South - North

In the next week I'm going to be travelling the country almost from end-to-end. Tomorrow we leave EARLY (6.30am) to start our 3-day hiking tiyul in the southern Negev - in the sweltering heat, I fear..... We'll finish on Thursday evening in Eilat, on the Red Sea, where I'll be spending the weekend. On Sunday or Monday I'll head northwards, to Kinneret (or "The Sea of Galilee") for a week of Nahum Goldman Fellowship Programme. Friends and family will recall that I spent a week on this same programme in Mumbai India, back in 2005 (see cool photo montage!)

I will try to post updates when I can, in the meantime blogfans, keep the comments and emails coming, I love love LOVE to hear from you :)

Bruchin

Here is a pic from the Bruchin settlement in the West Bank. You can always see more photos on my Flickr site (see link on right hand side of the screen....)

Beyond the Green Line

Today we travelled across the Green Line. This is the common name for the border around the West Bank (border may be the wrong word, as it's yet to be agreed upon as a border - rightly or wrongly, there is no Palestinian state yet for Israel to share a border with). A quick and woefully incomplete history: The green line was originally the UN armistice line established between Israel and the Arab countries that it fought during the 1948 war of independence - Egypt, Syria, Jordan. At the end of the 1948 war, Gaza was part of Egypt, and the West Bank was part of Jordan. Israel later recaptured both of these territories during the 1967 war, and for the last couple of decades many Jewish settlers have come to live here, both in places that were historically inhabited by Jewish communities, and in newly-built settlements, strategically dotted amongst Palestinian towns and villages.

Anyone who has read a newspaper or seen a television in the past 40 years will know that the question of who is entitled to live on each side of the Green Line - and who holds sovereignty over these lands - sits at the root of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians (intertwined with security and terrorism, religious radicalism, unfortunate political decisions, and collapsed efforts to negotiate of course). This is the iconic struggle of our times - as evidenced by the world's obsession with it. And of course, there is a lot more to the story that what one ever hears in the news. I'm putting a disclaimer here that I'm not going to be able to adequately comment on what I know about the settlements, nor what I think about them. It's too hard in a blog and I am still processing my thoughts!!!

The purpose of our trip was to visit a small Jewish settlement - Bruchin - to see what it was like, and to hear from some of the settlers why they have chosen to live here. Only an hour earlier, we met with the head of Peace Now/Shalom Achshav, an Israeli organisation that favours the dismantlement of many (but not all) settlements in exchange for security and a final negotiation of borders with an independent Palestinian State. The Peace Now representative gave, I thought, a fairly cogent analysis of the situation. His view was that even if Israel's future in giving up the Territories looks bleak, and may not lead to peace, the alternative is even bleaker. Retaining control over around 4 million Palestinian Arabs, when it's inconceivable that they can (or would want to) be integrated as full citizens of Israel as long as Israel hopes to be a Jewish State, is part of what I've heard called the "demographic argument" for the two-state Israel/Palestine solution.

But of course, things are never so simple. A two-state solution seems like the only viable solution to me, but there are so many question marks and barriers to this happening. Would a Palestinian state be economically viable? Would it guarantee a safer Israel - or, as some fear, would it create a platform for even greater violence? Would rockets and missiles begin to rain down on Israel - as they are on Sderot and Ashkelon today? Even if Israel was willing to go ahead in good faith, as history has shown, even the most comprehensive offers to date, like at Camp David and Taba have been rejected - not negotiated, rejected - by the Palestinian leadership.

We met with several women at Bruchin - these were not the crazy lunatic settlers that one might imagine from the news, but a group of pleasant and quitely well-spoken young mothers who invited us into their homes. Although they didn't express wildly objectionable opinions or attitudes, I found their reasons for choosing to live in the West Bank neither convincing nor realistic. They certainly don't see themselves as barriers to peace - as many do - but expressed a desire to just get on living peaceful lives in their peaceful settlements. At the root of their conviction is the religious belief that Jews are supposed to be living in these lands, as part of the Land of Israel given by God to the Jewish People. Although they more or less avoided representing themselves as political, of course this religious view is also tangled up into a political position as well - this land clearly wasn't just sitting there empty, ready for Jewish people to come and set up house wherever they pleased. On the other hand, it's also clear that this logic works both ways - many within the Palestinian political and religious community have made it clear that establishing a state in the West Bank and Gaza is only "Phase I", with "Phase II" being a Palestinian state that extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean and is entirely free of Jews.

