J Street recently announced the launch of a new free trip that will take American Jewish students to Israel-Palestine this upcoming July. The trip will include meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and stops in both Palestinian cities and Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
According to J Street U President and Stanford senior Eva Borgwardt, the idea for the trip came after Birthright refused to respond to a J Street U petition in the fall asking to hear from Palestinian speakers on Birthright trips.
“We began thinking about the kind of Israel programming we would actually want—a holistic look at contemporary Israel, including traveling to Palestinian communities over the Green Line, engaging with social issues in Israel, meeting Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who are working toward a just future for their country, and thinking critically about our role as Americans in those conversations,” Borgwardt said.
The trip will have 40 spots and will be open to all Jewish college students, even those who have already gone on a Birthright trip. Borgwardt said J Street received over 350 requests to apply before the application opened on March 18.
Over 500 students also added their names to the J Street U “Let Our People Know” campaign in the first 24 hours. The campaign was launched along with the announcement for the trip and asks students to pledge to only go organized trips to Israel-Palestine that offer a balanced perspective on the conflict.
According to Zachary Spitz, a senior at the University of Chicago and a member of J Street U’s national board, the trip is designed to expose students to a variety of different perspectives. This was part of the rationale for including meetings with both Palestinian leaders and Israeli settlers.
“Our trip will not shy away from difficult conversations,” Spitz said. “I am confident that these encounters will facilitate more questions, a deeper understanding of the issues, and ultimately a commitment to get more involved with peace efforts.”
He added that he hopes that the trip will provide a gateway for people to get more involved in thinking critically about the conflict.
Borgwardt agreed that exposure to conflicting ideas is an important aspect of the trip.
“We don’t want to only show a single perspective, and so rather than only meet with people who agree with us, we are meeting with settlers to give students a holistic picture,” she said. “We think that the inequality in Area C—settlers enjoying paved roads and swimming pools, while Palestinians in neighboring villages are disconnected from water and electricity and have demolition orders on their homes—speaks for itself.”
However, some Jewish students feel like the J Street trip does not address the deeper unjust aspect of Birthright—namely that many believe it is unfair to offer a free trip to Israel-Palestine for Jews when Palestinian refugees cannot enter the country. This was the motivation behind the Return the Birthright campaign that Jewish Voice for Peace launched in 2017, which asked students to swear off free trips to Israel-Palestine until Palestinians get the right of return.
Maya Edery, the campus coordinator for Jewish Voice for Peace, said she would still encourage students to boycott the J Street trip.
“It is still fundamentally unjust that [Jewish students] can take this trip when Palestinian refugees can’t return home,” she said.
She also believes that while it’s important to listen to Palestinian voices, it is concerning that the J Street trip meets with settlers as well as Palestinians.
“It is deeply problematic that the J Street trips visit both Palestinian leaders and settlers, as this equates these two groups, and ignores the fact that settlers are the occupiers and Palestinians are living under occupation,” she said. “If students are still going on the trip, I encourage them to think critically about the power dynamics they will see.”
Despite the concerns of some, many students have expressed interest in applying for the J Street trip, including Yoni Slater, a first-year at George Washington University and the co-chair of the J Street U chapter there.
“I requested an application for the new trip the day it was launched because this is exactly the kind of Israel experience and education I want from my communities,” they said. “… It is long past time that Israel education which omits and erases Palestinian existence and experiences of the occupation is treated as the tool of the occupation that [it is].”
Abby Browngoehl, a senior at Middlebury college, went on Birthright in the summer of 2017 and said that while she enjoyed her experience on the trip, she would have considered going on the J Street trip if that had been an option at the time.
“Deciding to go on Birthright was definitely an uncomfortable decision for me, but ultimately I did decide to go as to not lose the opportunity to potentially make a connection with and some personal conclusions about Israel,” she said. However, she added that she would have preferred a trip with a more inclusive itinerary rather than one with such a clear bias.
Browngoehl also said that she would be interested in going on a future J Street trip to learn more.
“Any opportunity I have to engage in these conversations is valuable,” she said.
As applications for the trip start to come in, Borgwardt hopes that the enthusiasm from the young Jewish community about this trip will help bring in funding for future trips.
“We hope that more such trips will run in the future, and J Street is open to being a part of the process of creating them,” she said. “The question of whether it happens is one of whether the organized American Jewish community and donors respond to this call from members of our generation.”
For now, Borgwardt hopes students will continue to sign the pledge and put pressure on donors to support future trips.
“Everyone can sign the pledge to only go on trips that meet with both Israelis and Palestinians and confront the occupation. This is the main way to send the message that many young Jews refuse to accept the erasure of Palestinian voices and silence about the occupation in our community.”
Sarah Asch studies English literature and creative writing at Middlebury College, where she will graduate in February 2020. She serves as the editor at large of the Middlebury Campus and her past work has appeared in the San Francisco Public Press and Tikkun Magazine.
Featured image credit: Pixabay.com/Snmphotographyart.
