One group of students was organized by the Zionist Organization of America. While in Israel, they have been meeting with veteran campus activists, taking part in projects dealing with the rehabilitation of the Jewish people and homeland, and honing their activism skills for the return to American campuses.
The group staged a protest at the Norwegian Embassy following the news that a province in Norway has decided to boycott the Jewish state. They spent Wednesday teaching students at a Jerusalem high school about the perils of anti-Semitism in Diaspora life and the struggles of Jews on campuses worldwide.
Tuesday night, the group heard from a panel of student activists who had made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel). Natan Gesher, a veteran Betar activist and founder of an initiative to have the PLO mission booted from New York City, told the group: “You will find that activism in America is futile except for the sole enduring quality – that it awakens and gathers Jews who sacrifice and invest their time and resources on behalf of the Jewish people, eventually resulting in their realizing that Aliyah is the only answer. Israel is where it is all happening – nowhere else.”
The ZOA group also visited Jews formerly of Neve Dekalim now living in Yad Benyamin after being expelled from their homes during the Disengagement. The later met with a Bedouin agent of the Israeli government, with Yoram Ettinger about the myth of the PA demographic threat and with investigative journalist David Bedein. The group visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hevron, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and took part in the training of first-response teams in Gush Etzion designed to provide self-defense for communities there. The group also met with Kedumim mayor Daniella Weiss and planted olive trees in the Shomron town of Itamar.
The ZOA group crossed paths with another group that covered similar ground at the dedication of a new music school in Kedumim – the annual Betar trip. Israel National Radio’s Avi Hyman spoke with the trip’s organizer Dennis Seaman of Cleveland and members of the group.
“We aren’t just here to buy a couple t-shirts and go home,” Nir Katz, a student of International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at George Washington University participating in the Betar trip told Hyman. “We are here to help build and to see parts of our homeland that many Israelis have not even seen. I have been here so many times, but never experienced it the way I have these past two weeks.”
The Betar group spent much of their time building a park near Kedumim on the perspective route of the Partition Fence in the region.
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