Final Week in Israel

I'm preparing for my last week spent in Israel, at least for the foreseeable future.  I'll be going to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, and I am very much looking forward to seeing my students one last time, during my final week of school.  Among the Israelis whom I have befriended here in Israel, I am not as close to any as I am to my students, many of whom I will very much miss.  My greatest concern is for their continued education.  As I've mentioned in the past in this blog, many of my students come from very disadvantaged families, and the more time I spend with them improving their English skills, the greater their opportunity to improve their own educational and economic chances.  I choose my diction carefully: it is my students who have the opportunity to improve their own selves, all I do is offer them the possibility, in granting them access to a native English speaker who, I hope, has been a good instructor.  Many of the students whom I have taught reject the opportunity that I proffer to them, because they don't realize (or don't care) that it is by excelling in school, learning, and understanding, that they will be able to make their own lives as well as the lives of their families much happier.  Still what will happen next year, when I will not be around to help, to encourage, to guide, and to motivate?  Will my students realize that, although I'm gone, they are still just as capable of excelling?  Those that do understand that will be the ones who continue to improve.

Meanwhile, almost the entire West Bank is being searched high and low by Tzahal for the three kidnapped teenagers from Hebron.  It's been more than a week so far since the three boys went missing, and the Israeli media, especially the right-wing Times of Israel, has been putting the story into its top headlines.  To my grief, if not to my surprise, Tzahal soldiers have already clashed multiple times with protesting Palestinian youth, throwing rocks and homemade bombs.  Israeli soldiers have already killed two Palestinians with live fire, one of them fourteen years old, sent several others to the hospital, arrested several hundred Palestinian men (most of them with ties to Hamas), and damaged hundreds of buildings.  The Palestinian Authority, despite its support of the pursuit of the terrorist abductors, is showing signs of impatience at the thus-fruitless search.  The Israeli government continues to broadcast optimism that the boys are alive and will soon be found, and the international community seems to be condemning the kidnapping as an act of terror.  I'm upset.  Interestingly enough, the story is not very prominent in the U.S. media.  Checking the websites of a few major American newspapers (plus the BBC), I can't find anything about the kidnappings; the only Israel story being featured in the American news seems to be about the Presbyterian divestment (which, unsurprisingly, made top headlines in Times of Israel and Haaretz, but not Jerusalem Post).  I wonder if NPR's "On the Media" will mention anything about this discrepancy.

As if there weren't enough strife in the Middle East already, the radical Sunni uprising in Iraq is getting worse each day.  There are only few thousand insurgents who make up the army of the ISIL (which is sometimes also referred to as ISIS), although reportedly as few as 800 captured Mosul.  In response to their takeover of regions in the north, including Mosul (from which around half-a-million people fled, many of them to the the Kurdistan region), the country's most respected Shi'ite cleric, Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa calling for "all able-bodied Iraqis" to suppress the insurrection.  Although the counter-insurrection (I don't know what else to call it; most members are volunteers, with only a small percentage of the troops made up of Iraqi regulars) speaks the voice of Iraqi unity, by the numbers, it's a Shi'ite force.  There are paramilitary parades in several cities in Iraq.  According to the New York Times article on these events,  "The Mahdi Army rally in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad on Saturday was the largest and most impressive paramilitary display so far, but there were also mass militia parades in other cities, including Najaf and Basra on Saturday, and smaller rallies in Baghdad on Friday, equally motivated by what participants described as patriotic and religious fervor...  as Iraq lurches toward sectarian war, the prominent role of Shiite-dominated militias could also exacerbate sectarian tensions, hardening the sentiments that have allowed the Sunni militants to succeed... Some commanders have been linked to death squads that carried out campaigns of kidnappings and killing against Sunnis, including from hospitals [all italics added for emphasis]."  In other word, what could unfold in Iraq over the coming weeks (and months) is civil war with religious, ethnic, nationalist, and revenge-driven motives.  I don't foresee a happy ending or peaceful situation in Iraq anytime soon.

I remember how, as a freshman in university, I read about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, and about how, in their ignorance and arrogance, the Europeans broke apart and shoved together various regions to be divided among the victors as colonies, dependent kingdoms, and, of course, "mandates."  The creation of Iraq was among the most egregious cases of European hubris; had Wilson, Lloyd-George, and Clemenceau not all had classical educations, they might not have reified "Mesopotamia," and decided that it was a good idea to turn it into a unified country under West-friendly Hashemite client-King Faisal I.  I am, of course, exaggerating the ridiculousness of the situation, and glazing over details, but I truly wonder if the Middle East would not now be a safer, more peaceful place had the Paris Peace Conference been a more democratic process, rather than a foursome of old white men sitting around a table giving away countries that they've never visited, belonging to peoples that they've never even heard of.

On a significantly happier note, my older brother Sam is now engaged!  I'm extremely excited to see him and Sarah again soon, presumably on Drew's wedding, the week after I return. 
I'm looking forward to seeing Becky, as well as the remaining members of my group, one last time before I leave on Thursday evening to visit Eli for my last Shabbat in Israel.  Perrin is going to come over tonight, and I'm hoping to have a pleasant evening with her :).

~JD