A Reflection on Experiences of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“Such memory need not reflect truth instead it portrays a truth that is functional for the

group’s ongoing existence.”

- Robert Rotburg, “Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict”

Beyond the walls of the old city, there is a market where the people dance in the streets

until well past midnight and sing as loud and as strong as they can, even if their voices strain and

are gone by morning. They talk without paying heed to the boundaries that have divided them for

hundreds of years; they are people drinking together, laughing together, sharing their thoughts,

bantering with a beer in their hand paid for by the stranger with a smile whom they’d only met

moments before. This is the new Jerusalem, where Arabs and Israelis treat enemies as brothers, a

place where the connection between human beings extends beyond their differences, a place that many witness every day, but for some, is still a scene only experienced in the most elusive of dreams.

As I wandered through cobblestoned, tin-roofed markets lit by flood lights hanging from

the rafters above my head, and colored by graffiti of immaculately dressed jesters, thoughts of

conflict easily disappeared. At the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, I was enticed by the

rich buttered honey-nut aroma of fresh baklava mixed with the must of bright fabrics coated with

thick hookah smoke, the closeness of pilgrims and locals as we all nudged our way through

crowded stone walks and endless side streets to our destination. Although we were travelling on

separate paths, brought to this place by separate lives, we all connected in this holy

place, the city of God and ancient kings. Still – underneath the façade of beauty, there lingered the tension of those exhausted by a life constantly filled with a threat to existence.

Along the security fence in area A, the part of Palestine governmentally and militarily

controlled by the Palestinian Authority, miles from the merriment of the market, men and

women often wake in the morning to no electricity or running water and unpaved streets littered

with trash; the men wait to hail an illegal taxi that will take them from the West Bank into

Jerusalem to work. Electricity, water and other municipal services are controlled entirely by the

Israeli military forces inside the West Bank. Every two days, Palestinians on the other side of the

Green Line must live without these basic resources; meanwhile Israelis in West Jerusalem walk

down spotlessly clean well-lit cobblestoned avenues. In East Jerusalem, Palestinians are not

legally considered citizens of Israel equal to other Arabs living outside the disputed holy city.

I stumbled across the idea of Israel and Palestine entirely by accident. At the time, I was working at the campus newspaper. I was worldly minded to the extent one could be as a sophomore in university. I attempted to listen to and read the news, especially world news, as it drew my particular interest . I had come in contact with the plight of the Palestinians once or twice in passing, but whether narrated to me by a friend or a perusal of the news for the day, it wasn’t really on my radar. Up until that moment, the struggles encountered in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had always been one of many stories buried in the thousands I consumed and several I wrote about every day. I was mildly interested, but nowhere near invested.

At the moment a colleague approached me about experiential education opportunities with the Fact Finders Learning Mission, my life was a hodgepodge of personal struggles and academic rigor – I had a deep desire to get away from everything. If I am honest with myself and with the reader, I will admit this desire to run was the motivating factor, originally, for going on the trip. Although I’d had a mild interest in the Middle East since high school, it felt at the time as if my fascinations were being stitched together to serve an ultimately selfish and personal goal. Words can do a lot to charm. I was accepted to the cohort, and even had myself believing in those stitches I had sewn into my life. I slowly became more and more invested in this thing called “the conflict,” and all its moral complexities and tragedies.

The first education session took place at the Merage Jewish Community Center in Irvine. I was early, the first there. To get to the conference room I had to speak with a uniformed guard who screened me and then gave me directions. I wandered the vast, carpeted halls, following the hotel-like floral patterns to the slitted windows of each door, confronting empty rooms. I had to double back on my path several times before finding the correct office, where Lisa Armony, the humble former journalist and founder of the Rose Project, was setting out platters of grapes and pretzels. We spent the night discussing what narrative is, how the complexities of the region and its people are often like the vines in the carpets, doubling back on one another. This was just the start. Each session became a journey of self-discovery as well as a mission to learn about the intricacies of the people and societies we would encounter. By the end of the week of summer orientation sessions, I had sequestered myself in a back corner of the basement of Langson Library at UC Irvine, where they kept shelves upon shelves of Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. Even if I had no direction yet, I was determined to learn.

How I found the room that day was a lot like how I found the Middle East, or rather it found me. I wandered into a world seemingly choked by weeds of tragedy and loss that confronted me with the warmest hospitality and community I’d ever experienced. And I quite literally doubled back on to it.

On assignment for the student paper my freshman year of university, I joined an event called Conversation Kitchen, where people from across campus could come together for conversations about culture and diversity. That particular event involved discussing the Middle East over Mediterranean food. At this round table discussion, I sat next to a girl with short blonde hair cut at an angle and round wire-framed glasses that framed her intense blue eyes . She introduced herself as Berna.

“So, what’s your interest in the Middle East?” I asked.

Her ethnically Turkish family emigrated from Bulgaria during the Soviet Union, and she came hoping to learn more about her own family history. I told her how I wanted to be a journalist in the region, I just wasn’t sure in which capacity. She pointed me towards an organization she had joined that year – The Olive Tree Initiative, a conflict analysis group that was focused on conflicts in the Middle East. I was enthralled. Immediately after the talk and enticing Mediterranean hummus, couscous and pita bread, I organized a time to meet with one of the heads of the organization, Daniel Brunstedder, a political science professor at UC Irvine. When I told him of my dreams to report on the stories of people and misrepresented communities and conflicts in the region, he offered a response I would often get that year:

“You’re a freshman, you have time to explore. Do that first and make sure this is something you actually want to do.”

Disappointed but determined, I did exactly as he asked. I spent the whole next year taking classes on immigrant communities in India and colonized communities in Africa, on the theories of colonialism and on diversity, on media and culture theory; but at the end of all that, I wasn’t satisfied. Whether by fate or chance, the summer of 2018 I found myself once again confronted with the Middle East.

