Oren Kroll-Zeldin
Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine (BBIP) is a three-week immersion program in Palestine and Israel that takes university students of all backgrounds to the Middle East on a journey of comparative conflict analysis and conflict transformation. Combining rigorous academics and practical hands-on training, this study-abroad course allows students to explore questions at the core of all conflicts. The program creates spaces for both personal and collective growth, helping students gain new understandings of the roles they play in international conflicts and how this relates to their social and political identities.
One summer during the program, I went with a group of students to Independence Hall in Tel Aviv. Independence Hall is an Israeli national museum dedicated to teaching visitors about the historic signing of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Each visit to the museum begins with a short documentary video telling the history of the building on the famed Rothschild Boulevard, which was once the house of the Tel Aviv mayor Meir Dizengoff and later an art museum. The video also gives a short history of the founding of the city of Tel Aviv and a brief explanation of the accomplishments of the Zionist movement between its founding and the United Nations partition plan in 1947. In the final minutes of the video, museum visitors see footage of David Ben Gurion declaring the state’s independence, followed by a short description of the Zionist narrative of the 1948 war. Immediately after the conclusion of the video, visitors are ushered into the basement of the building, which has been re-created and preserved to look exactly as it did when Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948.
At the end of the presentation in the museum on the day I brought the group of students, the docent asked everyone to stand while “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, played on the speaker system, reproducing the very events that made the building a destination for tourists in Israel. Most of the students I brought to the museum that day found this to be a strange and uncomfortable request. The cultural and ethnic identities of participants in the program were diverse and included Jewish Americans, Arab Americans, and students of Palestinian descent. When they were asked to stand for “Hatikvah,” the students were forced to make a quick decision: to stand or not. Would they stand because they were asked to or because they support Israel? Would they refuse to stand up because they had visited a Palestinian refugee camp the day before and struggled to reconcile what they learned from the refugees with what they were exposed to at the museum? The awkward tension among the students was palpable and provided opportunities for rich reflection later that day and for the remainder of the program. Notably, none of the Palestinian or Arab students stood. As an act of solidarity with their Palestinian classmates, some non-Arab students also refused to stand, while others rose at the docent’s request. Every single Jewish student rose to their feet during “Hatikvah.”
Later that week, after a day of travel in the northern West Bank, the group walked through Qalandiya checkpoint, an Israeli military checkpoint separating Ramallah from Jerusalem. While standing in line to be checked, the group saw an old man trying to cross the checkpoint into Jerusalem. We learned that he had an Israeli permit to enter the city and was meeting family members that night because the following morning he was scheduled to have eye surgery in a Jerusalem hospital. The guard at the checkpoint yelled aggressively at the old man, pointing his gun into the old man’s chest, telling him that he could not pass through the checkpoint. Despite the fact that he had a permit and that the guard had already allowed the man’s son to pass through the checkpoint, the guard continued his intense verbal assault on the old man. The students watched intently as the man turned around and walked away from Jerusalem, head down and tears in his eyes, unable to cross the checkpoint.
After the old man was denied entry to Jerusalem, the students, all of whom possess U.S. passports, were easily waived through the checkpoint without any difficulty. It was a critical reminder to the students of their own privilege. Why could they, as citizens of the United States, pass through the checkpoint to go to a city they do not necessarily “need” while this old man was denied entry into Jerusalem, a city he relied on for a variety of basic services? How does confronting the lived experiences of Palestinians help students understand the realities of life under occupation? In what ways might that experience shape the students’ political awareness and their commitments to conflict transformation? Much like the visit to Independence Hall, the experience crossing Qalandiya checkpoint served as a foundation for critical reflection for the remainder of the program.
These vignettes demonstrate the varied encounters that students have daily while immersing themselves in the complexities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In particular, they provide a critical lens through which to understand the long-standing conflict on a deeply personal level. The diverse perspectives that students observed during these experiences get at the core objective of the program: engaging with multiple narratives in order to make sense of everyday life in Palestine and Israel. Through these encounters, students learned the value of dual narrative learning in ways that challenged them to understand and empathize with the experiences of others through their own, very different lived experiences.
