From Yale to Former Yugoslavia
November 20, 2008
Yale University student Jeremy Avins remembers vividly his visit to Givat Haviva and tour of the region in 2005.
“I still remember being on a bus and how you pointed out that we can drive into the West Bank without ever knowing we are there,” he recently emailed International Department lecturer and guide Lydia Aisenberg.
Jeremy’s first visit to Givat Haviva was a few years beforehand, when participating in the Diller Teen program. The San Franciscan and a number of his peers were so impressed with Givat Haviva that when they returned home they collected money for Jewish-Arab encounter projects and forwarded the money to Givat Haviva.
Jeremy recently participated in a very special learning experience in the former Yugoslavia and has written an in-depth report of that visit forwarded to Givat Haviva.
“I am sending a synopsis I wrote about the trip I did this summer with a group of 22 Jews and Palestinians to the former Yugoslavia for conflict comparison and resolution work. It was a very transformative trip for me, and I am still just beginning to know how it affected me. If you get a chance to read the attached summary, would love to hear your thoughts and also pass on to anyone else who would like to read it,” wrote Jeremy.
A very special young man, Jeremy has remained in close contact with Givat Haviva since the Diller Team team came our way and we are grateful to receive his work – and to be able to pass on to others.
Jeremy Avin's report (Fall 2008):
"As a participant in Abraham’s Vision’s “Vision Program” this past summer, I was one of 22 Jews and Palestinians to share a month-long odyssey in the former Yugoslavia doing conflict resolution and comparison work. The trip to Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, and Montenegro was transformative, fascinating, and inspiring, and it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive account of all we experienced, felt, and learned together. Here I will try to relate a summary of our activities and some personal reflections.
We spent the first nine days getting to know each other and the former Yugoslavia in Belgrade, once the capital of Yugoslavia and now of Serbia. Despite ranging from ages eighteen to 29, coming from all the over the United States, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, and being members of three different religions, to note just a few of our many diverse characteristics, we bonded incredibly quickly. I have participated in a few group programs, but in none of them have I seen so quick a formation of such strong interpersonal bonds. It didn’t hurt that Belgrade is a city with a great nightlife that is said to sleep less than New York! Because I had studied the Yugoslav conflicts over the past year, I did not find the first few presentations so interesting, but it was interesting to see the places about which I’d researched and talk with our guides, who included a Montenegrin woman who works for a dialogue center and a Jewish woman from Belgrade living in Tel Aviv, about their thoughts and perspectives. The group dove excitedly into exploration of the conflicts; a Palestinian friend and I quickly began a project of photographing political graffiti wherever we went. As for the “group process” (Abraham’s Vision’s model of dialogue), our facilitators, an Israeli Jew from Haifa and Israeli Palestinian lawyer from Kfar Qana, avoided the tenser subjects at first, instead prompting us with discussions about topics such as food, religious life, and culture. Though the group was frustrated by this, in retrospect I see how essential this was in allowing later discussions to be productive, honest, and deep.
This early avoidance of controversy by the facilitators also served a purpose they would emphasize throughout the program: the participants taking the initiative in constructing discussion. The first more emotional conversation came while a few of us were at dinner, and the talk turned to moral equivalence, or lack thereof, between suicide bombings and IDF responses. A Jewish participant who had never before spoken with a Palestinian said he felt IDF actions were more moral because they were responding to acts designed only to kill civilians. At this, all the Palestinians at the table and a couple of the Jews grew immediately incensed, arguing that while suicide bombings are not justifiable, they occur because of the oppression of the IDF, whose actions kill far more civilians than suicide bombings ever will. I (uncharacteristically for me) sat out this conversation – I had been so encouraged by the relationships we had built in the first few days that I did not yet feel ready to dive headfirst into these issues. But by the next morning, when the facilitators finally spurred controversy by showing the film “Occupation 101,” my personality would no longer let me refrain from the discussions.
The first few of these discussions were marked by Jews and Palestinians making points probably common to their respective home communities but rarely heard in the other groups’ communities. Many Jews talked of the history of persecution of Jews and spoke of the measures taken today by the Israeli government and IDF as unfortunate but necessary measures to prevent terrorism. Palestinians spoke of their families being forcibly displaced in 1948, of the continuing inhumanity and unnecessary brutality of the occupation, of frustration with an American Jewish community deaf to the plight of the Palestinians, and of the inherent racism they felt in the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. Many, if not most or all, of the Palestinians said they thought a two-state solution impracticable or unjust. How could the power disparities between Israel and a hypothetical Palestine ever lead to a viable Palestinian state, they asked, for example, if Israel controls so much of the water and would refuse to let the new state be militarized? The Palestinian citizens of Israel were the most vocal opponents of a two-state solution. This makes sense to me, as a two-state solution does nothing to alleviate the discrimination they face in a Jewish state.
