Our Israel trip is coming to a close. We, the Emery HS Class of ’09, spent 4 years or more looking forward to this trip. Every year we watched a class leave, every year coming closer ourselves to being that group. The trip finally came, and now its almost over, and we have to finally fully accept that we’re leaving Emery for good. I think it’s nice that we have the trip to ease our removal from the community for both us and the people we love back at home. This has come up constantly in our conversations on the trip, and always has at home: how sad it is that we must leave a loving place that we love coming back to everyday.

As a fitting cap on some of our experiences at Emery and on the trip, we had an amazing discussion yesterday. There was a group of college students at our hotel who work with the middle- and high-school Christian youth group Young Life. A few Emery students started talking with them Friday night and were shocked to be faced with that which we have been warned would happen but we did not want to acknowledge: anti-Israel teachings. The Young Life group had just spent a week in Bethlehem working at a Bible college there and interacting with Palestinian Christians. They had attended two lectures by Palestinian professors talking about the Palestinian situation. Some of the main issues focused on were refugees and the border wall. The Emery students, who were very concerned, spoke with Mr. Dow, who arranged a discussion Saturday afternoon with the Young Life group. It wasn’t mandatory attendance for us Emery students, but most attended.

Emery and the Young Life Group together

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6:15pm Saturday, Emery and Young Life sat down in one big circle of chairs 15 feet from the shore of the Kineret. Mr. Dow led the discussion and Yossi spoke as well. What Dow presented was the content of our Zionism class condensed into 45 minutes, with a focus on the issues most concerning to the Young Life group. I found it very cool that what we learned in the classroom was able to be simply picked up and moved out into real discussion of the issues. The discussion consisted mostly of Young Life students asking a few questions and Dow and Yossi giving a general explanation of the Jewish viewpoint and specific answers to the issues raised by the Palestinian professors. Below is a sampling of content from the discussion from Mr. Dow and Yossi:

It is important to keep in mind the audience for this talk–the Young Lifers. Mr. Dow started by explaining his and Yossi’s bias. Both have backgrounds in Jewish education. Mr. Dow studied medieval Jewish and Arab history as an undergraduate and Yossi has a formal background as a Jewish educator. While he is more left-wing and Yossi more right, there is a “divergent overlap” where our discussion mostly took place. That is, Jewish responses to many of the basic issues behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are agreed upon by many Jews. Next, there is the idea that the Jewish case for Israel can be made entirely with non-Jewish sources. An important source in this category is “From Time Immemorial” by Joan Peters. She was a CBS correspondent who set out to write a book about the conflict expecting that the book would be pro-Palestinian, After she finished with the British sources, she saw how the British did things such as give 70% of mandatory Palestine to the Arabs–Transjordan–and how boats of Jewish Holocaust refugees were turned away from the shores of the Mediterranean as new Arab immigration was secretly allowed. The explanation given is the new discovery of oil there.

One of the biggest issues in this conflict is names. Both sides are guilty here. During my trip to Israel, I’ve seen maps of Israel made by religious Jews who use names other than the West Bank and Gaza for those areas. Nevertheless, the origin of the word Palestine is important. It comes from the Romans, who sought to erase from history any record of Jews having been in Israel after the Jews fought them more successfully than any other group in history. The name Palestine comes from the Philistines, a group that no longer existed at the time.

In this conflict, propaganda is often used. In it, the rhetorical strategy of the half-truth is most powerful. A lie is easily disproven, but a half-truth is most difficult to respond to. A. M. Rosenthal, a New York Times writer, once said that to understand history, you have to look at the entire loaf of bread, and not just the last few slices (“History is a loaf, not slices of bread”). The issues in the conflict are more than 61 years old, or 161 years old. They are 3000 years old – as old as Jewish history. Half-truths come up a huge amount in regard to the issue of refugees. There were about 400-600,000 Arab refugees after 1948.While there are of course cases where Arabs were mistreated in the war, the Jewish policy was that Arabs could stay and become citizens. To be completely honest, of course some Jews were delighted to see them leave though. Why did they leave? They did because the Arab states threatened them and said that if they stayed, they would be considered traitors to the Arabs. Their Arab brothers then took all of them and put them into refugee camps. Why? Because accepting the refugees and integrating them into society is a de facto acceptance of the existence of a Jewish state. If the refugees aren’t in camps, then they aren’t a problem that can be used as a negotiating tool. There is no doubt that there are humans suffering in camps, and of course no Jew likes this. However, the suffering does not continue due to Jewish negligence. Information about this can be found in issues of the Economist from 1947, notably generally an anti-Jewish magazine. As well, there was a roughly equal number–400-600,000–of Jewish refugees from the Arab world who were forcibly kicked out when Israel was founded. They came to Israel and were integrated into the new state.

