The seminar has been a great experience so far. I’ll do my best to summarize a few key points I picked up. The tour of Jaffa during the beginning of the seminar provided an informative foundation and historical summary to the land that Israel sits on. Our tour guide Avi went through a brief 4,000 year history and explored the varying empires that ruled over time. After the overview we toured important sites in Jaffa and made our way to adjacent neighborhoods for further historical context.
The meeting at the US embassy with David Berns was a way for our group to hear about US-Israeli relations and a chance to ask questions around our paper topics. Lucky for us we had a chance to meet and shake hands with Ambassador Shapiro as well. The Ambassador wished us the best in our stay in Israel and hoped that one of us will find the final solution to the conflict (we were asked to contact him if we did).
We arrived in Jerusalem on Monday and hit the ground running. Our morning lecture on Tuesday with Daniel Siedemann was extremely informative and wonderfully candid. Mr. Siedemann has a strong background in US-Israeli relations, works closely with the US government and various bureaus, and is an expert background on the city of Jerusalem. The following is a paraphrase of one of the points he mentioned regarding a two-state solution to the conflict: Palestinians want to push Israel to the sea; Israeli’s want to push Palestinians to Jordan. Unfortunately, these options aren’t available at the moment so we will try for a two-state solution.
Thursday we had a full day of lectures, history, and site seeing with Ben from an Israeli organization Ir Amim. If I had to describe the day in one sentence I would say, “I witnessed a small glimpse of the Israeli-Israeli conflict.” What I mean by this is that our tour guide, Avi, and Ben, from Ir Amim have two very important but also very different perspectives on the arab-Israeli conflict. Ben spoke from a more left-wing political perspective and Avi spoke from a more centrist-right perspective. Both individuals went back and forth between each other in front of the group which provided me with a better understanding of the politics within Israel, hence the “Israel-Israeli conflict”. From my personal point of view, witnessing this take place was exactly what I expected the seminar to provide and I’m glad that this happened early on so I can take all of the information, facts, and perspectives with me as our group continues learning.
Walking the Ramparts in Old Jerusalem
At the security wall near Abu Dis
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