SchwartzBlog

Today was miraculous. We started the day with a hike on Mt. Arbel. I would love to describe the views I saw, but I wouldn’t do them justice. Rest assured, pictures will be up in a few days.

We then headed away from Tiberius towards the town of Zefat. But before we did, we made a special stop to plant some trees. My father planted one in memory of his mother. My mother planted two. One in memory of her mother, and one of her grandparents. And I planted one for Dianne Weiss, the mother of Geoff Weiss who is one of my best friends.

We then headed to Zefat where we saw a synagogue and went shopping.

Then we headed to a Kibbutz (a small town) right at the border of Israel and Lebanon, where I learned more then I could of ever imagined about the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you can call it a conflict. Using binoculars I got to look into southern Lebanon, an area that is essentially owned by Hezbollah. There is no police, only Hezbollah security. What I saw were a bunch of half-completed houses with no windows. And what I learned was that these houses were missile sites. And every house I could see was like that.

There are two UN bases that I could see in Lebanon. One is made up of soldiers from Indonesia who are muslim. They are never harmed by Hezbollah. The other is probably less than 100 miles away. But the soldiers are from spain, and they are Christian. Those soldiers are constantly assaulted by Hezbollah.

There are two sides to this conflict. The Israelis want peace. They are willing to give anything for it. Including half of their land, which they have already done once when they gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt. Now lets get to the other side. Muslim’s believe that people who do not believe in their religion should not exist. The Muslim’s belief is that Israel should not and cannot exist. So what is there to negotiate?

The man who told me all of this at the Misgav Am Kibbutz was Aria. Aria is not originally from Israel, he actually was born and raised in Cleveland. After the second world war he realized that as a Jew he was better off making a life for himself in Israel than in America. He fought in 4 wars while serving in the Israeli forces and even at 67 years of age, still helped them in the  most recent war in 2006. What I learned from Aria was definitely different than what I normally hear from our local media, on both sides. Honestly, Neither FOX nor MSNBC nor CNN really has the true story based on what I heard from Aira.

Here is something that many people do not know. People say that this is a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But the fact of the matter is, there are no such thing as Palestinians. They are just Arabs from Syria or Jordan or Lebanon that weren’t born in the current state of Israel, but moved there in an attempt to drive the Israelis out. Here is a another quick fact. Jews have been living on this land since the early 1900s when they started legally buying it from the Arabs. The land was infertile and full of rocks, so the arabs were ready to get rid of it. So the Jewish National Fund bought the land, fixed it up, and then settled in it. All through legal process.

The gist of what they said was that The issue is not with the Israelis. It never has been, and it never will be.