Perspectives from Israel and Palestine

My understanding of the history of Israel, in a nutshell, is this. Thousands of years ago Jews settled on the land and it became very holy to them. Throughout history since then, several groups have taken over the land that is now Israel, including the Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Byzantine, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and finally the Israelis. In my opinion, this fact alone makes it impossible to determine who the land belongs to now, because it has belonged to so many. At this point, the only ones left in the area are the Jews and the Palestinians. The Zionists believe that it is their land because this is where their ancestors lived and where Judaism was created, and the Palestinians believe that it is their land because this is where their (more recent) ancestors also lived. And neither is wrong.

                I’ll start with Israel. I’ve been here for three weeks now and have absolutely loved it. I’m staying in Tel Aviv, which is the most liberal and open minded city in Israel. To compare it to the US, I think of Tel Aviv as having the people of San Francisco with the weather of San Diego. It has the best of both worlds. In Jaffa, on the southern end of Tel Aviv, many Palestinians and Jews live together peacefully, and it is one of the only places in the Middle East where you can find Arabs and Jews living in apartment buildings together and being friends. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is the opposite. The city is very divided between the Jewish areas and the Arab areas, and there is very little mixing. Just walking through Jerusalem you can feel the tension in the air; it’s obvious that nobody likes each other.

                The majority of people that I’ve met in Israel have a very open-minded and anti-war mindset. They disagree with the war last summer, they want the new Jewish settlements to be removed from West Bank, and they want a new Prime Minister. They’re not the killing machines that the media makes them out to be, in fact, they’re some of the best and most caring people I’ve ever met. Of course there are people who are extremely religious, racist, want Palestinians dead, and reelected the prime minister, but my point is that not everyone thinks like that.

I’ve been asked by several of the type of people who believe everything fed to them by the media and have never been to Israel, “Why don’t the Israelis just leave the Palestinians alone and go somewhere else?” “Why do they have to kill Palestinians?”  The media makes it seem like everybody in Israel is a right-wing killing machine, and that’s just totally wrong, it’s a very divided country. The media also makes it sound like in 1948 a whole bunch of Jews just showed up in Israel for the first time and pushed out the Palestinians. This is also not true; Jews lived in Israel before it became a country. It was a shared land. The perspective on the Jewish state that I’ve heard from many Israelis is this: Jews have been repeatedly killed all through history and this is the first time they’ve finally been given a country that they can govern and be safe in. This is very important because even today anti-Semitism is growing in places like France, Turkey, and Russia, and many Jews move to Israel in order to live in a place where their next door neighbors don’t want them dead and their government treats them like regular citizens. Various Palestinian extremist groups don’t want Israel or Jews to exist at all, and have been constantly shooting rockets at Israel for decades. The Israeli government does as much as it possibly can to protect its own citizens, and this often means killing people who are considered a threat. And, as seen in most wars, the search for those people deemed threatening also results in tons of civilians being killed. It’s similar in America’s war against Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere that the US has been striking with drones, but the American government isn’t willing to go to quite the lengths as the Israeli government in order to ensure their own citizens make it out alive. If the Palestinian extremist groups would just put down their weapons, most Israelis believe that there would be peace tomorrow, but if Israel put down their weapons they would be killed immediately. I think this is true, but I also think that in order for the Palestinian extremists to ever put down their weapons, the extreme Zionists will have to stop building and expanding their settlements in the Palestinian territories. And it’s difficult to get them to stop because it’s really really hard to control crazy people who have a lot of power.

That’s not to say there aren’t Arab-hating racists in Israel. There absolutely are. But not necessarily more than there are in other parts of the Westernized world. And most of them stay away from Tel Aviv because they would be shunned by society for being racist in Tel Aviv. My only encounter so far with extreme racism against Arabs is when I posted on a facebook group for Eilat (border town near Egypt) asking whether anybody had been to Egypt lately because I want to go diving there. Somebody replied “I will not spend a dime in any Muslim country on principle and question the thought processes in the minds of those Jews who do,” and continued to state that he does not believe it’s possible for people of different races or religions to be true friends. When I called him out for being a racist asshole he said “it’s self-preservation, not racism.” Maybe he had a terrible experience while in the army, I have no idea, but people like this unfortunately do exist in Israel as with everywhere else in the world. Luckily I haven’t come across anybody else in Israel with quite so strong negative feelings.

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Before going to Ramallah, I had no idea what to expect of Palestine. I had been warned by tons of people who have never been there that it will be very dangerous for me as a non-Arab. I had seen news reports about how it’s such a wreck and people are living in slums and Israel forces their quality of life to be terrible. It’s all wrong. Ramallah is a very nice and well-functioning, developed city. I never once felt any danger as a foreigner, everybody seemed to love me and love the fact that I came to visit them (though they didn’t know I’m Jewish). I arrived with Kristina, a Swedish girl, and immediately two guys approached us and started talking to us in broken English. They were really into Kristina’s blonde hair and blue eyes and wanted to take a million selfies with us. Not in a creepy way though, they were just really nice guys who were fascinated by foreigners. We walked around with them for a while and they showed us a spot on the rooftop of a music school that they hang out at with a great view over the city. A few hours and about 100 selfies later we headed back towards the bus station because Kristina was going back to Tel Aviv that night. She left and my couchsurfing host picked me up and took me to his apartment where he lives with 2 of his brothers. All 3 of them were incredibly nice and we spent the rest of the night gathered around their hookah while I asked questions about life in Palestine.