I felt very conflicted in these discussions. The narrative of my family is that of a standard left-of-center American Zionist perspective. My maternal great-grandfather, whose name I carry, was the leader of the Jabotinskyite Zionists in Brazil, and multiple pictures of him with Menachem Begin hang on the walls of my family’s house. Though my family’s politics are far to the left of my great-grandfather’s dream of a Greater Israel, we still revere him for his charisma and love of Israel and the Jewish people. We believe, like many American Jews, that the basic outlines for a lasting peace are obvious to most, and it’s only a matter of finding leaders courageous enough to implement an agreement. But what I had begun to notice before the trip and then had to face directly on the program was that Palestinians are left out of this narrative, especially when it comes to recalling the events during and around the time of Israel’s creation as a state. The tenor of the moderate left Zionist narrative regarding the Palestinians is not hostile in the way settlers or Yisrael Beiteinu activists may speak of the Palestinians in less-than-human terms. The Palestinians simply do not figure in. Last summer, for example, I was with my mother, visiting the mosaics at Tzipporah. My mother was raised to love the state of Israel and always be concerned with the plight of the underprivileged; she is a product of Socialist-Zionist summer camps and a 1970s college education in Berkeley. Yet at Tzipporah she was confused to discover a sign in remembrance of the Arab village that had stood there until it was destroyed in 1948. Of course my mother knew, abstractly, that Palestinian villages had been destroyed in ’48, but the events of that war had been so neglected even in her left-wing Zionist education that she was astounded when confronting the consequences of Israel’s creation on the ground rather than in a footnote.
Similarly, some of the other Jews and I were challenged about assumptions so basic that we never think about them. Why do we need a Jewish state? And more importantly, what price is ok to pay for it? The standard answer to the first question, which I believe is standard for a reason, is that in its treatment of Jews the world has shown itself utterly incapable of protecting us, and thus we need a place for ourselves, if not a “safe haven” then at least a place where we can fight for ourselves. But the Palestinians wanted to know why protection against possible future anti-Semitic atrocities is justification for the present oppression of and discrimination against an indigenous people who had nothing to do with the bigotry and persecution of Jews in Europe. Some expressed utopian aspirations for a state that is not designed for one group but that is designated as a place of refuge for all those under persecution. One Palestinian from Ramallah even offered his house as a permanently open safe haven for us, should any of us ever need it, G-d forbid.
My most important moment in Belgrade came in a group process session soon before we left. Slightly overwhelmed by the discussions of the past few days, I gave a mini-speech in which I emotionally stressed that I want to want a one-state solution, that my heart breaks to think of Palestinian families not being able to return to Ramle or Lod, that if given the opportunity to make one state with the other 21 people in the room I would not hesitate, but that the history of my people and the world as I see it now prevent me from trusting anyone but the Jewish people with the safety of the Jewish people. In a sense, I said, I feel forced into Zionism – I find nationalism of all forms abhorrent, exclusionary, and xenophobic, so I don’t feel so deeply infatuated as I once did with the idea of Zionism, but I just don’t know what else to want, given the world as it is and has been for at least 2,000 years. Afterwards, many of the Jews came up and thanked me for expressing thoughts they were feeling, and multiple Palestinians thanked me for bringing up issues they had not considered. “I have never heard any of that,” one American Palestinian, who has become a close friend, told me. Another close Palestinian friend said to me, “Thanks for what you said today. It definitely was not easy to hear, but it was important for me because I could never before understand why this conflict mattered so much to American Jews. I just didn’t get why it was so personal.”
With a week-and-a-half’s worth of strong bonds and intense discussions behind us, we boarded a bus for Kosovo. Crossing the “border” from Serbia to Kosovo was strange since the former does not recognize the latter’s independence. It was perhaps symbolic that we entered on the Fourth of July, as America’s support for Kosovar independence is probably the only reason it has been able to happen. Indeed, posters of George Bush and other US officials are plastered literally all over Pristina, the capital, and one of the city’s biggest fairways is named “Bill Clinton Boulevard.” The predominantly-Muslim Albanians, Kosovo’s dominant ethnic group, are perhaps the Muslim population most favorably disposed towards the US. The reality of the conflict was immediately apparent in the multiple NATO tanks whose turrets pointed directly at the row of cars crossing the border. Kosovo is currently home to three international forces: one from NATO, another from the UN, and most recently, a European Union force. Being in Kosovo was particularly interesting for me because I had written a term paper the previous semester on nationalism among Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia. We checked into the Grand Hotel Pristina hotel as Ricky Martin blared from a party in the UN building next door.
