Last spring, a group of students at Israel’s Shalem College asked a popular Arabic teacher her thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Daniel Gordis, the college’s vice-president, describes her sobering reply and its implications:
[The teacher is] a religious Muslim who wears a hijab, lives in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and is a graduate student at Hebrew University. She’s fun and warm, and a great teacher—the students like her a lot. . . . [One day, her students] told her that, since they’d never discussed the “situation” (as we call it here in Israel), they were curious how she thought we might someday resolve it.
“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly. So they waited. But that was all she had to say. “It’s our land. You’re just here for now.”
What upset those students more than anything was not that a Palestinian might believe that the Jews are simply the latest wave of Crusaders in this region, and that we, like the Crusaders of old, will one day be forced out. We all know that there are many Palestinians who believe that.
What upset them was that she—an educated woman, getting a graduate degree (which would never happen in a Muslim country) at a world-class university (only Israel has those—none of Israel’s neighbors has a single highly rated university), and working at a college filled with Jews who admire her, like her, and treat her as they would any other colleague—still believes that when it’s all over, the situation will get resolved by our being tossed out of here once again.
Read more at New York Daily News
More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jerusalem, Palestinians, Shalem College