Birthright Unplugged recently announced two summer tours to Israel and the West Bank as part of its attempt to expose Jews and others to the realities Palestinians face in their “daily li[ves] under occupation,” according to a publicity email.
Dunya Alwan and Hannah Mermelstein developed the tours in 2004 as a response to Taglit-birthright israel, which has to date sent 98,000 Jewish young adults on free trips to Israel. Alwan, an Iraqi-American of Muslim-Jewish descent, and Mermelstein, an American Jew, “reject the notion of a ‘birthright,’ as embodied in Jewish-only fully-funded trips to Israel,” according to their mission statement. “Israel has ignored the internationally recognized right of return for refugees, but has created a ‘Law of Return,’ which extends citizenship benefits to any person of Jewish heritage, excluding millions of Palestinians born in the land that has become Israel.”
Birthright Unplugged, Mermelstein stated in an email, is “designed specifically for Jewish people because this is an audience that is specifically targeted by traditional Zionist tours to Israel, and often these people do not have opportunities to visit the occupied Palestinian territories or be exposed to any Palestinian narratives.”
Erica Fishbein, a senior at George Washington University, went on Birthright Unplugged precisely to be exposed to the narratives never taught in her Orthodox day school upbringing.
Over a six-day whirlwind tour of the West Bank and northern Israel, Birthright Unplugged participants meet with Palestinian and Israeli political activists, local community leaders, and Palestinian farmers denied access to their fields because of the separation barrier. They spend two nights with families living in Bethlehem and the Dheisheh Refugee Camp and, within northern Israel, visit destroyed Palestinian villages.
For both Ari Adler, a senior at University of Colorado, and Fishbein, the highlights of the program included the varied viewpoints to which they would not ordinarily be exposed and which were, as Fishbein says, sometimes challenging to hear.
“There were a lot of really intense parts of it,” she recalled in a phone interview. “Really eye opening.”
Though both Adler and Fishbein appreciate the non-mainstream perspectives they received from the program, they say the biases and political agenda of the leaders were apparent.
“Their agenda seemed clearly to show us that Israel was doing things wrong and we should join activism groups to fight the occupation,” said Adler in a phone interview.
With fewer than ten people per trip, Birthright Unplugged is miniscule compared to Taglit-birthright israel, but their clashing philosophy and nominal allusion has poised them to face heated criticism from the group.
Conflicting statements from two Taglit-birthright israel representatives leave unconfirmed the potential of a legal battle between the two groups, though Mermelstein reports receiving a cease-and-desist letter regarding trademark infringements.
Unplugging Alternative Tourism
Birthright Unplugged is part of an alternative tourism industry within Israel and the occupied territories that has been growing since the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000.
Along with individuals like Alwan and Mermelstein, an array of Israeli and Palestinian NGOs and human rights organizations, such as the Coalition of Women for Peace, Ta’ayush, a grassroots movement of Arabs and Jews, and B’tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, offer alternative tours for Israelis, internationals, diplomats, journalists, religious groups, and individuals.
Tamar Avraham guides tours of the separation wall and Jerusalem area for Ta’ayush. The current proliferation of tours, she surmises, grew out of the “frustration of many peace groups…which were not connected to the general public.” The tours do not seek to catalyze instant change, she says, but to contribute to a process of learning and seeking information.
The main goals of alternative tours, says Jeff Halper, founder of Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD), is to educate people about the “facts on the ground,” meaning the everyday realities for Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, and Bedouins.
Most alternative tours, like ICAHD’s, last a few hours, while others, like Birthright Unplugged, last nearly a week. From bringing participants face-to-face with the separation barrier to bringing them within the territories to meet with local community leaders and activists or to demolished villages within Israel proper, tours are as diverse as the organizations and individuals that organize them and the participants they attract.
The drawback of alternative tours, particularly those that have no one target group, Halper admits, is that they often end up preaching to the converted. Even so, he says, they are important, as they help train and strengthen a core group of activists.