With Fact Finders, I would find myself balancing the stories and perspectives of journalists, locals, non-profits and diplomats and weighing them against history. I would be confronted with crumbling infrastructure and with injustices, but I would also be challenged by a longing for home that I had never experienced in my own communities, though it permeated the lives and collective consciousness of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Before setting foot in Israel, it was easy for me to form opinions, to have conceptions of the

place and its nuances filled in by the narratives given by others. It was easy for me to interpret the situation as a child would, through the lenses provided via education, media, distance, and environment, the ultimate authorities in a setting where I felt forced to have an opinion about everything that lives and breathes, from political movements to the smallest celebrity gossip. Being in the Middle East, so close to a civil war in Syria, where ISIS collects itself after devastating defeat, where there are so many causes for one conflict or the other, it was apparent that I, the four-foot-ten American blonde in a dress and black thick frame glasses, had no knowledge when it came to facing the dangers of conflict and the perspectives attendant with

those inherent risks. I had never experienced the threats of war, the trauma of being driven from

my homeland, nearly forced into extermination both in words and action without a state for my

people recognized by the international community; nor had I experienced the injustice of

occupation both in land and spirit, settlements encroaching on my home only for my family to be

forced into “ghetto-like” camps awaiting return that may never come. So I set out to learn as much as I could about the ethical complexities of the conflict that allow it to continue.

I brandished my notebook and pen in place of a tourist’s camera, and I wrote it all down,

the hopes and tears of Palestinians and Israelis alike, attempting to understand. It became clear to

me, in the ten days I was in Israel and the Palestinian territories, on my first of two trips to the

region, that while each narrative presented by the local journalists, diplomats, and regular

Israelis, Palestinians, and Arab-Israeli citizens was unique, each person affected by the conflict

also held on to deep national and religious identities and nuanced historical traumas, collective

memories deeply set within Jewish and Palestinian national narratives.

These narratives could create the potential to see eye to eye, but instead, justify the continued war. The lack of willingness to reconcile their collective traumas has culminated in a series of ethical dilemmas that complicate the boundaries between Israeli Jews, Arab Israelis and the Palestinians.

In the first days of the trip, Rami Nazzal, a Palestinian journalist and founder of Beyond Borders tour of the West Bank, took us to a cliff overlooking the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. He stood at the head of the group, extending his hand out to trace the distant lines that marked the border between the Jewish and Palestinian quarters of Jerusalem. He spoke of the lack of resources and municipal services accorded to Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

“There were only two telecommunication networks, which both operated on 2G. It

affected e-commerce because Israel was not releasing the network to a Palestinian government

they didn’t trust. There is a lack of municipal services because the municipality workers are wary

of Palestinian leadership. There is a problem with government policy, not the people. Israel may

be corrupt, but at least they take care of their people.” Nazzal described the worn paint that chips

off the walls of the houses and the trash that accumulates in the street because no trash

cans are provided and no one is working to clean them. From a distance, we saw ovular black jugs

on roofs, used to store water for when Israeli government forces shut off water and power

supply. In contrast, the cities in West Jerusalem were paved with clean cobblestones without

trash blowing across the streets in the wind.

On the second trip I would take to the region with the Olive Tree Initiative, I would experience one of these power outages at Dheisha, a refugee camp outside Bethlehem. Even when you are academically prepared for the nuanced reasons behind the power outage and the dearth of resources, there’s nothing that prepares you for the world plunging into utter void as you are saying goodbye to a host family with whom you had just shared a meal of maklouba (a popular vegetable and rice dish) and a wealth of conversation on the back porch, surrounded by beautiful homegrown plants, listening to the television in the living room buzz with dramatic lines of an Arabic soap opera. There is nothing that prepares you for the calm demeanor of the grandfather, father, mother, children, nieces and nephews as they lead you without flashlights or generators back to the bus, where you will be able to charge your phone that’s running on low battery. Maybe you’ll need it for a flashlight later, when you go to the night market in the city, or to the beach when you get to Tel Aviv. This is part of their every-day life, a “perspective” touched on by the brush of an academic, leaving the realities of these people glossed over with a fresh coat of black paint.

On the outskirts of West Jerusalem, while my Fact Finders cohort stood huddled against the oppressive heat, an Israeli security vehicle pulled behind our group. An officer clad in brown fatigues watched us from inside the vehicle, behind tinted sunglasses. At a checkpoint we encountered driving into Area A, a rusted red sign read in Hebrew and English, “This road leads to Area A under the Palestinian Authority. The Entrance for Israeli Citizens is Forbidden, Dangerous to Your Lives and is Against the Israeli Law.” The capitalization of ‘forbidden’ and ‘dangerous to your lives’ underscores the divisive rhetoric of the conflict and emphasizes a narrative of ‘otherness’ which the Israeli government

places on Palestinians. This sense of otherness is perpetuated by the erection of border

walls and checkpoints that keep the people of the West Bank under control. Several times

during our tours through the West Bank, Israeli surveillance and

IDF soldiers tailed our group. While there is a legitimate Israeli concern for security, especially after the 1990s bus

bombings, bombardments by Gazan rockets and tensions with

surrounding Arab nations, if a people are constantly demeaned by

constant military surveillance, lack of municipal services, warning signs hung outside barbed

wire fences , and denials of citizenship, how can they feel as if they

belong, even if they work alongside other Israelis? Divisive rhetoric such as that seen on

checkpoint signs, and the constant surveillance by the Israeli government, only perpetuate the feeling that Israel discriminates against those who share their country.

Faced with seemingly opposed perspectives, my Fact Finders cohort gathered that night independently of leadership and hashed out our own personal histories and experiences that affected our biases -- what we brought to the table in the face of the massive amounts of history, culture and trauma the region and its conflicts offered. Throughout the 12 days we spent in the region, we would return to that conversation to ground ourselves, and even after the trip we gathered together to personally catch up with one another but also to debrief. Several times we met up at eight or nine at night at Newport Beach. Sitting in a circle in the sand, accompanied by the waves, a Bluetooth speaker and LA street tacos, we would discuss the people, places and narratives we encountered and how we could act on it, since we had the privilege of returning to comfort. While there was an expectation to do something with what we witnessed, there was no academic pressure to it, and that allowed us the freedom to respond as we wished. Some of us went into conflict and regional studies to study the conflict more, others changed their entire career trajectories to political matters, some applied the methods Israelis and Palestinians used to bear their traumas to inform their response to their own struggles in diverse communities of color,

My own understanding of the conflict and the academic discipline attempting to come to terms with it has been tailored and stretched and resewn many times since my first exposure on that hill overlooking Jerusalem.

