Originally posted under Dave Belden’s name, now under Mike’s so all his posts can be accessed together.
Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts are here and here.
Friday, March 12th, 2010
Today was spent in the incredible and ancient city of Jerusalem, a city that has been besieged 36 separate times. Today was a beautiful clear day, unlike the past few days that have been dusted by the sandy haze created by changing seasonal winds blowing from the east. The sense of history and time in this city is almost overwhelming, Sandstone pathways in the old city are smooth and shiny from centuries of traffic, ancient mosques and churches decorate the skyline. It was difficult to take it all in in just a day . . . Luckily we have tomorrow as well.
On the short bus ride to the old city we were told that the IDF had retaliated for rockets launched from Gaza into southern Israel, and that no Israelis were hurt but a few Palestinians were injured. One of the few more-religious kids on the trip sitting in front of me exclaimed “yes!” and clapped at the news of injured Palestinians. While it was surely a somewhat facetious remark, it underlines — in my opinion — the lack of understanding and compassion which allows such a remark to be acceptable to say (or perceived to be), even it if was said in part as a joke. I’m glad to say that two or three of my peers who were within earshot vocally reacted to the remark. Anyway, back to Jerusalem . . .
We found ourselves on a little knoll right outside the wall of the old city. We learned an abbreviated history as well as some topography of Jerusalem – three valleys that connect and flow down into the Dead Sea. Which hill is the real Mt. Zion? Where is King Herod really buried?
The first activity we did was visit the City of David outside the walls of the old city in East Jerusalem (part of Jordan between 1948 and 1967). We went underground via an ancient tunnel (Warran’s shaft) that was built thousands of years ago by King David’s invading army as a way to sneak inside and take the city (!!!). Later on, inhabitants of the old city 
extended this passageway via a long tunnel to a source of the Gihon spring so that the city could still have access to water even when under seige when no one can leave the walls. We walked the length of this narrow passageway (about 20 minutes), in which ankle high water flows still to this day. The passageway is very tall at some parts and crouching height at others, and it zigzags in the middle where the two sides were trying to find each other during construction.
After touring through the old city and below the City of David, we briefly visited the Western Wall and then went to a colorful market for lunch. We then returned to the hotel for some downtime before Shabbat preparations and a return to the Western Wall (Kotel).
The Western Wall on Shabbat is buzzing with life and excitement. When we had visited earlier in the day it was not nearly as busy, though it was still very powerful to be there. I’ll never forget touching the wall, listening to the Hebrew prayers of bobbing Hasidics on either side of me, while church bells and the afternoon prayers from the nearby al Aqsa mosque sounded in the distance. Shabbat begins when there are three stars visible in the sky, and we arrived when there was still a good amount of color in the sky. Access to the Western Wall is controlled by an orthodox religious authority, so men and women are segregated by a fence / wall. The men’s section is between two and three times larger than the women’s section and has additional access to a large synagogue in the foundations of the temple mount which allows men to get a little closer to the arch of the covenant, the room which originally housed the stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
T
he Shabbat celebration at the wall is truly a beautiful sight, people are filled with absolute joy, donning huge smiles. Scores of groups of men huddled in circles, some huge some small, celebrating in prayer. If one wanted, he could bounce from group to group, repeating the prayers into the night. Others are up against the wall praying individually. Ashkenazi Orthodox boys and men of different European dissent sport distinct hats to differentiate and pay tribute to their heritage — the best clearly being some eastern European Hasidics that wear large fuzzy black cylinders, maybe a foot and a half wide and eight inches tall. A large circle of IDF soldiers sing loudly with their arms around each other as they jump up and down orbiting the space between them, each one with an M-16 dangling at his side. I was bobbing around between groups taking as much in as I could for about 15 minutes before I was pulled into a group of singing and circling men by a young orthodox man who turned out to be from Myrtle Beach, North Carolina.
I met up with the group and we all walked back to the hotel and ate dinner. I spoke to a few of my male peers who were very moved by the experience of going to the wall, but sadly, this was much less so for the 
women in my group. They explained that there was much less dancing and singing, and that the feeling was very similar to the brief visit to the wall earlier in the day, but just with much more women.
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
It being Shabbat, today was a fairly relaxed day. Although we had the choice to attend one of three Saturday morning services, most of the group opted to sleep in — myself included.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque
Although we are all adults on the trip and there was no programming until 3pm, we were not allowed to go off and explore Jerusalem (perhaps parts of the old city that birthright doesn’t take us to, like the Christian quarters, the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque) on our own. Since some people were getting restless however and wanted to get out of the hotel, our guide announced after lunch that he’d be leading an optional tour for those who wanted.
About a third of the group came on the tour. We saw a windmill outside the old city that was brought in pieces from England by a wealthy English Zionist in the nineteenth century. The windmill was located in one of the first Jewish suburbs located outside the walls of the old city — a neighborhood with beautiful views overlooking the old city and surrounding hills in which homes can sell for $10 million and are often owned by foreigners. From this neighborhood we could see a long segment of the separation barrier hugging the ridge of a long hill far off in the distance, dividing the west bank and east Jerusalem. Our guide claimed that the wall was built specifically so as not to destroy any houses in the building of the wall. He claimed that when a security fence is built (as Israel often does in less densely populated areas), 150 feet on either side of the fence must be cleared (I’m not sure why?), but that a huge concrete wall like the one we were looking at only needed 15 feet clear on either side. He explained that since the building of the wall under Sharon, terrorist suicide bombings have dropped dramatically, which is true (the implication seeming to be that the wall was a success, therefore providing the unsaid justification of why there is no need to have a discussion about alternatives to the wall or the context of occupation).
