All Shakshuk Up

I continued not to take any particularly relevant pictures, so I will continue to post mostly unrelated ones.

World Famous Team Shakshuka

After doing a bunch of things (and some stuff) for the past few weeks, I attended a Shabbaton this past weekend devoted to developing participants' understanding of Security and Diplomacy in Israel. In short, it was extremely interesting and I learned a ton.  In long:

When I was 9 years younger, I remember being in Israel around the time of the Gaza disengagement and having no idea what was happening/feeling completely disconnected from what little idea I had of what was happening.  I knew that lots of people had a bunch of opinions that didn't coincide with one another, but I don't recall having an especially firm grasp on what exactly the Gaza disengagement was, and settled with counting the number of orange anti-disengagement ribbons and blue pro-disengagement ribbons cars were advertising at the time.  The first stop on the Shabbaton was an overlook of the Gaza strip.  There was a strong emphasis on the human aspect of the conflict, a side I tend to immediately be drawn to (if it wasn't obvious from previous posts).  The guides spoke about a small cluster of gravestones not far from where we stood, placed there as a result of the strange process of relocating Israeli graves in Gaza during the disengagement to enable families to visit the graves in the future.  We ate lunch by a school named after Ella Abukassis, a teenager from Sderot (one of the hardest hit and most densely populated cities close the Gaza border where civilians have 15 seconds to take cover after hearing a rocket warning siren) who was killed by a rocket attack after laying over her younger brother to protect him.  We also visited the famous playground caterpillar bomb shelter in Sderot and talked about how traumatizing it is for children to grow up in a place like Sderot or Gaza, and how impossible it must be for children to understand and process, considering how many grown adults also suffer from post traumatic stress.  We also learned that because Gaza is exactly 26 miles long, there has been a Gaza marathon.  It seems like the only time it happened was in 2011, and then according to Wikipedia, "In 2013 the marathon was scheduled for April 10, but was cancelled following a decision by Hamas, who rules the Gaza Strip, not to allow women to participate." I have all kinds of feelings on all these things.

Gaza

Caterpillar Bomb Shelter in Sderot

One of the first sessions I attended was about asymmetrical warfare, in which we talked about different moral dilemmas and what actions a government can take to eliminate terrorist acts/what makes asymmetrical warfare asymmetrical. In terms of one of the terrorist acts that recently happened in Jerusalem in which a van drove into a crowd of people on the sidewalk, the terrorist is abusing a system (that ordinarily holds a certain amount of trust) by taking advantage of the the baseline trust level that citizens have in order to function in any kind of less than paranoid way.  However, in these delicate systems of trust it only takes one person to shatter the trust and disrupt the peace.  It suddenly gives you reason to believe that strangers you pass everyday have the potential to attack at any moment.  Ironically, the only way of preventing this kind of warfare is by taking rights away from civilians, disturbing their lives, and following through with the terrorist's initial intentions.  But when the only way of protecting civilians is by making rocks, knives, any hard object unavailable, it the solution is completely unrealistic and can leave the public with debilitating fear.

The last talk I went to was about the future of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict.  The speaker talked about how complicated it is for two groups of people to be in the same place for a long enough time to establish the same national identity.  He spoke about the separation barrier/security fence/apartheid wall that, although it has has decreased terrorist acts to some extent, has also worked to separate people who used to see each other everyday, causing greater misunderstanding, fear, and isolation on both sides.  He contrasted the tense Israeli-Palestinian relationship to the peaceful coexistence currently experienced by Greek Orthodox/Christian/Catholic Church and Jews, even though this kind of compatibility would have been imperceivable 100 years ago.  Today, there are tourist maps drawn by Christians that depict a Christian view of the world that does not coincide with the Jewish world, yet it does not deeply disturb the general public. As a result, the speaker proposed promoting coexistence, insisting that "there is an amazing magical impact of human contact."  It sounded really great to me, but this statement seemed a bit too warm and fuzzy to effectively solve such a deep rooted conflict. He explained further. People love their neighbors and friends and are more likely to feel animosity towards and demonize people they are isolated from.  Simple solution (ha): remove the hate and the map won't matter.  Easy, right? The way he spoke about it made it seems incredibly realistic, and there are even programs today that work to forward this idea.  For example, MEET (Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow) "is an innovative educational initiative aimed at creating a common professional language between Israeli and Palestinian young leaders." Which to me, sounds awesome.  However, people are understandably very cynical about this idea, which I guess is exactly what it's trying to combat. Cyclical cynicism!

Magical Bookstore in Tel Aviv

I also attended a talk from a diplomatic correspondent from i24 news, from One Voice Palestine, and a lecture on militant/terrorist groups in the Middle East.  Everything was super interesting and I learned so much/got significantly more confused about everything in the way that copious amounts of information I care about usually makes me.

Post Hot Yoga, Roladin's Halva and Chocolate Chip Rugalach-like delicious thing of wonder/
How to reap the fewest benefits from hot yoga

Other than that, I had an amazing experience at the post office on a Friday afternoon where I spent over an hour waiting to get a friend's package as a mob of angry mail recipients persistently pushed their way past innocent Americans (I was told that this was not nearly the worst of it and that we had just missed an actual fight that had to be broken up.).  We eventually made it to the front of the line when one of the particularly frustrated stomped away in a huff and gave us his line number.  After waiting for a guard to free us/unlock the door, we finally reentered the world of personal space and lower tensions.  The experience reminded me a lot of this.  Thanks for preparing me, 30 Rock.

View from the bus I spent an hour and forty minutes on today/
Abstract representation of how Israelis experience rain induced driving hysteria