As a writer, I felt it would one day be my responsibility to share these stories I witnessed, so I sought further knowledge, in hopes of being able to tell those stories as accurately and sensitively as possible. In my time with the Olive Tree Initiative, I was not only exposed to more in-depth knowledge of the things I witnessed, I was expected to turn that knowledge into a specific type of discourse about conflict.Education sessions for the Olive Tree Initiative trip began three months before we travelled. The first session, there was no sense of discovery – we were to have completed hundreds of pages of assigned reading beforehand and come to the lecture already informed with opinions of what we read. In many instances, I would be hesitant to form these opinions. Having been to the region once, I knew how mutable the people and conflict scenarios seemed to be – there was always an exception to the rule or something one hadn’t considered – so I was there to learn more history and background, in order to be better prepared to ask questions of the people we encountered.

As students, much of the literature we read to understand the conflict came from prominent scholars of the Holocaust and Zionism, while the readings to understand Palestinian situations mainly came from primary sources where Palestinians were denied a right to sit at the table and discuss their fate as a state. This dichotomy allowed for a specific view of both sides as victim of one conflict, something Rosemary Sayigh calls the “trauma genre” – by viewing both sides as victims, with the literature of the Holocaust emphasized, the stories of one side- or both - are eclipsed in favor of creating an apolitical view of the conflict.

In a required meeting before the Olive Tree Initiative trip, students gather in a darkened conference room in our social sciences wing for a presentation by another student – majoring in cognitive sciences and political science – on the ways that bias affect the brain. We sit at a long table, our darkened faces lit only by the cold light of the projector screen, our silence permeated only by the low hum of the computer fan. The student, Laila, begins by outlining the part of the brain that makes our decisions – where different hormones come together to form our emotional centers. “Seratonin and endorphins create happiness in the brain,” she says. “Oxytocin, the chemical that releases social bonds, is what we have to worry about. What we read and who we interact with affects this chemical, which affects our emotions, and by causing negative or positive emotions towards people, affects our bias. So we have to deny their existence, actively work against these chemicals in the brain to overcome bias.”

This, it seemed, was the foundation of the program’s stance on bias, and along with well-known flags like confirmation bias (only consuming information or interacting with people who align with your own opinions), was purported as a way to foil subjectivity in favor of perfect objective truth. This did not take into account unconscious defense mechanisms used by people who experience trauma to, as a modern scholar on the topic, Rafael Moses, states, “project conflict on to “the other,” allowing “an individual, when he does not wish to face a hostile thought within himself,” to ascribe those thoughts to ‘the other’. It is the other that wants to attack him, to do him in, and many more forms of aggression…. the demonization, or the dehumanization of the enemy.”

Students, by internalizing this ideology via their focus on objective truth - through the eyes of specific disciplines - narrow their focus to only recognize things within the framework of those disciplines “true” or “unbiased.” They may create unconscious defense mechanisms against a point of view unlike their own employed in the name of academic pursuit, instead of merely listening. If bias is not properly addressed and critical thinking about multiple perspectives of academia together is not acknowledged, then diversity in thought is not encouraged. As a result, when students go on an “experiential education trip” during which they are supposed to gain a fuller understanding of multiple perspectives, they are unable to recognize those nuances, and thus, are misdirected in their gathering of information, as I saw with many speakers on both my trips to Israel and Palestine. The organization in question cannot deny biases exist, and they can’t deny the emotion that leads to bias because it is there and very real in this conflict. When the structure of education about the conflict is very clear about biases, students think critically about the perspectives they hear and engage with during the conflict, how the Israel’s and Palestinians see one another, and the inequalities that exist in the conflict at present. Denying bias exists is like putting a blanket over people’s eyes - if bias, or further, opinion doesn’t exist then conflict shouldn’t; therefore, why can’t people just get along? It isn’t like that and it never will be. Denying emotion when there is trauma involved will not only invalidate the traumas of both peoples it will invalidate the inequalities caused by the narrative’s attendant with those traumas. At the same time, the stories or the hopes of the people who tell them cannot be denied. While those stories may be re-traumatizing the teller, they are willing to go through that trauma because they know that someone educated will share their perspective. But all the understanding of history is empty without the emotions and opinion behind that history. Without bias, history, and the history of trauma against both Israelis and Palestinians, cannot breathe, it cannot possibly be understood, and therefore, cannot possibly be solved.

Instead of an amalgamation of students from different backgrounds, religions and connections, the students at the Olive Tree Initiative were all majors or minors in political science or international studies, or were ethnically related to the conflict; they had been recruited by a rigorous application process that entailed lengthy interviews and essays about how you would take specific research and ideas into the trip, whether it be research on water or education, or the effects of narrative and trauma. As a member of this cohort, you were expected to make a substantial contribution to academia after the trip concluded and we returned to the United States. After your return you were also expected to respond in a specific way. Not only was there a less-than diverse group of students involved (which lends itself to a more narrow set of ideas); the ways in which they shared their responses were tailored to the needs of the organization rather than the students who would be making the changes the people on the ground desired.

It is through open curiosity that those present to absorb these narratives will be able to properly process and act on the traumas that are being relayed to them, in hopes of change. Even if that change happens at a more local level, maybe recognizing patterns between the Palestinian or Israeli trauma and the colonial imperialist or ethnic or racial traumas of another minority group, as several people on Fact Finders did, that solidarity still allows for the stories of the people who are willing to bare their souls and their experiences .

While criticisms of the Israeli side encompass the aspects of colonialism, they often become an afterthought, especially in the face of people who ascribe to those beliefs that further the oppression of the Palestinian people. On the Fact Finders trip, while there were biases of both a personal and political discourse, they were clear about where their personal biases stood an what lines those biases did and did not cross, leading to a more organic learning experience, whereas the structure of the Olive Tree Initiative was built to inherently erase bias, thereby excluding issues that are key to the conflict, whether intentionally or not.

