Living with Rockets: Al Jazeera and Sderot

On Thursday evening, May 29, 2008 a group of Israeli and Arab college students were aired live on Al Jazeera from Haifa where they participated in a special two-hour program. The college students, studying at Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion, Haifa, and Bar Ilan universities, were asked questions about the future of the state of Israel and about the history and present situation of its citizens.
 
As one of three students from Bar Ilan University invited to a special Al Jazeera program about Israel, I found myself on an usually warm night debating the future state of Israel with Fayid, Ranin, and several other Arab students studying at Israeli universities. 
 
The whole evening was a bit surreal. Here I was, in Haifa, taking about the future of the state of Israel with people who clearly had a very different idea of the Jewish state. All this on the last TV station I would ever imagine appearing on to talk about Sderot--Al Jazeera! 

Of course it was imperative for me to talk about Sderot and the rocket attacks and the suffering of the Israeli residents in this western Negev town. I've been talking a lot about this rocket situation for the past year--just ask any of my friends and my family back in Maine.

Walid Omary, the program's host and Al Jazeera's Jerusalem Bureau Chief, asked us questions and then had two panel guests comment on our commentary. For us Israeli students, we had an Arabic to Hebrew translator. Each student was given a minute or so to respond to Walid's questions as the cameras in the background recorded our exchange.
 
There were obviously many and varying opinions but we were all basically civil on camera. Walid asked us what we thought the solutions for peace were and how we envisioned the state of Israel in another few years. One Arab girl said that in order for peace to exist, the state of Israel could no longer be Jewish and that the concept of Zionism had to be completely eradicated. The president of the Haifa Student Council for Arabs stated similarly that there should be a secular state.
 
It surprised me how most of the Arab students were not for a two-state solution
 
We got into heated discussions off camera during the advertisement breaks. One debate involved the origin of falafel and the kafiyah.
 
I got the feeling that none of the Arab students truly recognized a Jewish state of Israel. The Holocaust was mentioned as the primary reason for a Jewish homeland from a couple of Arab students. The historical and religious ties that the Jewish people have with this land was not recognized by any of the Palestinians, except by one of the panel guests. Many of the Arab college students stated that Palestinian right of return was fundamental to peace.

I had an interesting conversation during the break with an Arab girl from Haifa University who described herself as an atheist. Her father, she told me headed a human rights organization. When I spoke about Sderot and how Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas and Fatah's Al Aqsa brigades frequently wound innocent civilians and damage homes and property almost daily, this Haifa student asked me if I understood why.
 
"The people in Gaza have been forced to live without water and fuel," she explained. "They are desperate because the borders are closed."
 
I pointed out that Israel has been forced to close off Gaza in order to limit the number of Palestinian casualties that would result if the IDF was to enter in a full scale military operation. According to the IDF, 97% of the Palestinian rockets are fired from civilian and residential areas in northern Gaza, often from the populated cities of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya.
 
"What other way does Israel have to attempt to stop the Kassam rocket fire that plagues Sderot and the western Negev on a daily basis?" I asked her.  "And if this is a question of desperation, why does Hamas intentionally target Jewish women and children in Sderot and in the rest of southern Israel, why not just our military?"
 
We didn't have the opportunity to continue the conversation because the break ended.
 
A couple of the Arab students also said that they had no rights in Israel. This sounded rather inaccurate to me, especially in reference to religious rights. I told the panel and the students that only last year I saw two Arab men praying on the campus lawn in my university, Bar Ilan, which is a religious (Jewish) institution. "I would never be able to enter Gaza, Syria, or Saudi Arabia and be able to pray there freely as Jew," I said.
 
The debate would have continued except that the program ended at ten o'clock at night and we all had classes at our respective universities the next morning.
 
This was the first time that I directly engaged in this kind of dialogue with Arab students. I have Arab friends in university but I never discuss politics with them.
 
Working and living part time in Sderot under rocket fire, has not made me lose perspective that there are human faces on both sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict. On either side we have a right to voice the opinions that we believe to be true. I was glad to have the opportunity to so for the citizens of Sderot.