For our final Ta Shema trip, we were supposed to visit Ramallah and Ariel. Ramallah is a large Palestinian city in the West Bank, and Ariel is a large Jewish city in the West Bank. This post needs a little background, so bear with me. Ramallah is located in Area A, an area which in the Oslo Accords was given completely to the Palestinian Authority. It is illegal for Israeli citizens to enter Area A without a special permit from the Israeli government. Our trip was scheduled for May 14-15, the same day as Nakba Day. Nakba, or “disaster” in Arabic, is the day of mourning recognized by Palestinians to remember 1948 when Israel won its independence.  There were a number of people on our cohort, including our leader, who were Israeli citizens. The Israeli government decided not to give the Israeli citizens permits to go to Area A, Ramallah, on Nakba Day, and so we had to reorganize our trip and not go.

Of course, we were disappointed. It would have been an awesome experience to be able to see Ramallah and learn about the situation there, because the Israeli presence in the West Bank is felt differently in every city. We had an entire discussion about how we felt about not being able to go to Ramallah, and one thing that really struck me was how upset people were- at the Israeli government.

“Why are they restricting OUR movement?”

“I’m not just Israeli, I’m an American, too! I can go where I want!”

This particular restriction on movement is one of the compromises agreed upon in 1995 as part of the Oslo Accords, largely seen as the first step towards the establishment of a separate, sovereign Palestinian state- something which JStreetU claims to support 100%. But when these compromises actually affect us, we push back against them. Israel is blamed for “restricting” us from going to land which, in other conversations, these same people proclaim we have “no right to be on”.

It is this sort of thinking that perpetuates this conflict. The idea that compromise is good- as long it is other people compromising, and we do not have to bear the burden of that compromise. The idea that other people have to give things up, but we shouldn’t have to.

There was another reason that this situation rubbed me the wrong way. Nakba Day is a day of mourning, of remembrance, of grief. It seems to me that a group of Jewish students from Israel and America wandering around a Palestinian city on a day which is expressly against the creation of the state of Israel is disrespectful at least, and dangerous at worst. Israel had every reason to not grant permits to Israeli citizens on that day.

We discussed all of this in our group, but the fact that it even needed to be stated in such terms was shocking to me. Why was it that we do not want to abide by our compromise, but we expect others to? How can people simultaneously both condemn Jews for going into Palestinian areas and also feel entitled to go themselves on the most anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli day of the Palestinian calendar? These are questions that I do not have answers to, but certainly if these conversations are ones that must be had, please sit down with your friends, family, neighbors, community, please have them. Do not rest on your own entitlement while reserving your judgement for others.

This post is less about what I saw in Hebron and more about the effects of manipulating the truth.

Let me start with saying that Hebron is a city in serious need of help. “Empty”, “desolate”, “tense” are all words that I would use to describe Hebron. Ironically, the name of the city translates to friendship. There are streets that I am allowed to walk down, as an American, that people born and raised in Hebron are not allowed to walk down, as Palestinians. There are sidewalks that have fences down the middle which divide where Israelis and Palestinians can walk.The soldiers charged with keeping the peace in the streets were everywhere, literally on every street corner, asking who we were, where we were from, and where we were going. Being that our guide was Palestinian, we were asked more than a few times. Other than us, I could count on my fingers the amount of people on the streets in the middle of the day. It gave the effect of a severely understaffed historical destination town like one could find in the midwest with its “ye olde saloon” and tumble weeds.

Our guide, as I mentioned, was Palestinian. He took us to talk to another Palestinian man who lives in Hebron and uses cameras to document the injustices he sees on the streets, a cause that I am 100% in support of. Give a man a peaceful camera to document injustice and take away his violent stones and guns which exacerbate the conflict, and one day we may actually have peace…but that’s not the point here. We were talking to the man with our guide translating our questions into Arabic and his answers into English.

At one point a situation was brought up where the Palestinian was railing against the soldiers, one of whom had just last week shot and killed a Palestinian. The very next day, he was back at work “as though nothing had happened”. The part they neglected to mention: the Palestinian who was shot had just stabbed a soldier. We happened to know about the incident, or it would have passed as just another example of the demon Israeli soldiers that we were being told about. I 100% agree that injustices, pain, and institutionalized oppression is occurring on a daily basis in Hebron. You only need to walk down the street to see that. However, deliberately omitting the context of a situation casts doubt on every legitimate thing they may have said. It makes us think; If the situation is as bad as you say, if you are the genuine victim here, why do you need to lie, even by omission? It makes us talk about later, Why do they want to manipulate us, when we are the exact audience that they want? 

The second problem I have with this is more from a marketing perspective. The cohort often talks about how we should engage with our speakers. How can we ask questions that we want to know the answers to, while challenging the speakers in a way that they won’t shut down? JStreetU calls it engaging both our and their self interest. Our guide messed up. He forgot that he wasn’t talking to Americans with no connection to the conflict. He forgot that we were all studying in Israel, all of us with Israeli friends, all of whom had served in the army. By demonizing the entire army, he only served his self interest. He lost all of us when he said that the 18 year old soldier who shot a Palestinian in an effort to save the man who had just been stabbed didn’t care about what he was doing. We all know personally the effects that the army has on people, because those people are our friends. Saying that they are all “brainwashed robots who don’t care about humanity” is not a good way to bring us over to his way of thinking.

Moral of this week’s trip: be careful about how you present information, and be careful which information you accept as truth. Be careful which videos and pictures you accept as truth, too. All of the videos and pictures that our contact showed us started with soldiers running, none of them documented what had taken place to cause the arrest. All of the videos were without context. Everyone picks and chooses which facts they want to present, it is the logical way to present an argument…only use the facts that will back you up. In this case, we were lucky, and we knew that he was manipulating the truth in order to make us think a certain way. It changed the way we saw him, and it ruined everything else he had said. If we had not known, if we had accepted everything he said at face value, it would have wrongly changed our opinion of Israeli soldiers in general.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Don’t use knowledge to twist the way others think. It doesn’t work for long.

Be knowledgeable, so you can tell when someone is trying to manipulate you.