Birthright comes with a price

When tensions around the Gaza Strip were beginning to ignite in late December, I was safely following the conflict from my television screen, thousands of miles away in New Jersey. The dramatic shots of Jerusalem and the Knesset were all familiar to me, but when I had seen them for myself this past summer as a participant on the Taglit-Birthright Israel program, everything had had a different tone. Instead of the tense, conflict-filled country on the news, the Israel that Birthright had shown me was a peaceful place where I could celebrate my Jewish culture and history without security considerations.

A not-so-secret opportunity for youths eager to see the world at a discount price, Birthright is a jam-packed, all-expenses-paid tour of Israel, sponsored by the Israeli government and a number of generous philanthropists.

In recent years, however, some project participants have attacked Birthright for instilling a strong Zionist bias in young Jews against the interests of the Palestinians and the Arabs. Though Birthright was not originally designed to educate its participants about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the topic is in some ways unavoidable.

Leonard Saxe, a professor of social policy at Brandeis and the primary author of a series of Brandeis reports about Birthright, has written, "[R]ising anti-Semitism and the volatile political situation in Israel have led some stakeholders to identify an additional goal for Birthright Israel - to enable young Diaspora Jews to speak intelligently about the situation in the Middle East from a perspective sympathetic to Israel."

I certainly felt the effects of this bias on my own Birthright trip, which was arranged by a California-based group called "Stand With Us." There are 22 trip organizers in the United States. Part of my susceptibility to the bias was my own fault: I embarked on the trip embarrassingly ignorant about Israeli politics, armed only with the outdated knowledge I had picked up from Leon Uris' 1958 novel "Exodus." This is not unusual for Birthright participants, however: Dylan Tatz '06, who wrote his thesis about Birthright while at Princeton and who now works for the American Jewish Committee, said in an e-mail that studies show that the majority of participants "knew virtually nothing about Israel" before their trip. I did, at least, have a sense of the impossibility of the situation.I knew there were no real good guys or bad guys, only tragedy, confusion and miscommunications.

By the end of Birthright, my appreciation for the complexity of the circumstances had disappeared. Immensely difficult situations were chopped up and served to us in consumable form, readily digested as long as we were willing to take their side. I spent 10 days drowning in tales of Israeli bravery, and I returned home spouting artificial wisdoms like "The terrorists won't stop until they have eliminated Israel from the map" - one of the many things we were told at the Jordan border by a battle-scarred American who had immigrated to Israel and fought in five of its wars. True, the trip organizers told us after that much of what the man said was an opinion, not fact, but his haunting words made an impact, especially on those who were even less educated about Israeli politics than I was. One girl actually asked an Arab journalist who gave us a lecture on the trip why "the Pakistanis" were attacking Israel, and another boy memorably said, "I'm such a Zionist now, it's not even funny."

Looking back, I find it alarming how quickly the trip participants formed strong opinions. Alana D'Alfonso '11, who traveled on Princeton's Hillel Birthright trip during winter break, also noticed this phenomenon, remembering the number of people who joined Zionist facebook.com groups immediately upon returning home. D'Alfonso noted that while Birthright "made [her] more concerned with and more connected to Israel, and gave more relevance to a distant conflict, it definitely didn't make [her] a Zionist."

Not all students perceived as much of a bias in Birthright as I did. Tigers for Israel president Jacob Lowenstein '11, who attended Birthright in December 2007, said that for him, the idea of Birthright's bias is absurd. "[Birthright's] only motive is to promote Jewish appreciation of a Jewish state," he noted. Lowenstein noted activities such as role-playing the parts of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, which increased his understanding of their perspectives. "I know that the effort is to provide a balanced a view of the political situation ... There is no brainwashing to create a band of Zionist soldiers," he said.

On the surface, this would certainly appear to be the case. There is almost nothing about the Palestinians or the conflict in Gaza on Birthright's website, except some notes on unsafe areas that the trips do not visit for security reasons, like the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

Still, every Birthright trip, by its very nature, seems to try to instill some form of love for the land in its participants, even if that effort is not always clear during the trip. According to Tatz, the problems begin when the participants return home and feel that they are "experts" on the subject despite their lack of knowledge. "Their friends may follow the Israeli-Arab conflict more astutely in the media," he explained, "but their trip gives them a certain unsupported authority that someone who has not been to Israel - no matter his familiarity with the issues - cannot claim."

But is it realistic to try to avoid this? Rachel Jackson '11 said she does not think so, adding that the Israeli soldiers who accompany the participants on parts of the trip cannot help but express their feelings about the situation. "The bias is through the individuals," she said, "but it's not really bias because this is what these people believe." The important thing, she said, is to "keep aware that this is only what people think is true".

There is nothing surprising about Israelis expressing their opinions to the participants. After all, the topic is incredibly personal for them. One of the soldiers from my trip, Daria Podshivalov, said in an e-mail, "[A]ll the Birthright Israeli participants have at least one thing in common that they all share: their love for the country and their will and desire to tell, give, and share from their love to the people coming to this program."

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However, this "love" is precisely the problem, said Tatz. "When one loves something, one is sometimes blinded ... Put simply, Birthright alumni love Israel, but don't have a clue how to answer the questions, and to make matters worse, they think they know it all."

Ultimately, Birthright might not be enough: There are too many facets to Israel that cannot be covered in 10 sightseeing-filled days. "I would say Birthright is too short to show the whole picture, and maybe that's a good thing, 'cause it leaves you with wanting more," said Ran Bario Bar-Yoshafat, a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces Special Forces who accompanied my Birthright trip.

As for me, whenever I pick up the New York Times and see headlines about the bombings in Gaza, I am just as confused as ever about what and whom to trust. In the end, I suppose my desire to simplify the problem is childish: There are no easy answers, and I must figure out what I believe through careful analysis of both sides. The only way to do that is to return to Israel, but this time, I'll have to do it on my own dime.