I was really curious about Palestine so I asked as many questions as I could think of. I asked about their lifestyle, what they do day to day, how easy it is to get jobs or study, how their daily lives are affected by Israel, what they think of Israel, what they think of religion, whether they think there’s a solution to the conflict, etc. And what I learned is that overall many aspects of their day-to-day lives are very similar to ours. They watch a lot of American TV and movies and bits and pieces of American culture have seeped into Palestine because of that. Two of them studied computer science and are now working as a programmer and a graphic designer, and the other one is currently studying psychology. They said that the biggest ways that Israel affects them is that there is no 3G network in Palestine, streets in Palestinian cities do not show up on Google maps, and when driving between cities they have to go through Israeli checkpoints which can be very time-consuming. These are all annoying and very unfair things, and the lack of 3G and slow transportation can definitely suppress business possibilities, but I was a bit surprised to see that their lives are much easier than those in Morocco or the places in Eastern Europe where I had been for the previous few months. Their day to day lives are really not so different from ours in the US; they wake up, eat eggs for breakfast or pick up something to go on the way to work, work for the day, in the afternoon go to a coffee shop or come home and make dinner, and maybe go get a beer at a bar in the evening. They even have a few bars in Ramallah, which is pretty rare for the Arab world.

When I asked about religion and the conflict with Israel, they also had interesting answers. They didn’t have any problem with Jews or Israelis as a whole; the biggest problem they had is with the Israeli settlements taking Palestinian land (something that many Israelis also have a problem with and the reason for many protests in Tel Aviv). These are guys who could easily be friends with Israelis but they have never had the chance because they aren’t allowed into Israel without a permit. They had very similar political views to many people that I’ve talked to in Tel Aviv. They equally disliked the Jewish extremists and the Islamic extremists because both cause so many problems. They didn’t see any solution in the near future though, because it will be very difficult to create peace when there’s no possibility for interaction and friendship between likeminded Jews and Arabs. If the more open-minded Jews and Arabs could have a chance to interact in a peaceful environment, then maybe more people from the Jewish and Arab worlds would realize that they don’t have to be enemies, but at the moment a 20 foot fence and armed guards restrict that interaction.

Gender and sexuality are two more things that Palestine is far behind the rest of the world on (from my Western perspective). Women and men are not treated equally in any way; they both have very specific rolls in the household and on the streets. There was not a single woman selling fruits or vegetables in the market. There was not a single woman smoking cigarettes on the street while nearly every man was. In some coffee shops there was not a single woman present and when I walked in with a tall blonde German girl, the waiter pushed a chair in front of us, assumedly to hide the couple inches of skin on her ankles that was showing between her dress and her shoes. Most places I saw were like this, but not everywhere. I also went to another coffee shop with my couchsurfing hosts where there were a bunch of students and young people and most girls were dressed in regular shirts and jeans without a headscarf, some of them were smoking cigarettes or hookah. I got the feeling that these women could only express themselves under cover though, in places where the rest of the world couldn’t find out what they’re doing.

The gender roles are also very apparent in relationships and sex. I was told that the majority of people never have premarital sex because they’re taught their whole lives that it’s a terrible sin and they would never be accepted in society if they had sex before marriage. Teaching kids that sex is a sin doesn’t suppress their sexual thoughts and urges though, and with the internet, teenage boys are easily able to access porn. By the time they get married, all they know about sex is what they’ve seen in pornos, so they treat women like they’re treated in porn and they never have the chance to learn how to have really intimate sex that is best for both parties. And if they’re gay, forget it, they’ll still have to marry the opposite gender and live their whole life in the closet if they ever want to be accepted in society. I haven’t had the chance to talk to any orthodox Jews yet, but I am told that the gender and relationship roles are also the same in orthodox Jewish communities. So Israel also has these same problems, but on a much less widespread basis because religion permeates the culture much less in Israel than in Palestine.

Parties are something that exist in Ramallah but are all very undercover. There are a few bars and clubs in the city but people who go to them can’t flaunt it. One night while I was there, the brothers that I was staying with had a party for one of their girlfriends’ birthdays. Since these guys don’t have much experience with drinking, it felt like I was in a crazy time capsule back to tenth grade parties. At some point in the night, the music switched from European electronic music to traditional Arabic music and everyone started singing and dancing and hilariously falling all over the place. It was quite the cultural experience, one of the biggest culture shocks I’ve felt yet.

