Traveling around Israel Israel

Recently, someone commented that I haven't really made any attempt to see or write about the Israeli side of the conflict. This is true, although I think my focusing on what is being done to Palestinians is justified by the fact that I'm writing mostly to Americans, who through the billions of their tax dollars that go to military aid to Israel are playing a large roll enabling the occupation and the continual settlement expansion that it makes possible. The fact that America is such a large financial contributor to Israel means not only do we share in the responsibility of what is being done with that money, but that we have the ability to apply significant pressure on Israel to change its policies of settlement expansion in the West Bank (i.e. colonization) should the American public begin to care enough. The U.S. does not support Palestinian terrorist groups, has much less ability to apply political pressure on them, and the American public already has an almost uniformly negative view of them. Hence I feel less driven to spend my limited time here witnessing and reporting on their wrongdoings...

However, I do think a major fault with many Palestinian activists is that they don't really understand Israelis, or what think and how they view the conflict. Hell, one year ago I was sure most Israelis really wanted to keep as much of the West Bank as possible, and to grow the settlements as much as they could. Don't get me wrong, I still think the Israeli right and those in power definitely do, but it wasn't until I spent a lot of time talking to Oren and other pro-Israeli-policy activists (I hate characterizing people with the opposing views as 'Pro-Israel', there is nothing inherently anti-Israel about saying that Israel shouldn't be grabbing more and more West Bank land, and that they should give Palestinians a real state. I'm pretty sure the Israelis working on human rights issues in the West Bank that I have met don't consider themselves 'Anti-Israel') that I realized that MOST Israelis could care less about grabbing more West Bank land, that they really only support the occupation because they are afraid of Palestinian violence if the Israeli army pulls out. And that really changed the way I think about a lot of things, and what I think the best way to approach the conflict is. Basically what I'm trying to say is dialog is important, and that if we talked to and got to know one another, we might find that the gap between what the majority on both sides will find acceptable is smaller than we think.

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ANYWAY, for those reasons, and just out of my own curiosity, I spent a weekend a little while ago with Elie jumping around Tel Aviv, Sderot, Ashqelon, and Haifa. Sderot, the town right next to the Gaza strip that gets bombarded with homemade rockets on a regular basis, was especially eye opening. Every children's park and bus stop had a bomb shelter next to it, the school had a giant concrete canopy over it. The people we were staying with told us that at some points they would be getting 70-100 sirens a day and they would have to run into the stairwell or a bomb shelter or something. Their windows got blown out at least once. They are happy that there is only a rocket every week or so now. And while they said they don't know many people that got injured or killed from them, they know several people who have been traumatized by it, that are just freaked out or stressed out all the time. Obviously no innocent person should ever have to live like that...

These people we stayed with were probably the chillest people I've met out here. It was like being back home in IV for a night, which I really, really needed. I felt more at home there than I have anywhere out here. It was kind of an Israeli Biko, a bunch of semi-hippies and artists going to the nearby college, just super hospitable super welcoming people. It was one of their birthdays so they were kind of having a little get together, and people were just passing around drinks and a few joints, playing music, just people having a good time joking around. Ah and this one dude was AMAZING on the guitar, if any of you know who Umm Kulsum is he could play that on the guitar, not to mention improvised flamenco, and even Super Mario themes;) We didn't really delve too deep into anything political, but they did express sympathy for the people in Gaza, that if it was like hell in Sderot they couldn't even imagine what it was like there. I have no idea whether they supported the war there or not, but they definitely weren't people that were happy about the idea of people getting bombed. The whole time I was sitting with these people, I kept thinking how most Palestinians I've met think that no Israelis want peace, that they are all against them, and I couldn't stop thinking just how wrong they were. Someone back in the states told me once that Sderot was "almost like a settlement," and I couldn't stop thinking how wrong that was as well, that while I'm sure getting bombed all the time generates a high percentage of right wing nutballs, this is just a normal town with many normal people. The people here aren't settlers going out of their way to harm Palestinians and confiscate their property, the people I met were just trying to live their lives...

Palestinians, and even some Palestinian activists including myself a year ago, are not aware that the majority of Israelis are like this, that they really do only support the occupation out of fear, and not out of greed. I would like to think that if more people on the Palestinian side became aware of this, that they would come to the conclusion that an explicitly completely non-violent struggle that makes no threats to Israel proper, and employs only demonstrations and extreme civil disobedience (like physically tearing down a wall separating them from their lands or blocking roads to settlements with their bodies) would be the most intelligent, not to mention moral, course of action.