Israel is not like Harvard, as I discovered firsthand during my visit there from February to August this year. I have a background in education and in folklore studies, and the purpose of my trip was to learn about the practical application of folklore to educational practices, and to learn about Israeli culture and history. I returned with stories to share and with an understanding of how important it is for Israelis to share their stories with Americans.
When I arrived in Haifa, a city just north of Tel Aviv, I was greeted by a man whose language I didn’t recognize. I pulled my cheat sheet out of my pocket and read from words scrawled there the night before: Ani lo m’deberet ivrit, I read, Ana mah bahkish arabi. “I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I am an American.”
The differences between Israel and the United States are striking. Israel is diverse and divided, ancient and beautiful. The country is a desert, made up of red rocks, canyons, and irrigated farmland along the Mediterranean shore. The most remarkable thing about the country is its small size. It takes just three days to walk from the western border with Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. It takes five hours to travel by bus from the southernmost tip of the Egyptian border to the northern border with Lebanon or Syria. The trip takes travelers past Bedouin villages and a cutting-edge sustainability research station; past kibbutzim (communal farms), Ethiopian refugee camps, and cities that are still hit weekly by rockets from the Gaza strip.
During my stay in Israel, I worked for six months at the Centre for Creativity in Education and Cultural Heritage (CCECH) in Jerusalem. My apartment, near Hebrew University, was on occupied land that had been part of Jordan before the war of 1967. My daily run took me to a scenic panorama of the Old City of Jerusalem, where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, where Jesus was crucified, and where Mohammed ascended to heaven. On the east side of the Mount of Olives I looked out over the Negev, the desert that covers two-thirds of Israel. On clear days I could see the Dead Sea and the river that marks the border with Jordan. West of the river, I saw construction workers building the cement wall that slashes the view, separating the Israelis from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
At CCECH I worked on a project bringing together Jewish and Arabic children living in Jerusalem. Working within a “separate but equal” system, we visited classrooms in three Arabic and two Jewish schools, talking with children about their heritage. Every six weeks, families from the schools came together for joint activities. In a multilingual country, where Arabic is not taught in the Jewish schools, politics was only one of the barriers to be surmounted. For many of these families, participating in the joint activities was the first time they had engaged with each other in a social environment. It was the first time that members of the Jewish community crossed the line into the Arabic neighborhoods. During these shared activity sessions, children from deeply divided communities were able to meet as equals.
In Jewish culture, Israel is known as the Promised Land. In Israel, the Hebrew name for the United States is “ertzot habrit,” literally, “the land of the covenant.” Everywhere I went in Israel, people looked to America for answers. A man from Ashkelon, a city disrupted by rocket fire from Gaza, told me that he was afraid that America would let Israel down. A man from Ramallah, in the West Bank, said he was afraid America would abandon the Palestinian people. Both men told me that if there was ever going to be peace in Israel, it would be from America’s hands. At CCECH I saw how sharing stories can help achieve this goal in Israel.
Hannah will be giving a talk about her experiences in Israel on Sunday, Dec. 6, at 1 p.m. at Congregation Kerem Shalom in Concord.