Sunday following the free morning, we heard a presentation on the challenges of equal education in Jaffa. The speakers were, as I recall, a superintendent from the public system and a principal of a private school in Jaffa. There are separate curricula in separate schools - for Jews and for Arabs. But it's not quite that simple. The Jewish schools are actually mixed and Arab families often perceive (rightly or wrongly) that these schools are better and so transfer their kids into these schools. At a certain critical mass of Arab students, the Jewish families tend to want a more Jewish environment and transfer their kids out. We heard about the challenge of devising appropriate curricula for the respective student bodies, funding challenges, and so on. I hesitate to write more on this presentation, important and interesting to me though it was. I was listening only with half an ear because I was busy preparing my remarks for the film introduction I was tasked to offer later that afternoon.

What caught my full attention, and that of everyone else, was when Adar Cohen, a fellow whose job is supervision of civic education in the Israeli educational system, was invited to comment following the presenters' session on education in Jaffa. In his remarks, Adar tried to convey why separate school systems for Jews and Arabs in Israel make sense in Israeli society. He described the system as "segregated." As one might imagine, his arguments were completely uncompelling to the group. The term "segregation" set off alarm bells. Adar's comments were a good example of how hard it was to convey the reality of Israeli society to this group of (mostly) outsiders. On the other hand, Jeremy Gunn, among the most broadly educated and experienced fellows, offered valuable comments from his experience around the world that countries striving to offer parallel, that is, separate, but equal education systems for different populations do not have a good record of success. That is, that these systems typically demonstrate what was famously established in American law, that "Separate but equal is inherently unequal."

Procedurally, Adar's comments were interesting because here he was, a fellow, being put in a position to represent Israeli policy. I was upset when some fellows, in response to my concerns about the lack of balance in the program, described his presence as an example of structural balance. I completely disagreed. A fellow should be a fellow - a learner - and should not be burdened with presenting a balanced view that is lacking in the structure of the program.

One fellow, Jeremy Lowe, posed a question - a challenge - to Adar during his remarks. Having been to Ram'allah that morning, Jeremy (and the other three fellows who traveled with him) was profoundly disturbed by what he'd seen. In the remaining days of the program, he described his morning visit to Ram'allah as the most powerful and affecting experience he had on the whole trip. What he saw was a city that is effectively a prison - surrounded by fencing and barbed wire - and its population prisoners. I wasn't there and I didn't see what he did, but clearly his encounter with the reality of the walled off life in the West Bank was very troubling to him. So he took the opportunity of Adar's comments on education in Israel to challenge Adar with the moral burden Occupation in general. After all, Adar is not only an Israeli citizen but a public servant. It was a pretty outrageous comment and surprising from Jeremy, who is a remarkably bright, educated, and thoughtful person (PhD candidate in religion at Emory). Later that evening Adam called Jeremy out on it and reminded the group to respect the ground rules of mutual respect for everyone in the program.

It was in the aftermath of Adam's rebuke to the group (Stavros, a lovely Greek Cypriot fellow described us all as being like "wet cats" in the wake of Adam's reprimand - I'm not sure I agree but I thought it a great comment!) that I was to introduce the screening of Eyes Wide Open. Time was short - discussions had gone long after the presentations. I offered what amounted to a glossary of the film - so people would have some concept of the value systems and practices of the Haredi world that the film showed. The film is very beautiful and sad, actually. A tragic love story of a man whose heart and soul open up when he allows himself to express his same-sex love, but whose life in community and family, of course, cannot bear that expression.

Following the film - and this is what I was so busy with in the morning - I took the few minutes I had available to me in the morning to share with the group some of the insanity, on the one hand, and tremendous openness, on the other evident in Israeli society with regard to homosexuals. For the insanity, I showed this famous picture http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/31/international/worldspecial/31gay.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=gay+march+jerusalem+united+religious+leaders+opposition&st=nyt (at Adam's suggestion) from the unified opposition of the clerical leaders in Jerusalem to the proposed 2005 Gay Pride parade (who else but gays can unify perpetual enemies?) and also this terrible image (scroll down to see the key picture) http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3926502,00.html of Haredi protesters who appealed to the courts (and lost) in their attempt to bring donkeys to this year's Gay Pride Parade, as they had last year. For the openness and hopefulness, I brought websites of several gay organizations in Israel, for the secular and the observant and also cited the IDF's record of facilitating the rescue and asylum applications of gay Palestinians. I mentioned the ways in which the challenge of gay identity in Israel reflects the divide between the traditional and the secular... My agenda was to show that Israel actually is progressive and protective of individual rights, and not only a discriminatory entity. I got positive feedback on my presentation, though there was so little actual time, or mental space, available for it that it came and went quickly in the context of the program.

