I'm very far behind in my blogging, and haven't been as responsible as I could have been. I'm going to try to shore up my long silence by describing this week's MASA Shabbaton in Jerusalem.
Thursday was a fairly ordinary day. There is a substitute standing in for one of Rambam school's two regular English teachers with whom I collaborate at work. Sadly, the substitute does not speak any English; although this did not at all impede our own communication, I find it rather irritating that the school could not even get a substitute able to communicate ever so slightly in the language which she is teaching to my students. Anyway, I still did my best to teach my students; I do, however, miss Chani, who is not only good at teaching, but also an excellent English-speaker. Only Veta and I showed up for Ulpan, and I think that we had a very constructive session. I learned the verb "להתעטש," which is the verb "to sneeze," which I have been needing to do quite frequently all week. I've been off-and-on sick for three weeks now, and really just want to be fully healthy again. It's been over three weeks since I've exercised, and my body is feeling it; I'm not nearly as strong or energetic as I ordinarily am, and can feel myself losing muscle mass, and gaining abdominal fat. That evening, I Skyped with two really wonderful people in the U.S., back-to-back. I Skype regularly with Rachel (less than a chapter left before we finish reading Sefer Zecharya!), but I haven't spoken with Rav Ami in months, and was very glad to have the opportunity to do so.
I was up at 6:20 am on Friday. After my morning routine, I was out the door, and just barely caught the 7:57 am train to Tel Aviv, where I was scheduled to meet the Masa bus. There was no electricity running in the train station, reminding of the fact that, although Israel is in many ways just as much a developed nation as France or the United States, not everything always works as efficiently as the Paris train system, and in no way is this more clearly manifest than in public transportation. Before I decided to take the 7:14 am bus every day to work to avoid such problems, I was used to my bus to work frequently driving past my bus stop, because it was full, and the bus company did not adjust its schedules in order to compensate for that. Likewise, boarding a bus traveling to Jerusalem requires that one uses ones elbows to block others, or jab them out of the way. I'm completely serious; there is no such thing as an orderly queue in this country. On the other hand, the water system is excellent, and Israelis never need to worry about turning on their kitchen faucets and see nothing come out, as they do in Israel's friendly neighbor Jordan. The train ride was easy; I spent it reading Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Shegagot on the way (later that weekend, I finally finished Sefer Korbanot! Woohoo! Now I'm beginning Tahara!). Outside Tel Aviv's Arlozov Train Station, I ran into Coco, and the two of us located a large mob of people our age (בחורים) speaking in English, waiting outside of a parked bus. It seemed that we had found the group, but that they were confused about the bus; the bus outside of which they were standing was actually driving to a cemetery, according to the driver (I spoke to him in Hebrew, which most of the others could not do). Coco and I found the correct bus in time, as did the rest, eventually. We both read, but also tried to take in the Jerusalem landscape.
