Ok.
Also; please know that my updates will not usually be this long. As soon as I catch up to today's time, my entries will be much shorter. By the end of this entry, I'll be only 5 days behind (Yahoo!)!
I've been talking a lot about E. Jerusalem, the West Bank, the difficult issues in W. Jerusalem, and Hummus.
Maybe I need to lighten up a little bit, or talk a little more about my life in W. Jerusalem.
With that in mind, let me introduce the agenda:
I. Michael Safarad Square and Molad
II. HaRav Kav
III. Tu B'Shvat, Olive Trees, and West Bank Tension
II. HaRav Kav
III. Tu B'Shvat, Olive Trees, and West Bank Tension
Also; please know that my updates will not usually be this long. As soon as I catch up to today's time, my entries will be much shorter. By the end of this entry, I'll be only 5 days behind (Yahoo!)!
I. Michael Safarad Square and Molad
All right. I realized I missed an experience in the first five days. Let me press replay:
Day Four:
Karen, our education director, took us l'ktzat haleicha down Rechovot Ramban and Keren Hayesod to the Michael Safarad Square, an area that offers a pretty wonderful view of the southwest side of the old city and the valley leading down to the City of David/Silwan (Palestinian/Arab village where Ir Shel David is).
While there, Karen talked about the difference between space and place, where place is defined by the people who come to know it, and space is place waiting to be defined. It was a concept I had heard before in anthropology classes: ethnographic mapping, where people come to identify seemingly meaningless spaces on earth with a cultural narrative. What would I come to define here as a place? And, once I have defined a place, will it still remain a space to be filled with meaning?
If your head hurts, mine does too. Let's move on.
While there, a person was supposed to meet with us from an organization called Molad which works to restore a "left wing voice" to the Israeli government (think the MoveOn or American Center for Democracy equivalent in America).
Hey Hannah Wizman-Cartier, Micah Weiss, and Avital Aboody-- guess who it was? Elisheva Goldberg!
Hey Hannah Wizman-Cartier, Micah Weiss, and Avital Aboody-- guess who it was? Elisheva Goldberg!
After a hug and some "what an awesome surprise"s, we got down to talking about Israeli politics.
Molad is a center to restore notions of democratic liberal policies back into Israeli politics. For the past several years, the "left" of Israel has become smaller and a lot less vocal.
*Ok, quick aside to people who are unfamiliar with Israeli politics. Israel has what is called a parliamentary democracy system. This means any party that gets enough votes can be put into the congress and add to the government. This also means that age-old parties can lose popularity because of their policies. This also means that parties can be made out of nowhere and suddenly get a ton of seats in the government (which is what happened in early 2013).
It has the same executive/legislative/judicial branch checks and balances within the government, but the executive and legislative process is a little more complicated. You don't vote for the executive branch. Instead, you vote in the 120 members to the legislative branch (Knesset) each election cycle. Then, from those 120 representatives, whoever is the majority party creates a coalition government that will make up the executive branch (all the ministers; ie minister of education, prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, etc.). However, an executive branch can only be formed if it contains members from parties that, in total, add up to more than half of the Knesset (for example: a party who wins 37 seats must make coalitions with another party with 10 seats and another party with 14 seats to create an executive branch because all of them together equal 61 seats). And then from this coalition comes the executive branch made up of the leaders from each party in the coalition.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg.
I put "left" in quotations because Israeli parties do not really have a left or right wing. Generally the community here group the political parties into left and right wing according to their stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict. So, a rightist party can be pro-settlements, religious yet underlines the importance of helping underserved populations in Israel. Just the same, a leftist party here can be be pro-peace talks, secular, yet more concerned with government process than actual policies.
For an overview of the political parties in the Knesset now, click here*
So yes, when I say left here, I actually mean about leftist liberal and democratic values in general, from worker's rights to citizenship to fair representation to critical analysis to the situation in the West Bank to the Arab-Israeli conflict in general.
The need for Molad according to Elisheva? "The government right now has no definitive left voices and all of the parties, funding and policy support in the government right now comes from a distinctly conservative place on the issues faced in Israel. All political parties here, while they claim center, left, right, are actually significantly right wing from the outset, so most centrist parties have policies that are more right wing than most other countries versions of central.