In my week of vacation after the program I got to spend some time with volunteers who are leading some of the efforts to further expand opportunities for gay Jews in Israel. Here is their website: http://havruta.org.il/english. Tremendous.

More later.

Shabbat in Tel Aviv, Migrant Workers, Education, and Gays

On Shabbat morning Adam, the Fischers (board member) and I went to Yakar, a liberal Orthodox shul in Tel Aviv. I was familiar with Yakar from Jerusalem and didn't know they had a Tel Aviv "branch." The nicest piece for me was being invited to daven Shacharit. When the fellows arrived the rabbi met with them to answer questions about the shul and Judaism, and then they joined the service for Musaf and kiddush. On the plus side, lots of questions about what a Tallit is, they liked the musicality, they liked the food. On the down side, the (wonderful) fellow in our group, Sajida, who wears a head scarf (interesting story) felt that she was shunned by several by virtue of her dress. (She felt this much more intensely on the streets of Tel Aviv where she felt that some pedestrians would not answer her requests for directions and the like by virtue of her head scarf.)

We heard a lecture from a visiting staff person, Nira Yuval Davis, about an approach to dialogue that seeks to avoid the rigid assumptions of identity politics from an earlier period. Her approach is called Transversal Dialogues.

Later on Shabbat we heard a presentation from a former UN commander who has served in the Balkan conflicts. Among his points was the impossibility of assuring peace among conflicting sides when there is no commitment to cease hostilities between them.

We then heard a dispiriting presentation from an Israeli Jewish woman whose cause is protecting the rights of migrant workers in Israel. The story of migrant workers (Phillipinos, Thai, Ghanaians) in Israel is well-documented: after the Intifadas, when Israel no longer felt safe employing Palestinian workers, it began to issue visas for foreign workers. Short-sighted legislation and lax enforcement of laws to protect laborers have created a situation in which many such workers in construction or farming are at best indentured servants. The Israeli government and society needs their labor but fears their implications for the Jewish demographics of Israel. Thus, many are legal for a few years but stay on permanently (though at risk of deportation) without status. The situation is pretty awful and the Knesset has not stepped up to the plate to normalize workers' immigrant status.

After this cheery episode the group went to mass at a Catholic cathedral in Jaffa which caters to migrant workers in the area. I missed the mass because it was too far to walk on Shabbat afternoon, but joined the group in the cathedral afterwards and for dinner next.

Sunday morning we were off but I spent it viewing the film Eyes Wide Open - עיניים פקוחות because I was to present it to the group that night. It's an Israeli film (fiction) from 2009 about a gay relationship between two men in Me'ah She'arim. (Here's the NY Times review http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/movies/05eyes.html and here it is on Netflix - not yet available but you can save it for rental later http://www.netflix.com/WiSearch?oq=eyes+wi&v1=Eyes+Wide+Open&search_submit=.)

Each year the Summer School looks for an opportunity to present on gay issues as increasing gay visibility tends to be a challenge to patterns of coexistence in traditional societies. Four members of the group took the opportunity of an open morning to hop in a taxi driven by a relative of one of our presenters and go see Ram'allah. Their visit became important later.

NY Times article about the trip

Here is the link to a short article by BBC reporter Nick Thorpe, who, together with two of his sons, was on our trip for the week in Cyprus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/world/europe/16iht-letter.html?_r=2&ref=europe

An unhappy look at Jaffa

Final photos from the program.

Click the photo to see the album.

It is now Monday night, August 16th. The program ended a week and a half ago, on August 4th. Since then, I spent an additional week in Israel with friends and returned late Wednesday night / Thursday, finally arriving back at my apartment in Brookline in the evening of August 12th. Before any more time passes I want to complete my presentation of the ISSRPL program in this blog and wrap things up. Here we go:

On Friday, July 30th we visited an Arab community center of sorts in Jaffa. We heard from a lawyer and a professor, and also from a sheikh. This was the morning of hearing what life in Jaffa looks and feels like from the Arab perspective. It wasn't pretty. One thing I did not know previously was that fully 95% of Jaffa's population prior to Israel's War of Independence was vacated from the city - either by flight or expulsion. Many tens of thousands of people. Thus, the country's most important Arab city - politically, commercially and culturally - was shut down.