During the days I walked all over Ramallah through the old city, through the markets, down the residential streets, past the government buildings, and into a refugee camp. The central square was in a constant state of chaos, completely packed with people overflowing into the streets and bumper to bumper cars honking nonstop. Outside of the center things got a bit more calm and the traffic disappeared. I walked south a ways towards a refugee camp because I wanted to gain some insight on the perspectives of the people who live there. On my way I was waved into a café by a guy trying to sell me window ornaments, and I sat down next to another guy who he was trying to sell to and we began having a conversation. He was a literature professor at the university in Ramallah and spoke very good English. He said that he has been in Israel several times and has no problem with most Israelis, he just doesn’t like Zionists. He thought that a two state solution would work if Israelis would stop building settlements in West Bank and would give back control of all of West Bank to Palestine. And he said that this is a fairly common perspective in Ramallah.

 I continued onward to the Al Amari refugee camp just south of Ramallah. The camp is mainly populated by refugees whose families were moved out of their homes in Israel in the 1940s. Three generations later, the camp has been upgraded to brick apartment buildings with electricity and running water and some modern amenities, but it is still clear that is it much poorer than the rest of Ramallah. Trash lined the streets and it smelled like they didn’t have a great sewage system.

As I was walking down the street a guy waved me into his internet café. I came in and everyone stopped playing their video games to swarm me and high five me and ask where I was from. They offered me some orange juice and I sat down and asked some questions. It was difficult to understand any answers very well with their mediocre English and tons of kids screaming right next to me, but what I did understand was that this 18ish year old guy works at the internet café, doesn’t go to school, and is very good at video games (he really wanted me to play Grand Theft Auto so I agreed, but after getting killed a few times because I’m terrible at video games, he took over and clearly had a lot of experience). His great-grandparents were forced out of their homes during the war in 1948 after which Israel was created, and his family has lived in the camp ever since. When I asked why he didn’t leave the camp and move into the city, he said that he doesn’t want to leave the camp. It’s where he grew up and it is his community, everybody is like brothers and sisters there and they all grew up together and work together and do everything together. Three generations ago they were living there because they had no other option, but now they’re living there by choice because they love their community.

Some of the guys did seem to really hate Israel (for good reason). I asked what they thought about Israel and one guy said, “They took our land. We don’t like them. But we are fighting back, Hamas has an army and fights back.” They asked if I liked Israel and I replied “I don’t like all of Israel’s politics” and then one guys asked “do you like Hitler?” Completely taken aback, I replied, “who?” thinking that I must have misunderstood, and he went on, “Hitler. He kills Israel. We like him.” It was scary hearing words like that from a guy who was so incredibly friendly and caring in every other way. And it was sad knowing that they’ve never had the opportunity to create their own opinions about Israel and Palestine and violence and religion, they were born into this mindset and don’t have enough education to understand the propaganda constantly being stuffed down their throats. I asked if they thought there would ever be peace between Israel and Palestine and one said, “No, Israel will never stop taking our land, so there will not be peace.”

This wasn’t the mentality of everybody in the camp though. I also had a conversation with another guy who had a very different story. He was about 20 years old and was born in Jordan. His grandparents were originally from Ramallah and moved to Jordan in 1967, and his family lived in Jordan until 15 years ago. Then they moved back to West Bank and are now living in the refugee camp. I asked why they moved from Jordan to Palestine and he said “because this is our land. Why would I stay in Jordan if this is my land here?” I continued, “but wouldn’t you have more opportunities for education and jobs and travel if you lived in Jordan?” and he replied “yes, but we don’t think like this. We love our land. The land is more important than money.” This mentality is the opposite of what I’ve experienced anywhere else in the world. In Eastern Europe, in small towns in Germany, and in Grinnell, Iowa, very few young people want to stick around. They want to move to a city where life is more exciting and there are more job opportunities, but in Palestine it is the opposite. Living on his family’s original land meant more to this guy than anything else. He also had the most liberal views about Israel of anybody I talked to in the camp. He had no problem with Israel or Jews in general, he just didn’t like the settlements and how the army continues to occupy Palestinian territory.

After the refugee camp I headed to the bus station and back to Tel Aviv. I needed some time to wrap my head around everything I had just seen and heard. It seemed that the biggest problem the Palestinians I met had with Israel is that the settlements are taking their land. And the biggest problem the Israelis I met had with Palestine is the constant stream of rockets being shot at Israel over the last couple decades. The rockets are being shot because Hamas and other groups are mad about Israel taking their land and the land is being taken because the Zionists are angry at Palestinians and don’t think they’re worthy of living on the holy land. It’s a never ending circle. Of course the situation is much more complicated than this simple description, but this is how many regular people who are not involved in politics feel about the situation.

For now, I think the best we can do is promote love between everyone, promote positive interactions between Jews and Arabs, and do our best to educate everyone that they can go out and question everything, create their own understanding of the world, that they don’t have to believe in the politics or religious values of the society around them.
some further reading, for those interested:

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/for-the-love-of-israel/