To contextualize Jewish immigration to Israel post WWII and the need for suburbs outside the walls of the cramped old city, he explained that many Jews returned to western Europe from camps and exile to find their homes being lived in by new occupants that had moved in during the war. The irony of this caught my ear because of the many Arabs fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 and now have generations of Israeli families that have made lives in these homes. Though these two displacements were happening at the same time and are connected, there was of course no mention of the latter displacement.I want to say at this point that I like my guide very much and that as far as I can tell he is a fairly compassionate, non-reactionary, fair person who wants to see a just peace come between Israelis and Palestinians. I was not expecting to find him to be as much like this as I am finding him to be, which is great. He says things in a very straight forward and honest way — “the international community considers east Jerusalem to be occupied territory, Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be part of Israel and doesn’t think it should divide its own city” — and his tone does not suggest that one is more true than the other. At the same time, some questions cannot be answered simply, and they require conversations and nuanced answers, and when simple answers or explanations are given for these sorts of issues, the implication is that the answer is simple when it’s anything but. So while the tone and presentation may be very fair, fairness is not the main consideration when a complex issue is reduced into a simple statement. Our guide, Danny, is also not void of opinion. I have picked up from various comments that he personally thinks Israel’s timing with the recent settlement announcement was stupid in that it was harmful to the peace process; also, in speaking about the assassination of the dovish Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right wing orthodox Israeli in 1995, he said that he wanted to and nearly attended the peace rally at which Rabin was assassinated. Anyway, my point is that though he says things that are problematic and worth noting in my posts, he wants the right things (peace, ending Israeli oppression) and is doing a pretty good job considering his important role in all that is the Birthright program.
At 5pm the tour group met up with the rest of the group and in the park outside the hotel we prepared for tomorrow’s main event — the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum. Four of five people shared personal stories about how their grandparents escaped the camps or how other relatives were not so lucky. We did an exercise to discuss issues of responsibility and obligation concerning the roles of the Judenrat in the Ghettos (the Jews that the Nazis gave special privileges and power to administer the ghettos and make tough decisions).We ate dinner in the hotel and then gathered on the 3rd floor for some evening programming. An Israeli film maker came by and showed us two short films made while he was in film school, one by him and another by a friend. The films were good, and the second one provoked some interesting questions, but most people were too eager to go spend a night on the town to stay around and ask questions and have a discussion.
[Note: this paragraph was replaced as some details were wrong]. I stuck around and had a conversation with the film maker about what he didn’t like about Waltz with Bashir, the animated Israeli film from last year. He said that the movie plays on what he considers to be a popular misconception about Israeli culpability in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon whose inhabitants were brutally murdered in the early 1980s during the first Israel-Lebanon war. He felt that Israel had absolutely no dirt on their hands and that it was completely irrelevant that the state of Israel had everything to do with why these people were in refugee camps in Lebanon in the first place. He blamed the Phalangists (rightly so, but the Israelis and commander Ariel Sharon in particular share responsibility. In the narrative that I know, Israeli tanks surrounded the camps and did not let anyone leave as the Phalangists went into the camps and murdered at least 800 people (common estimates suggest much higher numbers of civilian deaths, upwards of 2000, with some estimates ranging as high as 3,500 civilian deaths). We also spoke about operation Cast Lead in which over 1400 Palestinians in the Gaza strip died and 13 Israelis died (6 from friendly fire). He disputed the numbers given by the Red Cross and other groups and claimed that the vast majority of the 1400 (1160 by IDF accounts) Palestinians killed were militants (IDF claims some 700+ of the deaths were militants). Local NGOs contend that the vast majority of the deaths were civilians (around 1200). I asked him about the reporting I had heard on KPFA’s Flashpoints that claimed ambulance drivers were targeted by Israeli snipers, and about the oil refinery and other civilian infrastructure that was destroyed in the bombing campaigns, and he said that all of it was untrue except for the oil refinery but blamed that on Hamas launching rockets from the refinery. Sadly he had to leave before we could move from what had spiraled into a blame game of sorts to the more important discussion of what is ultimately good for establishing a lasting peace. Totally interesting nonetheless.
I read in the news that Hillary Clinton called the timing (while vice president Joe Biden was visiting Israel to try and rekindle peace talks) of Israel’s announcement that it plans to build 1600 new settlement homes in east Jerusalem “insulting.” The quartet today also condemned Israel, and the UN reminded the world community that it considers the settlements to be illegal under international law. Perhaps this will translate into some material punishment or ultimatum involving stipulations for continued US foreign aid to Israel? Dubious.
I haven’t heard Flashpoints in many years, but the last time I did it was hosted by David Bernstein, grandson of a rabbi, and a person I had great respect for. I would say that truth is the first requirement for any meaningful discussion. I see your guide is conflicted. You are right to appeal to his higher self. I would be much more confrontational and therefore much less successful. Elders should always be able to learn from our youth. Thanks for sharing your experiences with me. I have greatly benefited from them.
Well written, and honest, and reflecting the ambivalence most of us feel when we are visiting Israel (for me, May 2009) or in USA when things happen in Israel (Humiliating VP Biden)……….And reading your deswdcriptions at the Wall, reminds me forcefully that we really must fight the effort to reduce womens’ rights in Jerusalem as exemplified by their unequal access to the Wall, and all the other similar ‘nonsenses’ going on in Israel by the Religious Right.
Sorry for the review, but I’m really loving the new blog, and hope this, as well as the excellent reviews some other people have written, will help you decide if it’s woth your reading.