Eight Girls

I recently concluded a 10-day Israel seminar with a group of HUC MA in Jewish education students. The seminar was titled Sacred Vision/Complex Reality and as it said in the program overview, our goal was to explore “the multi-layered dimensions of historical, sacred, contemporary, and changing Israel as a learning laboratory” for developing a more sophisticated and meaningful personal and professional relationship with Israel. We jumped right into that in our opening study session. We began with the first few lines of the parsha for the week, Va’yechi -- Jacob’s deathbed request to Joseph to swear not to bury him in Egypt but rather to take him back to his ancestral burial place. We then studied a series of rabbinic texts to try to understand how the sages negotiate the tension (and borders) between vision and reality as they craft their relationship with the land of Israel. We grappled with the differences and similarities between Jacob’s request to return to his homeland and the rabbis’ yearning to extend the boundaries of Israel in both physical and metaphysical ways. And we asked the students to consider where they stood in relationship to Israel as actual and imagined homeland, or if they stood on that continuum at all.

Perhaps one of the most challenging times that we confronted the question of where we stand, came during consecutive meetings with two sets of high school aged girls who are active in two very different youth groups. The first group included four Israeli Jewish girls who attend Ironi Alef, a municipal secular public Jewish high school in Tel Aviv and are part of a youth group sponsored by the non-profit educational organization called Windows-Channels for Communication. The second group included four Israeli Muslim girls from Jaffa who are active in the Muslim Scouts.

Windows is an almost 20 year-old joint Israeli-Palestinian organization that works with youth in a “triangle”: Jewish Israelis, Palestinian Israelis, and Palestinians from the territories. The youth meet most often in single-identity groups but also have joint weekend seminars and frequent exchanges through letters, skype, phone, and email with their counterparts. As noted on their web-site, Windows is based on the premise that to “advance the process of reconciliation in our region, it is important to understand and internalize democratic values and human rights and to deepen mutual knowledge of the other.” The youth groups are organized primarily around writing and producing a bi-lingual magazine where all participants have the opportunity to share their stories.

The Muslim scouts are part of the broader scouting movement in Israel that serves well over 45,000 youth throughout the country. Scouts meet in single identity youth groups so that there are sub-groups including secular Jewish, Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze troops. From the best I can tell through the minimal information I found on the web, there are about 2,000 members of Muslim scouts, organized in 10 troops. The girls we met are both scouts themselves, and were also serving as volunteer counselors during a winter holiday day camp.

With each encounter, we hoped to learn a little bit about the girls, their motivation to join their organization and their hopes and dreams.

The four Jewish girls from Windows were lively and seemed eager to talk with us. Like typical teenage girls, they spoke at a rapid-fire pace and were ably translated by my daughter Hannah, who has been working at Windows for the past 2 years. Though I am admittedly biased, I was truly impressed by Hannah’s ability to express not just the words but the nuance and emotion in each of the girls’ words. The girls told us that what first drove them to join the youth group was their interest in learning about what remains invisible to them in their “middle class bubble in Tel Aviv,” as one of the girls described. “They don’t teach us anything in school about the other side,” she said. “How can we not know anything about them? How can they not know anything about us? They don’t teach us anything!”

The girls come from a school that has a painful history, like many others in Israel. Two sisters of girls from their Junior High School were killed in a terrorist attack during the Second Intifada. As might be expected, this prompted lots of anger and lots of fear in the school community, as one of the girls recounted. Despite its reputation as an ultra-liberal enclave, not all of the families supported the girls’ decision to join the Windows group. One girl spoke about her grandfather who was a prisoner of war and was very angry when she joined. Two others said they joined despite their parents’ discomfort. Regardless, they all chose to step out of their comfort zone and learn about themselves and their Palestinian neighbors.
The girls told us about the challenges and rewards of getting to know Palestinian youth both from nearby Jaffa and from Bethlehem, the three communities that make up the triangle of association. They shared how difficult the process of communication can be at times and how they both empathize with and remain distant from their Palestinian counterparts. They also shared how the process of sustained interaction with others so very different from themselves, has helped them become more critical thinkers, gain self-awareness and self-confidence, and even had an influence on family conversations and attitudes towards peace and reconciliation.

