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At N.Y. Nakba Event, Some Light at the End of the Tunnel, Inshallah

It’s late, I just got home from a Nakba commemoration at Columbia University, a panel of four professors in a classroom with about 250 people in it. It seems important to relate the following before I go to bed.

I saw half a dozen or more students in the crowd wearing yarmulkes. They were quiet throughout the presentation and during the Q-and-A, one of them, a small athletic kid in a blue sweatshirt, questioned the panelists about the significance of Hamas’s policy calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. The panelists, Arab-Americans, sought to assure him that no one wanted to kill Israelis, they wanted to live with Jews; and even the fiery Joseph Massad said that he disapproved of Hamas’s language.

No one heckled the panel, all the questions were respectful. Saif Ammous, one of the organizers, marveled to me that the ardent Zionists seem to have gone away over the last couple years, just as Norman Finkelstein has observed. Saif had gotten up early that morning to paper the campus with dramatic red posters naming Palestinian villages erased in the Nakba, DAYR YASSIN, for instance. And that surprisingly, they hadn’t been torn down.

After the panel, I stood at the side of the room listening to the kid in the blue sweatshirt and another Jewish kid in a yarmulke who had lived in an Israeli settlement for 2 years, a tall thoughtful kid, and a Serbian woman and a big mischievous Arab as they discussed the situation. The conversation was intense, respectful, and earnest. "So because you worry that we will drive you out, you need to drive the Arabs out, that is the justification–" the Arab said. Or when the Serbian woman spoke of Palestinians as second-class citizens, or the terrible conditions in the West Bank, the Jewish kid would say, "100 percent," "100 percent," meaning I agree with you 100 percent. While the tall thoughtful kid said that he was disturbed by the denial of rights in Israel, but Jewish villages had been erased, in the West Bank, under Jordanian rule ’48-’67. The Jewish kids acknowledged the Nakba.

I haven’t seen a spontaneous conversation of this sort in all my reporting on this issue. I believe that it reflects a lowering of fears among Jews in the next generation, and a new space opening up in the discourse. I want to believe it’s a Red Sea moment, a little miracle, and this space will only grow. Readers of this blog know I’m an optimist, tonight I feel full of wonder, that people may actually be listening to one another here in America, which is even more important than their listening to one another over there….

P.S. Two people who speak Arabic better than me (a category roughly equal to the world’s population) inform me that my earlier headline, Imshallah, was misspelled. Apologies!

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