So we're a group that seeks to act as a voice for leftist policy in order to combat this trend. We use specific and critical data to point out the discrepancies in what the government says and does, because a lot of their power roots from emotional arguments and not arguments that are grounded in fact or rationale, and a left desperately needs a political voice in this country."
I could get on board with that, I thought. Chalk one up for a more thriving democratic debate and a little more focus on peace-making instead of unilateral moves on the Israeli side.
But I asked her also about what she thought about dialogue vs. fighting for whats right. I'm all about being a proponent for left-swinging values and a more collaborative peace process, but I also know that if you fight the "other side," you sometimes push the other side further from working with you. She told me she was conflicted about it at first, but then realized that Israel needed this voice, and that the more the left becomes a legitimate voice for politics in Israel, the more the culture will change and, sooner or later, the right will have to pay attention.
I guess I couldn't argue with her assessment of the situation. The "right" has been a bit too dominant in Israeli society for the reasons she stated and there does need to be a return to the table to fix the many issues going on in Israeli society in addition to between Israel and Arab countries. At the same time, I think everyone in a society gets better when they talk with one another and share all concerns and needs on the table: working toward the common good.
Darn. I guess this is turning into a heavy/complex/confusing piece already. *sigh*
II. HaRav Kav
No, this is not a famous rabbi.
Right now I'm going to introduce you to the most terrifying yet somehow smooth and efficient transportation system I've ever experienced.
Jerusalem has two different methods of public transport: buses and the light rail. The light rail is a subway system on street level. Since it doesn't snow here often, it's always open to the weather outside. It runs all day from 5:30 AM to 12 AM each day. It's pretty quick from one end to the other, and it looks pretty sleek too.
The bad news: it only goes along one particular line of Jerusalem townships, leaving others square outside of it.
And, you guessed it, as with everything in Jerusalem, this light rail is not without complex controversy.
The light rail itself goes from Mt. Herzl and Yad Vashem to Pisgat Ze'ev, which is, according to international law, an illegal settlement across the green line (noted by the dotted line in the map). Pisgat Ze'ev, along with other 'settlements' across the green line in the Jerusalem area, is a suburb within the municipality of Jerusalem. Thus there is a contention about Pisgat Ze'ev and the other all-Jewish neighborhoods that are considered 'illegal.' Some who believe these neighborhoods illegal therefore point to the light rail and say that it effectively makes it even harder for the green line to be the border between two potential states.
To me, I'm less concerned about calling these areas legal or illegal than by the concept of having only-Jewish neighborhoods in a municipality. Jews are more than allowed to dwell in all-Arab neighborhoods (they just choose not to) yet the same rights to dwell in these all-Jewish neighborhoods across the green line are not granted Arab Jerusalem residents or Israeli Arabs.
On top of this, as I noted in my last entry (re: Sheikh Jarrah), Israeli Jews have a system by which they can evict Arabs from their houses and live in their neighborhoods, whereas there is no process for Jerusalem Arabs to do this.
These two things in my view only perpetuates a separation and contention between peoples in the city. I recognize that to put both in the same neighborhood at this very moment in time may prove disastrous and counterintuitive, but how are you ever going to start to repair relationships on the ground when you continue to be separate each from the other?
And, as the history of the school that I'm working at, Yad B'yad (which was started between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis that wished to live and have their kids learn together in Jerusalem), there are people out there who would start to build bridges and, in turn, shift the culture in widening the gaps.
But yeah. That's the light rail, the controversy, and my own thoughts.
The Jerusalem bus system is extensive and wide reaching.
To be honest, it's the most confusing thing I've ever tried to figure out, direction-wise. But at least once you know where you're going it's a very quick ride.
So quick that you lose your balance with every acceleration even when you're holding onto something, and then straightway lose your balance again because the driver pounds the brakes every time they stop.
I swear those brakes must be incredibly durable to outlast what Israeli bus drivers do to them.
And so, ironically, let me introduce the bus pass that makes all the above experiences and complexities possible: the Rav Kav. This is the card that enables you to travel anywhere by public transport in Israel. Sadly the funds in the cities are not connected, so you must pay as you go. Still, it beats taking a paper ticket everywhere (yahoo environmentalism!) and I also have a nice little picture to let everyone know how excited I am to be a consumer of the efficient Israeli public transit system.