Tsippy had been in charge of the Beit Hadassah museum for 10 years now. The renovated house of Jerusalem stone in the Jewish section of Hebron housed her insular community of Hasidic Jews who, according to the history she taught to tourists every day, had belonged to the land since Moses had walked the Earth. Tsippy’s community had thrived in Hebron alongside the Arab majority until 1929, when Arab riots in the then British Mandate spilled into the city, resulting in the torture and massacre of the local pharmacist, rabbis and students. She tells this story each time, of the family that lived in the museum at the time and tried to escape using the ladder on the third floor, still perched outside the window with plaster models. Each time she looks at the fear etched into the porcelain face of the girl on the ladder she thinks of her own father pulled from his bed in the middle of the night and stabbed by an Arab man who was part of that revolt. She had been hiding behind her bedroom door; when the men had gone, she and her mother disappeared into the night. After the revolt, Hebron had remained in Arab hands until Israel’s miraculous success in the Six Day War, which returned her beloved Hebron, and many other cities within Judea and Samaria, to Jewish hands. In 1979, Tsippy, 10 women and 40 children were allowed to return and reside in Hebron, under the protection of the Israeli army. To honor an agreement for mutual recognition signed by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian’s defacto government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ratified the Hebron Protocol, which split the city between Palestinians in Hebron 1 and the small Jewish community in Hebron 2. Guards still roam the city and facilitate frequent drills and checkpoints around Tsippy’s community. Hardly anyone plays in the playground across from the museum or in the street. Some are still afraid of being pushed into the sea.

Haviv, an Israeli journalist who wrote for the Times of Israel, was also afraid to be pushed into the sea – but not by Palestinians. He did not deny the occupation, he didn’t even condone the leadership of Netanyahu, explained by scholars of the day like Gabor Mate as a duality of those who don’t “care about life” and those who do. He knew, as Bunzl did, that “a specific interpretation of the Holocaust had been an important argument for the policy of strength and mistrust vis a vis the world.” He knew his people had been traumatized by the Holocaust, that often leadership employed the Holocaust as justification of their “need for security.” But he knew it wasn’t really about the Holocaust, or about justifications for security. It was about the Western interpretation of Israel’s policies, perpetuated by students like those in front of him.

“You think we don’t need this security. Why? Because you are taught that we orchestrated this. You see AIPAC aligning with “Israeli policy” against “occupation.” That we need them to tell us how to operate within our own political system. But I have no idea what these people are talking about. You are so far removed from Israelis here, in the Middle East. Our party lines are oscillating wildly, and we lose faith in our government every day.”

“The Israelis thought was that, ‘if we give the Palestinians independence, they will leave us alone.’ But the military men, the ones in power now, were the ones pushing this narrative that Israelis are afraid, and Palestinians want them to extricate themselves from the Middle East.”

“You all are anti-Semites.” He let his words hang in the air, let the shock of his statement reverberate off the walls of the hotel conference room where we met him, in Tel Aviv.

He believed that because we bought into the “trauma narratives” of either side, that we are making Jews into victims as well as perpetrators of a conflict that was all about who needed money from the West.

“We were bombed by Palestinians relentlessly. Why does someone kill themselves? For their family? No, they are educated ideologically, they are driven by threats to themselves and their loved ones, by a mythic story of martyrdom. By money coming from the West’s NGOs. Their leaders tell them they are doing it for the other victims of their side, but what victims? They are the ones who don’t clean up their streets. They blame us. You blame us, simply because we are here, on this land.”

The Jewish people base their claims on a few things: First, that God promised the land

to the patriarch Abraham; that Jewish people settled and developed the land; that the international

community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people; that the territory was

captured in “defensive wars.” For the

Palestinians, Israel’s shortcomings are in the fact that even “after occupation, Israel still claims

the violence is perpetuated by the Palestinian side.” Politically, both Palestinian and Israeli leadership have used their narratives to

perpetuate their status of victimhood and their right to self-determination and autonomy. The

Palestinian narrative is that of intimidation and occupation by Israeli forces, which constrains them in all areas of life. This results in a mentality of perpetual victimhood

perpetual victimhood, and the negation of the Palestinian rights to self-determination and

religious, political, and land rights. For Israelis, this narrative centers on the collective trauma

experienced by the Jewish people in the Holocaust, which made them the ultimate victim, but

focuses itself on the resilience of the Jewish people in their ability to adapt and progress in spite

of their trauma. There’s a sense of resilience in the Jewish narrative, and leadership implies

through checkpoints, racial profiling, lack of municipal

services, and constant military surveillance that the Palestinians are not only unwelcome but that they

and really the Arab world as a whole have become stagnant with their perpetual

victimhood, and Israel must be the one to come to their aid occasionally.

For the state of Israel, survival of the Jewish people and culture is the justification for

controversial plans like the settlement movement that has displaced many Palestinians as Israelis

push further into the territory of the West Bank. While the state of Israel promotes prosperity

and the right to exist for its people, and has every right to do so, the Israeli government sanctions

settlements in houses still owned by Palestinians no longer welcome on their own land.

Continued exposure to these narratives and constant reminders of such deep psychological wounds have created the fear of security that leads to physical and emotional violence against the Palestinians.

In order to understand the proper approach to biases in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one must recognize the origins of the Zionist and Palestinian national narratives, as well as the traumas attendant with those realities. In his essay Bunzl declares that “in the Israeli-Palestinian case, both the oppressors and the oppressed cultivate an identity of victimhood” as the “presently and actually strong” - the now state of Israel - “had been, historically speaking, extremely weak” Bunzl suggests they portray themselves as such, “amidst a Muslim Arab ocean.” His reasoning for this continued narrative of victimhood hearkens back to the creation of Zionism as a “negation of exile” and a rejection of stereotypically “Jewish qualities” in favor of something that would come off more like the “strong, beautiful, manly, anti-urban, rooted in the soil” aesthetic that was dominating Europe at the time. Those who were considered aligned with the idea of Zionism as a representation of the “new Jew” were considered part of an “ethnic community.” This aligns with current Jewish views of self as members of a national identity that permeates all aspects of their state, including the marginalization of the Palestinians in favor of an ethno-economic and socio-ethnological state. At the present moment, continued civic and ethnic marginalization of the Palestinian people reinforces the idea of an ethnic state, defined by Ramzi Suleiman as “the product of a controlled process of self-defeating selection from the minority’s collective memory.” That collective memory becomes national narratives, which in the case of the state of Israel leads to retraumatized people and in turn to the eventual politicide of the Palestinian population, meaning that the Palestinians become de facto second-class citizens, divested of all political voice in Israeli society. It is this divestment of political sovereignty that extends to the argument that Palestinians should have statehood of their own. After the second intifadas ended in the early 2000s and Palestinian nationalism became much more unified under a PLO sanctioned narrative of victimhood that had built since the annexation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

Palestinian security forces we met with showed us a Vox video from YouTube about the basics of the conflict, which highlighted massacres of Palestinians by Israeli militias in 1948 such as that of Dar Yassin and highlighted the annexation of the West Bank and subsequent displacement of many Palestinian families. He then told us about instances where the Israeli forces were saying they were collaborating with security, but were actually conducting night raids on his compounds. “What is the difference between a Jew and us? They took the Jewish children into the military, first taught them to be strong, to view us as backstabbers, not to be trusted, and then gave them a gun and stuck them on a checkpoint.”

