“There’s fighting over there. See that over the mountain? It’s smoke.”
I struggled to locate it, but all I could see was the brown earth spread 360 degrees around me. My eyes stretched for miles out; the land went on forever. The world seemed to be never-ending, but for the people living right in front of me, I realized their world was ending.
And that’s when I saw it: a cloud of murky smoke hovering above a small plateau, about a mile in the distance. The hill was just high enough that we couldn’t see anything that was happening. But we knew. The whole world knew. Yet we were there, at the Syrian border, feet planted firmly and safely on Israeli soil.
The war between the rebels and the Syrian government wasn’t just words on an iPhone screen anymore — it was real. Someday, my kids will read about the Syrian civil war in their history textbooks, and they will have about the same emotional connection to it as I had with the French Revolution. But standing in Israel, facing people dying in Syria, knowing that some had died yesterday and that they would continue to die tomorrow, the world came alive to me.
My trip to Israel was for educational and journalistic purposes. As part of a group of high school students with Write On for Israel, a program sponsored by BlueStar, we interviewed and shot B-roll for a documentary and learned how to intelligently advocate for Israel. I had the opportunity to experience Israel in a way that not many people ever will.
We traveled to the West Bank, walked across the border, visited an Arab village and ate lunch at an Arab restaurant while we learned about reincarnation and Druze beliefs, as told by a Druze.
We went to an army base in the West Bank and were taught by Israeli soldiers how to shoot a rifle. We practiced shooting (with paintballs, of course) and learned Israeli self-defense, Krav Maga.
On top of that, my documentary group interviewed people who were living in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem during the 1948 occupation. We listened to their stories as they talked about something so horrible we can only imagine.
We visited all of the borders, including Syria, where we saw the aftermath of the fighting. I threw a rock over the Lebanese border; I looked into the Gaza Strip while standing in Sderot, a city that had been bombed three days prior. I saw Jordan on the other side of the Dead Sea from the top of the Herodian Palace.
We didn’t ride camels, float in the Dead Sea or bring back T-shirts that said, “I survived Masada.” Instead, we saw violence. We witnessed poverty, figured out how to distinguish a Palestinian home from an Israeli home, and learned about the Middle East conflict from a variety of people. Our guest speakers ranged from an American man who moved to Israel and joined the Israel Defense Forces at age 18, to a Palestinian journalist writing for the Jerusalem Post.
Of course, I was on a pro-Israel trip, but I didn’t feel brainwashed. How can you be brainwashed about something so complex? How can you be brainwashed when you’re standing right there, taking it all in for yourself?
The truth isn’t malleable. It cannot be twisted, shaped, molded or made into anything it’s not. It just wasn’t until I traveled to Israel that I realized the truth is so much more complicated than I could have ever imagined.
Whose right is it to live in Israel? Will Israel ever exist on Arab maps? Should the U.S. intervene in Syria? Why do people think Israeli soldiers kill babies? Will there ever be peace?
So many questions followed me during my 10 days in Israel, and now that I am home I realize they may never go away. At first this disturbed me. I felt so small. But isn’t being a journalist all about asking questions? Sometimes they might be fulfilled, and other times they will remain unanswered.
Because of my time in Israel, I realize how much I want to put my voice out there. I want to see who listens. I want to know about the world I’m living in — not just my school, my town or my country. I want to hear people’s questions, develop my own, and travel, interview, investigate, watch, listen and report until I am one step closer to the answers.
Jamie Altman is a senior at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton who went on the Write On for Israel trip this past summer.