Jerusalem Photos

Challenging Questions

These are among the challenging questions raised in our seminars regarding the relationship between Israel and American Jewry:

• Will Israel continue to be able to energized American Jewry or will Israel increasingly become perceived as a liability?
• Can Americans be trusted to address fundamental existential issues about Israel’s security?
• Can the American Jewish community be trusted with their own existential issues?
• Do American Jews have the tools anymore to handle complexity?
• Can Americans and Israelis talk to each other as grownups?
• How do we create a relationship (between Israel and America) where you are engaged enough to fight for the Israel each of us want rather than accepting or rejection the reality that is? 

WE NEED EACH OTHER

• We need each other to help each community get through their own individual challenges.
• Israel needs Americans expansiveness and Americans need Israelis' depth.
• Israel needs the optimism of American Jewry.  
• We need to continue to view Israel as the project of the Jewish people and Zionism as the ideology of the Jewish people.

Honored to meet a great leader of the Jewish People

Photos from the Hartman Seminar

Its Complicated

Hartman Institute

Over the last days we have been immersing ourselves in the complexities of peace process and the West Bank and Jerusalem.  Brilliant lectures by Tal Becker, who has participated in many of the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, and Dan Kurtzer, former US Ambassador to Israel and Egypt raised challenging and difficult issues.  A day-long bus trip among the neighborhoods weave in and out of the pre-1967 borders brought the challenges to life.

The boundaries that had defined pre-1967 Jerusalem seem to create an intricate mosaic or jigsaw puzzle.  Creating any rational separation as part of any long-term agreement seems no less than a Herculean task.  Years of negotiations have struggled with the question of how to carve out space for a contiguous Palestinian state, while acknowledging Israel’s need for safety and security and recognizing that there are blocks of land that house very significant populations of Israelis. 

It is a Gorgon knot.

             

How does that impact our efforts on campus? For me, on a most basic level, the phrase “it’s complicated” needs become our underlying awareness and perhaps the framing in which we engage students around these issues.  Students for Justice in Palestine call for full Israel disengagement from the West Bank.  But it’s complicated.  Negotiations have taken place of this issue for decades and solutions are elusive – not because the parties lack good will or because they are not motivated to find a solution – but because it is complicated. 

The issue of economic injustice of Palestinians living in the West Bank is raised.  It is easy to point a finger at Israel.  But, its complicated. Yesterday, on Mount Scopus, facing east, we saw a completed, but unused road.  The road would provide a convenient linkage between Bethlehem and Ramallah, cutting travel time dramatically and would enhance the day-to-day lives of Palestinians who live in those cities.  However, it is not the Israeli government that is preventing the opening of the road but, rather, the Palestinian Authority. Why; the status quo must not too comfortable for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank lest they become complacent and comfortable in this political reality.  There are legitimate issues of economic disparities to be raised – but it is complicated. 

There is a desire, perhaps a need to define our world in simple, bi-polar terms.  There is the Force and the Dark Side and the difference between the victim and the villain is clear for all to see.  And that is the narrative that many on campus would seek to create about Israel.  But its complicated.  Somehow, we need to elevate the quality of the dialogue and move away from finger pointing.  But black and white is easy.  Nuance is complicated.  Thus the work to be done.