III. Tu B'Shvat, Olive Trees, and West Bank Tension
Well darn. I guess I am going to talk about E. Jerusalem/the West Bank.
S'licha me'od.
Every year at around this time, Jews celebrate a holiday called Tu B'Shvat, or literally, the 15th of the Jewish month Shvat. On this day, we celebrate trees and the natural environment. It's a pretty wonderful holiday filled with tree hugging and unbridled love for nature.
One significant tradition of the day is to go plant trees, to "renew the natural environment." Some people send money to the Jewish National Fund in order to plant trees in Israel (which... actually is another point of contention, but you can read about that here and here because it's kind of a long tangent), and others plant trees in their local communities.
Rabbis for Human Rights has an ongoing campaign to get Israelis to replant olive trees that have been uprooted by attacks by extremist West Bank Israelis (also called settlers by some). In the past, these Israelis have always uprooted olive trees, which remain a chief source of livelihood for many West Bank farmers. On Tu B'Shvat, they decided to lead a delegation to the West Bank to replant some trees destroyed in November of last year. Our group was registered for this delegation.
So we bussed off to Jalud in the West Bank to plant what was around 50-60 new olive saplings. It was a beautiful day, and everyone was in high spirits. I always loved planting trees because it added to the environment, yet this process seemed a little more important because it at least helped a person continue to make a living.
For some video accounts and pictures of the experience, click here, here, here, and here.
During the experience we met a Palestinian farmer named Ahmad. A tall fellow clothed in a hoodie and a scarf, he was a 25 year old bouncing around and directing us to each new plot to be planted. One of the program mates, Mischa, and him struck up a kind of brotherhood through the experience, even though neither could really communicate with each other. Afterward, him and the others on my program would continue to facebook chat in the weeks following (this had a slight blip when he began to feel uncomfortable talking to girls that were not Muslim and then found out we were Jewish and got confused because "all Jews are bad!" To clarify, Ahmad has spent his whole life in Jalud while Jewish settlers have continually uprooted and vandalized the fruits of his livelihood. It seems generalizations are flowing in all ways based on each person's respective experience of "the other")
Another beautiful moment was when I looked across the valley to see two Israeli settlements (Shivut Rahel and Shilo) right there within 2 km of where we stood. They had fences and IDF guard posts while the Palestinians did not. Standing there in that beautiful sunlit valley was a false sense of peace and quiet, yet... it was peaceful and quiet. Every day there is a new tension that sprouts between Palestinian and Israeli people that live in the West Bank.
But the land, the land stayed, and will continue to stay, beautiful, as long as people continue to love it as much as these two groups of people.
I wondered then how bridging this gap would even be possible. Maybe we could point to how yafeh/hehloo (beautiful in Hebrew/Arabic) the land was between them. Or begin water projects. As Bob Gutman once told me, negotiations over water might be what creates a necessity for peace in the area.
After Jalud, we went to see a mosque in Kus'ra that had been vandalized and burned by a settler crew. This was in retaliation for an attack on a couple of settlers by Palestinians that had happened several weeks before.
I could go on and on, but I'll give you a break. You can see my video of my visit to the mosque and my reaction afterward here and here.
I have to state the obvious here. It wrenches my heart when religions become armies. This moment was no exception.
Molad is a center to restore notions of democratic liberal policies back into Israeli politics. For the past several years, the "left" of Israel has become smaller and a lot less vocal.
*Ok, quick aside to people who are unfamiliar with Israeli politics. Israel has what is called a parliamentary democracy system. This means any party that gets enough votes can be put into the congress and add to the government. This also means that age-old parties can lose popularity because of their policies. This also means that parties can be made out of nowhere and suddenly get a ton of seats in the government (which is what happened in early 2013).
It has the same executive/legislative/judicial branch checks and balances within the government, but the executive and legislative process is a little more complicated. You don't vote for the executive branch. Instead, you vote in the 120 members to the legislative branch (Knesset) each election cycle. Then, from those 120 representatives, whoever is the majority party creates a coalition government that will make up the executive branch (all the ministers; ie minister of education, prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, etc.). However, an executive branch can only be formed if it contains members from parties that, in total, add up to more than half of the Knesset (for example: a party who wins 37 seats must make coalitions with another party with 10 seats and another party with 14 seats to create an executive branch because all of them together equal 61 seats). And then from this coalition comes the executive branch made up of the leaders from each party in the coalition.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg.