Our bus's guide, a young American-born עוֹלֶה
(immigrant) named Benji brought us to several locations in Jerusalem, in order to highlight certain security elements in place in Jerusalem. Our first stop was in the suburb of Giloh, specifically rechov Arlozov. Just on the opposite side of the Green Line from the Arabic neighborhood of Beit Jala (for those of you paying attention, "جالا ," Jala, is an Arabic corruption of the Biblical Hebrew "גילֹה"). During the Second Intifada, the apartment buildings on this road in this section of this suburb in Jerusalem were most infamous among Israelis for being the target of sniper-fire from the adjoining Arab neighborhood. The exact Arab-Israeli borders in Jerusalem had been drawn up pretty much by a couple of Israeli generals in 1967, following Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. For this reason, there were a lot of divisions that resulted in unfavorable border lines for local Arab residents; one man's orchard was cut from his house, and he needed to spend more than an hour in border-crossing checkpoints in order to visit his property. We took a look at some of the out-of-use old concrete watchtowers that had been manned by Israelis to watch border-crossings. Since the towers' original construction, there had been an attempt on the part of the Israelis to automate border security. The idea is that the fewer IDF soldiers Palestinian Arabs see actively patrolling the border, the less resentment the Arab population of Jerusalem will feel towards Israel. The guard pointed at the separation barrier; yes, the barrier which Israel insists is a temporary security measure, but which is the UN's pretext for calling Israel an "apartheid state." The holes which are meant to be used to hoist up the walls and drag them away all clearly visible, even from a distance. At one point, the course of the separation barrier made a clear swerve, in order to include Rachel's Tomb on the Israeli side of the border, which the guide described as an unequivocal Israeli land grab. Also visible from this vantage point was the shielded highway leading to Gush Etzion, the physically largest Jewish settlement bloc in the West Bank. The term "גּוּשׁ" in Hebrew means "bloc," and the Gush Etzion is geographically the largest of the three West Bank settlements, the other two being Ariel and Ma'alei Adumim (the latter of which I passed through with the rest of the Ramla Oranim folk on our trip to the Dead Sea, when our guide Stav pointed out the red soil for which the region is named, adding the apocryphal legend that the name originates from the region a place where bandits waylaid and spilled the blood of many travelers). Although Israel did bulldoze settlements following the signing Oslo Accords, much to the grief of many ultra-Zionists, the bulldozing of such cities as Ariel, with a population of nearly 30,000 people, is completely off the table for consideration, even by the far left. This of course raises the question as the eventual shape of what will likely eventually become a sovereign Palestinian state. Will it just have little pockets of Israel infiltrating it like fingers through playdough? This shielded highway that we see would make up one of the tendons of such a "finger." It is covered with sloping walls on both sides so as to protect vehicles from sniper fire. It's a sad reality that such a thing is necessary. The second location of our bus tour of the city, very close to the UN embassy, was a housing complex, נוֹף צִיּוֹן, planted very deliberately in the middle of an Arab neighborhood by Zionists. Nobody wanted to live in the buildings, but the company nevertheless resisted attempts by wealthy Arabs to re-purchase the land. There was a police station planted right next the border crossing. Just imagine all of the resentment brewing among the Arabs, who need to pass through lengthy border checkpoints, and feel as if they are under police surveillance. Whatever eventual peace settlement is reached (and I hope that it will be reached soon), Israel is, for better or worse, going to need to maintain some kind of border patrol, humiliating as it is. Otherwise -- think about it, geographically -- it would be possible to drive a car from Iran, Israel's greatest international enemy, through Iraq and the very lousy border patrol in Jordan, directly into Israel. That is simply too great of a threat; the other borders are simply too permeable for Israeli to feel safe trusting traffic to enter its borders without a very diligent border patrol. As Israelis say, "מה לעשות?," what are you going to do? The final location on our bus tour was an observation platform overlooking the old city, with the Temple Mount front and center in our line of vision. Benji, our guide, asked us to compare the state of the buildings and landscape to the wast of the Temple Mount (our right) to everything to the west (our left). The west, the Israeli side, was scattered with trees, with brighter and more modern houses, and quite a few skyscrapers. The PA side of the border, the east, had far less greenery, had very run-down looking houses, and had none of the impressive, metropolitan architecture of the Israeli side. There's an argument to be made that this juxtaposition alone should indicate to all the world that the onus of the peace process rests on Israeli shoulders. I'm somewhat skeptical as to how far this argument can be carried, but the economic disparity is quite clear, just to the naked eye. Benji explained to us that current Finance Minister of Israel Ya'ir Lapid sees economic disadvantage among Arabs as a sort of opportunity. If he can build an economy, and have individual Arab citizens prefer having good jobs and feeding their families to becoming suicide bombers, then Israel will be a more secure state. That, anyway, is a simplification of his logic.