In Kosovo we met with Serb and Albanian activists dealing with the ramifications of the ethno-religious-nationalist conflict. Particularly exciting was our visit with a Kosovar Serb to a 14th century Serbian Orthodox monastery in a town populated entirely by Serbs that still operates as if it is part of Serbia. Serbs often speak of Kosovo as “our Jerusalem,” and indeed their claim to it is similar to Jews’ historical-religious claims to Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. Swedish NATO soldiers guarded the monastery, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, reminding me of my visit to Rachel’s Tomb outside Bethlehem.
The other most noteworthy experience in Kosovo was visiting a dialogue center in Mitrovica, a city in the north of Kosovo where Albanians and Serbs are divided by a bridge on which clashes often erupt. The center was adjacent to an abandoned UN courthouse which was also surrounded by barbed wire fence and guarded by multiple tanks and soldiers. The workers spoke of the difficulties of bringing Serbs and Albanians together and elaborated on their diverse feelings about the situation in Kosovo and the international community’s involvement in it.
The definitive Jewish-Palestinian experience of our time in Kosovo was a role-reversal workshop revolving around the trial, in an Israeli courtroom, of IDF personnel for the alleged killing of civilians in a targeted assassination of a Palestinian militant. A Jewish friend and I were assigned to be the lead prosecutors on behalf of the Palestinians. I actually found the details of the exercise itself to be rather poorly constructed, and thus perhaps did not take it seriously enough, but the resulting discussions proved to be revealing. The Palestinians who had to defend the IDF felt absolutely disgusted with themselves. A debate then arose about the word “terrorist.” To many of the Palestinians, the idea of state terrorism is ignored in mainstream discourse about the conflict, and they view the IDF as a terrorist organization given the daily uncertainty, humiliation, and violence it inflicts upon Palestinians. There was also a related discussion about nonviolence movements. On the one hand, the Palestinians in the group opposed using violence, but on the other hand, they felt that nonviolence had proven its futility, and now, given the difficulty of travel within the West Bank and between there and Gaza, is well-near impossible. One argued, in a point that would come up again later in the trip, that every people has its breaking point, and eventually violent frustration is impossible to contain. Naturally, these were not pleasant things for me to hear, and I remember my contribution to these discussions as primarily in the form of listening and occasionally plugging nonviolence.
The next country we visited, Bosnia-Hercegovina, was my favorite. Bosnia is easily one of the most beautiful countries I have ever visited. It is full of small villages by pristine rivers lodged between dramatic, lush, green rolling hills. At the same time, the war is far more present in Bosnia than anywhere else. While in Belgrade there are still a few important buildings symbolically left unrepaired from the 1999 NATO bombing, Bosnia is littered with bombed-out buildings full of bullet holes, signs that warn of the persistent dangers of land mines, and charred remains of minarets that point mournfully upwards. The two cities we visited, Sarajevo and Mostar, exemplify both sides of Bosnia. Sarajevo is an incredibly beautiful city surrounded on all sides by tree-covered hills. One feels as if he or she is in Western Europe then turns a corner and seems to be in Istanbul. The city’s multiethnic and multireligious past is still visible, as within 300 yards one can encounter a mosque, a Catholic church, an Orthodox church, and a synagogue (again, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen).
In Sarajevo we spent a lot of time discussing the dubious role of the international community in the Bosnian War. We met with an American who worked for the UN during the war and said that Washington could easily have prevented it with a different strategy. We visited the remains of the tunnel Sarajevans dug from the besieged city, under the UN-controlled airport, to free Bosnian territory. We also visited the annual commemoration for the Srebrenica genocide of 1995, where tens of thousands of mourners gathered to bury the latest identified dead, and diplomats gave stock, emotionless speeches, as if merely checking off an item on a to-do-list. On a happier note, we also held a culture night in which we performed or displayed elements of our culture, however we defined it. It was revealing that unlike many of the Jews, the bulk of the Palestinians’ performances were somehow related to the conflict.
