Rulah and Yael: Urgency and Partnership

This morning's visit with Rulah and Yael, educators at the Sadaka Reut Arab-Jewish Youth Partnership was both encouraging and sad.  Personally, I was alternately agitated and inspired.  Both women are committed educators, working with teens and young adults to shape moral imagination and political maturity in a land desperate for both.  They spoke of despair among young Israeli Jews and young Palestinians and the challenges around raising up empowered leaders in a divided and even "racist" environment.  In this difficult setting, their Partnership does some of the most important work we've seen.

They reflected on the violence and prejudice they live with everyday.  And each in her own way spoke to the urgency of international pressure.  As an Israeli and a Jew, Yael spoke of her pain around the moral decay all around her, and her despair in watching contemporaries flee the country for other places (like Berlin, for example).  As a Palestinian with deep roots in the Arab villages to the north, Rulah spoke of the police presence and violence in those same villages this very day.   And she asked us to think of ways the West could bring Israeli power to recognize the injustice of the occupation itself.  "I don't believe in coexistence without partnership," Rulah said with feeling.  "So if you want to coexist with me, first let me exist.  Then we will see."

Rulah continued: "My people are still fighting for our land back home.  In order to get something [like justice], you have to work hard for it.  I can't let this injustice go.  With everyone leaving [on the left], who will I talk to?  Where will I find partners?"