The Elephant in the Room….& my final project

     Growing up going to Jewish day school, attending synagogue, traveling to Israel to visit my family, and being an active part of the pro-Israel community in my city provided me with a great deal of knowledge and experience surrounding the conflict that I would not have otherwise had. It also saddled me with a handicap that was up to me to overcome. I'm talking about the blinders that are often put on Jewish youth in our formative years to focus all of our attention on the good parts of Israel without addressing or explaining the bad parts. I was educated extensively about all of the many reasons we Jews desired and needed a land to call our own, about the many battles fought and won valiantly and bravely in order to protect ourselves from those who wanted us eliminated. I always wondered about the side of the story that I was not as enthusiastically introduced to, and around 5 or 6 years ago I finally addressed the elephant that had been in all of the classrooms in which I'd grown up--the possibility that "my side's" record was not as spotless as I would have liked to believe.

      To further address the issue of Israel's roots and history, I would like to encourage all of you to read the book "My Promised Land" by Ari Shavit, but since I know you're all busy and won't get to it right away, definitely read this review from the New York Times. I CANNOT EMPHASIZE how important this book is, not only for Jews who identify as Zionists as I proudly do, but also for anyone else remotely interested in this conflict.


      This elephant is what we have been addressing in class so far, and I greatly appreciate the added perspective. Dr. Tamari and Betty Herschman's work has been crucial to the understanding of the conflict--they are both scholars who clarify and simplify this daunting topic. This is incredibly important work simply because of how many people this conflict affects and how central this conflict is in international politics.

     1.  After reading the review of Shavit's book, do you have any new thoughts regarding the material that we read in Armstrong's book and that we learned from Tamari and Herschmann?
     2.  Does this give you any new insights into the motivations(for existence or survival, for example) of the members of the Israeli or the Palestinian communities?
     3.  What do you think would be an effective way of educating young people in Jewish schools as well as students in Palestinian or Arab or Muslim schools to ensure mutual understanding, acceptance, respect, and friendship?


       The problems that I have with the way that Jewish educators often go about teaching students about Israel and Palestine are what I would like to focus on for my final project. I want to develop curriculum for Jewish and Arab/Palestinian/Muslim (I am grouping these three communities together here without equating them, recognizing their differences) children that will aim to create amicable relations between following generations ensuring that open dialogue surrounding peace negotiations can eventually happen--the children are our future! Cheesy but SO TRUE!

Another potential final project is to explore in more concrete ways than I ever have before how exactly one can go about ameliorating and eventually solving this conflict. This plan will include assessments of how effective government action has been and will be, and also how effective various types of "soft" diplomacy has been and will be. My passion for solving this conflict comes from my intense pride of my Jewish ancestry and the deep sadness that results from having this pride yet living in a time when Israel is so blatantly mistreating Palestinians.

Peace, y'all.