Editor’s note: A US consular official commented to the group with whom I was traveling, many years ago, that if we did not get intellectual indigestion on our trip, someone was not doing their job well.

This was my first trip to Israel or Palestine, and although I had been reading about the conflict for years, I was overwhelmed by what I saw and experienced.  In many ways, what I saw confirmed what I already knew: the brutality of the occupation, the suffering of the Palestinian population, the violence of the Israeli military presence, the settlement enterprise, the travel restrictions, the widespread devastation in Gaza.  In other ways, what I saw confused me and made me feel like I had a lot to learn, and unlearn, about the dynamics of the occupation and the path to a solution.

We visited one place that surprised me a lot: a school in West Jerusalem called the Hand in Hand school, that brings Palestinian and Jewish Israeli students together within classrooms in the hope of overcoming hostility and prejudice, and encouraging students to learn more about each other’s backgrounds, values and concerns.  Before visiting the school, I was curious but a bit skeptical about the model, which seemed simplistic.  By promoting mutual understanding as a solution, it seemed to imply that the conflict was simply a function of mutual misunderstanding.  Moreover, the model of mutual understanding, where each side learns to see the perspective of the other, tends to equalize the grievances of both parties.  This gives a misleading view of the conflict, and hides or underemphasizes the fact of the occupation, which is inherently one-sided.

However, I was very impressed by what I saw at the school, which wasn’t simplistic at all but based on a rather sophisticated model of co-existence and dialogue.  While encouraging students to humanize each other, the school never implied that there was an equal power relation between Palestinians and Jews in Israeli society.  It openly acknowledged that there is, and tried to think how, in the light of this dominance relation, children from various sides could learn with and from each other to overcome the racist antagonisms that are so evident in the political culture around them.

The school aims to establish safe spaces for dialogue, where both the Jewish and Palestinian students could express their specific concerns and grievances.  At first I was unclear what this meant.  I understood the grievances of the Palestinian students, but what grievances could the Jewish students express that Palestinians would be expected to sympathize with?   Here is one example: as our guide at the school pointed out, the Jewish students have lost loved ones in the conflict.  I might think of these dead friends and relatives as pro-occupation soldiers, as agents of oppression, as “legitimate targets” of attack for Palestinian resistance fighters, etc.   But they were also brothers, sisters, cousins and friends.  They were human beings.  I came to see how the polarized debate – where these soldiers are seen as either military heroes or as enemy oppressors – could be a problem if you are an 8 year-old little girl mourning the death of a beloved uncle while becoming aware of the troubling political circumstances in which the death took place.  If children are going to treat each other as human beings, they need the space to see the conflict in these human terms.