Sunday Night & the Peace Conference

Had an interesting night tonight, its weird how single days can be such a microcosm of your life. I agreed to go to a rally supporting a unified Jerusalem. I woke up with a bad feeling about the rally, after my last experience in Hebron, what can I say, I got a little scared. It wasn’t my finest hour and yet it really was a great hour for me. It defined what I’ve always been about. I’ve always talked about getting involved in politics but when it comes time to do something. I’ve inevitably come to the conclusion that the people involved in making any significant chance don’t really want change. So I decided to head down to the Kotel with my friends and pray instead of protesting. Maybe it was a selfish decision, maybe not. I committed to something that I wasn’t really sure of in a moment of a fierce patriotism I don’t really feel. When the peace conference clears I don’t’ expect real progress to be made. I think the conferences are a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Hopefully I will be proved right. After talking with the staff and student body at Aish, I began to realize how I really saw the rally. That I don’t ultimately believe that protests do much to change opinion and that our decision to spend some time praying was as worth while a pursuit as our friends decision to go to the rally. It felt like the right thing to do because you need a balance you need both the physical (the rally) and the spiritual (praying) one without the other is useless, I hope when the dust has settled on this conference, Jerusalem is still firmly in Israeli hands, to split an already divided city would be nothing more then folly. All you need to do is look at what happened in Gaza to know what the outcome will be if the Israeli government allows the Palestinian Arab’s to control a piece of territory in the heart of the Jewish state, both literally and figuratively. It’s one thing to read newspapers in the United States and think about this theory and that theory. All that is useless without a first hand view and my view is of the Kotel and East Jerusalem every single day, but that’s just my opinion I could be wrong.