A trip to Israel and Palestine- Tommie Ullman

International politics, Travel / Dec. 14, 2016 / by Tommie / 0 Kommentarer

A trip to Israel and Palestine

I always thought that as a European, one has to visit the three main birthplaces of the European civilization; Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. I have now completed a visit to the third and last remaining one on my list: Jerusalem.

I went there on a one week study trip with Uppsala Association of International Affairs (UF). The purpose was to learn more about the Israeli society and of course about the Conflict (with capital C). The Israel/Palestine conflict gets more complicated the more one learn about it. Even more so after going there on this study trip. Yet, many people with no connection to the region tend to pick a side. Of course one should condemn human right abuses by Israeli soldiers as well as Palestinian rockets and terror acts against Israelis, but I believe the situation is too complicated to take a side on the macro level. I will come back to this in the end of this blog post.

Interesting meetings when travelling with UF

I had traveled with UF three times before; to the Balkans in 2010, Egypt in 2011 and the Caucasus in 2012. More often I travel as an individual, which has its pros and cons. A new big group, of whom you initially know no-one, can be exhausting if you have a mild form of prosopagnosia :-D, but it turned out to be a nice group. An advantage with this way of travelling is that you get to meet organisations that is hard to book meetings with by yourself.

In my opinion, the most interesting of the meetings was the one with the Jerusalem Post because they gave a more explanatory background to Israel’s policies on the occupied areas, from Israel’s own perspective. The Israeli experiences from withdrawing from Gaza is for example not very good. And if they had returned the Golan heights to Syria ten years ago, the heights might have fallen into Daesh’ hands, or at least being used by the Assad regime. Most of the other organisations we met were different kinds of human rights organsisations, which was also very interesting, but the JP-meeting fulfilled a very important complementary role.

Yaakov Katz, Editor-in-Chief at The Jerusalem Post.

But I will not focus that much on the meetings as such here, You can read about them on UF’s own blog. I will give some personal reflections about the trip and about the Conflict.

Visiting the West Bank

The one day on the West bank was extremely interesting. TIPH (Temporary International Presence in Hebron) guided us around in the city of Hebron. We visited the bigger Palestinian part and the Israeli settler part. Also in the settler part, a majority of the inhabitants are Palestinians but their freedom of movement are restricted. We met an elderly Palestinian woman who told us her family members who lived outside of the settler area could not go there to visit her.

Some settlers try to justify the settlements by referring to the old Jewish presence in Hebron which lasted until the 1929 massacre made by Arabs on Jews living there. That massacre meant an end of the Jewish presence in Hebron at that time. But most settlers move to Hebron due to lower cost and not due to religious or nationalistic reasons.

Israeli soldiers in Hebron are often very young (18-21 years old). They were often willing to talk in a very frank way. One of them (not the ones on the picture) said he’d much rather go to university or walk around with a camera instead of a machine gun.

The Palestinian locals on this Hebron street had put up a net over the street because the settlers in the houses above threw down items at them. Even with the net they could still threw down liquids. On some places the net has been removed by Israeli forces since burglars could climb on them…

A little girl looking at us for a long time. When we were leaving the spot she dared approach the garbage container with her garbage bag but couldn’t reach up. An Israeli soldier helped her out.

Not many people on the streets in the settler part of Hebron.

Walking around in Jerusalem

When travelling to Israel one has to do some touristy stuff as well. One person in the group had some friends who guided us around in the capital. Jerusalem has a totally different feeling than Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv has its nice historical parts (Jaffa for example) but many cities have that. Jerusalem is unique in so many ways. To walk around in the ultra orthodox neighborhood for example is an experience that is hard to describe, it has to be experienced. In some quarters a majority of people walking around in the same black clothes, black hats and black twists in their hair. Often looking seriously focused walking very quickly at the side of the road in a high pace (why the rush? 🙂 ) Many people doing the same in a fairly small area.

The Western Wall in Jerusalem wearing the mandatory kippah. 🙂

A view over parts of Jerusalem from a church

One of the gates between the Jewish and the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem.

Kippahs in all coulors in the touristy streets. Even Real Madrid and Manchester United. Unfortunately no Djurgården kippahs so I didn’t buy any… 🙂

Nice people and high security

It was fun to see that many Palestinians are very happy for the Swedish recognition of the state of Palestine. Sweden was the first, and so far only, EU-country to make this recognition. This gratitude rendered free bread, postcards, stamps and many nice comments. But also many Israelis were very nice in a more direct and friendly way than one would see in Europe. Random curious people starting to ask curious questions on the street. If I had been paranoid I would have thought they might be from the security service pretending to ask innocent curious questions – but I am not paranoid so I believe they were just ordinary curious people. The ground for potential paranoia is the ridiculously numerous question at the airport on departure, and to certain extent on arrival. 🙂

I can totally understand that Israel feels threatened and needs a high level of security, unfortunately many extremists wants bad things to happen to them. But the level of security on the airport when leaving was a bit over the top. All kinds of questions like “ Where have you been?” ”Why did you go there?” ”Who did you meet?” ”Why did you meet them?” ”How did you get in contact with them?” ”What kind of organization are you?” ”What is the organization’s purpose?” Etc etc. It is not worthy an open democracy – which Israel is.

Is a solution possible?

Israel needs a ridiculous level of security because they are threatened. That is also why they occupy the West bank and ask stupid questions to tourists. With Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran in their neighborhood, the threat is real. At the same time when ordinary innocent Palestinians are humiliated and threatened on daily basis it will not do any good for Israel’s security in the long run. And it is wrong in all kind of ways.

As I wrote already in the beginning of this post, the conflict is extremely complicated. When religion is involved, the room for compromise is smaller. How do you argue with someone who claims they have God on their side? There are however moderates as well on both side, and that is why I do believe in a solution, eventually. Peace was not far away in the 90’s so we can get there again but then we need new leadership on both sides.

Israel is a democracy so they have free and fair elections and can chose a new path anytime. The problem is that Palestine is not a democracy and even if the Palestinian people would want peace, they have a harder time influencing their leaders. Again we see that democracy is often a necessary condition for peace. Therefore I believe a Palestinian democracy needs to come first, then there can – eventually – be a two state solution which probably needs to include some kind of international surveillance to guarantee Israel’s security.

The Israeli settlers in Palestine is – in contrary to what many say – not necessarily an obstacle for a two-state solution. There are ethnic minorities in many countries and the Jews in an independent Palestine needs to be guaranteed rights, like the Arabs in Israel.

There are many more things that could be said – both about the trip and about the conflict – but this will do for now. 🙂