Skip to content

Day Two: My Trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories

photo.php.jpg

Tuesday, February 10, was pretty full day. We began by visiting Bialik Rogozin School, which focuses on educating the increasing number of non-Jewish immigrants coming to Israel. Following that, we visited Schneider Hospital, and found out about their excellent Save a Child’s Heart program (SACH). SACH was founded by a former US Army cardiac surgeon who came to Israel in the nineties. His vision was to provide children in the Palestinian territories and the Third World with first-class cardiac surgery. They have provided pediatric cardiac surgery for 3300 children from 48 developing countries. Fifty-eight per cent are from the West Bank and Gaza. They also train a lot of Palestinian docs.

Next we visited the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv.  Located in a mostly Arab section of town, near an old Muslim graveyard, it was established by Shimon Peres, the present President of Israel, in the mid-nineties, through his personal donation and support. It’s an NGO dedicated building peace between Arabs and Israelis through positive dialogue, education, and relationship-building. He said he wanted to build a warm, neighborly, and lasting peace in the Middle East.

The Peres Center focuses on relationships between Israelis and Palestinians and between Jews and Israeli Arabs, and concentrates on three areas: Peace education, health and medical care, and agriculture, water, and the environment.

Peace education focuses mainly on sports, especially girls’ sports, played in mixed Palestinian and Israeli teams.

Agriculture, water and the environment are especially critical because with the limited resources of the Middle East, it doesn’t make sense for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinians, and Israel not to work together.

But the most interesting, and tied in to our earlier visit to Save a Child’s Heart, is health and medical care. The Oslo Accords gave the Palestinian Authority (PA) control over their medical system, but their infrastructure remains very poor. Their program supports bringing Palestinian children to Israel for complex treatments and training Palestinian docs in essential skills so that the PA’s medical infrastructure can be strengthened. Shimon Peres has said that if he wanted to be remembered for anything, it would be as a man who saved the life of one child.

We talked to our presenter, the head of the NGO, about the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Her reaction was strong. “We are not practicing Apartheid,” she said. “There are definitely problems with the way Israel treats the Palestinians, and believe me we Israelis have lots of strong opinions about this. But Apartheid is very different. As to boycotting, boycotting is the opposite of what we do here. If you boycott, you are closing off relationship. We’re all about building relationship. Boycott is the opposite of communication.”

She continued, “Boycott makes sense if it’s a black and white issue. This is not a black and white issue. This is grey. They live with an occupying army. No question, that’s bad. But we live with rockets fired into our land, aimed at our homes. To frame this as black and white shows you don’t understand every side of this issue.”

That evening we had dinner with Dr. Dina Porat, who specializes in anti-Semitism studies at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum. I found her presentation disappointing. She brought up some interesting points, which seem to be borne out in fact, such as the causes of recent anti-Semitism in Europe. She said religious reasons are not so much the cause today as economics and increased immigration. Unfortunately, she started mixing opinion in so much with fact that it became hard to distinguish between them. At one point she talked about stats that indicate that the United States does the worst job with hate speech because, unlike other nations, we don’t prosecute until after the hate speech has caused hateful actions. This caused a great discussion among us after she left: are we supposed to catch them in hateful thoughts, a la Minority Report? Are we to arrest them for expressing hateful thoughts? That seemed her opinion, but at that point, it seems, we drift over into being more like modern Egypt! The consensus seemed to be that we still like the way the US does it—you fight bad ideas with good ideas.

We were late getting back which was a problem—I had scheduled to meet with our family’s friends, the Pinchas family, an hour before we got back. It turned out they’d only just left the hotel when I got there, but left a note they’d be drinking at the Norma Jean bar. I caught a cab and met them there.

About seven or eight years ago, we hosted their daughter Shaily, Sara Caitlin’s age, as a guest when she spent the summer with Kids Who Care, a local musical theater group our daughter was part of. When Margaret and I visited Israel five years ago, we met the rest of her family, and really hit it off with her parents, Carina and Neri. Neri was a captain in the IDF reserves, from which he’s recently retired, and works fulltime as a manager of a plastics plant that hires mostly Israeli Arabs. Carina is an English teacher and sometimes police officer. They are, from an Israeli point of view, a mixed-race couple—Carina is from a Russian Jewish family, very white, and Neri is a Yemeni Jew, very dark and Arab-looking. All the kids look like Neri. Shaily finished her military service about a year ago and is about to enter the reserves as a medic. She’s studying to be a physical fitness trainer.

At the Norma Jean we drank a lot of beer and they plied me with still more food—I think the Israelis are trying to make me burst this trip. We were out til nearly 2 am. We caught up on one another’s news and laughed a lot. They were very interested in my trip and we talked a lot about it. Like most of the Israelis I’ve met so far, they are surprisingly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, but have less sympathy for their government and leaders. Like many Israelis, they regularly hire Palestinians (often illegally, much as we Texans hire illegal immigrants) to do work they need done. Carina feels that Israelis are unfairly painted in the media, “as if we hate Arabs and want to kill them all. I don’t hate anybody! I hear these news reports out of Syria of mothers loosing their children and my heart goes out to the mothers—I can’t imagine such a thing. Do people know that our hospitals in Galilee are taking care of 200 Syrian refugees? (The actual number is more like 500, I learned at the Schneider Hospital.) The way we’re painted in the media, I bet no one would think Israel would do that.”

She complained about John Kerry talking about boycotting Israel, but Neri was more philosophical. “He has to say that in front of the cameras, but I bet they’re saying very different things when it’s just the politicians.” I told them about Rabbi Melchior’s thesis that peace will best come if we take into consideration religious issues, rather than avoiding them. “That makes sense,” Neri said, and Carina agreed. “It does. So much of it is all about religion. We have to learn to respect one another.”