As the plane touched down in Tel Aviv, HaTikvah poured out of El Al’s loudspeakers. We sang along: we’d just come from a ten-day Holocaust history tour of Poland, and nothing could have looked better than the Ben-Gurion runway.
I was seventeen, on a summer youth trip to Poland and Israel. I spent the next four weeks soaking up Masada, Magnum bars, and the Dead Sea. By the time I returned home, I was confident in my newfound knowledge. I was an Israel expert.
This summer I went back for a refresher course, accompanying an academic peace delegation–a group of American professors who’d come to meet their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts and learn about the situation. We spent two weeks in Israel and the West Bank meeting peace activists, social service providers, and scholars. I had high expectations: mind-blowing hummus, rare handcrafts, and a newfound, authoritative perspective on the conflict. The first two were easy, but the third evaded me altogether. I was undoubtedly influenced. I came across scenes I could never have conceived of from my office on West 26th Street. I took home vivid memories–and a “position” that’s murkier than ever.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. The delegation was run by a group whose main goal is a peaceful end to the Israeli occupation. As such, the trip focused on Palestinian civil society, nonviolent protest, and academic theory surrounding the occupation. And when the two weeks were over, the organization expected me to join them. This expectation relied on my drawing a specific set of conclusions from what I saw—conclusions that would lead from our itinerary to their mission statement.
The same is true of virtually any trip designed to give outsiders an understanding of “the situation.” All purport to show what’s really going on, to present the true story neglected by the news. And all, from Fellowship of Reconciliation to birthright israel, expect advocacy from their alumni.
It is a legitimate request: taking a stance is important, and many organizations, certainly the one I traveled with, make no secret of theirs. Each presents the narrative they believe most needs to be heard. The trouble is, advocacy requires participants to reach prescribed conclusions –which in turn dictates the itinerary and outlook of the journey more than the murky, multifaceted “situation” possibly could. What I saw didn’t fit neatly into the agenda of my group–or any particular agenda at all.
Inside Israel, I heard a soldier describe downtown Hebron as the most dangerous place he’d ever been. When we visited, you could have heard a pin drop. Thousands of latched-up green doors were the only testament to a once-thriving marketplace, and many streets in the casbah–the old city–were shadowed under a canopy of chain-link fencing. This, our guide explained, was because settlers often throw garbage out their windows onto the Palestinian passersby below. Looking up through the debris, we could see an Israeli flag in a second-story window.
When we arrived at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, most of my group wouldn’t go inside–it’s a holy site for Muslims and they wanted to be respectful. Four of us went anyway, telling Israeli security that we were “American”–code for Christian–to avoid being sent around to the settlers’ side. Inside, hundreds of tiny prayer rugs muffled the floor, and the tombs of Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, and Rebecca rose in individual vestibules, dim humps draped in embroidery. An enthusiastic guide led us on a tour, focusing equally on the patriarchs’ tombs and on Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 prayer-time massacre there. He pointed out the scars from Goldstein’s bullets, repeating his name again and again as if, living outside the Hebron area, we might not have heard of him.
At Hebron University, we heard the president speak about the near-impossibility of running a university under occupation. He declared his hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace and his commitment to teaching his students nonviolence. I believed him. But I also knew that as Americans, we weren’t likely to hear much else. As we left the campus, we saw spray-paint on the ground: a star of david with a swastika in the center.
By the time we arrived at the Jenin refugee camp, we had seen a great deal and I had concluded very little. The camp is notorious, known variously as a hotbed of terrorists and as the site of a grievous Israeli human rights violation. Today, it was as silent as Hebron. The heat was intense and the shadeless streets were inch-deep in white dust. The only adornments anywhere were the hundreds of posters of “martyrs”: Yassin, Rantisi, and many less well-known faces. Though the only people outside were construction workers–international donations are helping rebuild the center of camp–we were cautioned to stay together. Israeli operatives apparently visit on occasion, and a mixup could be unfortunate.
Our guide, a resident of the camp, led us inside the community center, where he reprised Shylock in sincere, broken English. “Those on the out,” he said, his voice rising, “they look at me and they see terrorist. I am not terrorist. I am only trying to live here. I am person too. I am flesh and blood. I am person just like you.”
In September of 2000, an Israeli newspaper published an article titled “Yesh Matzav”–meaning, “there is a situation.” Matzav, a word that once referred to any current state of affairs, has come to mean one thing alone: the status of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It is the matzav that we – along with reporters, activists, and politicians – constantly seek to grasp and convey to others.
Any claim to a legitimate perspective on the conflict is based on the claim to a full understanding of the situation. When we argue, we often justify our position by telling our opponent that they just don’t know the facts. And we back down from a defeated case – or exempt ourselves from taking a stance at all – by claiming not to know the situation very well. All of which is easier than agreeing on a narrative and then having to wonder if our morals match up.
It’s that claim – to a fuller understanding of the facts – that both my trips professed to give me. The first time I left Israel, my group visited the Kotel before boarding airport-bound buses. We cried at the wall and cried harder when we landed in Newark. We vowed to return as soon as we could. This time, as the two weeks drew to a close, my companions promised to keep in touch, to help plan future delegations. Then they went home to write op-eds advocating their perspectives on the situation. I didn’t – not because I doubted what I’d seen and heard. It’s just that I’m reluctant to accept my own itinerary as the full matzav.
A visit is crucial to any deep understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the idea that after fourteen days we can understand “the situation” – and that political organizations are best situated to provide this understanding – is misguided. Each trip, necessarily skewed, considers itself successful only if its participants reach the same conclusion the organizers did. Ultimately, all we will see is the “situation” we are shown, the situation we ourselves are in. That may lead to good advocacy, but it will never lead to better understanding.
As promised, I did make it back to the Kotel. But it wasn’t my first stop; early on in this trip, I visited the Bethlehem YMCA camp, a clearing in the woods near Rachel’s Tomb. Our guide Salwa’s daughter, Amira, was a counselor at the camp, which consisted of a ring of army-green tents with a Palestinian
flag flying high in the center. Adorning Amira’s tent was a framed photograph of a small girl in a school uniform. “That’s Mary,” she explained, “one of the martyrs. Each tent is named after a martyr.” Salwa told us how Mary died – shot by Israeli soldiers in the streets of Bethlehem, an accident.
Across the circle, thirty or forty eleven-year-olds were scrambling for their share of a large red Jello cake. Suddenly several boys began playing a game: stomachs to the ground, they propelled themselves forward on their elbows, racing to the farthest tents. “They’re practicing,” said Salwa genially, “for when they go under the wall into Israel.” Then, maternally, she herded us back to the car.