In 1950 the city ceased to exist as an independent entity and was incorporated into the new We also heard about the forced relocation of the remaining Arab population from their homes into vacant homes in a specific quarter in the neighborhood. These relocations happened more than once. There were also Arabs from outside the city who were transplanted by Israel into the city. It seems the new neighborhood was (is?) fenced off. Families were scattered. We learned, too, about Israel's laws by which it readily deems private property as abandoned and assumes ownership of that property. With that, we learned of Israel's very grudging granting of new building permits to Arabs, in Yaffo and elsewhere, resulting in highly problematic housing situations and leaving Arabs with little choice but to build illegally and risk having their new structures demolished by the state. Whole neighborhoods of Arab Jaffa were bulldozed by Israel over the years (Israel's explanation is that the housing was decrepit and needed to be cleared) and Jews from all over were transplanted into formerly Arab Jaffa. From the Arab perspective, the whole Arab character and substance of the city were erased over time. There was more, none of it good. With coexistence being the overarching concern of our program, our learning on this particular morning painted a picture of a broken minority society on the one hand, and public policies by the majority, on the other, that provided few promising means for healthy rebuilding.

At one point, visiting the Old City of Jaffa, we saw historical markers put up by Israel to tell the story of the place. First of all, the markers are printed in Hebrew, English, and several European languages, but not in Arabic. Further, that Jaffa had once been an major and important Arab city was not mentioned at all. This was indicative of something we talked about repeatedly on the program: the story, or narrative one tells about the past points to one's vision of the future: if the historical markers are to be trusted (which is debatable) Israel does not recognize an Arab claim on Jaffa of any sort. It does not "see" the Arab past there, and presumably does not "see" an Arab present or future there. At a minimum, the erasure of the long Arab history from the public story of Jaffa was very disrespectful, given the continued presence of Arabs in the city and in Israel.

My fatigue had the better of me when the sheikh spoke, but I listened intently when he insisted that Jews are only a religious group and not a people. The implications of his understanding are enormous - he would happily return to the condition under the Ottomans when Jews were a tolerated religious minority. The gap between Jewish self-understanding and this Muslim's understanding of Jews was unbridgeable and worrying.

Our day included a visit to the Hassan Beq Mosque, now incongruously adjacent to the David Intercontinental Hotel facing the beach, when previously it was a center point of a neighborhood that no longer exists. We went for Friday prayers but most of us, being non-Muslims, had to wait in the garden outside the mosque itself but within the gates of the property. Following the prayers a sheikh told us about the history of the place.

We had an outstanding lunch back at the community center. What could be bad about an enormous tray of flavorful rice with pieces of fried potato and eggplant mixed in?

In the later afternoon we had a terrific program which, unfortunately, I mostly missed. A Jewish Israeli doctoral student in philosophy, and an Arab Israeli pursuing a different academic decree, took us on a walking tour of Jaffa and, at each of three stops, told the story of the place from the Jewish and Arab perspectives. At the port, for example, we heard from the Jewish guide about the Jewish history of the port going back to Solomon importing materials for the Temple through the port and about the waves of Jewish immigrants coming through the port in the 20th century. From the Arab guide, we heard about the enormous export operations Arabs ran through Jaffa prior to Israeli independence. We also heard about expulsions of Arabs to the north and south on ships sailing from Jaffa. Adam and I had to leave early to get back to the hotel in time for Shabbat. Adam and his family and me, together with a Jewish board member of the Summer School and his wife, had Shabbat dinner (following T'fillot) at the hotel. The rest of the group dined out on their own.

Worried as I was about imbalance in the program, a fellow on the program from Cyprus urged me to have more confidence in the group's capacity to listen and observe critically to what we all heard and saw. A good caution.

Alas, it will take me still more time to finish my review of the program. More another night.

Joel

From Cyprus to Israel

I found that sitting and writing while still on the program proved impossible. Our days were too long, I was too tired, I wanted to spend free time with the other fellows and not with the computer... On the Israel portion of the program all of that was true, but it was also the case that my feelings were so intense I didn't know where to begin.

It's now Friday morning (the program ended on Wednesday) and I'm in Tel Aviv, meeting a friend later today and hanging out with my hosts' dog, Max. So I figured I'd sum things up.

We had several full days in Cyprus that I never described here, though I've provided some photos. There were remarkable experiences:

Seeing Turkey's self-interested investments in the TRNC: on the one hand, they give material improvement to the "independent" state, but on the other hand they further blur the distinction between the TRNC and Turkey itself. Our guides explained that Turkey is using the TRNC as a bargaining chip for entry into the European Union: Admit Turkey and Turkey will soften or relinquish its hold on northern Cyprus.

