May 24 Conference Meeting

These are some clarifications I would like to make about what I’ve said at the last video conference. I thought about it a lot and I think my discomfort with the position I found myself in during this course, has distorted some of what I had to say. A great deal of my discomfort was actually my discomfort with my being an Israeli. At the beginning of this course, before we started the video conferences, I read a piece about what happened to the Palestinians in Haifa during the 1948 war. I told Vered then, that Israelis can debate their history's accuracy but I'm not sure we can be proud of it. I see my frustration as a positive thing: this course frustrated me, in part, because it made me do what I've been avoiding from doing for a long time- facing the reality. I'm grateful for having had the chance to do so. Although I still think that in order to establish a fruitful dialogue, the materials should have been more balanced, what I meant for was to raise the following question, must a sense of belonging to a place (Makom) rely solely and exclusively on a connection to the land itself. I feel that as an Israeli in the context of such a course, I'm at a competition I'm supposed to lose and I have no desire to compete with anyone. It's not debatable that historically the Palestinians are more connected to the land itself, but Israeli's also have a very strong connection to the place, some of it- a connection through text. Is a connection to the land exclusively defines the connection to the place, or do other possibilities of connection are equally valid? I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank Aaron for his remark; I guess keeping an open mind means willing to accept even the unexpected. Since this is the end of this course, I just wanted to say thank you all for an enlightening experience.