In our Emery Zionism class, we used a Dow mnemonic device called the “Seven 7s” that covers much of the history behind the conflict. They are:

• 70
  • 2nd temple destroyed
  • Jewish government destroyed, diaspora begins
    -Zionism begins. The word refers to tzion – the hill where the City of David was built. It’s the notion of returning there.
  • Non-Jewish sources for this: the Roman writer Josephus’s book “Destruction of the Jews” and the Arch of Titus in Paris celebrating the destruction of the 2nd temple.
• 7th century
  • Islam founded
  • Sharia (Islasmic law) has the concept of a dhimmi–non-believer. There are suras–verses–in the Quran that explain how the Jews and Christians are to be expected as people of the book. However, they are hated at the same time because while they are monotheists, they don’t accept Mohammed as a prophet. Dhimmis were second class citizens in Arab countries with the Pact of Umar.
• 1897
  • The first Zionist congress took place in Basel, Switzerland, organized by Theodor Herzl after he witnessed the Dryfus affair.
• 1917
  • WWI ends, British control of Palestine begins with the defeat of the Ottoman empire.
  • The half-truth that Zionism is simply an extension of colonialism and imperialism can be addressed here: In reality, the Jews had nothing to do with Britain taking control of the area. The Allies won the war and the spoils included the Ottoman empire, and Britain took Palestine.
  • The British make the Balfour Declaration that looks upon with favor the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
  • No Palestinian movement at this time – the people in Israel saw themselves as Arabs
  • Around this time, Transjordan is created.
• 1937
  • Peel Partition Plan is proposed by the British Peel Commission. It offers to split mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews accept, the Arabs say no.
• 1947
  • The U.N. Partition Plan is proposed after the newly formed United Nations takes control of mandatory Palestine. The Jews accept, the Arabs say no, they will not accept a Jewish state.
• 1967
  • The Six-day war is fought and Israel gains control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Desert, and Golan Heights. Israel later returns the Sinai and its oil reserves to Egypt to complete a peace agreement.

Another important point is that many Palestinians and Arabs cannot bring themselves to accept the existence of a Jewish state, and so they continue to fight. It is because of this fact that the Israeli border fence is necessary. Yossi has family who was killed by PLO terrorists. This kind of thing really happens here. The family was gunned down in their car within the border of Israel. The fence is meant to help protect the lives of Israeli citizens. Of course it has had some negative effects on Palestinian life, but terrorism cannot be accepted.

The PLO is the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It is the predecessor to the organization that runs Palestinian lands today, the Palestinian Authority. Its charter explains how it wants to destroy the State of Israel and end the Israeli occupation. It was founded in 1964, whereas the Israelis didn’t take over the West Bank or Gaza until 3 years later, in the 1967 in the Six-day war.

There are a lot of people surrounding Israel who simply want to destroy the place. The top 1/3 is vulnerable to Katyusha rocket attacks from Hizbollah in Lebanon. The bottom 1/3 is vulnerable to Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza. This is a country where only the middle 1/3–including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem–is safe. How can Israel not seek to end the fear of 2/3 of its population that a rocket could fall anytime on their home.

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In a few days we’ll be meeting with the David Project, a group that supports Israel advocacy by college students on campuses. I’ve heard them speak before, but it is now that I am fully convinced of their relevancy.

Our Israel trip is coming to a close, and I am excited to have had such an amazing experience here in this beautiful, amazing land.

Gaza Rocket Ranges

Hezbollah Rocket Ranges

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Photos from this day

Shenit metzada lo tipol: Masadah will not fall again

Am yisrael chai: Israel lives!

We relived Masadah.

We woke up at 3 to leave at 4 to climb the snake path up Masadah. I can never forget this experience. We climb up in darkness in the starlight. The climb was difficult, but not long – only an hour. We begin touring as the false sunrise hits us. Unfortunately there were clouds so we couldn’t see the sunrise. We start our day in the oldest beit knesset, synagogue in the world – 2000 years old! We pray – shema, amidah, aleinu, kaddish. Yossi (our excellent tour guide from Alexander Muss) told us about tefillin and a message to learn from them.

