Tours of Jerusalem Part 3

The past two days have been very uneventful in blogging terms. Yesterday was curriculum meetings and a public speaking worshop. (At the meeting Yaron, one of the founders, brought pastries and bagels, which I turned into both breakfast and lunch. That brings the free meal count to 5) The year one instructors (I am a year one instructor, I don't know if I've made that clear) got to meet their TA's. The TA's are last years graduates of the program. They've done meet for 3 years and were the first class to graduate from the program. For all of their hard work, they get to be my bitch for a summer. I picture myself throwing a sandwich down on the ground and screaming at the top of my lungs like I wanted dijon and not yellow mustard. I like daydreaming.

Anyways, they all seemed like nice kids, and one of the palestinian students will be going to MIT next year. They should be a good help because we have knocked down the number of year one instructors from 5 to 4 and upped the number of year one students from 30 to 40, so things could be a little hectic. They're mainly going to help out with recitations and labs so we can get a more 1-1 connection.

Today we did team building in a nature reserve somewhere in israel (our director abeer kept it very shady beforehand, I think it was somewhere northwest of jerusalem). For the most part it was team building stuff, it was fun, but the sort of stuff you'd expect. At the end we did make rafts from large plastic drums, small logs, and rope. We got to the other side of the pond, the other teams raft fell apart and they all got wet. Brennan likes to win. The nature reserve though was rather interesting. Apparently it's written in biblical texts that the area of israel and palestine in ancient times was covered in forrests and animals everwhere. Since then I guess some people were in the area, some problems or something happened, people built some stuff (is my sarcasm translating to text?) and the land got pretty stripped down. An israeli had some money and didn't like this, and so he bought some land and made it a kind of man-made nature reserve, which is kind of the opposite of the way nature reserves usually work. He bought some barren land and then planted various flora and fauna that was written in biblical texts. At lunch they gave us some humus with tihina (ground up sesame paste) and labene (kind of like cream cheese made from goat cheese). (I will count this as a half of a meal, I had to have ramen when I came home. Free meal count: 5.5)

But to complete our tours, which were now 4 days ago, we went to the museum on the seam, a museum built directly on the border between east and west jerusalem. The museum was modern art about labor and the way people work. While I have loved everything that I have done so far in the Middle East, this sucked. In general I don't like modern art, and that is one thing, but I didn't really like the art especially because of the subject matter. It dealt a lot with basically the downtrodden workers around the world but I thought a lot of it was kind of winey. Worse still, the curator was constantly trying to force conversations about the art, and we had just finished all of this israeli and palestinian perscpective stuff and she would stop us from discussing that, which was very annoying. At the end she had us all sit down and talk about "how we felt" (sigh). It felt like a sophmore year english class discussing art where no one cares, everyone is tired, and no one wants to talk. An awkward time was had by all. Still, the meet batting average for events is quite good. Afterwards we went out to dinner for falafel, and when the bill came, meet paid! (free meal count: 6.5)

In general, I have a few points about the two tours (I'm not gonna talk about the museum on the seam)

-I wish there had been more time with the jewish soldier. I feel like we didn't have enough time to get a good, real discussion with him. We spent about 4 hours on the palestinian tour, and had lots of time for questions. We got about an hour with the former jewish soldier, and we didn't get too much time to answer questions, and he seemed to be very knowledgable about subject matter and I think, given the chance, he could have defended many questions that we might have had having seen the palestinian tour.
-Both sides don't aknowledge that the others' problems exists. This is one of the most frustrating things I find when talking about people about the conflict. For instance we had a meeting at MIT which was the israeli and palestinian perspective from 2 students at the kennedy school of government. When I asked the palestinian, who was a moderate, what percentage of palestinians support terrorism, he basically replied "you have to understand what causes people to do terrorism." He basically completely avoided the question. On the palestinian tour of the region, there literally was ZERO mentions of terrorism. Then they scoffed at anything israel was doing because of security concerns, acting like all of them are a farce. Similarly, the israeli soldier didn't deal much at all with the checkpoints in the west bank which basically cripple the palestinian economy (we were told by the palestinian at our meeting at MIT that coca-cola says the west bank is the most difficult place in the world to do business because of the checkpoints) or the house demolitions (he claimed that in the late 90s the israeli supreme court ordered them to stop). They both seem like they have their own agendas, and don't deal with the others. (This somewhat makes sense, because for both of them, their livelihoods revolve around the conflict. No conflict, no job. It doesn't pay for them to see the other sides perspective.) This is very dissapointing because if I think someone is being closeminded or has an agenda, I'll tend to block them out, because I don't know what to believe. I found myself doing this on both sides.
-I don't think the palestinian perspective is shown on TV. When I watch the news, I feel like I get a good deal of stories on palestinian terrorist attacks on israel. Stories might even try to be even and explain what the terrorist attacks are in response to (and israeli incursion into the west bank, maybe some bombings of some houses, etc.). But what I never understood is how the occupation effects the day-to-day lives of palestinians, and quite frankly, how hard lives are for the palestinians. We could have saw the worst of the palestinian's neighborhoods (again, the agendas of the tour guides make it tough for me to see reality) but Max, our israeli head of curriculum, thinks it gets worse as you go further into the west bank, let alone the gaza strip, and this neighborhood we saw was awful. Lots of rubble, skeleton houses, trash everywhere, I talked about this 2 posts ago. I feel like worse than anything you would see in the US. I'm sure there are nice places in palestine, but I think life there is really hard for a lot of them, and its not portrayed in the American media.
-I'm feeling pretty sympathetic to the palestinians. I obviously don't condone their violence. I think they would get a lot more sympathy if they tried non-violent means, but looking at the discrepencies between the lifestyles of a fairly rich country in israel which is so close to a country that seems so poor with people feeling downtrodden, and with the situation constantly being exacerbated by israel, its tough not to sympathize. Of course, I tend to change my feelings about this whole thing every 10 minutes, but that's how I'm feeling right now.