I put "left" in quotations because Israeli parties do not really have a left or right wing. Generally the community here group the political parties into left and right wing according to their stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict. So, a rightist party can be pro-settlements, religious yet underlines the importance of helping underserved populations in Israel. Just the same, a leftist party here can be be pro-peace talks, secular, yet more concerned with government process than actual policies.
For an overview of the political parties in the Knesset now, click here*
So yes, when I say left here, I actually mean about leftist liberal and democratic values in general, from worker's rights to citizenship to fair representation to critical analysis to the situation in the West Bank to the Arab-Israeli conflict in general.
The need for Molad according to Elisheva? "The government right now has no definitive left voices and all of the parties, funding and policy support in the government right now comes from a distinctly conservative place on the issues faced in Israel. All political parties here, while they claim center, left, right, are actually significantly right wing from the outset, so most centrist parties have policies that are more right wing than most other countries versions of central.
So we're a group that seeks to act as a voice for leftist policy in order to combat this trend. We use specific and critical data to point out the discrepancies in what the government says and does, because a lot of their power roots from emotional arguments and not arguments that are grounded in fact or rationale, and a left desperately needs a political voice in this country."
I could get on board with that, I thought. Chalk one up for a more thriving democratic debate and a little more focus on peace-making instead of unilateral moves on the Israeli side.
But I asked her also about what she thought about dialogue vs. fighting for whats right. I'm all about being a proponent for left-swinging values and a more collaborative peace process, but I also know that if you fight the "other side," you sometimes push the other side further from working with you. She told me she was conflicted about it at first, but then realized that Israel needed this voice, and that the more the left becomes a legitimate voice for politics in Israel, the more the culture will change and, sooner or later, the right will have to pay attention.
I guess I couldn't argue with her assessment of the situation. The "right" has been a bit too dominant in Israeli society for the reasons she stated and there does need to be a return to the table to fix the many issues going on in Israeli society in addition to between Israel and Arab countries. At the same time, I think everyone in a society gets better when they talk with one another and share all concerns and needs on the table: working toward the common good.
Darn. I guess this is turning into a heavy/complex/confusing piece already. *sigh*
II. HaRav Kav
No, this is not a famous rabbi.
Right now I'm going to introduce you to the most terrifying yet somehow smooth and efficient transportation system I've ever experienced.
Jerusalem has two different methods of public transport: buses and the light rail. The light rail is a subway system on street level. Since it doesn't snow here often, it's always open to the weather outside. It runs all day from 5:30 AM to 12 AM each day. It's pretty quick from one end to the other, and it looks pretty sleek too.
The bad news: it only goes along one particular line of Jerusalem townships, leaving others square outside of it.
And, you guessed it, as with everything in Jerusalem, this light rail is not without complex controversy.
The light rail itself goes from Mt. Herzl and Yad Vashem to Pisgat Ze'ev, which is, according to international law, an illegal settlement across the green line (noted by the dotted line in the map). Pisgat Ze'ev, along with other 'settlements' across the green line in the Jerusalem area, is a suburb within the municipality of Jerusalem. Thus there is a contention about Pisgat Ze'ev and the other all-Jewish neighborhoods that are considered 'illegal.' Some who believe these neighborhoods illegal therefore point to the light rail and say that it effectively makes it even harder for the green line to be the border between two potential states.
To me, I'm less concerned about calling these areas legal or illegal than by the concept of having only-Jewish neighborhoods in a municipality. Jews are more than allowed to dwell in all-Arab neighborhoods (they just choose not to) yet the same rights to dwell in these all-Jewish neighborhoods across the green line are not granted Arab Jerusalem residents or Israeli Arabs.
On top of this, as I noted in my last entry (re: Sheikh Jarrah), Israeli Jews have a system by which they can evict Arabs from their houses and live in their neighborhoods, whereas there is no process for Jerusalem Arabs to do this.
These two things in my view only perpetuates a separation and contention between peoples in the city. I recognize that to put both in the same neighborhood at this very moment in time may prove disastrous and counterintuitive, but how are you ever going to start to repair relationships on the ground when you continue to be separate each from the other?
