JERUSALEM — Idiot. Stupid. Crazy. Oscar Miranda was called all of those things and more when he announced his intention to accept the Birthright Israel program’s offer of an all-expense-paid, 10-day trip to Israel.
But near the end of his trip earlier this month, he said, “I want to come back to Israel. I want to travel more. I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that I did something different.”
Miranda, a sophomore at San Jose State, said that before he left for Israel, “my boss gave me a really hard time. He made it clear to me that if he was my father he’d lock me up and not let me go because any random person can blow you up.”
Despite his boss’ best efforts, Miranda was undaunted.
Miranda had seen a lot worse than anything he was likely to encounter in Israel. A dozen years ago, he was rocked out of bed by gunshots and explosions while visiting family in El Salvador. In Israel, he said, he “didn’t hear one shot.”
U.C. Berkeley freshman Simon Dardashti had never made an excursion to El Salvador but said he’d done something nearly as dangerous.
“The chances of me dying in Israel are far less than while driving in L.A.,” he said.
What Birthright organizers and Israelis euphemistically refer to as “the situation” failed to scare off Miranda or Dardashti, but it was enough to dissuade thousands of others. While planners had hoped as many as 10,000 young Jews between the ages of 18 and 26 would take part in the program this year, only about 60 percent of that number signed up.
In addition to San Jose State and U.C. Berkeley, students from Sonoma State, the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State also took part in the 3-year-old program during January and late December. With 34 students, Berkeley Hillel leaders said their group was the largest.
Because of heightened security concerns, students who made the trip experienced curtailed personal freedom and mobility. Although the trip was more closely monitored than previous Birthright tours, Shawn Laing, director of the Sonoma County Hillel and a Birthright leader, believes students received “a valuable experience, even if they couldn’t go to the clubs every night.”
Access to the Gaza Strip, West Bank and the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was strictly forbidden. But furtively grinning students were spotted at the Western Wall tunnels with hookahs and trinkets they had obviously picked up in the open-air Arab shuk.
Birthright participants were not taken to popular, touristy sites recently hit by terrorist bombers, or, for that matter, any public market-type situation. Following the end of a day’s programming, students were not allowed to leave the hotel.
Although participants had anticipated a loss of personal freedom and understood the organizers’ reasoning, that often didn’t make the situation easier to bear.
“I felt like a fourth-grader on much of this trip,” said Jonathan Yaffe, a junior at U.C. Berkeley. “We were staying at Tiberias, where there hasn’t been any violence for 25 years. We weren’t allowed to leave the hotel to go to the market next door. My brother was 14 when he went on a trip to Israel a year and a half ago, and he was able to leave the hotel and run around. Sitting in circles, playing name games and throwing a ball around are a weird way of keeping us in check. I feel patronized, but I realize that it’s a free trip so I can’t complain much. I don’t regret coming, but I definitely had issues with the trip.”
Searching for the personal freedom they didn’t find on the Birthright trip, around one-third of U.C. Berkeley’s 34 students — including Yaffe — opted to travel through Israel and the Middle East on their own at the conclusion of the program.
Laing understands Yaffe’s frustration, but he insists that the additional security was necessary.
“For the most part, the students respected our wishes and knew that this was not the best time to be wandering around Israel by yourself,” he said.
“All of us as staff would like for [the students] to have been here before; we know what Israel is like. But it’s a safety precaution. Some people didn’t want the students to go to Ben Yehuda because they were concerned that they’d get blown up. My perspective is, what if you’re on Ben Yehuda and something happens? Even if you’re not in the middle of it, who do you turn to if you don’t know the language and 800 people are running around screaming in Hebrew?”
Dan Firestone wishes he could have spent more time walking the streets and talking to locals, but he fully understands organizers’ concerns. The U.C. Berkeley graduate and current medical student at U.C. San Diego is less pleased, however, about frequent, overtly religious group discussions, which he says were not mentioned at all during the orientation process.
“I wish they’d been a little more public about that. But this year, they really didn’t want people to shy away,” he said. Also, “They’re not saying, ‘Make aliyah, join the army and fight for our cause,’ but they wouldn’t mind. They have an agenda. But they’re giving us a trip, so they deserve to have an agenda.”
Despite his reservations, Firestone describes Birthright as “a pretty sweet deal” with “an unbeatable itinerary.”
While more than a few students said speakers and guides were laying on the pro-Israel agenda a bit too thickly, others claimed they were being presented with multiple points of view.
U.C. Berkeley sophomore Noah Kagan understands that Birthright is a trip to Israel funded by pro-Israel groups, but he still feels the information he was presented was “almost balanced. We’ve seen both a right-wing approach and a left-wing approach.”
Even those with fairly extreme points of view didn’t claim to speak for anyone but themselves, according to Dardashti.
“We’re dealing with a lot of educated people. And every time we do get information, people say, ‘This is only my perspective; get the other view; too,'” said the freshman. “Even the people who were very right wing in the Golan said, ‘I’m very rightist, so this is only my perspective.'”
Meanwhile, a group of Arab teenagers the U.C. Berkeley group met in the Galilee were very open about claiming “that some parts of Israel should be our own,” recalled Dardashti. “I was shocked it came so easily.”
Birthright’s founders are extremely candid about their hopes for young, often unaffiliated Jews to establish a connection with Israel and Jewish culture. In many cases, the organization appears to have succeeded.
“I’m a cultural Jew and an atheist. And certainly a trip to Israel isn’t going to change that. But I do feel more connected to the Jewish community now,” said Sarah Berkowitz, a U.C. Berkeley senior. “Now I’m much more motivated to participate in Hillel and within the Jewish community. Hebrew classes, Israeli folk dancing, it’s all stuff I never knew about before.”
Traveling in the SACHLAV Sephardic Heritage Tour contingent with more than a few yeshiva graduates, Daniel Zaghi says he’s actually been inspired to become more religious.
“Now I feel like my connection to Israel is much stronger. It’s a unique educational experience; it’s live. To see the places and touch and feel them is so much different than learning from textbooks,” said Zaghi, a U.C. Davis graduate and San Jose native whose family escaped from Iran when he was a toddler. “I will become more of a Zionist. I’m quite interested in settling down here and making aliyah.”
But will these feelings last? Birthright supporters and benefactors desperately hope they will.
Zaghi says it’s too early to tell. “I don’t really know,” said the 22-year-old, who is currently poring through medical school applications. “But, at this point, the feelings are strong enough that I think they’ll stay.”