By Joel Magalnick, JTNews Correspondent
When late-night radio talk show host Erin Hart was offered the chance to visit Israel, she jumped at the chance.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Israel, since I was a child,” she said.
Hart, whose weekend show on KIRO-AM radio is considered to be among the more progressive of the station’s offerings, spent six days in the Jewish state in July as part of a group called Project Interchange, an institute of the American Jewish Committee.
Rabbi Richard Harkavy, executive director of the local AJCommittee chapter, encouraged Hart to pursue the trip as the sole Northwest representative, and filled out the application on her behalf.
Harkavy praised Hart’s qualifications, and said her visit has since gone a long way with listeners who do not support Israel.
For her part, Hart wanted to make this journey with Project Interchange because she felt she could trust that her experience would be well-rounded.
“They gave us as many perspectives as they possibly could.” she said. “I wanted to go with somebody who wouldn’t have an agenda that wasn’t simply one way or another.”
Due to liability restrictions and State Dept. regulations, however, the contingent — all of whom were radio talk show hosts from around the country — was unable to pass into the West Bank or Gaza Strip.
“That was the one hole in our knowledge,” Hart noted.
Though disappointed about not being able to visit, Hart said she firmly believes in a Palestinian homeland, but “whether they deserve Yasser Arafat is another question entirely.”
She said she sees Arafat as standing in the way of the goals of the Palestinian people achieving peace.
The trip schedule was jampacked, but Hart said she felt like she got a good feel for the country. The tour began with a visit to a memorial of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a man whom Hart said she admires passionately.
For her, the start was fitting because of her desire to see peace in the region.
When visiting the beaches of Tel Aviv, Hart found them gorgeous, even with lingering reminders of violence.
“Everywhere we went is beautiful,” she said, “and then you see Mike’s Place,” the bar that was the site of an April suicide bombing that killed three people.
She said, however, that she was impressed by the speed in which Israelis rebuild and move on after an attack.
“There are sobering reminders everywhere,” she said. “At the same time there’s a lot of energy.”
The Project Interchange group’s travels took them into the old city of Jaffa — which amazed Hart at how empty it was in the middle of the afternoon — to the edge of Bethlehem to the uppermost guard tower of the Golan, where Lt. Col. Dror Ben Hur of the Israeli Defense Forces spoke about Israel at its most vulnerable points, and why the country must be on constant guard.
Hart and her fellow travelers spoke to many people about many different issues, ranging from resolving the idea of democracy with a Jewish state, to highly controversial topics, such as the razing of buildings in Gaza.
Though many of the Israelis she spoke to had problems with the building destruction, “I think the person who talked about it with the most sadness was the lieutenant colonel with the IDF,” she said. “That’s the biggest public relations problem Israelis have in terms of the community and the world at large.”
Other stops included conversations with Russian and Argentinean olim, a panel about biotechnology —many Israelis were surprised to find out that Seattle can do more than make software — and spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with one analyst who has since been a guest on Hart’s show.
The diversity of the Israeli and Palestinian populations impressed Hart as well.
“I was amazed at the variety of citizenry,” she said. “There is a lot more subtlety and depth to Israeli society than people think. I must assume [this is] true of the Palestinians, but we get a very one-sided view of them, too: beleaguered, battered, downtrodden and terrorists.”
By virtue of simply visiting, Hart got a view of that pluralism: she was there when single mothers took to the streets to protest the policies of finance minister Benyamin Netanyahu.
Attitudes also varied. As her group sat through various seminars, the interactions between different groups of Israelis and Palestinians was markedly different.
The journalists, she said, would joke and talk with each other.
The Jewish settler and the Palestinian rights worker, however, would not even look each other in the eye. Both gave Hart a first-hand look at the propaganda that comes out of both sides of the conflict as well. Where she said she had trouble believing the settler who said he would move back into Israel proper if he were given enough money, the Palestinian rights worker “was very bombastic, and he tried to say there was no hate taught to Palestinian children ever,” Hart said.
“He said they weren’t ever taught to say ‘death to the Jews,’ which is ridiculous. The 15-year-old kids from Palestine that I interviewed later were saying ‘we were taught to say those things.’”
Yet she spoke to other Palestinians who shared real concerns with her. She said that many people are worried about Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’ ability to lead. Everyone she talked to, from businessmen to people on the far right, were rooting for him — or someone else — to be able to accomplish a peace deal.
Now that she is back, Hart makes no bones about wanting to see peace in the Middle East.
“I have always wanted peace for the region, but it’s more personal now. I really want to see it happen,” she said.
The trip has also taught her a lot about looking beyond the surfaces of an issue. She said that with a much deeper understanding of what people in the region face on a daily basis, it has enriched her radio show with the level of how she can speak to the issue, in addition to the quality of guests.
Hart is also more skeptical of the information she receives; she sees it as her job to help people learn more about the issue without relying upon one side or the other.
Yet even those improvements have not gone completely smoothly. While she has received positive feedback from listeners who appreciate her support of Israel on a liberal radio show, “I also get email from people who are very supportive of the Palestinian side who are mad at me,” she said. “At the same time, they seem to keep listening, and they send me their stuff and groups to contact.”
Personally, Hart said she came back with more hope and sense of possibility. Most of all, she said she would love to see what both sides could accomplish without 55 years of war weighing on their shoulders.
“To throw that off and see where that could go,” Hart said, “it would be amazing.”