A Very Extended Postscript

I am deeply honored receive a comment from Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and am taking this opportunity to respond. She wrote:

Your feed-back is interesting. I would have liked to have heard your views at the meeting and to have had the opportunity to engage with you on your thoughts. For me the visit to Israel/Palestine was the first and what I saw was deeply disturbing! I reported on my personal observations. With me were people who have been to Israel many times who saw what we saw together for the first time. They were as shocked as I was. I also saw young Israeli's working together with Palestinians. To me this was the most valuable part of my experience during the visit. How many such initiatives have you heard about? Maybe if you were listening you would have picked this up as the centre peice our our visit - to witness first hand the tremendous joint effort being made at the grassroots level by Palestinians and Israelis. I think the more people can see for themselves the more real it becomes. No amount of posturing or shouting one another down will change the life of the Palestinian child or the Israeli child who grow up to hate each other. It will not help the Israeli who lives in fear or the Palestinian whose life has been taken away by the military occupation. I think if we take the attitude that we have heard it all before, we close our minds to the reality of the people whose human rights are abused on a daily basis. Listening should be on both sides of the divide, otherwise there is no hope. What are you personally doing about the situation apart from observing as you indicate? What is Wits doing? That is my question.

First of all I want to say that my impressions of your talk were positive, and I tried to convey this in my earlier post. What I meant to say was that you, Nozizwe, were preaching to the proverbial choir. I entered the lecture well aware of the devastating human rights abuses inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli state and army. Through my academic studies as well as my own research I have read several books and articles concerning the conflict; the one which affected me most was "Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel" by Avram S. Bornstein which I read for a class called "The Anthropology of Contemporary Warfare". A few days I attended a screening and discussion of a film called "Encounter Point" which chronicled two members of the Bereaved Families Forum, an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, as they advocated for a peaceful solution. While I certainly cannot claim to be an expert in the subject, I was simply saying that your speech, while moving, did not reveal information with which I was not already familiar. Moreover it seemed that the attendants of the talk were largely involved in pro-Palestinian activism and therefore were also knowledgeable with the observations that you made. Hopefully the meeting served as a launch-pad for activism and action on campus, but I can't really speak to its effect on anyone except for myself. Since I've been in South Africa I've found myself increasingly questioning my political positions and ideas, and am currently exploring and educating myself about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. My journey is further complicated by my identity as a proud Jewish woman and I am currently navigating what it means to be both Jewish and decidedly against the actions of the Israeli state. This is a process that is by no means simple or easily resolved. I definitely agree with your position on listening. To state that "talk is crap", that one side will should not listen to the other, is counter-productive and serves to perpetuate the distance between the Israeli child and the Palestinian child who you evoke in your example.

To answer your questions: I do not know what Wits is doing in this situation. I am an exchange student who has been here for two months and leaves in another two. Judging by the passion of the PSC I am sure that many students on campus are working to raise awareness and affect change. What am I doing? That is more difficult to answer. At the moment, I am not doing much of anything aside from attending meetings and educating myself. There isn't much I can do in the way of activism during my brief stay in this country. I intend on further pursuing the issue when I go back to my college in the United States and getting involved when I am in a situation to work on long term projects and establish myself in an activist community. For now I am doing the best that I can.

I am sorry if the vagueness of my post caused misunderstandings and offense. It was not my intention to be blase and jaded, rather to express that while I enjoyed the talk, it did not expose anything new. Perhaps that should be encouraging, that your audience is well-versed in and compelled by the horrors that you discussed. If you want to discuss this further my e-mail address is AHuston@email.smith.edu. Thank you for responding to my post and I wish you the best of luck in your own activism.