karp seemed to welcome her parents’ decision, albeit halfheartedly. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to make the decision,” she says.
With security concerns mounting among the overseas students at Hebrew University, as well as the administration, the Rothberg School has encouraged students to remain on campus. Though the school has stopped short of restricting the movement of students, Dror notes the efforts that have been made to keep students engaged without having to leave campus. “We’ve provided more on-campus activities so that they won’t feel isolated on campus,” she says. “They’ve been encouraged to take advantage of these activities rather than venture into the center of town.”
Hebrew University Hillel, which usually stages one musical theatrical production per year, has decided to stage a second in order to keep more students involved. Says Karp, “There’s no shortage of programming. They recognize the need for a social life.”
But for many the suggested activities are simply not appealing enough. Says University of Michigan student Olga Frankstein, “There are suggestions, but they [the school] can’t control us.” Karp adds, “They’re trying, but there’s only so many school-sponsored programs you can go to; there’s only so much time you can make yourself stay on campus. I mean, you just get sick of being here. You have to get off campus sometimes.”
Thus, many students continue to travel the city freely, assuming a surprisingly bold posture amid the continued terror attacks. Says University of British Columbia student David Bluman, “I’ll go to Ben-Yehuda Street [the downtown Jerusalem pedestrian mall that has been the site of several suicide attacks], I’ll go to Emek Raphaim Street, I’ll go wherever.” Bluman also says that he continues to ride public transportation, something many overseas students, and Israelis alike, have ceased doing. As for the fear of attacks, Bluman says, “You can’t be thinking about it all the time.” Staying in his dorm room for fear of terror attacks, he explains, would be “letting the Palestinians win.”
For many of the students at Hebrew University, however, the recent suicide attack at Café Moment looms large. The attack occurred in Rehavia, a quiet neighborhood on the west side of the city that many felt was immune to violence. Frankstein mentions the attack on Café Moment as a turning point. “Rehavia was an area that was generally okay,” she says, echoing an opinion held by many Jerusalemites before the attack.
University of Wisconsin student Hillel Kurlandsky cites the weekend after the attack as the first time all year that he has felt less free to go out: “It’s because of the immediate aftershock of the attack.” Still, he has gone out since the attack and plans to continue to do so. “There’s no way to protect yourself from everything,” says Kurlandsky, “but there’s no point in coming 10,000 miles away from home to sit in your dorm room.”
But not all are as defiant in the face of the rising tide of violence. “I’m not strong-willed enough to say, ‘I don’t care if something happens,'” Frankstein says. Her solution is basically to “stay home and find other things to do” until the situation gets better or until she leaves at the end of the semester–whichever comes first. “I’d still rather stay in Israel; I don’t want to go home early,” she says. “But I’d also like to stay alive.”
Despite the less than ideal circumstances, many of the North American students say that the positives involved in living and studying in Israel still far outweigh the negatives posed by the violent conflict with the Palestinians. Despite the intifada, says Benmoise, “There’s no better place in the world, really.” Hershfield concedes that “there is a reason to feel uncomfortable,” but he insists that studying in Israel is a valuable experience no matter when you happen to do it.
Similarly, Frankstein says that while she does experience considerable anxiety over the security situation, she still considers studying in Israel an amazing chance to learn about her history and heritage. While there were times when the violence complicated her decision to come to Israel, she ultimately knew that this is what she wanted to do. “Now,” she says, “I am happy I came.”
Kurlandsky also strikes a positive note. “I wouldn’t change it for the world.” Having wanted to study in Israel for as long as he can remember, Kurlandsky is grateful that he had the opportunity to do so. “I have no urge to go home,” he insists.
Gloria Dror says that those students who stay stand to have an extraordinarily positive experience. She compares the current school year to 1991, when the Gulf War sent many overseas students packing. In a situation like that, Dro
r says, those who remain are “probably more serious about their studies” and will experience a more focused school year. Furthermore, she says, a smaller group makes for more meaningful and lasting relationships among the students. A positive experience depends largely on the participants and, Dror says, the type of students who would show up at a time like this are “a good crop.”