These encounters illustrate the possibilities for learning when confronting the everyday lives of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. The disparate nature of these two experiences helps students grasp the complexity of the conflict and illustrates the diversity and complexity of everyday life in Palestine and Israel. Not only did these two experiences teach certain elements of the dominant narratives of each community, but they also served as a platform to connect the students’ multilayered social identities with the personal and political lives of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. Furthermore, the unpredictable nature of learning in the field, as exemplified by the disquieting experiences students had at the museum and the checkpoint, encourages students to push the limits of their comfort. In the process, they learn how to ethically participate in and critically respond to possibilities of conflict transformation.
Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine, an immersion program organized by the Center for Global Education at the University of San Francisco, teaches students about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through travel, workshops, presentations, and group process. During the program, students travel from the program base in Jerusalem throughout Palestine and Israel, meeting with Palestinian and Israeli scholars, activists, and NGOs while also visiting historical, cultural, political, and religious sites that are important to both national groups. These site visits include tours as well as lectures and presentations that cover a wide range of political perspectives, exposing students to as much of the complexities of the conflict as possible within the span of a short, three-week educational program.
From a pedagogical perspective, BBIP is rooted in two main theoretical frameworks: comparative conflict analysis and social identity theory. By taking a comparative approach, BBIP deexceptionalizes this conflict by emphasizing the ways in which certain key themes—such as competing narratives, violence, nationalism, and power—are reproduced in various societies and other conflicts globally. This serves to illustrate for students the possibilities of conflict transformation and encourages them to think about how similar issues may become manifest in their own communities. The second theoretical framework, social identity theory, focuses on the ways individuals’ multilayered social identities give them affinity to a particular group while simultaneously informing their beliefs, values, and actions. BBIP, by rooting its approach in social identity theory, helps students explore the roles they play in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as well as new understandings of how practices of their identities are linked to other social, cultural, and political issues in the world.
During BBIP, students have a wide range of experiences that are meant to expose them to as much of the complexities of the conflict as possible in such a short time. For example, during the program, students visit a Palestinian refugee camp and a Jewish Israeli settlement in the West Bank to meet with both refugees and settlers; go to the Mahmoud Darwish Museum and Yasser Arafat’s mausoleum; tour Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, and meet with a Shoah (Holocaust) survivor and visit the adjacent Mount Herzl military cemetery; swim in the Mediterranean and Dead Seas; tour a destroyed Bedouin village; meet with a founder of the Israeli Black Panthers, a politician in the Palestinian Authority, and a staffer for an Israeli member of Knesset; and visit religious and historical sites in Jerusalem’s Old City. These patchwork experiences “expose students to multiple narratives, cultures, histories, communal truths, and political ideologies, enabling them to draw on the experiences” of those who live the Palestinian-Israeli conflict every day.1
In addition to the site visits and presentations, students attend workshops led by BBIP educators that provide the academic backbone of the program. These workshops focus on key themes in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and teach students about topics such as local history, theories of conflict transformation, gender in society, and the role of the media in international conflict. Lastly, the group-process sessions provide the critical pedagogical opportunity for students to debrief and deconstruct their thoughts and feelings about what they experience every day during the program. Group process is a facilitated dialogue in which students are encouraged to “reflect on their social backgrounds, socialization processes, and systems of knowledge production” in order to help them make sense of their experiences and challenges them to articulate the struggle of learning about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict experientially.2 Though students are often exhausted by the program’s grueling schedule and are initially resistant to the dialogue sessions, in many ways, group process is the most important and successful element of the program, and data from postprogram student evaluations show that students value group process more than they do most other elements of BBIP.3
I have been involved with close to a dozen peer or educational trips to Israel or Palestine in the more than quarter century since I first visited Israel with my family. On the basis of those various and disparate experiences, most of which were quite transformative for me personally, politically, and professionally, I believe that BBIP is the most pedagogically interesting and successful educational program in teaching students about the complexities of everyday life in Palestine/Israel and providing a deep understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program’s success is predicated on its commitment to a dual narrative approach and its steadfast refusal to engage in any type of advocacy, focusing instead on giving students the tools to critically analyze their perceptions of the conflict.
