Second Day

Birthright Day 2

"Some have left...some are dead"

Today we woke up and went to Jaffa. We stopped at the shore and Ronnie read a first person account of a member of the 2nd aliyah's arrival in the Mandate of Palestine. It was a very sentimental piece, about the mustachioed Arab sailors with Turkish hats, pulling them off the boats into the warm Mediterranean waters, seeing the orient for the first time etc etc. Ronnie went on to talk about how Jaffa was an Arab town. He said it "was very different then, sewage was flowing through the streets." Somone asked what had happened to the Arabs who used to inhabit the old city. He quickly replied that "some left, they went to the West Bank, Gaza or Lebanon, some are dead." I'm not sure if any Arabs were forcibly expelled from Jaffa, but if they were, Ronnie didn't care to mention it. We toured the old city and walked around on the plane between Tel Aviv and Jaffa where intense fighting broke out between the Jews and Arabs in 1948. The plane used to be covered in Arab homes. All but one is bulldozed and we got a chance to see it and go inside.

"Don't You Dare"

Later we went to Independence hall in Tel Aviv. This is the building in which the state of Israel was declared in May of 1948. It is very non-descript, small, with very few windows. A woman came out to give us a speech. It was very emotional. She said that our state was born in this room. That the declaration of independence was ours too, that we are all connected to this land. She told us about the UN sponsored 1947 partition plan. That the Jews had reason to Reject the plan, namely because it did not make provisions for security and left the state with very vulnerable boundaries, that Jerusalem was surrounded by Arabs, and that most of the land in the proposed Jewish State was in the Negev and bereft of fertile land or resources. Nonetheless, she pointed out, the Jews accepted the plan and were dancing in the streets while the Arabs rejected the plan. While it was infused with emotion and holier-than-thou tone, she made the very important point that the Jews did accept the plan and were forced by the Arabs to fight a war that they did not want to fight. Some people tend to forget this in their criticism of the state, and it's important to keep in mind. I'm surprised that she didn't also mention the partition plan of 1937 that gave the Arabs even more land than the 1947 one. Once again, the plan was accepted by the Yishuv and rejected by the Arabs.

She went on to speak about the aftermath of the failure of the plan. She said that the Americans told Ben Gurion "'don't you dare declare a state'" and instead asked them to propose an immediate ceasefire with the Arabs. "'If you declare a state, you will not have our support.'" As far as I know, this is grossly inaccurate. Along with most nations who would have liked to ensure the survival of the Jewish Community in Palestine, The U.S. was concerned that the fledgling Jewish State would not have the capability to take on the much larger Arab Armies in a war for survival. Thus, the U.S. suggested that ceasefire be proposed so that a diplomatic solution could be found. The U.S. never said "don't you dare" they were only saying that if you do, you might not survive. Secondly, the U.S. never told Ben Gurion that he would forfeit U.S. support if he declared a state and that this woman said they did is completely ludicrous. In reality, the U.S. recognized the State of Israel just hours after Ben Gurion declared the state's independence. Another fact this woman forgot to mention was that the U.S. actually sent a little over 200 military advisors and special forces to assist in the war that broke out immediately after the declaration.

Clearly this woman was distorting reality in order to shift our loyalties away from the U.S. and toward Israel. The first step in the process seems to be an attempt to sever our ties to the U.S. by making us feel some antipathy towards it. So she tells us that American didn't want to see the Jews succeed, that American could care less about the Jews in Palestine. She doesn't mention that Truman had a deep sympathy for the plight of the Jews, especially after the horrors of the holocaust were revealed to the world, and that he resisted the anti-Zionist pressure within his own administration that only sought to appease the Oil Dictatorships set up in the Gulf. This seems somewhat manipulative to me, but people are already starting to buy it.

Another thing the woman said was that everyone in Israel wants peace. Everyone. Ask anyone on the streets, and what will they say? We want peace! She didn't' mention the terms of this peace, nor did she go into the fact that no one in either Israel or the Palestinian territories can agree on what peace will finally look like. I sensed some frustration in her voice, because right now, any sort of peace looks extremely distant considering how fragmented both the Israelis and the Palestinians are. There is no strong leadership on either side, and thus no possibility for any sort of meaningful progress.

Eventually she had us stand up while Hatikvah played through some speakers on the walls.

"Look into the pewter pot"

We returned to the Hotel and got ready for Shabbat services. It was nothing special…just some songs in Hebrew with an acoustic guitar etc. We were on holy time now.

Later on in the evening almost everyone gathered in the lobby bar area and out on the back porch of the hotel. There was some wine, beer and some other stuff. The frat and sorority people couldn't wait to crack open the Vodka and the Whisky they bought.

I got a chance to talk to Liron, our IDF guard a bit. She told me about how unfriendly people were in NYC and that she loves Israel because it feels like a family. Then she told me not to believe anything I see on CNN or the BBC about Israel because it's all lies. I asked her why and she told me that people don't understand what it's like to live in Israel and that they can't say anything meaningful about the place. She went on to tell me that she supports settlements in the occupied territories because the land being settled was unused. During the Gaza pullout she refused to take part in the expulsion of settlers. Luckily her unit commander liked her and stationed her elsewhere instead of sending her to jail for a month. I asked her if she thought it was far to the people who lived in occupied territories and she shrugged. "I don't give a shit about the Arabics, I don't care if they all drown."

Later I went inside and sat down with my group leader, Jesse, and some others. Jesse just graduated from York University in Canada with a degree in Near Eastern History. He was talking with some other people about Arafat and Camp David. He was throwing down the Usual Arafat was a coward line, he ruined everything, she should be ashamed, he had no right etc etc. He also said that he was extremely anti-settlement and that he believes that they should never have been built. Nonetheless, he claimed, Arafat should have come to terms with reality in 2000 and accepted the fact that some of the largest settlements in the West Bank just would not be removed period. Sure Arafat might have been stupid for not realizing the power realities, but it's hard to call him a coward when all he did was constantly refer to the article 49 of the 1949 Geneva conventions which explicitly states that "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Israel has not Annexed the West bank (except for parts around Jerusalem) and so all those settlements are illegal. Arafat therefore had grounds to call for the complete dismantlement of every settlement in the west bank.

So Jesse's thoughts on this topic are interesting. He represents a confusing mix of moral certainty and an almost nihilistic acceptance of power politics. Here in Israel, it's very hard to mix the two without being inconsistent. Basically, most people like Jesse hold opinions implying that Arafat was a fool, but that he had every right to be.

This sort of thinking came up again when Jesse started talking about who really had the right to the land. On the one hand, he said that God promised it to the Jews and that God does have something in mind of the Jewish People. On the other, he acknowledged that that argument wasn't strong and that the Jews had rights to the land simply because they were there first and that the Torah is as good as a deed. I asked him about all the people the Jews killed after they left Egypt. He simply stated that they weren't around to complain anymore. So why not just expel or destroy all the Arabs? "Well", said Jesse, "there are human rights now, we have can't do that. If one day, God forbid the Arabs win a war, take the land, and kill all the Jews, fine…they won and I won't complain."

Later on Jesse asked me and some others who we would fight for if there were ever a war between the U.S. and Israel, assuming that both sights were relatively equal militarily. He said he would fight for Israel. Some other people did too. Some said they wouldn't fight, and some said they would fight for the U.S.