We arrived at our hotel, ate some sandwiches (this is where I spotted Ramla's own Max and Gabbie, who had been riding a different bus, with the same script), and settled down in the hotel's library for the first speaker of the day. By this point, it was around 1:30 pm. The speaker was Colonel Bentzi Gruber, a sub-commander in the IDF Reserves who has around 20,000 soldiers serving under him. His talk was about "Ethics in the Field," and he tried to give the audience an idea of what it is like, as a soldier and officer in the IDF, to be in charge of protecting Israel from rocket fire, suicide bombs, and other terror threats. Bentzi was a highly competent communicator, and although he was clearly convinced of the importance of his work, he did not present himself as overtly emotional. He spoke on a number of points (it was very clear that he had given more or less the same talk many times in the past), beginning with some of the wilder conspiracy theories spread by Israel's unfriendly neighbors blaming the IDF for their problems. Some of the other topics that he discussed included the blockade of Gaza, Gaza's economic reliance on Israel, Israel drone strikes and the warnings it gives beforehand, Israel's policy regarding demolishing houses, the use of U.N. ambulances by terrorists, PA and Gaza school curricula, medical treatment of terrorists, Israel's targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders, the IDF's anti-suicide-bomber-car tactics, the media war, and his own treatment when abroad as an international war criminal. One particular issue, which reminded me of my time on Birthright in Sderot, was the psychological impact of missile strikes and sirens in towns bordering the Gaza Strip, and how large numbers of children from these towns suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. There were a number of video clips; perhaps the most striking, though, was one of a man with an assault weapon over his shoulder searching for a child to use as a shield, and eventually grabbing one by the loop of his knapsack, and half-dragging, half-carrying him through the street. I don't think that that video (apparently taken by a fellow Arab with a smartphone) is going to disappear from my memory for a while. After the talk, I asked Bentzi whether people were ever injured in the "knocking on the roof" policy that he had described to us, and he kind of equivocated. I kind of interpreted his response as "sometimes, but not usually."
We had time to prepare for Shabbat. I shared a room with two other men, one of whom knew my friend Veta from Birthright. I showered, changed my shirt, etc., and, after first lighting candles, walked to the synagogue-room in the hotel for Kabbalat Shabbat with the other guests. There was no Shir Hashirim, much to my disappointment. Nevertheless, I still thought of מַה יָּפִית וּמַה נָּעַמְתְּ אַהֲבָה בַּתַּעֲנוּגִים זֹאת קוֹמָתֵךְ דָּמְתָה לְתָמָר, as I always do. I really missed this as part of my complete Shabbat experience. Following services was Shabbat dinner. I sat fairly close to Gabbie and Max. I should add here that I felt completely outclassed by most of the participants. It was a feeling very similar to that which I had felt when I attended the Institut de Touraine more than two years ago. I was surrounded by ultra-smart, highly-educated, highly-mature, super-polyglot Europeans. Many of the participants spoke a few languages on top of English and Hebrew (Russian was particularly common); one woman I met, who had her Master's degree and was doing security work in the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, was a doubly-native speaker of Hungarian and German. She was rather special, but, nevertheless, I felt much, much less informed about current events, as well as much, much worse at multilingual communication, than those around me. I sometimes felt a little bit like this at Drisha Institute back in June, in the sense that my Hebrew and Aramaic skills were so deplorably lower than those of everyone around me, but the feelings of being entirely behind academically and intellectually were made up for by the fact that everyone around me was so warm, friendly, and accepting. There was no time for this kind of friendliness at the Shabbaton; most of us would never see each other again in our lives, and there was no motivation to build friendships. Some people socialized between classes (there was, unfortunately, a fair amount of unused time between sessions), and I tended to read, either the book that I had brought with me (Mishnah Nezikin, flipping around) or from the books available in the hotel synagogue. Following dinner, we had a group discussion about ethics and security, addressing questions of sacrificing liberty for the sake of security, responsibility for the lives of others through action and inaction, etc. I was thinking very hard about the odd collection of ethics that's fallen into my head over the past few years. Over the course of the evening, I think that I had scrambled in my mind the competing opinions of Socrates in Gorgias, Cornell University's Professor Matti Eklund, Hippocrates, my older brother Andrew, and Rava as quoted in the Talmud Bavli, 74a ("A man came to Rava and told him that the governor of the city had
ordered that he slay a certain man or himself suffer death,
and Rava said to him: 'Rather than slay another person, you must permit
yourself to be slain, for how do you know that your blood is redder than
his, perhaps his blood is redder than yours?'").
Later on Friday evening evening, we had what was for me one of the most enjoyable sessions thus far, optional, so that people could be free to go to bed early. It was pretty much a question-and-answer-plus-discussion with one of the seminar's organizers, Calev, whom I had coincidentally met earlier in synagogue. According to his online profile, Calev "currently works in the Policy Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has been tasked to plan and design long term foreign policies for the State of Israel," and I found him to be very well-informed. I shot him three questions throughout the session. The first was about a figure that Benji had cited on our bus tour, of a 90% reduction in terror attacks coinciding with the construction of the separation barrier between East and West Jerusalem. The reply was that although the figure was accurate, there were two competing narratives seeking to explain it. The first, the Israeli version, is that the wall made it much harder for would-be Arab terrorists to slip across the border, and deterred terror attacks. According to the Palestinian interpretation, however, the reduction in terror attacks was a positive choice made by the PA following the death of Yassar Arafat, and his succession by Mahmoud Abbas, who was extremely sensitive to how terror attacks hurt the Palestinian cause in the international media. My second question to Calev concerned Iran; to what extent do Israelis perceive Rouhani as being fundamentally different from Ahmadinejad. This question had special importance to me; my brother Sam has a very good friend Persian friend, and I feel responsible for collecting information about Israeli public opinion about Iran, seeing as the competing interest of those two countries in particular are playing out on the world stage. I remember that, following President Obama's threats of force against Syria and subsequent inaction, the Israelis with whom I spoke were very disparaging of his lack of a strong show of force. If he wanted to solve the Syria situation diplomatically, he should not have been so openly threatening (I, personally, blame our Secretary of State for a fair share of belligerence in this respect), and if he wanted to solve it violently, he should have carried out his word. He did neither, and attracted not only the ire of the Israelis, but also that of the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and probably the rest of the Gulf States. Calev's answer to my question was more or less what I had expected: many Israelis feel just as threatened by Rouhani as they did by Ahmadinejad. Rouhani, after all, was the chief nuclear negotiator for Iran for a number of years, and, in his 2011 book, bragged about how effective he had been at stalling and fooling the Europeans while simultaneously enriching yellow cake. I unfortunately cannot find the excellent video clip of Rouhani nearly losing his temper at the Iranian news anchor who suggested that he, Rouhani, might have been compliant with international nuclear regulations (the video was a few months before the election, and therefore presents Rouhani when he was trying to present himself favorably to the Iranian public; I saw the video with English subtitles which I hope to be accurate). However, I did manage to find this minute-and-a-half clip of the current Israel PM speaking to the U.N. about this same question of Rouhani's dependability regarding the nuclear project, and it very well presents Israel's feelings of apprehension. Calev explained that, unlike Ahmadinejad, with his blatant anti-gay rhetoric and Holocaust-denial, Rouhani charms the international media. Calev also pointed out that most Iranians do in fact support a nuclear program of some sort (I'm slightly suspicious of how and by whom such a poll was conducted). My last question regarded Sisi in Egypt, who, though portrayed in the media as a "Nasserist," has not really done anything threatening to Israel. Instead, he began his time in power by attacking Hamas's smuggling tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip, doing the IDF's job for them, it seems. Hamas does have Muslim Brotherhood ties, after all, so it makes sense, given the anger against the Muslim Brotherhood right now. The response was that Sisi seems very unlikely to threaten Israel, and is much more of a threat to Gaza. Ironic, how dictators threaten Israel's security less than democratically-elected leaders...
The next morning, I was up for 8:15 am Shacharit. I even had time to study a little bit before Tefillah, which always makes me feel good. Because of the tight schedule, following the Torah reading, I needed to recite Mussaf by myself during the Haftorah reading. I ended up not getting any breakfast, anyway, because of a misunderstanding, but I survived.