Camera crews surrounded us, broadcasting our reactions and questions to a Palestinian news station, as proof Americans were listening.

Victimhood is everywhere on both sides, reflecting how close the traumas of the past are to the people, and how damaging the performative aspect of the conflict perpetuates many aspects. With the Walled-Off hotel specifically, it was the voyeuristic qualities of examining the wall, but at the same time it had to be there to support Palestinian painters in the gallery and to bring international attention to the Palestinian cause. Yet – what is the use of such things if the people who are witnessing them do not know how to process them?

For some Israelis there is also the concept of “unconscious guilt,” what manifests today in the guilt at the treatment of Arabs, Arab Israelis and Palestinians “thorough discrimination, lack of respect...in humiliating ways.”. Suleiman argues that it is “impossible for a Jewish Israeli to live in Israel without reacting to the roadblocks which we pass many times, where we were waved on while our Palestinian were submitted to checking of documents, examination of cars, and often humiliating examinations of the persons themselves.” This mirrors experiences I had when at checkpoints on the buses my group took when venturing around Israel proper and the West Bank. I would be passed over every time, but a Palestinian student with us on the trip would always be pulled off the bus for questioning, and once at a border crossing from Jordan into Israel, the Palestinian student, along with others of our group who looked “Arab,” were held for two, almost three hours at the border while the rest of our group waited. In an incident at Ben Gurion Airport leaving Tel Aviv to return to the United States, an officer looked through my pictures and when he came across photos of Palestinians we’d met and of Arabic graffiti on the walls of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah, where I had taken the pictures, he asked whether I knew how to speak Arabic. I answered with a simple, no, I do not understand what they were saying. It was true, as I couldn’t translate the graffiti at the time, but as I was learning to speak Arabic, I had plans to decode the messages at home. The simplest answer sufficed, lest I would also have been subject to questioning

The implication of this is that the Palestinians and really the Arab world as a whole have become

stagnant with their perpetual victimhood and have become reliant on other powers to help them.

The Israeli state sees itself as a benevolent parental figure who is chastising a child “giving them

a slap on the wrist”, according to Gil Hoffman, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post who our group

spoke to on the first day.

On a tour of the Menachem Begin Museum, our group learned about the four pillars that

Begin used to lead Israel into a peace agreement with Egypt. Those values were Zionism, Social

Justice, Independence, and Security. Gil Bringer and Dror Cohen, the two members of the

Knesset with which our group met, were adamant on their use of Begin’s values to bring Israel

closer to peace via a two-state solution. “An autonomous state [for Palestinians] would give them

what they want without harming Israel” said Bringer. Although this perspective acknowledges

the Palestinian desire for self-determination, it does not acknowledge the Palestinian’s right to

return to their homes after what Palestinians consider Israel’s biggest crime, the exile from

their homes and the creation of the Green Line upon Israel’s declaration of statehood. This “right

to return” is seen as a threat to many Israelis, as it would symbolize, for them, the end of a Jewish

state. For Bringer and Dror, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Jews in Israel are not

the same. “Most [who are now living in the West Bank] didn’t have a state, so there was no

national culture. There were tribes settled in that area. After World War II, Jews came from

countries with traditions and created a state around those traditions.”

By settling on the land, Bringer argued, Israelis were bringing Palestinians a culture and a

homeland, and that the Israeli government was also giving benefits like healthcare and other

resources to residents in the West Bank, following Prime Minister Rabin’s vision to “bolster

neighborhoods” and end the “underperforming cycle of poverty,” which also aligned with

Begin’s vision of social justice. Both men brought up the argument that the West Bank, which

Israelis refer to by its Biblical names Judea and Samaria, was land that belonged first to Israel as

ordained by God before it was ever given to the Palestinians, and that per Zionist creed, the

entirety of what is now Israel and the West Bank belongs by divine right to the Jewish people.

While, as a Christian, I did understand their religious claims to the land, I also understood this

view to be problematic, because it follows the trajectory of other colonialist and imperial

narratives throughout history, such as the European claims to Africa and the American notions of

Manifest Destiny. At the same time, however, this conflict does not fit the traditional mold

because both the Arabs and the Israelis have an ancient, centuries-old, indigenous claim to the

land outside of the claims attributed to them by the international community.

Moses elaborates on how these projections of victimhood onto the self “allows the members of that group to view those of the other group as less than human...therefore, they are not as good as we are, not as human or humane; hence, we the members of our group are allowed to ‘defend’ ourselves and do things to the other which, were he more human and less demonic, our conscience would not allow us to do.” The whole view of the enemy then, he argues, is “distorted in a way which makes it possible for the leaders of that society to mobilize its people against this wicked enemy”. Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians in this context represents what the Knesset members and even what Tsippy believed that they will forever be entrenched in the victimhood of the Holocaust. In her article Healing the Wounds of Our Fathers, Connely explains this mentality as the “death of time,” a communal sense of loss experienced through generations, explicitly applied to the trauma felt during the Holocaust. She and additional scholars implicate these traumas in the creation of “Holocaust survivors that helped “mobilize public opinion throughout the world in favor of Zionist objectives,” and that “it was this public opinion which enabled the Yishuv to place the question of a Jewish state on the international agenda.”

The idea of trust and being demolished by torture, the destruction of the empathetic bond, and particularly the idea that whoever has been tortured remains so, are veins of trauma and ramifications of that trauma that “lie at the heart of the Israeli nation” and in many ways define its national character, and thus, its response not only to its own Zionist nature but to the nature and being of the Palestinians themselves.

