I've been wanting to post for a while, but I've been running my own Israeli PR campaign on Facebook and Twitter and haven't been a little distracted. Ever since the raid things in Be'er Sheva have been tense. On Monday there was a protest against the raid by a few hundred students that, from what I heard (I didn't see it myself) was more anti-Zionist, than anti-raid.
So, on Tuesday, there was a huge rally in support of the IDF. It started at the main gate, but the police arrested the organizer and we moved it inside. Of course I had to be next to the one idiot who shouted "Death to Arabs." I yelled at him to leave, but he just smiled and laughed with another racist friend.
I've been trying to post my videos, but my Internet sucks and youtube keeps telling me to reformat. Very annoying. But I was able to get one to work at least: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg2a9_oqFeE
Yesterday, there were big protests again, both for and against and they got pretty heated. There was even a leftist who Heiled. Hooray for respectful and constructive protests.
When I got to campus today, Ahik was selling Israeli flags at the gate. He said there was going to be another protest today but I didn't see it. Maybe I was in class when it happened. I had Arabic and Oil Politics and in between I was running around getting stuff ready for the conference.
After class, I had a meeting with Andrea, Yoni and Loren to work on our Conflict Resolution presentation on the economic ties between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But before I could head over to the dorms, I ran into Omer from my village. He was clearly very worked up by this whole situation and asked me a lot about my program. I told him that it is very left-leaning and our tours focused on the conflict and he immediately made the jump to the program being anti-Zionist. He went on a big rant about how he didn't understand why he should be paying for the school to run an anti-Zionist program. I tried to explain that it wasn't anti-Zionist, just critical, because that's how you study. But he did get me to think about one big thing. Noah is our program coordinator. She's very nice and I've enjoyed the programs she's run that I participated in. But she is clearly and unabashedly and anti-Zionist. I think there is a huge range of legitimate political opinions in Israel between anti-Zionists on the left and Kahanists on the right. I'm all for free speech and not stifling political opinions, but not all political opinions were created equal. I can't imagine that the school would give us a program coordinate who was openly racist against Arabs. So how how they give us someone who thinks that Israel has no right to exist? I'm going to have to speak with Avi Rubin about this.
Now I'm very tired and I need to get up in a few hours for our trip to the Golan tomorrow. Should be fun! I don't know what I'm going to do without my 24 hour news connection. We'll see how it goes.
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