Mustafa Tamimi's funeral, Nabi Saleh (Photo by Sam Kestenbaum)

On the day of Mustafa Tamimi’s funeral, the sky is blue and clear. It’s the first week of December and the air is cool. Families cry and hold each other. Old men stand around in leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and shaking hands, their faces drawn. Tamimi’s body is covered in a sheet, laid on a board and hoisted on shoulders. He’s then paraded around the village’s narrow streets. The crowd gathered here – friends, family and supporters – is in the hundreds.

Mustafa Tamimi was from Nabi Saleh, a small village of 550, north of Ramallah. One week ago, he was shot in the head with a teargas canister. An Israeli soldier fired the shot at Tamimi, who was among a group of other Palestinian and international protestors. The shot was fired from inside an armored military jeep and at close range. Tamimi immediately crumpled to the ground.

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 from Masada, Mt. Herzl, Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

The day began with a much welcome 2 hour bus ride to Tel Aviv, which most people slept through the entirety of due to only getting a few hours of sleep the night before.

Our first destination was the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation, based out of the Wolfson Medical Center in South Tel Aviv. Save a Child’s Heart is a program aimed at helping children from developing countries where pediatric cardiologists are not available or few and far between. They do their work in three ways, they completely cover the costs to bring children to Israel for treatment, they train doctors from developing countries in Israel, and they go to developing countries and do training and surgeries side by side.

The lady giving the info session tells us that 50% of the children who come to Israel to receive treatment come from the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Iraq. One of my peers comments that it seems like a political gesture to take such a disproportionate number of kids from the West Bank and Gaza. The SACH spokesperson, a late twenties girl originally from New York, says that it is not political, but that it is simply “a community in need, and we respond to that need.”

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 from Mt. Herzl, Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.

Monday, March 15th, 2010
I woke up at 4:45 this morning for an optional sunrise hike to the top of a nearby ridge. It is noticeably drier here in the south than in other parts of Israel we have been. As soon as the dusk started to light up the land, I looked on the ground and found it to be full of empty shells from desert snails about 3cm wide – literally there was one of these shells on the ground about every six inches. The desert is actually covered in small green plants in many parts now . . . It only lasts a few weeks and we happened to catch it. Right after winter rains and before the summer heat gets too intense.

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 from Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.

Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Today we met the six IDF soldiers that will be joining our group for the remaining five days of the program. All of them are between the ages of 19 and 21, half women, half men. When birthright was started around 2000, participants in the program were not allowed to walk through many parts of Jerusalem or go out at night, like we now are, because of the high level of danger during the second intifada. We are told that the IDF “encounters” program was incorporated into birthright to allow participants to meet and interact with Israeli citizens . . . The implication being that the soldiers were here to provide that connection between participants and Israelis, not participants and the Israeli military.

We played some name games and ice breakers in the morning, the soldiers still in full military garb (no guns). We then got ready for a somber day at Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl Cemetery, the Holocaust museum / memorial and the burying place of nearly every prominent Israeli statesmen and soldier – among many others of lesser fame.

I subscribe to HonestReporting.ca, which gives a very different perspective than that offered by Tikkun‘s Michael Lerner.

Michael Lerner and I disagree on more than a few matters with respect to Israel. I am, after all, fundamentally Orthodox. That aside, and it is a small matter, Michael’s prophetic voice sings to me and influences me.

Honest Reporting is, I suppose, a neoconservative Jewish media monitor. There are quite a few “Honest Reporting” wesbites, so they represent a coordinated effort of some type. Whose? I’ve never really been certain. I love a mystery.