Apropos for a Sunday morning, we spent the first hours of the day discussing currennt Middle East affairs with a pair of highly qualified speakers. First up was Jodi Rudoren, a 15 year veteran of the New York Times who is currently serving as the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief. Jodi shared her thoughts with us about the challenges of reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict which, in her estimation, boils down to three particular issues: 1) The relentlessness of the 24 hour news cycle, 2) the fact that her position may be one of the most scrutinized in the news media given Israel’s often polarizing effect, and 3) nobody can agree on the facts/nobody can say for sure who “started” the conflict. She said that as a journalist she has an obligation to provide a neutral perspective, however she is of the belief that both sides in the conflict will (and do) interpret her reporting and the reporting of others in her bureau as biased toward the “other side.” Jodi took time to answer questions from us, including several that were formulated based upon data presented by Ari Applbaum the night before. Some of these questions even managed to catch her a bit off guard. It’s very fair to say that Rubinites know how to do their homework!
Our second speaker of the day was Middle East intelligence and security analyst Avi Melamed. Speaking at a hilltop outdoor amphitheater with a spectacular view of Jerusalem as a backdrop, Avi presented a very thorough and incredibly captivating history of the Middle Eastern conflicts. He walked us through the factors that produced the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. He provided us with a detailed history of the Muslim Brotherhood and explained its dual existence as political and religious movements under one umbrella. He then gave a similar explanatory treatment to the three major militant Islamist groups: Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah. From there, he walked us through the buildup to the current Syrian conflict and explained how it is that the Shiites and Sunnis are fighting the Alawite Assad regime while also remaining in active fighting with each other. Finally, Avi addressed the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His concluding thoughts on Middle East affairs included the statement that he is “painfully realistic but cautiously optimistic.”
The afternoon was spent remembering and honoring those who lost their lives in the Holocaust and in service to the State of Israel. We paid a visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum where we went on a guided tour of the vast array of artifacts, displays and personal accounts of humanity’s greatest crime. The museum complex is a striking collection of distinctive architecture, inside and out, with landscape features that pay tribute to both the victims and the heroic individuals who risked life and limb to protect Jews throughout Europe. Following the museum tour, we traveled down to the Valley of the Lost Communities, an enormous maze of carved rock that bears the names of every community whose Jews were basically wiped out from Nazi atrocities. Each Rubinite selected a community to which he or she had some kind of connection, found that community’s name on one of the many rock walls within the valley, attached the end of a large ribbon spool to that location and walked the ribbon over to a central meeting point. We then discussed our choices and wrapped all of our ribbons up together as a symbol of our connectedness, both to these communities and to each other. We said some prayers for the deceased and moved on to our next destination.
Mount Herzl is a memorial park that is the burial site for many of Israel’s founding fathers and former leaders. It is also Jerusalem’s military cemetery. In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the deadliest conflagration in Israel’s post-independence history, we made a visit to the gravesite of a Veteran of that war, a good friend of our tour guide Dovev’s father. Dovev shared with us a poem that was turned into a song and then played the song in his dad’s late friend’s honor at the gravesite. After walking the grounds of the military portion of the century and leaving rocks on certain soldiers’ graves as a sign of our presence and respect, we returned to the hotel.
Sunday evening kicked off with an informal dinner at the Jewish Agency for Israel’s headquarters, a building which once served as the de facto Capitol building for Israel when it was a fledgling nation. There we met up with some of our Federation traveling companion Mindee Fredman’s family who just so happen to be Israeli residents and who were gracious enough to answer our virtually endless barrage of questions about everyday life in this country. Later on, we departed to take on some of Jerusalem’s Sunday night shopping at a local outdoor mall before dispersing for the evening. It was a long, sometimes difficult day, but without a doubt it was an enriching one.
With a stunning panorama of Jerusalem gleaming in the distance, security and intelligence expert Avi Melamed delivers an informative and captivating talk about the internal politics of the various Middle East conflicts.