At the end of our day, we went to visit a temporary village in Israel (undisputed Israel) where many former residents of the Gaza Strip settlements - Gush Katif - have been put while the government creeps at a snail's pace towards building them new homes and communities. I was a little surprised to find myself touched by, and sympathetic to, the situation of these people, at least as represented by one woman who spoke to us about what it was like to be forced from their community after decades of hard work and commitment to cultivating the land, with very little meaningful compensation to date. Once again, she didn't say anything that I could outright disagree with or dismiss, and there are many things about the Gush Katif communities - including their deep valuing of community life itself - which were worthy of admiration. Last year, I thought that the unilateral disengagement from Gaza was both inevitable and neccessary. I pretty much still think this, but looking at Gaza today, it is hard to see how exactly the withdrawal has made things better (again, for complex reasons). Today, even more than before, I feel sad about the minorly and majorly tragic impacts of the conflict on so many people - Israeli and Palestinian. And that's about as good a summary as I can give right now.

Tripping

I have about 10 mins to blog before I go downstairs to be picked up by my adopted Arad family. They invited me to come to Tel Aviv with them for the day, as they have a series of family engagements and they thought I might enjoy tagging along. The downside is that I had to wake up at 6.30 am this morning :(
It's going to be a week of tripping around this week. On Sunday we have a field seminar north of Jerusalem (it's a controversial one, I hope to blog about it afterwards!). Then on Tuesday we set off - another early morning start I'm afraid - for our 3-day tiyul (hiking trip) in the southern Negev desert. We'll end up in Eilat, so i will probably stay there for a few days, before heading up to Kinneret for my "other" Israel programme - the week-long Nahum Goldmann Fellowship Programme. So much coming up!

Gotta run!

Shavuoooooooot

The elongated set of ooooo's in the header indicates me clutching my stomach and groaning after two days of continuous eating....we have just finished celebrating the chag (holiday) of Shavuot - which, among other things, marks the time when the children of Israel were given the Torah on Sinai. This is a holiday that hasn't featured prominently for me in the past - mainly I associated it with eating cheesecakes (it's customary to eat dairy foods on Shavout) - so I really enjoyed the way we celebrated it here at WUJS. For one thing, I ever knew
(or more likely, I once I knew but forgot) that it's also customary to stay up and learn during the night - because the naughty Israelites FELL ASLEEP when they were supposed to be waiting with bated breath to receive the Torah on Sinai. We had a really interesting set of seminars, including one with a reconstructionist Rabbinical student looking at some excerpts from the Talmud regarding the mitzvot (commandments), and a session with Alon (our director) discussing Israel's Law of Return vs Law of Citizenship(very thought provoking and not a little controversial), and finally we read Megillat Rut, (The Scroll of Ruth, who is thought of as the first person to convert to Judaism). We only stayed up til 2 am. but it was fun to learn so late at night. Luckily I had drunk coffee in the afternoon ....

Apart from the learning, we have eaten almost non-stop since Tuesday night. I'm happy to be eating again (after my brush with illness) but one of these days I am going to have to learn to stop when my stomach starts to actually hurt!!

Alive and well :)

I just want to report that I am alive and well and feeling much MUCH better after two miserable days. I had a continuous headache for about 48 hours, really uncomfortable, and then yesterday even though I hadn't eaten for almost a day I started to vomit up stomach fluid, blechh. I went to the doctor's clinic and they filled me with IV fluid and tried to figure out what was wrong, but they could't. So they prescribed me some antibiotics and sent me home, saying if i didn't feel better in the next few hours, I should go to the hospital to get more tests. So, since I didn't feel any better, that's what I did last night. I got even more IV fluid (I was "like dry bread" according to my doctor), and my BP was low even for me - something like 89/48? They did more blood and urine tests, and even ordered a C.T. which was a weird experience. Hours and hours later, they couldn't find anything on my tests but meanwhile I was starting to feel better! So they discharged me and I slept well last night and I'm even eating again, thank goodness!!

