In the 1990s, Ardie Geldman met with a group of Australian tourists visiting the Israeli town of Efrat, where he lives, and was confronted immediately with such questions as “Why would [you] build [your] house on other people’s land?” and “Why do Israeli soldiers shoot live bullets at Palestinian children?” Since then, Geldman has been the go-to person for groups of tourists—be they American college students, Europeans, or members of non-evangelical Christian groups—who come to Israel to learn about the Israel-Palestinian conflict and want their itineraries to include a stop at an “illegal settlement.” He reflects on the varying degrees of hostility he has encountered from these visitors, and what could be done to counteract the insidious propaganda that has reached them long before their arrival in the Jewish state:
Student groups making only a short call at what is, in their eyes, a “settlement” such as Efrat are virtually fated to leave with the same opinions they had when they arrived. Their visits are too circumscribed to facilitate the type of social interaction with residents that with sufficient time can engender trust and credibility. Without developing trust and credibility in the people they meet, the students remain resistant to allowing any contradictory information to alter their world view.
By contrast, students whose visits last a few days, irrespective of their experiences until then, develop a sense of Efrat as a community of people—people with names and faces, with family roles, with personal aspirations and personal problems, with favorite sports teams and musical groups, and with dental appointments just like them. These people have opinions, many opinions. And they express a desire for peace. Upon their departure, most of these students acknowledge a newly acquired appreciation for the complexity of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Without losing sympathy for the Palestinians, they are willing for the first time to take Israeli arguments under consideration, and they recognize some of themselves in these “settlers.”
Both types of visits point to the importance of emotions in shaping people’s political views, a fundamental principle for those engaged in Israel advocacy. The pathos engendered in visitors taken to witness the squalor of a Palestinian refugee camp or the overshadowing presence of “the Wall” is calculated to elicit strong sympathy for the condition of the Palestinians, especially when these experiences are presented from the perspective of Palestinian victimhood. It is easy to understand how, following these experiences, a frontal lecture by an anonymous settler who insists on the ancient historical and modern legal rights of the Jewish people to Judea and Samaria or, even less relevant, being shown a PowerPoint presentation that boasts of Israel’s high-tech achievements, might fall on deaf ears and even rankle a group of compassionate foreign visitors.
Pro-Palestinian ideologues and the Palestinian Authority long ago learned that the mind follows the heart and not the other way around. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs: take note.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/combat-lefts-alternative-israel-brainwashing/