“Trauma, as we know from PTSD, is a clinically-established phenomenon that can manifest whenever the suffering individual perceives existential threat. The problem is that this former threat may or may not be real today.

Objectively, Israel with its military might and nuclear power is one of the most formidable forces in the world; however, the irrational aspects of insecurity persist, nourished rather than managed, treated and healed”. The state recycles these narratives of trauma, with “an identity forged by its enemies and reinforced by the state’s religious, education, military and cultural institutions along with the trauma narrative,” so that “Israelis are not open to seeing themselves in new ways. Those who suggest such alternatives are often “dismissed as hostile to Israel and included among the expanding number of enemies. As George W. Bush put it: “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” In conversation with Mate, one concludes that, “in Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators, and that “the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, “a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution” .

On that day in 2003, Ron lost a daughter. Tal was 18, she was organizing a party for her senior graduation when she received a phone call from her friend, Liz. 9 words. “Would you like to go to the mall?” They took Bus 87 on Moriah Street. A suicide bomber was on board. There had been Tal, her friend Liz Katzmann, the tourists across from them in the aisle. Next to the tourists, sat the man who would end his daughter’s life. Ron committed every detail he could get to memory. Years later, he was asked whether he hates the Arabs. “Politics doesn’t know individuals,” he would say, meeting with our group, his gruff voice, thick with tears. “Once you know the individual then, you can like or dislike. They give the bomber celebrations of martyrdom, pressure then, as my daughter sits in her grave. How can a mother, whose son committed suicide, celebrate the day that my daughter was killed? My daughter’s death didn’t take anything from the Arabs. It did nothing for them.” But he knows that behind every shaky sip of water he takes as he tells his story to tourist and educational groups, there is the memory of that night. At least, he got to see her face. At least he knows.

On this day, he met with the Olive Tree Initiative. He wore his everyday attire – tan shorts, black sandals, grey t-shirt. The group met him at Tal’s grave. Another day to tell her story.

We’d been advised he would hide behind politics, and so he did, taking shaky sips from his water bottle every time he hazarded a mention of his daughter.

The pain is part of him now. It’s either a stone lying on his heart, or sometimes, it chokes him.

He believes they targeted Haifa, the city where he lives, for its diversity. Our group was in the city, and in Israel and Palestine at large, to engage and learn about the realities of Israelis and Palestinians.

A question from the crowd: “what is your experience of Jordanians and regional actors? Are you against all Arabs?” A conversation about identity ensued. Ron asks the student’s ethnicity. Jordanian. “Well, no, you see…” he begins to explain. But what about Persians? Iran? Identity politics eclipse Ron’s story, pushing back against ideas of cultural bias that Ron gained as a result of his trauma.

He has time to tell us how he has used his pain to propel the book of memorials he wrote with the other fathers of victims. Whenever he can talk about her, he does. He hands out navy blue business cards with gold writing, an inscription from Tal’s diary two days before she was killed. It reads: “People tend to disregard happiness, and I think I know why. Because, when you are happy, you do not care why, and you do not deal with it too much, but when you’re sad, you think of it and analyze why you are sad, instead of let it be, let it go and be happy again.”

His last memory of her was her smile and laughter at dinner. She liked camels, and writing, and she wanted there to be good in the world. She was only 18, taking the bus to the mall. He’d received a call from her before they got on the bus. What he and his wife saw on the television couldn’t be her. She had a driving lesson, her first, that afternoon. The driving instructor hadn’t seen her, she wasn’t picking up their calls. Tal was punctual. She wouldn’t be late. The coroner called. He and his wife got in a taxi cab, still calling the instructor, hoping. They identified her by her teeth.

When Ron told me his memories of his daughter, the others were gathering on to the bus. We stood under the shade of the trees, behind us the graves of other terror victims, and beyond that, the sea. He put his hand on my shoulder, tears brimming in his eyes with an unfathomable pain and said, “You made me relive these memories. Thank you.”

Ron’s present-day trauma is no different than that of every other person we met on the trip, yet he was not able to share his full story with everyone in my group because they were not able to use the knowledge they had supposedly gained of conflict resolution to ease into difficult conversations. When he was able to tell me what had happened to his daughter, and recall his last and happiest memories, he found a way to transfer some of that pain, to share and then disseminate the pain, so that maybe from tragedy, there can be change.

The day before we visited Ron, we’d visited Umm Ahmad, a widow. Her son had been a journalist. He photographed an Israeli tank as it rolled toward his village. They shot him in the chest. The video is on YouTube. Many years later, his father would be killed by a soldier. Shot in the kidney on his doorstep. Candles still surround a mural with his picture, hanging on the old stone wall. Umm Ahmad is a widow now. She made a charity in his name, and partnered with activists to share the wrongs that lead to deaths like her son’s. Many do that here, and hope for justice.

Umm Ahmad had gone the way of activism. She, like Ron, continues to invoke the name of her son whenever groups like ours come, but otherwise, there is no recourse for their pain.

We learned about the difficulties Palestinians in West Bank refugee camps have getting secure access to basic health care and water needs and how many were forced to leave their homes. We learned how many Israelis live in fear of their physical security and that of their home. Both fears come from traumatic histories and tragic connections to the conflict, and in trying to process that pain, created communities where they could share their story, groups of Palestinians and Israelis. The Parent’s Circle is one of these groups, a non-profit that describes itself as “the only organization in the world that doesn’t want to add members to its fold.” They seek to stop the violence perpetrated against families like that of Umm Ahmad and Ron through “dialogue meetings” between Palestinians and Israelis facilitated by members to share “their personal stories of bereavement and explain their choice to engage in dialogue instead of revenge.” None was a better example of this than Ben Kfir, who spoke with us about his depression after losing his daughter.

“It was so easy to take revenge,” he told us. He could just pick up the gun and go shoot the men who killed his daughter. It would be easy. The worst that could happen? They’d kill him. It’s not that big of a loss. But what kind of man would that make him? No better than the men with bombs, he supposed. There would only be more grief in his wake. More parents like him. More sons and daughters dead.