And, as the history of the school that I'm working at, Yad B'yad (which was started between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis that wished to live and have their kids learn together in Jerusalem), there are people out there who would start to build bridges and, in turn, shift the culture in widening the gaps.
But yeah. That's the light rail, the controversy, and my own thoughts.
The Jerusalem bus system is extensive and wide reaching.
To be honest, it's the most confusing thing I've ever tried to figure out, direction-wise. But at least once you know where you're going it's a very quick ride.
So quick that you lose your balance with every acceleration even when you're holding onto something, and then straightway lose your balance again because the driver pounds the brakes every time they stop.
I swear those brakes must be incredibly durable to outlast what Israeli bus drivers do to them.
And so, ironically, let me introduce the bus pass that makes all the above experiences and complexities possible: the Rav Kav. This is the card that enables you to travel anywhere by public transport in Israel. Sadly the funds in the cities are not connected, so you must pay as you go. Still, it beats taking a paper ticket everywhere (yahoo environmentalism!) and I also have a nice little picture to let everyone know how excited I am to be a consumer of the efficient Israeli public transit system.
III. Tu B'Shvat, Olive Trees, and West Bank Tension
Well darn. I guess I am going to talk about E. Jerusalem/the West Bank.
S'licha me'od.
Every year at around this time, Jews celebrate a holiday called Tu B'Shvat, or literally, the 15th of the Jewish month Shvat. On this day, we celebrate trees and the natural environment. It's a pretty wonderful holiday filled with tree hugging and unbridled love for nature.
One significant tradition of the day is to go plant trees, to "renew the natural environment." Some people send money to the Jewish National Fund in order to plant trees in Israel (which... actually is another point of contention, but you can read about that here and here because it's kind of a long tangent), and others plant trees in their local communities.
Rabbis for Human Rights has an ongoing campaign to get Israelis to replant olive trees that have been uprooted by attacks by extremist West Bank Israelis (also called settlers by some). In the past, these Israelis have always uprooted olive trees, which remain a chief source of livelihood for many West Bank farmers. On Tu B'Shvat, they decided to lead a delegation to the West Bank to replant some trees destroyed in November of last year. Our group was registered for this delegation.
So we bussed off to Jalud in the West Bank to plant what was around 50-60 new olive saplings. It was a beautiful day, and everyone was in high spirits. I always loved planting trees because it added to the environment, yet this process seemed a little more important because it at least helped a person continue to make a living.
For some video accounts and pictures of the experience, click here, here, here, and here.
During the experience we met a Palestinian farmer named Ahmad. A tall fellow clothed in a hoodie and a scarf, he was a 25 year old bouncing around and directing us to each new plot to be planted. One of the program mates, Mischa, and him struck up a kind of brotherhood through the experience, even though neither could really communicate with each other. Afterward, him and the others on my program would continue to facebook chat in the weeks following (this had a slight blip when he began to feel uncomfortable talking to girls that were not Muslim and then found out we were Jewish and got confused because "all Jews are bad!" To clarify, Ahmad has spent his whole life in Jalud while Jewish settlers have continually uprooted and vandalized the fruits of his livelihood. It seems generalizations are flowing in all ways based on each person's respective experience of "the other")
Another beautiful moment was when I looked across the valley to see two Israeli settlements (Shivut Rahel and Shilo) right there within 2 km of where we stood. They had fences and IDF guard posts while the Palestinians did not. Standing there in that beautiful sunlit valley was a false sense of peace and quiet, yet... it was peaceful and quiet. Every day there is a new tension that sprouts between Palestinian and Israeli people that live in the West Bank.
But the land, the land stayed, and will continue to stay, beautiful, as long as people continue to love it as much as these two groups of people.
I wondered then how bridging this gap would even be possible. Maybe we could point to how yafeh/hehloo (beautiful in Hebrew/Arabic) the land was between them. Or begin water projects. As Bob Gutman once told me, negotiations over water might be what creates a necessity for peace in the area.
After Jalud, we went to see a mosque in Kus'ra that had been vandalized and burned by a settler crew. This was in retaliation for an attack on a couple of settlers by Palestinians that had happened several weeks before.
I could go on and on, but I'll give you a break. You can see my video of my visit to the mosque and my reaction afterward here and here.
I have to state the obvious here. It wrenches my heart when religions become armies. This moment was no exception.
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