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The Light at the End of the Tunnel

[Boulder Daily Camera] Murray Richtel - Sixteen law students were celebrating the start of 2008 at a party in my apartment. While all the students were Jerusalemites whose discourse was in fluent English, half were Palestinians enrolled at Al Quds, a Palestinian university, and half were Israeli Jews enrolled at Hebrew University. I teach these students Criminal Procedure at a neutral site, the American Colony Hotel. For the first ten weeks of class the students had been cautiously polite and cordial to each other. At the New Year's Eve Party these students were not focused on their differences. Instead, they talked and listened non-judgmentally, asking respectful questions, genuinely interested in the responses. Nada told me as she was leaving for her home in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa: "This was the best night of my life. We were really like friends. If they left it to us, we could make peace." I am generally pessimistic about things here in Israel. Not only do I not see the light at the end of the tunnel, I don't see the tunnel. Still, I believe there is a very large core of both the Palestinian and Israeli societies, like my students, who are desperate to learn what the other side really wants, thinks, and feels. The writer was a district court judge in Boulder from 1977 to 1996.
2008-01-18 01:00:00
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