Avichay Sharon, spokesman for Breaking the Silence, an organization run by former combat soldiers who now bring Israelis and others to see the everyday realities in Hebron, believes that it is inaccurate to worry about “preaching to the choir”.
“Society, especially in Israel, lives in a protected bubble, walls of silence protecting us,” Sharon said in a phone interview. “Even the left wing don’t really know…what we are talking about,” The tours to Hebron, he reflected, are “meaningful for whoever comes”.
West-Bank-based Palestinian NGOs and non-profit organizations, such as Holy Land Trust and the Alternative Tourism Group (ATG), also offer tours around the territories and organize home-stays with Palestinian families. These organizations have a two-fold goal: to increase interaction between internationals and Palestinians by exposing internationals to life in the West Bank, and to provide a source of income for the local communities.
It is the experiential learning, Halper says, that is perhaps the best tool for people to really begin to understand what is happening within Israel and the territories. “There’s nothing that can actually replace seeing reality,” he said.
In Abu Dis, by what was once a thriving gas station, one can expect a bus or minivan to stop daily. The gas pumps in front have been closed since the separation wall blocked all major traffic coming through, and the store now sells refreshments and small snacks to people who come by to see the towering concrete slabs in the background.
Tour participants have a few minutes to walk along the wall, look at the graffiti – a mixture of angry slogans and political art – perhaps meet with a community member, and snap the requisite photographs. Because of its easy access from the center of Jerusalem and the publicly criticized fact that the wall literally cuts the town in half, Abu Dis has become a popular destination among many of the Jerusalem-area alternative tours.
However, as Adler points out, “there is a risk of [voyeurism] becoming an issue,” particularly when participants take roll after roll of photos.
Halper agrees that there is a need to avoid that possibility in these tours. ICAHD tours frequently stop by the gas station in Abu Dis, but Halper makes a point to go alone at other times to talk with the owner. Halper points to a demolished house that ICAHD rebuilt as a sign to community members that the tours are supporting them politically, not just stopping by as tourists.
Alwan and Mermelstein, too, remain connected with Palestinians who speak to their Birthright Unplugged trips.
As a way to directly help the people who meet with Birthright Unplugged participants, they recently launched Birthright Re-plugged, in which they bring young children from Palestinian refugee camps to visit holy sites within Israel and the villages their grandparents fled in 1948.
Although tour leaders do generally maintain connections within the Palestinian communities they visit, participants might cross that “gray line,” says Adler, when they, for example, take photographs of Palestinians going through checkpoints, which, though often new and shocking to tour participants, is a regular occurrence in Palestinian life that may seem disrespectful to photograph.
Melissa Weintraub, who co-founded Encounter Trips to Bethlehem and Hebron for future rabbis and Jewish educators, specifically chose not to bring her large tour groups to a refugee camp “because it felt like we would be treating the camp like a zoo.”
Others, however, deny the possibility of of voyeurism in these tours. Rami Kassis, Executive Director of ATG, links these alternative tours to a global trend of “responsible, solidarity tourism.”
“Part of the duty of people coming to the area is to meet the local community,” Kassis maintained.
Alwan and Mermelstein agree with Kassis. “ It is a tricky situation,” Mermelstein explains, “since we encourage people to document their experience in order to share Palestinians’ stories upon return to their home countries. Some of this documentation involves photographing others’ pain and situations of injustice.”
Precisely because of programs like Taglit-birthright israel that assume an automatic Jewish birthright to Israel, Alwan’s and Mermelstein’s mission is to educate Jewish people about having a “specific responsibility” to learn all narratives in this conflict and to “promote justice and human rights.”
Isam Shamroukh, volunteer at Shiraa’, a Palestinian NGO working to protect Palestinian workers, and a speaker for tour groups, agrees that visitors should not simply be witnesses to the suffering of Palestinians. “They should be peace angels,” Shamroukh says, “when they come back home, they should tell the real story of Palestine.”
