By Danny Silverston
Sophomore Speech Finalist
On December 27, 2015, I sat down to a beautiful lunch with my family. The meal was composed of countless assorted salads, hummus, pita, grilled kebabs, and bottled coca-cola. But the infamous red and white emblem imprinted on my bottle wasn’t in English, but rather in Arabic, as I was eating lunch in the West Bank.
The West Bank, named for its position relative to the Jordan River, is largely Palestinian-controlled territory that borders east Jerusalem in Israel, and an area that has a pretty bad reputation all around the globe.
World News headlines associated with the West Bank might sound something like, “Shooting among Israeli soldiers and Palestinian rebels” or “Israeli settlements anger Palestinians” or “Hamas terror strikes kill Israelis”. Certainly none of these headlines are inaccurate, but there is a whole entire dimension of this area that the media hides from us, a dimension that I had the good fortune of experiencing when I visited the West Bank this past December.
The media– newspapers, news networks, anything with a camera or reporters– doesn’t show us the West Bank. They show us a war zone, riddled with bombs and guns and angry Arabs.
Before i visited, I envisioned just that. From what I had heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the West Bank was home to the enemy, and stood in the way of Israel’s security.
This perception is part of the problem.
Here in the U.S, and more specifically Newton, our community is startlingly pro-Israel, which is great. Ani ohev yisrael (I love Israel), and I can’t stress that enough, but sometimes our generous support of Israel in the American mainstream media and in our community can stand in the way of seeing the other side, the opposite perspective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The newspapers we read merely show one frame, or snapshot, of the West Bank, but in order to truly understand the complete landscape and culture of the area, you need to experience the West Bank with your own eyes. News headlines today may show you a battlefront with armed Arabs, but they don’t show you real people.
Real people, just like us. In fact, while in Ramallah Center Square, a city as bustling and alive as downtown Boston, my family and I met a Palestinian owner of an ice cream shop who used to live on Jackson street in Newton, which is a five minute walk from our school. And as we talked with this former UMass student and his son, whose ice cream shop was part of a beautiful and vibrant cityscape, it was hard to imagine the West Bank as a dangerous place at all. Yet this was just one more frame, one more snapshot, one more dimension of the West Bank.
Before Ramallah Center, my family and I visited Al-amari, a United Nations controlled refugee camp established to provide shelter for over 5,000 out of the 1.5 million Palestinian refugees alive today. At the refugee camp, kids are brought up in a grid of narrow streets and alleys, surrounded by run-down concrete buildings that are built up to four stories in order to conserve space.
Here in Al-amari, children are dismissed from school at 12 pm, and are left to wander the streets and alleys for the remainder of the day, as young as one and a half years old. Here in Al-amari, the martyrs— people who sacrificed their lives as part of terror attacks in the name of Palestinian freedom— are idolized: their faces plastered on large banners praising them for their so-called courageous acts of attacking Israeli soldiers and citizens, attacks that will have virtually zero positive impact on the conflict in which they are entangled. But despite everything crooked and disturbing about this refugee camp, the Palestinians of Al-Amari made us feel at home.
With the help of our tour guide, Rami Nazzal, my family and I were able to have a sincere and personal conversation with a multi-generational Palestinian family. This family explained to us their struggles and views about living as refugees, from perspectives young and old. And as I listened to a Palestinian teenager barely older than me voice his opinions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I wasn’t hearing the voice of the enemy. I was witnessing a thoughtful kid who supported his culture and ethnicity just like I support mine.
Just as in Israel, Newton, and everywhere else in the world, this Palestinian teenager had strong personal values that had been influenced by his upbringings. And just like us, those influences may stand in the way of fully understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As we passed through the enormous wall that divided Israel and the West Bank, Rami said to us, “that everything is backwards when you go over the wall”. This statement could not be more true.
Enemies become allies, allies become enemies, and the good and the bad become an absolute mess. This wall happened to be painted with beautiful messages, one of which read, “Make Hummus not Walls”.
At the moment of reading this message, I realized that these two sides of the wall, two enemies with reverse ideas, are really just the same. Most Palestinians see Israel as the evil armed soldiers stationed at checkpoints, and most Israelis see Palestinians as armed terrorists rebelling at those checkpoints. But even from opposing and opposite angles, the ultimate goal of the artist who painted that mural was peace, and hummus, a goal just like Israel’s, and all of ours, depending on how you feel about hummus.
The conclusion that my family and I came to after visiting the West Bank is that better leadership is required on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that is not my point, and attempting to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a single article is simply impossible. Maybe you and your family will visit Israel and decide that Palestinians should find a new home, or that Palestine deserves all of Israel, or whatever, because experiencing the other side of a war like this lets you truly understand a different perspective on the conflict, and potentially come to your own conclusion.
I realize it’s a lot to ask of you to visit the West Bank, but the philosophy of understanding the other side, an alternate perspective, knows no bounds. That “sketchy” neighborhood in Boston that everyone tells you to stay away from may be worth a visit, because you just might learn something.