The story was that Yigal Yadin (archaeologist, Chief of staff in war of independence, dad discovered Dead Sea Scrolls) was on a train headed to Tel Aviv to use a special camera on a package he had with him from the archaeological dig. A russian immigrant was asking everyone to put on tefillin. An orthodox woman was sitting across from him. yigal was a prominent man, and everyone knew he was a secular jew. The Russian came up, and yigal asked him how he came to Israel, since at this time Russian accents were rarer in Israel. The Russian told a story of how he asked the Soviets to leave the country to return to his homeland Israel, and instead was tortured by the KGB and sent to a gulag, only to be hurt more there by guards and his fellow antisemitic prisoners. yigal asked him if he wrapped tefillin everyday there, and the Russian said yes. yigal then wrapped teflillin on the train. The Russian then moved on, asking the next person to wrap tefillin, with no idea who he had just spoken with. After the train arrived, the woman who had been sitting across from him came up to him in tears. She told him how she knew who he was, and she hadn’t wanted to bother him just to rub shoulders with a famous man, but she had to tell him her story. She told how her husband was fighting in the 1967 war in an area with snipers in caves. They were losing and didn’t know where the fire was coming from. Her husband simply ran out into the open to draw fire. Now his fellow soliders could eliminate the enemy. They then ran to her husband, overwhelmed by his bravery. They asked him for his last request, as he was dying from his wounds. He asked them all to wrap tefillin everyday. The woman told Yigal how to her his putting on tefillin helped to fulfill her husbands dying wish. Yigal then told her how the package he was carrying was actually the world’s oldest known pair of teflillin, from Masadah. [another source for the story]

Yossi said how the teflillin found at the site were the same as we use today. He also told us how the tefillin on the arm has 1 internal box, while the head one has 4. It is a reminder in a way that while us jews can have different ideas in the mind – Essenes, Saducees, Pharisees, Zealots – Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox- or any other mental division – we must always act as one.

We looked at the mikveh and heard a story of how a orthodox rabbi came and measured the dimensions of the mikveh there and found it to be perfectly kosher. Wow. What a tradition we have, with traditions that have remained constant for millenia.

We spent an hour discussing, as if we were the Siccarri, the sect of jews at Masadah, what we would do if we were in their situation, with 15,000 romans ready to rape and kill us. We did this in one of the giant water cisterns at the site (12 of them together stored enough water for 1000 people for over 2 years).

This was the most powerful part of my experience at Masadah. We went to the place where Israeli military men and women say their special Masadah oath. Shenit metzada lo tipol: Masadah will not fall again, a metaphor for Israel will not fall again. Usually, they do the oath as the completion of a 3 day hike in the desert. We stood there and shouted it, one word at a time. At this spot, our words echoed back perfectly. The first bit of the echo is just noise, but then our word comes back fully understandable. it was unbelievable. it was as if it was not just the echo, the scientific explanation, but that the spirit of those from Masadah was crying back to us. We then yelled am yisrael chai, Israel lives. I never want to forget that moment.

Yossi told us a few stories about that chant, that pledge.

Yossi told how he once had a group at the railing doing the chant, and an Israeli fighter was flying in the area doing maneuvers. The pilot saw the students at the railing, where he likely also did the oath at one time. He told us how the pilot then flew low, so low that the group could see the pilot in the cockpit. The pilot then rocked his wings up and down in a salute and jetted back up. Awesome!

There was a tank commander in the Golan Heights in the 1967 war. There were 8 tanks left, with a total of 40 shells, facing 750 Syrian tanks. They started to retreat, but were told that they were all that stood between themselves and Haifa and Israel falling. The men kept leaving, but with shells and bullets falling, he tackled his men and yelled at them to remember the pledge that made on Masadah – shenit metazada lo tipol. His own tank men went into their tank, inspiring the other men. They moved up and attacked the Syrians. With extraordinary effort, every single one of the 40 shells hit a Syrian tank – this does not happen! The tanks were moving in a column, and tank 41 was intimidated and turned around. Israeli reserve tanks then unexpectedly came into the battle and chased the Syrians, and more acts of heroism followed.

On Masadah, we all picked up 2 rocks. One is for me, and the other is for me to give to someone else to bring back to Masdah. The rocks are not ours, but belong to Masada.

I brought a rock from Auschwitz to Masadah. I placed it in a spot overlooking the ravine where we yelled.

This day was simply an awesome, awesome experience. It was beautiful, and I’m looking forward to the day I return.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

PHOTOS FROM TODAY
A funny video.

There was far too much for a tweet, so now it’s time for my first blog post about my senior Israel Trip. Today we started with a hike on Mt. Eitan. Sataf is an area that was terraced by the Judaens thousands of years ago. They built elaborate irrigation systems in the dry land by tapping into the water that flowed in springs deep within the rocky mountains. We hiked through this pretty area and entered a cave where a spring was flowing.

Our next adventure was more caving: Hezekiah’s Tunnel. We lived the Bible. This is a tunnel described in the biblical sources that matches reality perfectly. We went through most of this 300 meter tunnel in such complete darkness we couldn’t see the hands in front of our faces. It was just simply awesome to do.

We finished the day by visiting the Kotel, the Western Wall. No words are needed here except it was a powerful experience. The wall is important for different reasons to everyone. For me, it is the history of the place and the significance of my connection to it that draws me.

It just *feels good* to be in Israel. Yes, this is partially because I’ve just visited death camps and mass graves from the Holocaust in Poland, but also because of the stunning history of the land here and my connection to it. There is so much history here, interspersed with a modern nation. It’s awesome.

Check out the pictures and shalom!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.