After all, during this time I saw several friends leave their homes to answer the call of military duty, and I witnessed demonstrations of various sorts - ranging from extremely calm, to ones broken up by the Israeli police. I was even sitting next to a friend when she was interviewed on campus by SKYNews. More precisely, this was the first time in my life that I was in a country where a war was taking place during my visit.
I stress that last word - visit - because I believe that it is at the core of why I have been so silent on the conflict, only hours away from my apartment in Ramat Aviv.
Yes, I live in an apartment in a lovely suburb north of Tel Aviv while I pursue my studies in Israel...but as soon as my studies are completed, I have no intention of immediately settling down and growing old here. Nor was I raised here; nor was I brought up with the notion that someday, I would have to serve a mandatory term in my nation's military. In other words, though I am physically closer than many of my friends and family, I am much more removed emotionally & psychologically from the conflict than other, more vocal people that I have met in my experiences here. Granted, that probably helps me form my judgments without prejudice, but also contributing to my silence is the simple but often ignored fact that I do not know enough about the situation yet.
As Lawrence Pintak wrote, "Yet again, the disconnect. Yet again, American and Arab viewers are seeing two vastly different conflicts play out on their television screens. Yet again, the media has become a weapon of war." Much of the international media is quick to criticize the IDF without also criticizing Hamas. The IDF is definitely not without fault in the way that Operation Cast Lead has been conducted [I applaud people such as Michael Ratner (President of the Center for Constitutional Rights) & Jon Stewart (Daily Show) for their vocal opposition to some of Israel's policies] - but I am concerned in the way that many are quick to reach conclusions without an in-depth investigation of the events in question. Concerning the lack of criticism towards Hamas, as my favourite professor from this semester wrote in a recent email to me:
"No one denies that Hamas follows a certain pragmatic line, though pragmatism is not necessarily moderation. Obviously as a mass political movement, Hamas needs to be attuned to popular voices and to political exigencies. However, that also means that Hamas often speaks in several voices, depending on the audience. Thus Hamas leaders would say one thing in English when speaking to Westerners, and a totally different thing while speaking in Arabic. The question is what is the more genuine Hamas. Thus Mashal can say that he is willing to have a state in the 1967 borders (without saying if this is his final goal) while speaking to journalists and immediately declare in Arabic that the Jews must be humiliated before they are destroyed." [Note: the speakers on this link speak about the Jews, not the Israelis.]
On days where I didn't have class, I would spend mornings reading as much as I could from as wide a pool of sources as possible - if, for example, I read a Haaretz article and was intrigued by the content, immediately afterwards I would go to JPost and examine their take on the matter. On days where I did have class, I would stay up later than usual the night before, checking the latest developments, to make sure that I could contribute to meaningful discussions with my friends on campus. Regardless: the more I read, the more I realized it simply was not my place yet to support one cause or another too strongly because the situation is, naturally, far more complex than choosing who to support. Unfortunately, with such a sensitive topic as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fuelled with anger and hate from all sides - some of it justified, some of it indoctrinated - most people around me are quick to jump on bandwagons in one form or another.
As I write this, I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my best friends in Belgium before leaving for Israel. We were enjoying a couple of drinks in Waterloo with a group of our friends, when she and I entered into a heated discussion as to why I wanted to study Hebrew, Arabic, & Middle Eastern history in the region itself as opposed to somewhere in Europe or America. I told her because I wanted to travel the area whilst learning about the history of the conflict, in addition to meeting with Israelis as well as Palestinians, in order to make my own firsthand impressions of the situation.
At this point I have definitely answered the question I asked at the beginning of this post, but I still have much more to see and much more to learn before I can answer any of the questions I asked myself prior to landing in this part of the world.
[Police officer, filming one of several protests directly outside of campus.]
[Dormitory rooftop view: 1st week of the conflict - 300 dead. Protest outside of the main campus gate, with police officers observing from the other side of the street.]
[These three wanted to stand next to the protest, with their own pro-Israeli counter-protest - the police instructed them not to, in order to prevent inflaming the situation.]
[After the protest was over, my friend and I spoke to the girl in the middle.]
[This man stood across the street - initially, quietly: he later went on to incite anger from the organized protest by ulalating insensitively.]
[Moments before this picture, the man in black (on the left) grabbed the megaphone from the leader of the protest, and slammed it into the ground, making it shatter and causing several people to shove each other in the middle of the road. At this point, the police officers crossed the street in a hurry and intervened. The police was careful in intervening only with those who had demonstrated to be violent, by either a) placing themselves in between the protestors shoving one another, and b) if the former did not work, then forcefully pinning them down, removing them from the rest of the crowd by carrying them across the street to check for any injuries.]
[Honestly though, aside from the occasional protests and noticing a few friends leave for military duty, daily life in Tel Aviv carried on relatively normally.]
[Mostly due to extremely effective policing, many of the other protests I noticed in Tel Aviv were carried out peacefully.]
[SKYNews - one of the many crews to visit students on campus throughout the three weeks.]
[Apparently Barack Obama is even able to bring change to the fortunes of this shoe company.]
[5 minutes away from the Damascus Gate outside of Jerusalem's Old City, situated inside a dilapidated apartment, lies the Palestine-Israel Journal: a quarterly that aims to shed light on and analyze freely and critically, the complex issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians. Half of every issue is devoted to exploring a major theme on the joint Israeli-Palestinian agenda, while the other half contains regular departments relating to Culture, Economics, Viewpoints, Book Reviews, Documents and a Chronology of Events. Unfortunately, the journal is barely hanging on by a thread financially. To learn more, click here.]
[Also, due to the way this war has been carried out, this usually progressive part of Jerusalem's Palestinian population has posters like this in store windows.]
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