A brief disclaimer here- when I wrote this in 2002, I was a bit more conservative vis-a-vis the whole Israel/Palestine issue. Since then, I've lived in Europe for a year, been back to Israel twice more, and had a chance to sort out my own feelings more clearly- some of my opinions have changed in this time... (9/2004)

When I first traveled to Israel in January 2000, the attitude in the war-torn Middle East was that true peace was just around the corner. After Camp David, it wasn’t a question of if, but when. Only a fool would think otherwise. Apparently everyone was a fool. In the time since I first traveled to Israel, as part of the Birthright program, the Middle East had become a far more dangerous place. As everyone knows, it’s never been the most peaceful region of the world, but the outbreak of the 2nd Intifada, between September 2000, and late August 2002, when I began to chronicle this trip has been particularly brutal.

When we were visiting in 2000, I spent a great deal of time (and money) on the famous Ben-Yehuda Street Promenade in Jerusalem. As I write this, Ben Yehuda is a ghost town, in more ways than one. The site of numerous suicide bombings, along with neighboring Jaffa Street, any public place in Israel has become a target, thanks to the murderous actions of groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. People in the US seemed unable to understand what was going on in Israel until September 11- proportionally, Israelis have lost far more people, in hundreds of terror attacks, than every American lost on that fateful tuesday in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. A political cartoon which I saw shortly before writing this remains stuck in my mind. A calendar hangs on the wall, with the caption below it reading “typical Israeli calendar.” Every day on the calendar is September 11.

Although the problems we had experienced in the US have been minimal compared to what had been happening in Israel, the outbreak of the violence had brought tensions to a head in normally peaceful places. I’d been living in San Francisco, attending San Francisco State University (SFSU) after transferring from Emerson College in Boston after my sophomore year. San Francisco, well known as one of the most liberal and open-minded places in the country has a very large Arab, and particularly Palestinian population. San Francisco State is well known as a “commuter school,” made up primarily with local students- I was certainly the exception rather than the rule.

Because of this, there is a large Palestinian community present on SFSU’s campus. There is a large Jewish community in San Francisco as well- at SFSU we estimated that close to 2,000 (out of 30,000) students were Jewish. The intifada is naturally something that would provoke tensions between the 2 groups, who have had an understandably rocky relationship from the beginning. The difference at SFSU was that the two groups have never been on equal footing- the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) has continuously had the ear of the administration. This has affected school relations for at least the past decade, if not longer.

One of the most infamous incidents (before my time at SFSU) occurred in 1994, when a Jewish candidate attempted to run for a leadership position in Associated Students (AS), the student governing body at SFSU. The administration of AS prevented him from participating in the election, because he was a “Zionist,” which was considered a racist and apartheid ideology. Flyers were later circulated that year, claiming that the members of the Hillel (the Jewish college student organization) chapter at SFSU were spies for the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service). In that same year a mural was painted on the side of the Student Union, with an image of the Star of David surrounded by dollar signs. The artist refused to remove the mural, which was eventually sandblasted by order of the administration.

There was a clear pattern of SFSU being unfairly biased towards the side of the Palestinian students in numerous situations. The most obvious example can be found in the Student Union- The GUPS have had a prominent office on the mezzanine for the past several years- in the meantime, Hillel had been banished off-campus, several blocks away. Despite constant efforts and lobbying, AS had been unwilling (and still is, as of 11/2002) to grant Jewish students a space in the Student Union. The reasoning behind this was that Hillel is a “religious organization,” and therefore was not permitted to have space. This seems particularly galling considering the fact that Muslim Student Organization (MSA) is run directly from the office of the GUPS. News organizations picked up on this, and SFSU was investigated and later described as the “most Anti-Semitic campus in the country” by the New York Times.

With the outbreak of the violence in 2000, the tensions on campus became more and more evident. Jewish students were routinely threatened by members of the GUPS, cars were vandalized- meanwhile the administration seemed to be doing little, if anything to reduce the tensions. The situation in Israel truly began to come to a head in the second semester of the 2001-02 school year. In March, a wave of terrorist attacks led to beginning of Operation Defensive Shield, a move by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to reoccupy the Palestinian territories turned over as part of the Oslo peace accords. The most significant attack became known as the “Passover Massacre,” a suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, a small city made up largely of Russian immigrants located along the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa.

On the first evening, as a group of mostly elderly Jews and their families sat down to the festive seder meal, Abd al-Basit Awdah, 25, walked into the ballroom with explosives strapped to his body, and detonated himself, killing 29 others in the process. The ensuing carnage was broadcast throughout the world, and served as the last straw. Israel invaded with a vengeance, sealing Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah compound, and completely sealing off movement between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Operation Defensive Shield continued for almost 2 months, and as I write this, curfews continue to be enforced (although only sporadically).

Continued