So it's all a mystery, I wonder if it was some kind of virus coupled with fatigue and dehydration that did me in?

Pain in my head :(

I am not feeling so good today. Yesterday afternoon I started to get a headache which got progressively worse, last night I was awoken by a throbbing pain in the back of my head which has kept me in bed for most of today :( I'm not too sure what the problem is, at first I thought I had pulled something in my neck but now I'm wondering if I have a bit of a something, maybe something flu-like? Although other than the pounding brain and general fatigue, I don't have serious nausea (just lack of appetite). Not sure if I have a temperature as I don't have a thermometer. Anyways, it's all generally not so much fun. I'm drinking lots of water and keeping myself from dying of boredom by listening to scientific american podcasts on my laptop. Here's hoping that I wake up feeling a lot better tomorrow morning!

ani lomedet le'at, le'at....

I just want to report that I am slowly slowly developing a smallish vocabulary in Hebrew, such that I can tell people where I live, where I'm from, and make generally banal observations about the world around me ("She's very nice" "I want to learn Hebrew" "I am walking to the mall" "That is a big dog" "Those flowers are pink" etc etc). As well as recognising perhaps about one in ten words in the average Israeli's sentence. We've already learned about three dozen verbs, which is very useful. However so far we've only learned present tense - hence I feel I'm a bit stuck in an ever-present present which is frustrating when I want to tell someone either what I did yesterday, or what I'll be doing tomorrow. So at the moment I talk like a real immigrant, mixing my tenses ("Tomorrow, I go for a walk") (Yesterday I wash my dishes"). You get the idea.

Hebrew is one of those annoying languages where everything is either masculine (zachar) or feminine (nekevah). Which is, of course, endlessly troublesome for English speakers. You have to learn every word in its masculine and feminine forms, as well as masculine plural and feminine plural. I'm glad I learned French at school, as this prepared me a little bit for the complexities of learning a gendered language. It's funny though, now that I am learning Hebrew, stupid French words and phrases keep jumping into my head and getting in the way. And my adopted family in Arad think I speak Hebrew with a French accent. I interpret this as a signal that there's only space in my brain for one second language. Hebrew and French are going to have to fight it out between them to see who gets to set up camp in my grey matter....GentleLanguages, take your corners..... [dingding!]

Whose Desert is this, anyway?

This weekend (Fri/Sat) we had a Shabbaton out in the Desert, staying with a lovely group of young people - students from Ben Gurion university (in Beer Sheva)- in a small student development village called Adiel. Adiel is part of the Ayalim Association. As their website explains, the Ayalim Association

"was established in September 2002 by a group of young army veterans and today it is comprised of 300 student activists, from a total of about 5,000 students that seek to join each year.

The association works...... to promote the establishment of villages for students and young entrepreneurs in peripheral areas about which there is an Israeli consensus—the Negev and the Galilee.

These villages will form the basis for permanent settlement and social involvement, while channeling the goodwill and energy of many young people in Israel for national service as part of their personal fulfillment."

The idea is that so many Israeli students come to the desert (Beer Sheva) to study, yet very few remain to make the desert their home. Ayalim is a modern Zionist movement which sees a big future for Israel in investing and developing sustainable communities in the Negev. The students who live in the Ayalim Villages form communities that support existing desert communities, bringing youth and vibrance and contributing time and energy to these communities.

Our weekend in the desert was a fitting end to a week in which we've been getting to know a lot more about the complex relationships between this desert and the people that live in it, and the people who don't. Although the Negev comprises 60% of Israel, only a small proportion of the population lives here. Yet there are many pockets of inspiring "pioneering" activity - for example, Be'er Milka, a community very near the Sinai Border which so far comprises only 13 families, living in trailer homes while they develop their agricultural businesses and plan how to build their community.

