SIS Summer Abroad 2013: Israel: Toward the end of the trip... what I have felt so far

Toward the end of the trip, what I have felt so far is…

1. Israel is the real melting pot.

I was surprised by how diverse Israel is compared to its relatively small size of territory. I could meet diverse people, languages, cultures, religions, races, foods, etc. depending on the regions or areas. Here in Israel, Hebrew, Arabic and English are equally common so that you can see almost all sign is written in three languages. The Druze lives in their own community, the Druze village, keeping its traditional religion and culture. Bedouin is as well. Regarding to religion, Christian, Jewish and Islam coexist not only in Jerusalem but also in other cities in Israel. Israel also has various climate, nature and environment so you can feel different atmosphere once you move from here to there. For example, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like totally different countries rather than being in the same country: simply saying, religious and secular, and many different elements in detail. If you want to experience a real diversity, come to Israel!

2. My prejudice/perception of Israeli has gone.

I had a misperception of Israelis. I thought that the Israeli government and Israelis are in the same position (or have the same perspective). I was and still am against the hawkish attitude of Israeli government toward the Palestinian or Arab issues, which seem to make it worse to solve. To be more honest, I once thought that the current Israeli policy toward Palestinian is another type of Holocaust in view of Palestinians, and have some issues that I couldn’t understand/agree on: How could the religious belief be met by territorial sovereignty? International society sees Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory as an illegal act; however, even the UN peacekeepers’ operation has not intervened in such illegitimacy. My belief was that Israeli people has the same view with the Israeli government regarding those issues since the government represents its people. However, my prejudice toward Israeli people has been broken down when I met several Israelis and heard from them their perspectives. There are many people against the government’s policy and lots of people are working on social justice, especially for equal rights between Jewish Israeli and Arab Israeli and for social welfare of minority people. I have also heard of some people’s thought about the separation wall: although it is true that the suicidal bombing terror has been decreased since the construction of the separation wall, not many people see it as a direct result of separation wall. Rather, they believe that there are also other variables such as Palestinian Authority’s efforts to deter terrorism, policy change in both sides, etc. that have contributed to reduce the terror. In other words, most people see it as a correlation not a causal relation. Through this experience, I learned again ‘do not make a mistake of overgeneralization’. There are diverse spectrum of perspectives in Israel like as Dr. Ziv’s saying.

3. Common thing between Tel Aviv and Seoul.

Tel Aviv is no different from other big cities such as New York, Paris: Young people enjoy their lives, spend their time at the beach, hang out with friends, and the city is still vigorous and cheerful at night. We hardly tell the tension unlike in Jerusalem. They seem not to care about (or even recognize of) conflict with Palestine. In our meeting with an alumna of SIS, Anat Ben-Nun, working at the Israel NGO forum, mentioned this point as one of the obstacles that current peace programs face. Since young people think that they do not have any problem and they live normal lives, they do not care about peace issue. When I heard of this, I could easily compare this phenomenon with that of South Korea. Conflicts between South and North Korea are, of course, fundamentally different from those between Israel and Palestine, but the current situation that young people (Tel Aviv and Seoul) do not recognize of conflict is seemingly the same. This point was personally interesting to me. Peace does not emerge by itself. Peace is made by human efforts.

Photos I took during the field trip: