Encounter on the tubes!
Just wanted to give a shout out to the folks at Encounter. Encounter is an educational organization that provides Jewish Diaspora leaders from across the religious and political spectrum with exposure to Palestinian life. They do really incredible work and are worth checking out no matter where you are in the galaxy of views about Israel and Palestine. I know a good chunk of the staff who make it run and couldn’t be prouder to call them friends. They’ve got a new video showing a little bit of what they do, check it out:
What do they come out of this program thinking?
Divest from Israel?? Theres two sides to the story and now I know both? I dont know anything?
Ben David, did you _watch_ the video?
Speaking for myself, I came out of the program thinking, “wow, after months of talking to dozens (if not hundreds) of Israelis, now I’ve started hearing a few Palestinian voices, and I have a better idea of what new questions I have, and what I want to learn next.” And that was really exciting.
What disturbs me about this video is hearing congregational rabbis and community leaders say things like: “Now I realize that they all don’t just want to kill us,” or, “I now have a much more nuanced understanding of the conflict.”
How can intelligent, mature, middle-aged leaders ever have thought that all Palestinians simply live to murder Jews, or that the conflict was black/white good guy/bad guy?
Maybe the things that KFJ writes about the organized Jewish community leadership really are true. Very sad.