Our group process sessions continued to drastically change my perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We discussed notions of peace and justice, whether one is more important, and whether one can exist without the other. These questions figure prominently in my thinking about a two-state versus one-state solution. I believe that a one-state solution which allows Palestinian refugees to return to wherever they came from opens possibilities for more justice, but I am doubtful that in the short term, at least, it will bring more peace. Additionally, I feel that what justice means is not always clear. I got into a heated short discussion with a Palestinian from Israel about these issues that I related in my entry on the program’s blog:
'One of the questions from group process that has been occupying my mind is whether peace or justice is more important, and whether one can exist without the other. I certainly believe that many injustices must be remedied for peace to come, but in the end I feel that I would prioritize peace over justice if they came into conflict. This is an extremely hard position for me to take, as
one of the most famous quotes from Jewish texts is "Justice, justice you shall pursue" (Deut. 16:20). But I take this view for a few reasons. First, my highest priorities are to stop the killing and give everyone a chance to thrive economically, followed only then by remedying historic injustices. Secondly,
full justice for one often means injustice for another. For example, in group process yesterday one Palestinian said that she believes those expelled from their homes in 1948 must be returned to those homes to get full justice, but a Jewish participant responded that kicking out Israeli Jewish children who were
born in those homes well after 1948 would be unjust, as these homes are the only ones that these children have ever had. Surely they cannot be blamed for earlier injustices. Thus, a compromise must be found. Finally, while I believe that justice is a prerequisite for peace, I also think that a moderately just
peace, followed by time to heal emotional and physical wounds, would allow for the lowering of hostilities, increasing of trust, and then the opening of doors to pursuing greater justice.'
This internal conflict is emblematic of the conflict we face as inheritors, rather than creators, of a terrible situation. We must hold all our values dear, but the circumstances are so messy that we cannot always live all our values to the fullest, so we have to continually evaluate which values we consider most important and seek ways to realize as many of them as possible as often as possible.
It was in Mostar, however, that many of my most important revelations came. The main city of the Hercegovina region, Mostar is enchanting but heartbreaking. Its Ottoman-era bridge, destroyed in 1993 but rebuilt after the war, is the city’s symbol (Mostar means “bridge guard”) and the focal point of a beautiful old city. Divided between Boshniak Muslims and Croat Catholics, one photograph can capture in it a minaret and cross on the hill outside of town. There is also a Jewish cemetery and grounds for a new synagogue for the city’s twenty Jewish families. But Mostar was almost completely destroyed in the Bosnian war, and has only partially recovered. Bombed-out bullet-ridden buildings line the main street. Down the block from our hotel stood the gigantic ruins of a modern glass-front bank that had opened just months before the war. Boshniak and Croat children still go to school separately. Some Croats, whose nationalism is based on the Nazi-allied Ustashe movement of World War II, had drawn swastikas on buildings to provoke Muslims. Both here and in Sarajevo, graffiti demonstrating nostalgia for the days of the dictator Tito was ubiquitous.
The defining moment of the group process here was an hours-long simulation of peace negotiations between Israelis (in this case, the Jews) and Palestinians. Each side chose a prime minister and divided into smaller delegations for negotiations on specific issues broken up by in-group conferences. I was head delegate for the Israeli group charged with discussing settlements, natural resources, the security wall, and Jerusalem. There was ambiguity (purposely, I think) over whether we were supposed to represent our perception of our side’s public opinion or our own personal opinions. The Palestinians seemed generally to opt for the latter, while the Jews at least started with the former. I certainly tried to act the part of hardnosed negotiator while my friend unsuccessfully challenged himself to be a radical right-winger. True to our location, the vague solution on which we finally agreed was a federation of two republics, reminiscent of the structure of Bosnia-Hercegovina. There would be a Jewish Republic and a Palestinian Republic under the nominal federal government of the State of Israel-Palestine. Territory would be distributed evenly, residents of the “other’s” republic could choose to stay or switch, and over time there would be more integration so that refugees could return to both republics, travel between the two republics would be less restrictive, etc. Naturally, it was very vague, no one was really satisfied, and many issues were not resolved. But it was innovative, at least, and an important process to try.
The last few group process discussions were the most important for me. First, we broke into uninational groups where we discussed the activity with a facilitator. The Israeli Jewish facilitator chided us, rightfully I feel in retrospect, over the language we used in the negotiations. It was always about how much the Israelis were “giving,” and the Palestinians had to “ask” us for more. How could we possibly conduct fair negotiations with such an unequal power dynamic inherent in the discourse?
