JERUSALEM -- At 2 a.m. on Friday morning, the streets outside my hotel in Jerusalem were jam-packed with thousands of people making their way to the Wailing Wall where, the day before, I had placed my own folded up prayer -- and where I had to cover my exposed shoulders with a hastily borrowed shawl. What is it about shoulders, in particular, that God would find so disquieting?
Early Friday morning I headed to Tel Aviv to visit the Bialik Rogozin School, an extraordinary example of what is possible with real leadership.
The school has 750 students from 48 countries, including 21 orphans from Darfur. The majority of them come from the poorest parts of Israeli society -- all studying together with stunning results. In Israel as a whole, 46 percent of high school graduates go on to higher education. At the Rogozin School, Martin Karp, of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation that provides a lot of support for the school, told me that figure is 68 percent. "68.6," Karen Tal, the school's director corrected him.
And it is Karen Tal's leadership that is undoubtedly the key to the school's remarkable transformation. Born in Morocco, she took over as director three years ago. When she arrived at the school, it was plagued by every possible problem, including outbreaks of violence and dilapidated surroundings.
But the school I toured with her was immaculate, with students' paintings covering the walls, and new computers throughout. In one classroom, whose occupants looked like a mini-United Nations, kindergarteners were joyfully singing and dancing together. In another, I sat at a table with teenage students telling me their stories. Two sisters had come from Ghana; one boy from Ethiopia; another girl from Georgia; another from the Congo. A girl from Turkey had a particularly sad story, because she and her single mother, who works as a housekeeper, are facing deportation, as they are in Israel illegally. But everyone on the school's board is using all their influence to try to keep the girl and her mother in the country. "It would be so hard for her to go back and try to restart her life in Turkey," Tal told me.
I left Bialik Rogozin energized and inspired. So it was particularly jarring to drive straight from the school to the West Bank to see the Jewish settlements that have become a flashpoint of the stalled peace process.
The security wall. The roadblocks and barbed wire. The separate roads that the Palestinians have to use. The checkpoints and "buffer zones." The very large, sprawling, and very permanent-looking Israeli settlements carved out on Palestinian land. No wonder Palestinians feel like strangers in their own land.
Taking it all in, it's hard not to feel weighed down by a sense of hopelessness over the divisions that seem even more entrenched and permanent than the intruding settlements themselves.
Standing at one of the checkpoints, my mind went back to the school. There, the differences between nationalities felt utterly superficial, almost irrelevant. Here, the differences felt vast and unbridgeable.
Yet, in this land of miracles, we can still imagine the emergence of the kind of leadership that can transform both old hatreds and the facts on the ground.
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Arianna Huffington: Israel Diary: Voices of Peace, Stories of Conflict
My last day in Israel was a whirlwind of visits -- and points of view. I met with people on both sides of the conflict, all hoping to break through old paradigms that no longer work.
There IS...no moral equivalency, as Arianna suggests, between the indignity and DANGER of daily rocket attacks...and the indignity and NO DANGER of having to put up with checkpoints.
Israel is NOT required to admit or transit enemy people through its own territory. Israel is NOT...responsible for the welfare of an enemy people, or the economy of another territory not under its sovereignty.
The checkpoints EXIST...in the first place...BECAUSE OF...the rocket attacks and terrorism. Were there no threat and existential danger, there would be no checkpoints. However,
Israel, like any other nation on earth, is entitled to and OBLIGATED to control its own borders.
Consequently, Israel OWES NO APOLOGY OR EXPLANATION TO EITHER THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY OR ITS ENEMIES.
The Arabs shoot; Israel shoots back. The Taliban-backed al Q'aeda commit terror on United States interests, it is the OBLIGATION of the US government and ALL its politicians to take them out. There is nothing to negotiate.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/israel-diary-voices-of-pe_b_301738.html
Have you yet spoken to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza & East Jerusalem? Otherwise, Peres will have the only word.
"Yet, in this land of miracles, we can still imagine the emergence of the kind of leadership that can transform both old hatreds and the facts on the ground."
I recently was using a chain hoist, a fairly inexpensive tool for lifting heavy loads. By pulling easily on a chain loop one is able to lift a ton or more; a high travel low force input translates to low travel high force output. You have to just keep pulling on the chain for reduction gears to perform marvelous results.
A continuous flow of support for a practical positive idea can eliminate much of the world's suffering by lifting the burdens of chaos.
The poverty is due to the corruption of the Palestinian leaders, the world has showered tens of billions of dollars and Euros to help build Palestine and most of it has been stolen. Also, I was recently in Jordan, even without the Israelis to blame, it looks like a 3rd world country.
As for the settlements, Israel offered to remove them in 2000, Arafat responded not with a counter offer, but a war. Like all other wars started by the Arabs against the Israelis, it didn't work out to well. Some day they might learn, but not if their apologists in the west keep making excuses for them.
To be sure, a lot of Israelis claim they just want peace - as long as they get to keep all their stolen land and goods, and that Palestinians have no actual sovereignity. Having committed ethnic cleansing supporters of Israel then claim victimhood when rockets come from Gaza. 3000 people mostly civilians were killed by munitions from Israel falling on Gaza (from 2000 & prior to the December/January offensive) - this is the Israeli idea of offering peace.
To those who suggest Americans give back America to the Native Americans, I won't claim there wasn't a genocide conducted by my forebears against them or any unbroken treaties, or there wasn't simple theft of most of their land. The comparison is apt in that respect.
The occupation is not a result of Arab intransigence... it is the result of a national policy that seeks to expand into a 'Greater Israel' and cleanse itself of the Arab population it cannot absorb and sitll call itself a 'democracy.' Big joke, there. Again, there is such ignorance of the facts and the history of the region. So sad to read some of the really baseless comments supporting Israeli policy.
Salaam-shalom, keep up the good work!
I notice the situation is opening up here in regard to this critical topic. Several years ago real blog clog at this site when it came to this important issue.
Do folks know about the site MONDOWEISS. One of the best going on this issue
Although the decision to emigrate is a hard one for a people who rhapsodize so elegantly over the lay of the land and of dun villages surrounded by olive groves and strewn with limestone outcroppings, many are electing to leave daily. However the large majority of Palestinians remain attached like limpets to the rocky soil that still sustains. Viewed as a serious problem demographically and geographically to the current Israeli government, the idea of massive transfer is still an option, albeit a disagreeable one. It could and might be possible under the cloak of another regional tempest. Confrontation over Iran will do the trick. However, hopefully the good citizens of the globe would not stand by and let this happen…..again
I agree, and it only takes looking at a map to see why this makes sense. Where has there been any discussion about how a "contiguous" Palestine that includes Gaza and the West Bank is to be created? A tunnel between the two, or carving off southern Israel and giving it to "Palestine?" If one thinks things are bad now, can you imagine the turmoil that would accompany such an attempt? In any case, until Palestinian sponsors recognize Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state, then all such discussions are moot.
Giving up on creating a separate "Palestine" that doesn't have as it's goal the elimination of a separate Israel seems to be the only realistic and long lasting option. Both "Palestine" and Israel are recent political creations, although Jews have far older cultural and historical claims to the land than do Muslims. Presumably the "massive transfer" would be of populations from Gaza and the West Bank who gave up on the idea of a separate "Palestine" and decided to emigrate to neighboring countries, accompanied by the formal consolidation of Israel to include Gaza and the West Bank (and the Golan Heights). When this occurs I hope it is with a minimum of bloodshed, and I am confident that Israel will help smooth the process as much as it is in their power to do so.