The visit to the Sufi center in Lefke, northern Cyprus was memorable. It's not a single building but a compound, houses attached to other houses with pathways and courtyards between them. A group of male German travelers who have become Sufi were there at the same time as our group, in robes and Sufi caps and thoroughly European, rather than Middle Eastern, in appearance. The Sheikh who received us spoke for some twenty minutes, encouraging us to give up materialistic living in order that we may fulfill the unique destiny that each of us has. It was a loving and entirely accessible talk. He has a sweet smile (though his deputy's eyes and smile were sweeter still) and an engaging manner, even as he is well into his 80's. At the same time, some of the Sheikh's attendants handed out copies of his weekly teachings (much like the printouts on the weekly parasha that one finds in Israeli synagogues). These were filled with hateful ramblings about the failures of democracy and so on. You can see his writings here http://saltanat.org/. Not pretty stuff. The contrast between his personal and printed message was striking. Adam pointed out that inclusive ideas (all of us have unique destinies that need to be cultivated) do not necessarily go hand in hand with democratic ideas.

In Famagusta (on the east coast of Cyprus, more or less clear across the island after a very long and sweaty and exhausting bus ride) we toured a bit in the old city. The attraction where we spent the most time was at the former Cathedral, now a mosque, that you can see in a previously posted photo album. We ended that day at a restaurant built right up against the water. Were the TRNC more developed, there would be tens of similar restaurants built alongside it. Instead, it was fairly isolated. A cool night, starry sky, lovely restaurant, and the Sea. The 15-year old son of one of our participants was the first in the water - he more or less ran from the bus and pulled off his shirt and shorts as he ran, having put on his bathing suit first thing in the morning in anticipation of this moment. The rest of us were close behind. A night swim in the Mediterranean after our terribly long day was pretty dreamy. Oh, dinner was real good, too.

On our final full day in Cyprus we saw the national struggle museums of both the north and south. Suffice it to say that seeing the two sides of the battle fought through photos and sharply pointed explanations gives one a sense of the intensity of the conflict and the challenge of negotiating agreements when the two sides have such different narratives to tell.

The speaker scheduled to come Wednesday morning was thwarted by an airport strike in Greece so one of the coordinators of the program, Avishai Ehrlich, filled in with a presentation he had prepared for a different conference: The Ubiquity of the Holocaust in the Israeli / Palestinian Conflict. It was a poor choice for our program and the first indication of what we were to face in Israel. Avishai is an interesting and good man who is deeply committed to justice and equality. An Israeli who fought in the Six Day War, but politically very far on the Left, he spent much of his academic career outside of Israel, in the UK and elsewhere. Skeptical of nationalism anywhere and a constant advocate for the underdog, during his career Avishai became intensely critical of Israel's treatment of Arabs in Israel and in the Occupied Territories. In his presentation, Avishai pointed out accurately enough how Israel makes constant reference to the Holocaust to contextualize and justify its focus on security and legitimacy as a State, as well as how the Palestinians have come to use the Holocaust incredibly harshly to criticize Israel and give a frame of reference for their own situation. Still, the presentation was totally lacking in contextualization for our group. Adar Cohen, the only Jewish Israeli among the fellows, protested vigorously and a terrific exchange ensued among the fellows. It was distressing, though, because Avishai seemed unwilling to critique the grossly manipulative and fundamentally false equations in the Palestinian propaganda images he showed (one equating the Separation Wall in the West Bank with the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz). It wasn't that Avishai felt the equation was accurate, but he did not do his task to frame the material responsibly for the group, allowing it all to speak for itself. There was no critical analysis of what we were seeing as there had been all week in Cyprus. It was a case of poor pedagogy. And Adar and I (and some others, too, perhaps) suddenly felt very much on the defensive. Adam was excellent about shepherding the group through the tension.

The tone was softened later in the day when we heard from former mayors of the Greek and Turkish halves of Nicosia, who told about how they found opportunities for cooperation across the border not by focusing on ideology or rhetoric or broad policies (the sorts of things that national governments focus on) but instead by focusing on practical matters like sewage and long-range zoning plans (the sorts of things local governments focus on). Theirs was a hopeful and sweet presentation.

We soon headed south to Larnaca for our flight to Tel Aviv.

Shortly after settling into the hotel, well past 1:00 AM, several of us went for a night swim in the Sea, right behind the hotel (the Marina). Glorious.

