By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
What surprised Naama Levi and Doron Dvir was the appreciation they got from people outside of Seattle’s Jewish community.
The two Israelis, ages 25 and 24 respectively, spent six weeks in the area as fellows for the international arm of the Israel advocacy organization StandWithUs. They had an often-full daily calendar of speaking at both Jewish and non-Jewish institutions, including schools, churches and synagogues about daily life in Israel and their experiences serving in the army.
“They assumed it was going to be critical throughout and many people were very welcoming,” said Rob Jacobs, executive director of StandWithUs’ Northwest chapter.
But plenty of people wanted to hear what these Israelis had to say.
When they went to visit high school classes, they said that though some of the students asked if Israelis traveled by camel, they learned from Levi and Dvir’s lives, including stories about their army experience and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which they said they did their best not to portray as a black-and-white issue.
“After so many years of hearing that speakers were going out to the schools sort of representing the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel perspective, it was nice to be able to put some young people in front of the students who they were able to identify with,” Jacobs said.
Levi mentioned a mixed group of Jews and non-Jews at an informal event they attended during one of their last days in town.
“They wanted to know. They were curious about our experience as Israelis. They put some good questions, some hard questions. They were looking to hear answers, but they weren’t blocked,” she said. “They were there to listen, and I think that’s what we accept the most — people willing to be curious and open-minded about how does it really go.”
“We’re trying to show all sides of the conflict,” Dvir said. “When they finish our lecture, [their] time with us, they feel, I think, they’re getting a lot of information from both sides.”
Yet the pair was also surprised by the amount of misinformation they heard from Seattleites about their home country.
“I had conversations with people from the Jewish community and from the non-Jewish community, and I heard a lot of things I felt like, ‘This is not the army or this is not the country I know,’” Dvir said.
“We heard that the Israeli soldiers [were] authorized to rape and kill Palestinian women, and Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians and buried them in unmarked graves, and just hitting and beating up innocent Palestinians,” said Dvir, who served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces. “[These are] not the things I was told to do and these were not the orders I received as a soldier.”
What they had learned during their nine-month training period — a volunteer effort done concurrently while they attended university, and from which they were selected out of about 150 applicants — was that they would expect to find “anti-Israel” sentiments on college campuses throughout the U.S. Seattle was no exception.
“[We] read all kinds of materials that were spread around the university — terrible, terrible things about the state of Israel, about the IDF,” Levi said. “Then you go and you talk to people from the Jewish community, and you expect them at least to be supportive of Israel, the Israel that you know and grew up in in the past 25 years.”
They were shocked, however, in the instances that that was not the case.
“People who barely visited Israel are putting facts to your face that they read somewhere or some rumors that they’ve [heard] about,” Levi said.
That included an event they attended that featured two Israeli Army refuseniks strongly critical of its policies.
“I couldn’t believe that someone out of my country, an Israeli girl at the age of 18…told that to people,” Levi said. “These people [that hear] that later on go to other people and say, ‘Yeah, we heard this Israeli say — and this and that and that.’ That’s so wrong.”
But expressing those sentiments to outsiders wasn’t all that was wrong, Levi said. So were their facts, particularly in regard to statements she said they made about Israeli discrimination against women.
“A lie that is told is still a lie, no matter how many times you are telling it,” Levi said. “[This refusenik] chose not to go in the army, and I’m a lieutenant in the Israel Defense forces…. There are a number of women in the Israeli parliament — more than in America. We had a prime minister who was a woman. Our head of the Knesset is a woman…. The head of the Supreme Court is a woman. That’s fact. It’s not what I think about it.”
Dvir said he was disappointed that their visit to the Kadima Reconstructionist Community was met with closed minds.
“They were very polite, but I felt all the time while I was talking, they asked me, is it true…about Israelis torturing or killing, or…illegal orders of the Israeli soldiers against the Palestinians,” he said.
Dvir said he never received orders he felt were illegal or immoral, and that he and his fellow soldiers would jeopardize their own lives to keep civilians safe. His response was greeted with disbelief.
“I saw them looking among each other and smiling, and in the end they told me, ‘Okay, maybe you’re just saying half the truth, maybe you’re lying, you’re naïve. It’s not what’s going on there.’ What can I say? I served there. I’ve seen it,” he said. “I felt like I’m talking to someone who has already made up his mind. They were very polite, and they were very nice, but I felt like they [didn’t] come there to listen.”
Rainer Waldman Adkins, Kadima’s program director, said he didn’t feel those sentiments from his congregants.
“I did not get a sense that people were telling them that they were naïve or speaking half-truths,” Adkins said. “I heard from a number of Kadima people that they really admired [Levi and Dvir] being there and their comportment, sharing their stories and responding to people, and that people appreciated…that the two of them had a more complex view of things than might have been the stereotype.”