Soon after, I found truth in an idea I had been considering for a while: that in a group committed to conflict resolution, our biggest disagreements come not from huge differences over policy or political opinions, but over the perspectives, experiences, and narratives we use to come to those views. For example, I got into an angry argument with a Palestinian American over the settlements in the West Bank built on privately owned Palestinian land. The ironic thing was that we both believed those settlements need to be dismantled for peace to come. But I quickly found myself filled with an anger I have almost never felt as we quarreled over our reasons for that position. I explained that to me, we should recognize that when we remove children from the settlements who were born there, who did not choose to be born there, and who have never known another home, we are doing an injustice to them. That does not change my view of what should happen to the settlements – they need to go. But I see the removal of children born there as an example of peace and one side’s justice coming into conflict, and I prioritize peace (in this case, in the process also creating more justice for Palestinians). To him, the Jews who first moved to the settlements are violent thieves, and should be dealt with as such, and their children continue the theft by living on the settlements every day. We both see the settlements as intolerable obstacles to peace, but it is the disparate paths we take to that view that divides us most. Most important to me, though, was that the relationship between the two of us was strong enough that we could have this impassioned conversation and then immediately after shake hands and get ready to go out together for a night on the town.
The last discussions were also marked by two major changes. First, we at last made progress in adopting the facilitators’ lesson of taking the initiative to challenge authority when we are unsatisfied. As the program had gone on, they had given us less and less structure in the discussions so as to encourage us to take the program where we wanted it to go. Finally, at the last session they constructed a game that had vague relevance, at best, to the conflict. One participant decided it was stupid and pointless and suggested we just start talking about issues on our mind. We did, and it was one of our best sessions yet. It’s ironic that in “disobeying the authorities” we were doing what they had wanted us to do all along – kind of a Catch-22, I guess.
Second, many participants who had not said much in discussions before, especially Palestinians, began to speak up and made some of the most powerful comments of the trip. One Palestinian lashed out at the Jewish participants, screaming through tears, “Everything we talk about is always about if it’s good for the Jews, if it will make the Jews safe, if it will make the Jews happy! What about us? Does it ever matter what’s good for the Palestinians?!” Another Palestinian who had said very little before in group process broke down while speaking about the identity problems she has accumulated after a childhood in Israel. “I feel totally inadequate because I never learned about any of this stuff,” she told us. “I never learned anything about my culture in school. I learned about Holocaust and Tanakh, but never about Naqba. We had Arabic class once a week, and nothing about our religion. And then I’ve had Palestinians accuse me of being a traitor and a Jew because I live in Israel.”
It is quotes like this one and conversations like the one I had about children in settlements that have most changed my views and the way I would like to proceed in my involvement in the conflict. As a Jewish friend on the trip explained to me, every kind of “solution,” whether it is one-state, two-state, or whatever, can mean so many different things, and, more importantly, is many steps down the line. But no matter what specific solution we think is best, there are many realities that need to change. After hearing that Palestinian talk of her schooling in Israel, I am particularly inspired to work towards a reconstruction of the educational system in Israel into one that treats Palestinians and the Arabic language as the equal partners in the state that the law says (or should say) they are. All Israelis, no matter what their ethnicity is, should speak Hebrew and Arabic, learn about the Holocaust and the Naqba (without speaking of any kind of equivalence), and study all the religions represented in the state. That is just one example of what has to change no matter what a solution looks like. Palestinian farmers need to be able to farm without fear of losing their land or their life at the hands of settlers or soldiers, anti-Semitism must be fought wherever it is, refugees need to be given reasonable hope whatever the solution on their status is, and extremism on both sides needs to be unequivocally condemned and actively fought, to name just a few tasks on our long to-do list. What’s so liberating about this way of looking at activism is that it allows us to build coalitions with those with whom we do not agree on everything. I can disagree vehemently with someone in a discussion about one-state versus two-state, but if we can agree on the changes that need to be made to the Israeli educational system then we can work together on that issue. And through disparate people working together, the human relationships that are the core of any durable peace can be built.
