This year traveling up to the Golan Heights was a little more fraught with tension – after all, UN peacekeepers had been held for three days by Syrian rebels and the Syrian civil war made the historically quiet area more active. It also ended up being the location of one of the most amazing learning experiences of the trip. To put this all in perspective, student Katie Lonze shares her experience from both 2011 and 2013:

Two years ago, I was part of a group of about 30 law students from Marquette University and Arizona State University that traveled to Israel over spring break to learn about International Conflict Resolution and the various attempts at peacemaking in the Middle East. As a first-year law student, not enrolled in the class, I came into the trip with a less than fully developed understanding of the issues going on in the Middle East (which of course assumes that it is possible to have a fully developed understanding of the region.) This past week I was fortunate to return to Israel with 32 students and four faculty members from Marquette. The return trip was an entirely different experience, thanks to both the wealth of knowledge I obtained the first time and to my continuing interest in learning about past and current events in the Middle East. 

This continues my series of posts on the recent trip I led to Israel.  As part of the Israel trip, we met with different groups working on coexistance.  One group–Encounter–focuses on bringing American and Israeli Jews into the West Bank to meet with Palestinians.  They describe their work thus:

Encounter provides the only oppor­tu­nity for main­stream American Jewish leaders to visit Palestinian terri­to­ries in the West Bank. On our Middle East program, a plural­istic group of Jewish leaders meet Palestinian civil­ians and leaders in Bethlehem, Hebron, or East Jerusalem and engage in thoughtful conver­sa­tion about the complex­i­ties of Israel and the conflict.

A diverse array of Jewish leaders–rabbis, Federation Executives, lay leaders, and Jewish educa­tors from every denomination–sleep in Palestinian homes, play with Palestinian school­children and gain unique, multi­fac­eted insight into Palestinian life. These programs include rich Jewish conver­sa­tion amongst Jewish partic­i­pants who have disparate polit­ical and reli­gious affil­i­a­tions and perspec­tives. Many partic­i­pants iden­tify this internal dialogue as an equally powerful part of the trip.

We heard from the leaders how important facilitiation skills (based on the Public Conversations Project) are used to help groups listen more carefully and respectfully to those perspectives that are often difficult to hear and one of our Muslim students noted that she thought this would be a terrific program for American Muslims–to come to Israel and hear a perspective that they normally do not get.