By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Former IDF Lt. Hen Mazzig, who coordinates Israel advocacy for StandWithUs’s Pacific Northwest Chapter on 15 college campuses in and around Seattle, Washington, says the American Jewish community may be too focused on interacting with present-day elites, while pro-Palestinian advocates are building a constituency among the college generation, whose members will go on to become America’s future leaders.
“Future presidents of the United States are on a college campus right now,” Mazzig said during an interview this week with San Diego Jewish World. “They will go out of the classroom and see an ‘apartheid wall’ constructed by Students for Justice in Palestine. I don’t think they will support or join the SJP but when they are older this is the association that they will remember – apartheid and Israel – and their opinion will not be positive. This is when you shape your mind, on the college campus, and I feel there is a lot of need to work on grassroots organization at the college campus level.”
Although it is spurious to liken Israel’s policies toward Arabs to South African-style apartheid, Mazzig said he finds that college students typically don’t want to get too deep into the details. “Young people don’t want that,” he said. “They want to take sides, one side or the other, and they don’t want it too complicated.”
Sloganeering by Palestinian sympathizers and aggressive advocacy for the BDS movement – calling for anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—have put Israel’s friends on the defensive, particularly on college campuses. The Middle East debate used to be about the Arab-Israeli conflict with Israel the underdog.
Now, however, said Mazzig, Palestinians and their supporters have been successful in changing that conversation. As they tell the story, it’s the “Goliath” of Israel against the ‘little David” of the Palestinians. As long as pro-Palestinian forces are able to define what the debate is about, he said, they will have the upper hand on college campuses. Israel’s advocates need to do a better job in explaining—and simplifying—the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.
Mazzig, who met with students and Israel advocates in San Diego, was twelve years old in 2001 when a bomb went off at the Petach Tikvah ice cream shop near his home. He heard the explosion, then came upon the scene where a grandmother and her one-year old grandchild had been blown apart, “seeing things that no twelve year old should see, that no one should see.” He remembers going home in a daze, expecting his mother to curse the people who set the bomb. Instead, crying, she hugged him and said, “you are alive, that is the most important thing” and went back to making dinner.
The emotional impact on Mazzig was the opposite perhaps of what one might expect. Instead of wanting revenge, he wanted to get to know the Palestinians better, to see if making peace with them was possible. He subsequently gave his political loyalty to the Meretz party, which is one of the most left wing parties in Israel, while still being pro-Zionist, as Mazzig described it.
Before his graduation from high school, he went through various interviews with the IDF, to enable the Army to help place him in a unit best suited to his talents. Knowing that as the child of Iraqi and Tunisian Jewish refugees, he had been brought up speaking both Hebrew and Arabic, the Army offered him a position in its COGAT unit, an English acronym meaning “Coordinator Of Government Activities—Territories.” Thousands of soldiers are involved in liaison roles in the territories, with responsibilities focused on nine predominantly Arab cities or neighborhoods, such as Hebron, East Jerusalem and Ramallah. One unit works with Palestinian businesses, helping them navigate Israeli bureaucracy. Another unit coordinates with Palestinian security forces. Others liaise with environmental, health and archaeological sectors. Mazzig’s unit worked with international organizations such as the United Nations and U.S. Agency for International Development, and various non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross.
It was a tough job, with none of the people with whom he regularly dealt likely to be pleased. “In this job you are hated by everyone,” he said only half-jokingly. “The settlers didn’t like me at all – they called me ‘Judge Goldstone,’ my nickname in Hebron” after the South African judge who accused Israel of war crimes during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead incursion into Gaza, but later recanted. “International organizations looked at me as an occupier soldier –‘How dare you?’ Even though I did all this work, they still hated me. The Palestinians saw me as a soldier. And the combat soldiers as a guy who kept pulling them back. I felt like I was getting a PhD in intermediation.”
In fact, Mazzig, like many Israelis who go immediately into the IDF after high school, still is in the process of completing his bachelor’s degree. Through Israel’s Open University, which offers numerous on-line courses, he is taking Middle Eastern studies.
When he returns to Israel after his StandWithUs assignment, he said, he, like other members of the Meretz party, will be critical of some Israeli policies. However, he said, “Meretz can say all those negative things about Israel, but they love Israel. They love Israel because they live there and they are part of the community and they are working for a change. They believe this is needed for Israel and they are working from within.” He said such criticism from within contrasts with students on Seattle-area college campuses, more than 6,700 air miles from Israel, who believe that because they themselves are Jewish, their criticism of Israel is above reproach.
One young woman told him that Israel was like her sister, and her criticism of Israel was because she wanted her sister to get better. Mazzig said he replied: “I love my brother too but I am not going to go around telling everyone how awful my brother is to make him better. I am not going to say ‘don’t give money to my brother, such a horrible person, and this is how we can change him.’ You don’t bash someone you love, you work with him, try to change him, help him out. But don’t tell yourself that you love your brother if you are going around telling everyone how awful a human being he is.”
At 10 a.m., Sunday, May 4, Mazzig will address the Men’s Club of Temple Adat Shalom, 15905 Pomerado Road, Poway.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com