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Essay: Campus lessons
By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI
I recently taught a course on Israeli society and politics at Colorado College, a small, first-rate liberal arts college in Colorado Springs. And though that limited experience hardly makes me an expert on the question of the image of Israel on American campuses, I did learn several potentially useful lessons about how to convey the complexity of our dilemmas to smart but largely ahistorical American students.
My goal wasn't to teach the Israeli-Arab conflict but Israel, on its own terms. That is, to present the Middle East conflict as part of the Israeli story, one of many political, social and cultural conflicts that define the Jewish state.
Still, I had this dilemma: How would I switch to objective presenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict without betraying my beliefs? My friend and unofficial adviser at the college, Prof. David Hendrickson of the political science department, suggested these guidelines: "Tell the students what you think, because you owe it to them and they'll want to know. Just be sure to make them aware of all points of view."
I thought I might be able to handle that.
My first test happened immediately, during the opening session. I was explaining to the class how Judaism places a religious value on both peoplehood and land, and noted that a secular Israeli who risks his life protecting the Jewish state is fulfilling a religious category and so is in some sense considered a "good Jew." A student raised her hand and asked, "So Judaism would call someone a good Jew who rapes and murders Palestinians?"
Welcome to post-Leon Uris America.
How to respond? Do I begin the course by arguing against the big lie and risk being dismissed by students as a mere polemicist, or do I let my response unfold gradually over the coming weeks? I opted for the latter and said only, "Judaism wouldn't consider that particular person to be a good Jew."
As the course progressed, that interaction was a constant reminder to me of the need to explain the basics of Israeli reality.
The next challenge happened in that same opening session. In trying to explain that the Zionist return wasn't just motivated by anti-Semitism but by love of the land, I offered myself as an example of an American Jew who had moved to Israel simply to come home.
"I don't understand what you mean by 'home,'" a student interjected. "For me, home means family and neighborhood. How can 'home' be something as abstract as a country?"
My next test happened a week later, with the suicide bombing of bus 14 in Jerusalem. There was no way that, after a sleepless night on the phone with family and friends in Jerusalem, I could walk into class the next morning and pretend that nothing had happened.
And so I came as I was, an aggrieved and angry Israeli. I played the students mournful Israeli music by Ehud Banai and read elegiac, ironic poems by Yehudah Amichai. For three hours, they experienced something of our reality.
AFTERWARDS I was challenged by Jorge, a Palestinian Christian student who had grown up in Peru.
"I want to know how Israelis are affected by the conflict," he said. "But why don't we learn also about how Palestinians feel when their people are killed by soldiers and their homes are blown up?"
I explained that this was a course about the internal Israeli experience. Several students, though, took Jorge's side, arguing that the Palestinian conflict is so integral to Israeli reality that it's unreasonable to exclude a Palestinian perspective.
Justifiably, Jorge was constantly measuring my fairness. And I was constantly pushing him to go beyond anger - which is precisely why he had taken the course, courageously, in the first place. At one point I set up a debate between Jorge and Elena, one of the Jewish students in the class, about the origins of Zionism. I insisted that Jorge take the Zionist side and Elena the Palestinian side. "Say 'we,'" I urged them, when they defended their respective positions. Both performed admirably - until the very end, when Jorge shouted, "I can't take this anymore!"
Obviously I wanted students to sympathize with Israel's dilemmas. But most of all, I wanted them to understand the tragedy of history, which gave the Jews no choice but to try to return to the land and gave the Arabs no choice but to try to stop them. That same tragic inevitability has led Jews and Arabs to see each other as the embodiment of their worst historical enemy, so that Arabs became our Nazis and we became their colonialists.
When discussing the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis, the perspective that resonated most with students was that of historian Benny Morris, who argues that the Arabs declared a war of genocide, and the Jews responded with a war of ethnic cleansing.
The students I encountered had no moral expectations of Israel - or, for that matter, of any other state. In fact, they assumed that states are corrupt entities that will do anything they can get away with. That cynicism is not necessarily detrimental to Israel: It means that the Jewish state isn't placed on a pedestal, only to disappoint. It may be unflattering for Israel to be considered little better than its enemies, but it spares us the double standard to which Israel is often held.
At the same time, most of my students have been affected by the Holocaust. They are part of the first generation of Americans to be raised with the Holocaust as their symbol of ultimate evil. One of the most shocking revelations for students was that much of the Arab national movement was pro-Nazi.
"How can the Palestinians say they're right when they supported Hitler?" one young woman said, disoriented to discover that the Palestinian issue was more complex than she had assumed.
While there is little sentimental affection for Israel, there is much curiosity. The anti-Israel demonizers haven't yet won the debate on campus. Thoughtful college students respond to complexity, and my students were fascinated by Israel's courage in grappling with its insoluble political and ideological problems.
One of the most effective moments in conveying the decency of Israeli society was the screening of an episode about mass immigration from the Israeli TV series Tekuma, which deals with the history of Israel. When it was aired in Israel in 1998, the series was bitterly critiqued by the Right for being too self-critical. Yet all of those interviewed in the segment that I showed - whether Holocaust survivors or Sephardi immigrants or more recent Russian and Ethiopian arrivals - not only complained of how they were received by veteran Israelis but also expressed their love for Israel and gratitude for being here. For me, the lesson was that we don't have to be so defensive about our flaws. What seems to us as self-flagellation is sometimes admired abroad as candor.
At the end of the course, my Palestinian student, Jorge, gave me a gift: an icon of his favorite saint, San Martin de Porres, who was renowned as a peacemaker. In the icon, he is presiding over a plate of food shared by a dog and a cat.
I knew I'd passed the course.
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