Coexistence in Israel

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was traveling from Tel Aviv to Be’er Sheva, on one of the most crowded trains I had ever sat on in Israel. It was a direct, and as I got on at the final of four Tel Aviv stops, the seats were long gone and even the aisles were, for the most, part packed. No one wants to stand for that hour and 15 minute train ride, and I wasn’t going to be stuck in an uncomfortable position for the duration—I started wiggling my way through people, bags, seats, boots, you name it. And if you don’t know Israel, you would not believe the incredible diversity of the denizens on this mid-evening express. While making my way through the seats, I saw friends on my overseas Ben-Gurion University program already seated. I saw kids of our age in Israeli army uniforms complete with M16 rifles, weekend papers, MP3 players and books by Kafka, seated next to Muslim women with hijabs and university notebooks containing my host university’s insignia. I stopped for a moment to digest what I was witnessing, and I could not help but grin to myself while thinking what my classmates back at Columbia would say. I could just imagine the look of shock as they exclaimed, “What?! An Israeli soldier and a Muslim student sitting together on a train? Sounds like a bad joke to me!” I continued by the passengers and saw French tourists freshly tanned from the Tel Aviv beaches and a Christian Arab mother taking care of her young child and religious Jewish teens in jeans. I thought to myself, “In fact, this is not a bad joke. It is reality for many Israelis and it is called coexistence.”

This story is essentially a microcosm of my experience so far here at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel. For example, I live in the dormitories, and the apartments are mixed. Jews live in the same apartments as or next door to Palestinian-Israeli Christians and Muslims, Palestinian Muslims, Israeli-Bedouin Muslims, and Israeli-Druze. On Ben-Gurion’s campus, things are no different. Everyone takes classes together. People of all religions and languages sit next to each other in the computer labs and at cafés, and share the same grass outside during breaks. As an ardent Zionist who is concerned about every issue involving Israel, it gives me much hope to see non-Jewish citizens of the country receiving the same education and benefits as the Jewish citizens.

For just this reason I chose to spend my semester abroad at Ben-Gurion U. I knew that it had a diverse student population, that it represented all peoples in Israel, that everybody here had a voice. In my weeks here so far, campus has been both recovering and vibrant. First, school was closed down because it, like the rest of Be’er Sheva and other areas in southern Israel, had come under rocket fire from Hamas terrorists in Gaza and was deemed unsafe by the university. As a result, I spent my first week in Israel in a secluded field school in the middle of the Negev desert where rockets could not (yet) reach. When I moved in, the students were returning to classes. I was curious to see if there would be visible tension between the Arab and Jewish students, whether there would be mass protests or solidarity rallies like the ones I had heard about at Columbia. There were no rallies or protests. Rather, the signs were subtle: students were stressed because their semester had been pushed back and lengthened. People called up for military reserve duty were particularly harried because they had to make up the class work they had missed from the time they were called up to the time the university shut down. I thought I might see something when, for a week and a half straight, students representing various political parties set up tables on campus to hand out pamphlets and information to try to sway the student vote. But I saw nothing there—tables from the Arab Nationalist party, Balad (a Hebrew acronym meaning National Democratic Assembly) were set up next to the Jewish, right-wing party, Yisrael Beiteinu (meaning Israel is Our Home). Students representing the far right, the far left, and everything in between stood side-by-side and engaged in passionate and sophisticated conversation and debate. I stood watching all of this and once again thought about my classmates at Columbia—only this time, I didn’t smile as much. When I hear about rallies being set up on college walk and Low Steps to call for peace, the honoring of innocent victims dying on both sides, and a two-state solution, I am optimistic. When I hear about a vigil for innocent Gazans recently killed, I am also optimistic. However, what our campus is sorely missing is the acceptance of historical fact and present situation. Jews will not give up their homeland as many Muslim rulers demand, nor will they back down to terrorist organizations like the Hamas. Palestinians should and will settle for nothing less than their own, sovereign nation where they can finally free themselves from the squalor their rulers have purposely kept them in for decades.

If the people who live in Israel in the middle of it all and much of the time come from literally opposing households are able to come together at a university and engage in reasoned dialogue, when will students at CU learn to do the same?

The author is a student in
List College and the School of General Studies.