By Josh Scheinert

It’s on the bus driving in from the West Bank where you really appreciate Jerusalem’s grandeur. The Old City creeps up on you from out the window. The sun, reflecting off the Dome of the Rock is almost blinding. Yet, you can’t look away; you don’t want to. This is it, what it all comes down to – so you want to make sure you take in every last glimpse of this city of gold that ignites so many passions. 

I had a few of those bus rides. Passions ignited, I would often ask myself what Jerusalem has done to us, or better yet, what we have done to Jerusalem. If its walls could speak, would they affirm or denounce what is being done in their name? By the bus ride’s end, I would usually settle on the latter. Just give it up, I’d say to myself, referring to East Jerusalem.

Just give it up. Does that mean I’ve given up? Some people might say that I have. Whereas I used to stand firm, now I’m one of those softie lefties. I’m a liberal blinded by my own delusional idealism, ignorant of history, letting the bullies of the world push me around only to wind up hurt or disappointed.

But that’s not the case. I haven’t given up. In fact, getting to where I am now has been a lot more difficult than had I stayed where I was. I used to be the embodiment of my Jewish day-school upbringing: we were good and they were bad; we wanted peace and they wanted war. Giving up would have meant staying the same.

*Permit me a disclaimer. My ‘delusional idealism’ does not prevent me from realizing that there are countless individuals on both sides who are brought up in these environments. But I’m not in a position to talk about others. Though, that’s not to say, to hope, that others on both sides, can have the same sort of difficult evolution as I have.

This is not the place for advancing an agenda for peace that comes with such an evolution. There are others more suited to that than me. My opinions on the settlements, checkpoints, unity governments, refugees and final borders are no more qualified than yours.

Instead then, let this be place where it can be asserted that to be prepared to give it up – whether that be the West Bank or the dream of a Greater Palestine – is by no means giving up. It is neither an admission of defeat nor a repudiation of one’s self or one’s place in his or her community. Reconciliation and rapprochement have earned an unwarranted and unfair stigma. They are values to be prized, not shunned. After too many years of fighting and disingenuous efforts at peace, on both sides, they are all we have left.

My first act of Israel advocacy on campus took place in the early stages of the Second Intifada. A Palestinian group was bringing in a speaker. For a reason unknown to me to this day, pro-Israel students were going to stand outside the building, Israeli flags draped over our backs to showcase our solidarity and disproval of what the speaker was going to say. However, I cannot tell you what the speaker said that we disproved of. None of us stayed to listen. Today I can guess at what he might have said. Some, if not much of it, was probably true. But at the time I wouldn’t hear it.

To me, today, that is giving up. Hurling accusations at one another across a university hall, while standing in two columns reminiscent of a World War One trench scene, is also giving up.

What possibly, could either of those two examples, or the countless others like them, have accomplished. They are passionate affirmations of the status quo that have gotten us nowhere. But those who ‘won’t give up’ don’t realize that. Their principles, convictions and beliefs are what will solve this conflict, no thanks to the softies. Reconciliation and rapprochement are for those of us who give up and stand for everything while in fact we stand for nothing.

Yet, caught up in the moment, they miss the point. Those who try to reach outward, not inward, by evolving, engaging and understanding, are the ones undertaking the real fight. And it can only work if it begins as a struggle, or fight, with oneself, to come to terms with truths once deemed myths and realities that were more comfortable if ignored. When that stage of personal evolution is over, the next one, of engagement and understanding, can be equally as difficult. And while it might be absent the thrill of screaming at a rally, it is infinitely more rewarding.

To come and know the ‘other’ not as an ‘other’ but as part of a collective we presents tremendous opportunity. The benefits of humanizing each other cannot be understated. It’s time for those on the Palestinian side of the equation to have the courage to see the Israeli grandmother for who she is. She is a woman whose parents left behind the hatred of Europe, where they might have been tolerated at times, but were never fully accepted. So they came to build a future in their ancestral homeland, fortunate to have escaped before Europe’s ‘tolerance’ ran out. And it is also time for those on the Israeli side to humanize the Palestinian father, humiliated because his age presumes him to be a security threat. He is treated with scorn, denied dignity and believed to posses ulterior motives – of death, destruction and destabilization. Yet, really, his main goal – at which he has thus far been unsuccessful – is to provide for his family in the land he was born into amidst a conflict he did not ask for.

There is nothing unprincipled about making those realizations, nothing that betrays who I am or who you are. I challenge someone to tell me that I have turned my back on my Jewish upbringing, my schooling, community, and grandfather who fought for Israel’s independence because I choose to see a Palestinian woman in her olive grove as a woman deserving of her own homeland, without checkpoints and barriers, even if it means Jews have to move. If I’m to be guilty of trying to give up on something it’s the concept of otherness, all it does, is force us time and time again to miss the point.

And please don’t say I’m being naïve.

It comes back to the bus ride into Jerusalem. It’s most spectacular as the sun is setting. The blinding light turns into a truly golden glow, worthy only of Jerusalem. In that moment, frozen in time, as images and thoughts rush through my head I cannot help but feel what Jerusalem is meant to symbolize, what is must symbolize. But we’re not there yet. So while I might have evolved, might not fight the way I used to and have altered the lens through which I view the world around me, the last thing I have done, the last thing we have done, is give up.