For example, a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp has tremendous educational value on its own, but it takes on a different meaning when program participants also visit a Jewish Israeli settlement a few kilometers away. Similarly, learning about the Shoah from a half-day visit to Yad Vashem and meeting with a Shoah survivor is a deeply powerful and moving experience. But understanding the impacts of the Shoah on the contemporary political situation in Palestine/Israel is more transformative when students also hear about it from a former Palestinian militant and political prisoner who is now a prominent nonviolent activist. In this particular case, the Palestinian activist with whom students met saw a movie about the Shoah while in Israeli prison and cried when he learned about what happened to Jews during World War II. Juxtaposing the narratives and experiences of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis does not bridge these narratives but rather opens space for the students to critically reflect on the complexities of competing narratives and identities in the conflict.
The location of the program’s base at a hostel in Palestinian East Jerusalem, steps away from the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City and a short walk from the central downtown area in Jewish West Jerusalem, illustrates the learning potential of the program’s unplanned activities. An East Jerusalem program base is strategic and rooted in BBIP’s pedagogical underpinnings in dual narrative experiential education. Additionally, some of the most valuable dual narrative learning opportunities for the students occur after official program hours. Safety permitting, BBIP staff encourage students to explore Jerusalem’s nightlife in both the eastern and western sections of the city. When debriefing the day with their friends while sitting in local bars or cafes, students often report that other patrons at the establishment overhear their conversations and ask questions about why the students chose to visit Palestine/Israel, which leads to long conversations with people who live the conflict every day. These extracurricular conversations with locals complement the program itinerary well, and students frequently bring what they learned to group discussions the following day. Each exploration outside formal group programming is possible both because students are encouraged to explore on their own and because the location of the program base makes it possible to engage in after-hours dual narrative learning that challenges students to work through what they think when interacting with locals. In this regard, the immersion element of BBIP is multifaceted, with both planned and unplanned activities that collectively provide students with a unique experience to engage with everyday life in Palestine/Israel.
Students cross the invisible Green Line every day, enabling rich discussions about the differences between Jewish Israeli and Palestinian societies as well as the impacts of the cleavages in Jerusalem on both societies. These late nights do not merely provide the necessary opportunity to decompress but are pedagogically rich as well because they offer yet another occasion to experience the lived realities of Palestinians and Israelis. They also enable students to hear from more diverse Palestinian and Jewish Israeli voices, which sometimes reinforce what others have said and sometimes completely contradict what students have learned earlier in the program. This adds to students’ understanding of the complexity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, leading to more questions and fewer answers.
The stories at the outset of this chapter demonstrate the power and possibilities for dual narrative learning, particularly through immersion in the field. Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine is a successful educational program because it is committed to engaging with diverse narratives and exposes students to the deep societal divisions that are integral to the intractable nature of the conflict. It gives students the tools to grapple with the educational material not only intellectually but also experientially, thereby enabling a deeper engagement with the complexities of everyday life for Palestinians and Israelis. Furthermore, it allows students to meet people and travel to places they likely would not visit on their own, while providing the space to analyze and deconstruct their learning. BBIP alumni always return to campus and their home communities transformed by what they experienced.
I recently reached out to a few program alumni and asked what specific moments they remembered most about the summer they participated in BBIP. Remarkably, many of them recalled the visit to Independence Hall and the walk through Qalandiya checkpoint. This indicates how impactful those experiences were not only in the moment but many years later as well. One marker of the success of Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine as an educational program is the transformative experiences and memories it provides the students. But memories and transformation are important only insofar as they inspire change in individuals and in their community. Personal change is integral to conflict transformation, and BBIP provides the opportunities for students to radically alter the ways they understand and interact with the world.