In the weeks since the trip I have already had multiple experiences that have both continued and complicated my thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend and teacher of mine who led my first trip to Israel offered two ideas that I found enlightening. He explained that one can in part trace the inability of Palestinians and Jews to connect in discussions about human rights violations of Palestinians to the two diametrically opposed perspectives in which many members of each group view the state of Israel. For many Palestinians, and citizens of postcolonial countries around the world, Israel is a lingering product of European colonialism, and thus comparisons to the struggles of indigenous Africans in South Africa or Algeria make logical sense. But to Jews, Israel is the only place we have, and we think of its existence in terms of our survival. As a result, many Jews who actively fought apartheid bristle at seeing the cover of Jimmy Carter’s recent book. An example of this disparity in action is international pressure. Repeatedly during the program, Palestinians spoke of their wish for much stronger international pressure on Israel to change, again often accompanied by allusions to South Africa. But given that Jews’ support for Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is largely a reaction to our horrendous treatment at the hands of the rest of the world, pressure improperly applied will only lead Israel and the Jewish people to close up further and view that pressure as further evidence that the world is against us. The UN Human Rights Council’s singular focus on Israel is perhaps the most obvious example of a disastrous way to try to create change. It seems to me, then, that in the end what will transform reality the most is change from within the Jewish community, and so I feel I have a particular responsibility to work towards this end.
The other topic my friend spoke about was the failure of the Israeli and American Jewish left-wing to bring peace to the region. To most of us, he explained, the conflict is intellectual. We can sit at a table or stare at a website and speak of borders and settlements as if they are lines and dots on a piece of paper or computer screen. But to Palestinians in the West Bank, the occupation is a daily reality filled with questions smaller in scope but equal in importance. Will I be able to get to my field today, for example, and will a settler shoot at me? Fundamentally, the Jewish left has failed because most of us have not gone and seen the reality of occupation with our own eyes.
With the trip and these thoughts in my mind, I had a jarring experience less than a week later when I spent a weekend with my 14-years-old Israeli cousin. He lives on the kibbutz that his grandparents helped establish when they immigrated to Israel from Brazil in the late 1940s, and he goes to school in Sderot. His mother is a psychologist who works with children suffering trauma from Qassam rocket attacks. His school is reinforced to protect the students from the rockets, and there have been times he has had to run for cover. “I hate Arabs,” he told me bluntly, and when I told him about the trip from which I had just returned, he replied with a curious and sarcastic smile, “I think something is messed up in your head.” On the one hand I was horrified, but on the other, what could I possibly say? The conflict is not intellectual at all for him like it is for me. How could I expect him to feel any other way? He, like all of my generation, is an inheritor of the situation, and has done nothing to provoke threats on his life and family. And even if I still was confident in my views, how could I possibly expect to get his agreement, or even his acknowledgment of their legitimacy?
As a result, I have decided to direct the tenor of my activism in two different ways. Although I will continue to critique Israeli governmental policies and actions that I view as counterproductive to achieving peace, I don’t feel that as an American Jew living a comfortable American life I can too strongly criticize Israelis whose attitudes I disagree with. So instead I plan to focus on supporting the people and organizations that I believe are helping to change the situation for the better. But with the American Jewish community I feel that it is not only possible but my duty to support those doing good but to also try to change the views and actions of those with whom I disagree. I see lots of problems with the American Jewish community, and it is my hope that through the experiences I have had and will hopefully continue to have, and through building the coalitions of which I spoke, I will be able to open our eyes and ears to a narrative and reality that as a whole we refuse to acknowledge.
One of the most likely questions I foresee others asking me after reading this is, are you a Zionist? Though I generally consider myself in the camp that dislikes labels, it is a question that I have deliberated in my mind since midway through the trip. I think that right now, the most appropriate term for me is one used by social critic Ellen Willis, who called herself an “anti-anti-Zionist.” I don’t feel Zionist in my heart, because as I have already explained, I am not comfortable with nationalism in any form, and I find Zionism particularly problematic in that it displaced an indigenous population instead of fighting to liberate a land where the majority of the residents were of that group. But at the same time, I still feel the need that so many Jews have for a place where we know we can go should history hint of repeating itself, as it continually does. As I told my co-participants in Belgrade, I feel “forced into Zionism.” But more than that I just feel conflicted.
These are the thoughts I take with me as I “re-enter” the American Jewish community. I realize that much of what I have expressed is only critical of the Jewish community, especially the American Jewish community, but this is because I experienced this program, more than any other dialogue activity before, as an American Jew rather than an interested Jewish individual. I have spent the last few years trying to understand the conflict from all sides, and this ambition required me to reach out to Palestinians, a group with whom I had had no previous contact. But returning from the former Yugoslavia I feel a new additional responsibility to turn inward, back to my community, the American Jewish community, where my experiences can most effectively help to transform the conflict I care so much about ending.