On the first day of my Israeli-Palestinian relations course, I typically show my students a photo of me posing with relatives at age 10, when I first visited Israel with my grandmother in 1983. The landscape behind us is rocky and barren, yellow and sundappled. I tell my students it’s no surprise that their professor is a Jewish Canadian, someone for whom her subject matter is both personal and political. I want them to begin to reflect on how they connect facts and theories with their own philosophical, emotional or collective subjectivity.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the photo had been taken in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, only five years old at the time. Evidently we had been visiting the driver of my grandmother’s cousin.
Last month I visited Ariel again, this time with Lior Amihai, a thoughtful, intelligent and articulate staff member with Peace Now’s Settlement Watch team.
One gets to Ariel, a settlement of 18,000, easily from Tel Aviv, by driving 42 kilometers east along route 5. But Ariel juts 17 kilomters deep into the West Bank, reminding visitors, observers and negotiators that a two-state solution is increasingly becoming a mirage. As you drive east, you would have to closely inspect a map to realize you had crossed the Green Line, a demarcation that has sadly become an irrelevant and imaginary boundary for most Israelis.
With 300,000 settlers in the West Bank (and another 200,000 in and around East Jerusalem), the Israeli government continues to speak about a two-state solution, but the cost of withdrawal will be significant. Most estimates are that 70,000 settlers will have to be moved, with the remaining areas being annexed to Israel in the form of ‘settlement blocs’ with ensuing land swaps.
The West Bank is currently divided into three checkerboarded areas -- Area A (under Palestinian Control), Area B (under partial Palestinian control), and Area C (under Israeli control). At the checkpoint in the northern West Bank that we observed for several minutes, there were two lanes: one for Israeli cars (sporting yellow plates) and another for Palestinian cars (with green and white plates).
With our yellow plates, we gained easy access not only to Ariel but also to two other “settlement outposts” slated for withdrawal: Migron and the Ulpana neighbourhood of Beit El. In those two settlements, the Israeli courts deemed the settlers to be living on “private Palestinian land” and mandated their relocation. In Ulpana, though, the settlers are being relocated just down the hill.
Ariel has been in the news lately since the Israeli government is about to grant its community college university status, a move ardently opposed by many Israeli academics.
The name Ariel -- meaning lion of God -- is the Hebrew middle name we gave our daughter, to invoke the memory of three of her paternal uncles. I never had the opportunity to meet those uncles and I have no idea what opinions they held about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the settlements or the occupation. But I do know that in naming our kids, we sought to connect them with our family and our Jewish heritage.
Like many of us, I consider Israel a touchstone of my identity, an identity that I am passionate about passing along to my children. I speak only Hebrew to my kids, they have visited Israel, Hebrew books and music line our shelves, and they are connected to friends and family throughout the country. But I struggle with how I shall explain the pesky problem of the occupation, the military rule to which Palestinian residents of the West Bank are subjected while Jewish residents naturally enjoy civilian rule, the fact that Palestinian freedom of movement is restricted while Israelis are free to roam as they please.
Perhaps next trip, in addition to Hebrew Bazooka chewing gum, a white knitted kippah and an “I heart TLV tank top,” jewelry from Sheinkin street, and a Hebrew version of the “Captain Underpants” book, I will try to bring home two license plates: one yellow, another green. These plates will hang next to the vintage BC and Manitoba license plates I find for my kids at garage sales to remind them of their parents’ home towns.
The Israeli and Palestinian plates will be a grim reminder of the unacceptable ethnic rule that Israel, the country we teach our kids to love so much, maintains east of the Green Line. The plates will remind my kids to help strive for a democratic separation into two states and an end to the ugly occupation. The plates will be a badge against silence, a call to action, something to reflect on when we recite the prayer for the State of Israel on Shabbat, or say Next Year in Jerusalem on Passover.
**An earlier version appeared in The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin**