Earlier this week, however, we saw a different side to the story of life in the Negev. This was our study seminar on Bedouins of the Negev, led by Ye'ela, a Jewish Israeli anthropologist who works for a Bedouin Regional Council NGO. As one might expect, there are big problems with/for the Bedouin population in Israel. Many Bedouins live in unrecognised villages, meaning that they are not permitted to build such basic infrastructure as roads, schools, and in many cases, running water. For whatever reason (the reasons differ depending on who you ask, and can lead to heated debate amongst Israelis), there is an enormous mismatch between Bedouin needs/culture/aspirations - remembering that these are citizens of Israel - and Israeli government policy with regards to settlement in the desert. It's all extremely complicated and I certainly don't think I can do justice to this issue in one blog posting...but as the title suggests, even here in the desert where there are no green lines, there are still some problematic question about who can or should live here, and on whose terms.

PS. Hi Carmit, my newest blogfan :)

Shabbat, Old Skool-styles

This weekend I spent Shabbat in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was quite an experience, staying with two friends (one of whom is Orthodox) at a religious women's hostel in the heart of the Jewish Quarter.

Although I don't normally keep shabbat (ok, I don't ever keep shabbat), I really enjoyed the Old-Skool Shabbat experience. The Jewish Quarter is full of Yeshivot (schools for study of Torah) and many many Jewish outreach programmes and experiences. We took advantage of one of these - Shabbat Hospitality. What happens is on Friday nights, after Shabbat comes in, you can go and meet a very comedic guy called Jeff Seidel who will send you to the home of a Jewish family for Shabbat dinner. You can do the same on Saturday for lunch. We went to two different homes and had two exceptional meals with our generous hosts. The people were so welcoming and I really appreciated the opportunity to glimpse inside Jewish Orthodox life. Although Orthodox Judaism is not for me, I am endlessly fascinated by people who seek to live every aspect of their lives in keeping with the codes of conduct and teachings of the Torah. As always, I heard and saw things I could relate to, and things that I couldn't relate to at all. At times I felt connected to K'lal Yisrael and at other times, felt like a separate species of Jew from my hosts. But this is Israel, and the longer I am here and the more I read and learn, the more complex this place becomes for me.

This past week I have also become more conscious of the "bubble" that we could potentially be encased in at WUJS, in our quiet little desert town. Just outside our carefully and richly designed programme lies a country that is rent by religious, cultural, social, and political tensions. Some of these tensions are beginning to become the centrepieces of our seminars and fieldtrips. Tomorrow, for example, we are going to visit some Bedouin sites to find out more about the issues and challenges for this group of people. Next week we will focus on "Jerusalem's seam line" - the East-West divide that sits at the heart of so many of Israel's deepest problems. We look at these issues in our seminars too. There is a lot to think about.....

Moonlight hiking

A few nights ago we went for a moonlight hike in the desert with a man called Dov, an enthusiatic amateur archaeologist and lover of the desert who regularly guides walking tours to the many interesting and historical sites near Arad. He loves the desert and it shows.

Although the full moon failed to come to the party (it was cloudy), it was a remarkably warm night, and the aroma of jasmine as we walked through the suburbs to the edge of the desert was intoxicating. It was so interesting, we went to these caves where people lived and built huge water storage tanks in the ground to catch rainwater and sustain their desert lifestyle. According to Dov this all happened in the Byzantine era,c.1500 years ago. These amazing archaeological sites are literally a stone's throw from the edges of Arad - yet few people even know they are there.

Very busy!

I feel like I haven't been blogging as often as I really need to, to keep y'alls up-to-date. The problem is that there is SO much to blog about (what we're learning, what's going on at WUJS, our tiyulim, etc) but so little time to blog! Many days we have nary a moment to spare, in between classes and homework and group activities. So, my apologies blogfans...I will try to write something interesting soon :)