Thank you!

End-of-program reflection for the Peace and Justice Studies program and the Greer Scholarship:

Dear Greer Family,
Thank you for your support of my trip to Israel in Summer 2010. The summer has been one of academic enlightenment, personal growth, and hope.
My first two and a half weeks in Israel were spent studying environmentalism in Israel. Reading Alon Tal’s Pollution in the Promised Land, we traveled throughout the country of Israel exploring the history of the geography and people’s interaction with their land. Within a few hours’ worth of driving, we traveled from the beaches of the Red Sea and snorkeling, to the sandy mountains of the Negev Desert, to the blossoming fruit trees of the Golan Heights.
Settling down in Jerusalem, I studied Israel’s politics and history at the Hebrew University. I learned a great deal about the Jewish creation of the state in its ideology and methodology. I heard from many Israelis and Palestinians regarding the current conflict. One of my classes took a tour of East Jerusalem (where many Arab non-citizens of Israel live) with Rabbis for Human Rights, hearing a strongly Zionist argument for caring for the Arabs in Israel. We heard from the Parents’ Circle, a bilateral group formed by bereaved families who have lost relatives in the conflict. I saw a Palestinian woman being held by an Israeli man as she cried, the two consoling each other as they told us their heartbreaking stories. We visited the Peres Peace House and heard the stories of hope they create through their programming: joint sports teams, online chatting between Palestinian and Israeli schoolchildren, joint theater troops, and economic partnerships. A roundtable at the Israel Democracy Institute (the first roundtable I’ve participated in where the table was actually round) provided us with a chance to talk with Israeli academics about the tensions between Israel’s democratic nature and security issues – administrative detention, the blockade on Gaza, and prisoner exchanges. We heard from a Zionist settler in the West Bank who made a legal argument for her right to live there. We heard from Palestinians living in East Jerusalem who struggle to form community centers and send their children to school. We visited the Technion, where Israel trains its brilliant engineers and teaches businesspeople how to create successful start-ups. And, of course, we saw the Old City, and learned how close the holy sites of three faiths are to each other – in many cases, literally on the same ground – and the tensions this can cause.
In the classroom, our course culminated with “mock elections” and “coalition simulation” for Israel’s government. My group researched and wrote a platform for Balad, a Palestinian party. Our party won seven seats in our mock Knesset (parliament), and so we joined in mock negotiations to form a part of the coalition government. Through this interactive experience, we learned just how rocky Israel’s government formation can be. And we did it after visiting the actual Knesset, where many of us heard members of our parties speaking on the floor.
My trip to Israel was incredibly powerful. I learned an amazing amount and I am continuing to process. Luckily, I will have more time to do so through my upcoming anthropology capstone course. I will be taking the course with Elizabeth Drexler, the director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at Michigan State. Throughout the fall semester, I will research in more depth the various peace groups I came into contact with in Israel, exploring their methods and their contributions to the peace process. The summer has given me a great start to the project, as I’ve had the chance to put some faces with names of groups and pictures with places. And through my coursework, I have built a contextual framework that will be vital in my paper as I begin to delve deeper into the reality of prospects for peace in the Holy Land.
I thank you for your support of my summer. It was a wonderful experience, and I do not believe it is over yet!
Shalom, Salaam, Peace –
Rebecca L. Farnum
farnumre@msu.edu