Finding this group made him realize there was a way forward, one that has a possibility for reconciliation.

On October 4, 2003, Maxim Restaurant was targeted because it is owned by Christians, Muslims and Jews. Square windows the size of walls look out to the vast blue ocean, like the pools of blood, everywhere. The restaurant owner remembers the light, the ringing, the bodies of his friends, his family. He knew the eyes of his workers, of the children who had been running around the tables near the door - they were so full of love only moments ago – now, they stared, vacant. He cannot forgive and cannot forget. He can only exist inside the big thing, and learn to live with it. He closed the eyes of his workers. He almost closed the restaurant. But what message would that send? When the dust from the blast settled, Christian and Muslim blood mingled, indistinguishable in death.

In the wake of that dust, groups had come to the restaurant to gaze out at the ocean, to look across the road to the memorial that remembers the lives lost the day the pregnant woman had come in to the restaurant with not her unborn child, but a bomb. OTI had come there for lunch after our meeting with Ron, and immediately sat down to discuss the implications. The series of tables that were pushed together to accommodate the group’s large size seemed to push in on me, seated at the center and pushing my food around on my plate, contemplating the waves rolling outside the restaurant. Pieces of conversation broke my reverie about Ron’s confession to me: “But when you consider Jordan’s involvement in the 1967 war…I’d understand why Ron would have disliked Arabs…I was so annoyed that he didn’t talk more about his daughter. I was bored to death with the politics.”

But it was not about the politics. It was in fact, about the traumas that Ron had experienced with the loss of his daughter. It was about the collective traumas experienced by Umm Ahmad about the people in her community who have a discontinuity between past present and future, as traumas continue to happen to them, and narratives continue to be created around both her and Ron’s struggles.

It was a common saying on our trip that everyone we met had lost someone or knew someone who’d lost people close to them. Both sides are losing so much, and from so much violence. After Ron told me his story, it occurred to me that maybe remembrance is the way towards healing – connecting Israelis and Palestinians to one another through common tragedy. Every person we spoke to took their time and their energy to share with us, in hopes that we would retell their stories, and through accounts of grief or otherwise, be able to transcend the violence perpetrated by both sides.

The traumas of Palestinians that continues in the face of occupation by Israel causes many families to suffer humiliations. Our tour guide through Bethlehem, Raed, was a Palestinian Christian. His wife was Israeli, which throughout the years had caused a number of problems at checkpoints. One incident he remembered well, and narrated to our group, occurred on the night his daughter was born. His wife had gone into labor at the family’s residence in Bethlehem. When they drove to the checkpoint which crosses into Jerusalem, a towering concrete structure with guard towers housing IDF soldiers with guns, Raed was not allowed to drive his wife across the border to the nearest hospital in Jerusalem, and while in labor, she was forced to drive herself all the way to the hospital. Now Raed lives separately from his family – his two daughters and his wife live in Jerusalem while he remains in Bethlehem. The family owns two cars, one for Raed while he works in Bethlehem and one for his wife to pick him up when he walks across the checkpoint. At least, he said, they no longer had to exchange license plates on the car, so he could drive no matter what side of the border they were on. When they travel outside the US, he isn’t allowed to leave the country with his family because as a Palestinian he cannot travel through Ben Gurion and is not allowed to be seen driving with Israelis without coming under suspicion. He has to travel instead to Jordan where he catches a plane in the capital city of Amman, meeting the rest of his family at their destination. On his documents registering him as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, he is single. Because his family is registered with the state as Israeli, they are not legally allowed to be on his travel documents; leaving them on his documents would arouse suspicion. Every time he crosses checkpoints with his children he is humiliated by Israeli guards. The children are getting to the age now, almost teenagers, where they are beginning to ask questions – why must their family be treated differently? He doesn’t know what to tell them.

When I returned from Israel and Palestine, it was with a sense of purpose. I felt that I could publish these stories and further their voice to audiences they would not otherwise be able to reach, as speaker after speaker implored us to do. Even if, with the constant repetition of their traumas, with each retelling they seemed to cling to a certain hope that we would be the generation to create peace. Such is the perspective of many of my acquaintances state-side, who adamantly declare that I will, somehow, singlehandedly be the one to “solve peace in the Middle East.” It was not until I came to think about my own hesitation in sharing the stories I heard that I considered the great challenge it must be to retell and retell these traumas with the hope that each new face will be the one to change the trend of violence (while I was in the region my group had the chance to speak to Khalil Shikaki, a famed statistician in the Middle East, who said the current numbers indicate a strong and continuous trend towards violence). In this way, these people are never allowed to move past their traumas – Umm Ahmad will always be weeping for her son, Ron will always be reliving the moments he discovered his daughter was dead – hoping no one else will have to do the same, if not now, in the near future.

Nowadays, young people in the region are beginning to take their narrative into their own hands, even as the West encroaches further on both Israelis and Palestinians to continue towing the conflict they both seek to end.

The debate over the status of Jerusalem as a Palestinian and Arab or an Israeli

controlled city is the prime example of the claim that both recognize for their own groups but

will not acknowledge for one another. The international community, especially the current US

administration and the European union, are vying for an opportunity to put their stamp on the

Holy City.

“No country has the right to declare another’s capital,” said Shmuel, a member of OC

Hillel and organizer of their Jewish Education program there.

“Trump did not declare the capital, he recognized it.” To Shmuel, Jerusalem has always

been the capital of Israel; the embassies were placed in Tel Aviv strictly because of

conflict of interest. “Previous administrations have supported Israel, but Trump was the first to

actually create an additional embassy [in Jerusalem] and take action on that support.”

In the Public Affairs office of what is left of the Tel Aviv embassy, a blue and gold

crested plaque hangs on an otherwise banal beige wall, poised next to a smiling frame of

President Donald Trump. It reads United States Embassy, Jerusalem, Israel. Under the “L” in

Jerusalem, the golden rimmed badge is gouged white, blemishing what would be a perfect

monument.

Shmuel was in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for six years; while in the IDF he was in

charge of moving people through the controversial checkpoints that dot the security wall

between the West Bank and Israel. He struggled with his need to keep his country safe and the

racial profiling which occurs at the border checkpoints. “They are our enemies, but they are also

human,” he said. “It is only a few people who are bombing us, but we must keep the wall to

protect our people from those few who want to destroy us.”