At 10:15, we had the opportunity to join one of five in-depth discussion sections, led by the different seminar organizers. I joined Benji's group on "Iran and Israel's Existential Threats." Again, on the theme of trying to get Israel-Iran relations figured out. We discussed Iran's danger to Israel, not only in its nuclear potential, but in its funding and arming of terrorist organizations, such as Chamas in Gaza and the Hizbolah in Lebanon. The concluding activity involved ranking Israel's existential threats -- corruption, delegitimization, demographics, Iran, Jerusalem, and terrorism -- in groups. It was quite interesting to see how some groups came up with completely inverted threat-pyramids. To some extent, the wording of the activity caused this. According to some, terrorism might be a constant threat, but not an existential one, capable of destroying the state of Israel, or even severely destabilizing it.
Following this was the talk that had the most potential to be amazing, but fell short the most. Omer Bar-Lev, the Labor Party MK, who is a major peace advocate addressed us. He has also had an incredibly interesting career, which included taking part as a commando in the hostage-rescue counter-terrorism Operation Entebbe, back in 1976 -- yes, the one in which Yonatan Netanyahu, the current Israeli PM's older brother, was the only Israeli death. However, despite his passion for a new peace proposal, his English was indecipherable, to the point of it being painful to listen to at times. I wanted to hear him out so badly, but the language barrier was too thick.
Finally, at noon, I had something to eat. I also got to talk to Coco a little bit. I asked him to try to read the first Mishnah of Pirkei Avot, in order to test how well someone who knows modern Hebrew at about my level can read the Mishnah. He got most of the words, although words such as "מסרה" and "מתונים" were new to him. I really can't blame him. Still, this just encourages me to work harder on my own Hebrew. I ended up playing Jewish geography with some people whom Rozeeta had met. I turns out that Michael Hollander's brother Sam is studying at Pardes thanks to a MASA grant, which is pretty cool, I think.
After lunch, I had another choice of in-depth sessions, and I choose to take part in the one focusing on the Arab Spring, which interests me intensely. We made a full course of the countries affected by the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, even Jordan. One of the speaker's arguments, though, was that the Arab Spring does not truly have an Arab origin -- that we must look to the protests in Iran to understand the revolutionary movements of the Middle East. I got a lot more information about the Egyptian Constitution as proposed by Morsi's government, and why exactly it failed. By the way, here's an excellent clip of an incredibly eloquent 12-year-old Egyptian boy explaining why he thinks that Islamism is a swindle. The presenter was an excellent speaker, and knew his facts very well, but a few, I thought, were a little bit off. For instance, he said that the border with Syria has been one of Israel's quietest, not disturbed since the Yom Kippur War, back in 1973. While this is technically true, it is also true that the IDF engaged the Syrian army in the 1980s; Syria was busy trying to conquer Lebanon, and Israel also found itself in Lebanon, trying to put an end to the strikes of Hizbolah, which operates out of southern Lebanon. Coco noticed a few holes, too.
Following Havdallah, we had our final speaker, Jerusalem Post editor Gol Hoffman, easily the most right-wing presenter of the entire Shabbaton. He positively gloated about the number of Syrians killed by chemical weapons in the process of explaining that these weapons would otherwise have been used on Israel. When I raised my question and asked about Rouhani, he told me that the only difference between Rouhani and Ahmadinejad is that the latter hates homosexuals just as fiercely as the latter, but keeps it to himself. Although I was glad that he had come, and I do believe that I learned a few things from his presentation (although more about people like him than about the actual subject-matter of his talk), he made me feel all the more acutely what was missing from this weekend -- the voice of an Arab. I mean that; not only was everyone a male, but they were all Israeli Ashkenazi Jews. Sure, some had slightly different leanings, but there was a decided lack of diversity. Why couldn't a journalist from Ha'aretz have come instead, Coco wanted to know? They, at least, are liberal-leaning, unlike the rest of the presenters.
That was the end. It was an excellent weekend. Now I'm about to have another, also in Jerusalem.
Happy Chanukah, everyone!
~JD
No comments:
Post a Comment