At one point, someone from my group asked the girls if they planned to serve in the Israeli army after high school. Two of the four said yes; two equivocated, but said they definitely want to serve their country through national service rather than through the military. When they were asked if they defined themselves as Zionists, none used that word, but all said they loved their country and wanted to make it a better place for all its citizens.

While certainly not everyone in our group agreed with these girls’ political leanings, I think we all left this meeting inspired by the girls’ passion and maturity, by their ability to clearly articulate their thoughts, to grapple with complex feelings, and hold their ground when challenged by people who hold very different opinions than their own.

The following day, we traveled just a few kilometers south to meet with four Arab-Palestinian-Muslim girls from Jaffa who are in the Muslim Scouts. Two of the girls study in municipal secular public Arab high schools, one in a Catholic school and the fourth in a French-speaking school. All spoke to us in Arabic that was first translated into Hebrew and then English.

Like their Jewish counterparts in Tel Aviv, these girls were charming and seemed happy to meet with us. They lit up when they spoke about their experiences as scouts. They mentioned the leadership skills they were learning as counselors, but like typical teenagers, they seemed much more excited about the one-week camp that they live for each summer.

When we turned to more serious subjects, they were much less able to express their thoughts and feelings than the Tel Aviv girls. They spoke about a few encounters they had had with Jewish peers, but felt that nothing positive had come from these sessions. Though admittedly much may have been lost in the multi-step translation process from Arabic to Hebrew to English, it appeared that they lacked the sophistication and nuance that the Tel Aviv girls were able to articulate as they struggled to express their feelings about how each side sees and treats the other. This may be due to the fact that the Tel Aviv girls are engaged in an ongoing, multi-year process, whereas these Jaffa girls could only think of few times that they had met with Jewish groups. We simply didn’t have enough time with them to fully flesh this out. Perhaps a more useful comparison would have been with the Jaffa teens who are part of the Windows youth group. What was clear though, was that these girls feel ignored, pushed aside, and fearful that they won’t have a place to live in Jaffa as gentrification spreads more widely and the Arab population continues to be squeezed out. “Jaffa should be for the Arabs,” one of them said. Sadly, no one asked her if she meant only for the Arabs (who now make up about 30% of the population), or that it should just not become an exclusively Jewish city. The difference between these two stances is profound and we just didn’t ask which she meant.

The gentrification of Jaffa is a complicated economic and political issue. On one level, it’s an issue about rich and poor, a similar problem to one that plagues many urban societies. There’s no question that the Arab minority in Jaffa is an underclass, however. The high school drop out rate is close to 40%; crime is a serious problem. But, there also appears to be blatant racial discrimination at play here as well. As one example, the Community Center director where the scouts meet told me they receive a total of 150 shekels per child from the municipality for the entire two-week winter camp they run, less than $40. I’m fairly certain that a similar program in a Jewish community center in even the poorest neighborhood of Tel Aviv receives much more than that. Another example is the stunning fact that in Jaffa, a city that has had Arab residents for centuries, there are only 4 streets with Arab names. Ancient sages, early Zionist military and literary figures abound, but not a single Arab poet, historical figure, or local hero is honored in such a visual and obvious way.

What struck me as an even more insidious sign of how marginalized and “othered” these Arab citizens feel is that the girls’ language skills were so poor. This was evident in both what they said and how they said it. Even without understanding Arabic, it was clear to me that their language was peppered with Hebrew words and expressions. When I asked about where their families came from, they couldn’t say. In fact, the community center director interrupted at that point and said, “They don’t know anything about their history. It’s not taught in school.”

The girls’ fuzziness of language and personal history was particularly painful to me as a Jewish educator who is concerned with fostering strong positive associations with being Jewish. Language is such an integral part of identity, yet these girls seemed to have such a thin awareness of their culture and history. We work so hard to make sure that Jewish children know their past. Shouldn’t these Arab children also have similar opportunities or is it really the goal of the Jewish State to erase their past so that they cannot have a future? What indeed, is the risk of providing more opportunities for Arab citizens of Israel to develop a strong and positive Arab identity? Is it such a threat to the Jewish character of the state to have a productive, engaged minority citizenry who feel they can serve their country just as do the Jewish girls in Tel Aviv? Don’t they have the right to feel included and accepted in the broader society into which they were born?

No easy answers here. But certainly worthy questions to ponder when considering where we stand.