It is not the case that either of these narratives are completely false –Israel has just as much a

right to security and survival as Palestinians have to self-determination - but neither side is

willing to accept the others’ perspective and are quick to dismiss their point of view outright as

fiction. This denial results in the perpetuation of rights denied Palestinians and violence

perpetuated on the state of Israel in what Yossi Klein Halevi, author of “Letters to my Palestinian

Neighbor” calls a “cycle of denial”.

To make progress towards ending this cycle of denial, local people in both Israel and the West

Bank have started programs to facilitate dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, some of

which the group had the opportunity to visit during our trip. One of these places was the

Taghyeer Palestinian Nonviolence Center, where Ali Abu Awwad and his family keep up a farm

and retreat center to facilitate dialogue between diverse groups of Arab Israelis. Their mission,

according to their website, focuses on “purposeful nonviolent actions on the ground in which

Palestinians will find their power to become decision-makers and agents of their own liberation

by transcending the limiting narrative of victimhood and the competition of suffering, develop

the skill of adapting and managing anger at intolerable conditions, rather than being controlled

by that anger.”

Awwad talked of their focus on education as one of the main skills to cultivate that nonviolent

action. “Everyone involved in this national conflict had to study, learn languages and go to

libraries to be here. Making peace doesn’t mean to sign a paper. It must be part of daily life.”

Other centers for shared society we visited had similar motives, but none was so impactful as

Givat Haviva, an educational center for the promotion of a shared society between Israelis and

Arabs in Israel. At the center, we spoke with young people like ourselves who are working

towards an Israeli society more equitable towards Arabs and Palestinians.

The center is just off the main highway running along the border, a strategic location

meant to be accessible to Palestinians, Arab Israelis and Jews alike. The staff was immensely

friendly, welcoming us into the space and offering us an abundance of food and smiles. At Givat

Haviva, educational programs are set up for tourist groups and Israelis alike, to learn anything

from Jewish history to Arabic lessons, to career skills and classes in conflict resolution –

anything that students may need to take their vision into the globalized world.

We met Israeli college-aged youth in a group rotation style discussion, where each group of

four began with a topic and discussed our respective experiences, finding common ground and

creating a dialogue. With Haneen, an English and education major at Al-Quasemi College, my

group of four discussed the ways in which media, education and experience can either narrow or

expand our perspectives, especially when government has a role in the curriculum. As an

education major, Haneen felt teachers should discuss topics outside of the Israel-centric

curriculum and include “the Arab Palestinian side” of the story, so that students can be exposed

to the multiple narratives which make up a single truth. Leila, the niece of Givat Haviva director

Riad Kabha, will be attending Tel Aviv University this semester as a major in Political Science

and English. Already a prominent activist for Palestinian rights and dialogue, she plans to create

a network of activism in her university.

At the time of the trip, Leila had just returned from a visit to Canada and New York where

she was asked to present on her experiences as a resident of Barta’a, a city split by the Green

Line, the border between Israel and the West Bank. The city was divided after the 1956 Sinai

war. “It divided our families, and we had to choose one – our country or our family,” said Kabha.

Leila and Mr. Kabha’s family was, and still is, one of the founding families of the village.

Consequently, Leila and her uncle have a foot in two worlds, literally. The only visible border

between the Israeli and West Bank sides of the line was a simple sign outside a doctor’s office

reading “You are now entering the Palestinian Authority.”

Jerash refugee camp near Amman, Jordan, was built 1968, after the West Bank and Gaza were ceded to Israel. Many of the 29,000 residents of the camp are descended from Gazans who made their way across the state of Israel and the West Bank into Jordan after they were forced into exile during the 1967 war. They don’t hold citizenship in either Egypt or Jordan, because the kingdom would not allow them to become citizens when they were still considered “Egyptian” after the war. Now, they are stateless, but still some families consider themselves fully Jordanian, like Abdullah’s family, with whom I shared a meal in the house the family built themselves. The walls were a faded lilac, the narrow entranceway confronting you with sturdy wooden stairs. To the left, a concrete-floored room devoid of furniture except patterned cushions on the floor. The walls were bare, and we ate on a lace tablecloth spread across the length of the room.

The houses in the camp, much like that of Abdullah family, are meant to be chipping in some places. There is always a mindset that now is temporary, this home and life are but nothing compared to the moment we will take our old keys and turn them in the locks of the homes we left behind. Abdullah’s mother is Palestinian, his father a Jordanian citizen. She would go back to Palestine if she had the chance, even without her family. They don’t want to leave. All they know is Jordan.

Abdullah wants to be a fashion designer. He works retail in Amman, and has always had a knack for colors. He likes to create a picture with his clothes. He is 16, and he hopes one day he can take his retail business and use the money to help his family be able to improve their house, and maybe go to America for trade school. He works a full day at the shop and then comes home to do his school work. Sometimes, he will go to the cinema to watch the English films. He knows, like all the children of the camps, that education is the only way.

Amna’s favorite horror movie was The Grudge. She watched it over and over until she could form words, and then sentences in English. She realized, like many students coming up in refugee camps, that learning English was the way to education. She got herself through university in computer science, and returned to the camp to start a non-profit, which helps girls learn computer skills and provides tutoring services. For these kids who have grown up knowing nothing but the conflict, they see a way for their peoples to stop fighting.

Is the answer as simple as dialogue that leads to a shared society, as mutual respect of the

other’s historical trauma? As hope? Does changing the narrative to one of acceptance require the

sacrifice of a fundamentally Jewish state, or forgoing the rights of the Palestinians to have self

determination and return to the houses they still have keys to? These are, admittedly, questions I

do not have answers to, but for now, dialogue seems to be the best way to work towards a

solution. By being in Israel and the West Bank, we let all the people we talked to know that they

matter, their individual stories and experiences matter, that we, like the young people at Givat

Haviva, are working towards understanding. The question now is

whether the new generations can come to a peaceful solution, and whether those on the outside

are willing to listen and engage as we did. As Ali Abu Awwad, founder of Taghyeer Palestinian Nonviolence

Center said, “If Jewish people have a truth here, we also have a truth here. So,

peace is a place where two truths can fit together in one place.”

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