Our programmatic base in Israel was the Academic College of TelAviv-Yaffo

http://www.mta.ac.il/En/Pages/default.aspx, an award-winningly beautiful place with an expansive, academic spirit. Avishai had been on the faculty at the College until his recent retirement. After a warm welcome from the College's leadership (and a delicious Israeli meal), we had our first program. This was meant to be a presentation on the narratives different groups in Israel tell about the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. Already a divergence between our study on the divisions in Yaffo and an exploration of the conflict in general was apparent.

The first speaker was the Orthodox Rabbi Michael Melchior, a former MK and Minister and a passionate advocate for equal rights for Israeli Arabs and an end to the Occupation. He favors Jerusalem being the shared capital of two states and spoke powerfully and clearly. The second speaker was a member of Likud who was not elected to the Knesset, thank God. He offered a hateful, bigoted, triumphalist, literalist argument for total Jewish sovereignty in the entire Land of Israel. It was simply enraging to hear. It was filled with his analysis of the motivations of individuals and groups with whom he has never spoken. This last aspect was the most troubling for us in the context of our program: how can there be meaningful dialogue with another if one decides for oneself what the other is thinking. That is, how can one claim the right to define the other instead of the other defining him or herself?

Our scheduled Arab scholar was not able to come and so an Israeli scholar, again on the far left, spoke in his place. Here there seemed to be an argument that Israel cannot succeed as a Jewish democratic state and needs to be reconstituted. I actually agree that Israel being both meaningfully Jewish and truly democratic is aspirational and likely not fully achievable. But I think the outcome can be good enough that the State remains legitimate as constituted.

I staged a minor rebellion following this set of presentations. Fed up with Avishai's incapacity to moderate a discussion without injecting himself into it as a participant, when an afternoon break started I asked for an opportunity to speak to the fellows without the presence of the staff. The staff, with raised eyebrows but, I think, happy to let a good group process go forward, filed out. I checked my impressions with the group - that Avishai was not handling his role appropriately and that Adam was perhaps speaking too much in the discussions (crowding out time for fellows to ask and learn for ourselves) and found that there was general agreement. We made a request to Avishai. Over the remainder of the trip, there were attempts made to control the learning process in our lectures and presentations so as to allow the learning to be more open and less agenda-driven. Saul Shapiro, the staff member in charge of our intra-group facilitations, led this effort.

Later in the evening we saw the film Ajami, an intensely painful portrait of the deadly and deeply depressing conflict in Yaffo's poorest neighborhood. The film (nominated for an Oscar) portrays the drug- and crime-ridden tensions among Jews and Arabs, Christian and Moslem Arabs, Israeli police and the local population, all in the context of the wider conflict. Pretty devastating. It was very hard to see one of the fellows, Raja'i, a terrific 25-year old Palestinian from the famous Nusseibeh family (keepers of the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for 800 years), wrung out like a rag at end of the film. Instead of a proper discussion of the film, we heard from a Jewish and Palestinian activist in Yaffo. The former made some outrageous remarks - most memorable for me that there was a deliberate conspiracy on the part of the Jewish educational establishment to provide Arabs in Yaffo with a substandard education so as to keep that population back in Israeli society. I challenged her to offer some evidence for her claim. (Avishai supported me in that demand.) Some evidence was offered, which in no way adds up to a conspiracy in my view, but at least there was something to which to attach her charge. She also stated that Israel was engaged in a kind of ethnic cleansing in Yaffo. I was beside myself and feeling that the week in Israel would be a unending, biased presentation of Israel's ugliest faults and wrongs. In conversation with a with a sweet fellow about why I was so upset about what we'd seen and heard that day, I got very stirred up and ended up venting my frustration such that it sounded to him like I was enraged. Behaving badly: this was not a good sign. I was clearly not handling the situation well.

On a long walk on the beach with other fellows I calmed down and by the time I went to sleep I decided that I had to chill out and remain in control of my emotions and that it would be ok.

In another post I'll write more, to walk through the week in Israel on the program. It remained problematic for me throughout, though not as intensely as on the first day, but it was hopeful, too. The program ended very well. More another time.

Shabbat Shalom,

Joel

Cyprus and Yaffo, V

An album of our day in Jerusalem. We visited the Temple Mount (Haram al Sharif), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Kotel. (No pictures of the Kotel, sorry! It's so familiar already!) Then took a guided tour of the Separation Wall to understand the challenge of humanely and safely and legally defining boundaries in Jerusalem in a way that leaves room for a settlement. Click on the picture to see the album.

Cyprus and Yaffo IV

This album will get you from Cyprus to Israel.

Click on the picture to see the album.