Today we arrived in Israel, and had lunch, and cohort 8 and 9 jumped right into learning with Jamie Salter. He is an educator and tour guide who is originally from England and later moved to Israel. The meeting was broken into 2 different parts, the first about the current Israeli news, and the second about the politics of Israel.
During our first session, we learned that what comes to mind at first (the Palestinian conflict) didn’t even begin to be discussed until 38 minutes into the hour. Although Palestine is a big topic in Israel there are many other topics such as crime against Arabs, politics, ex prime ministers, and so much more. One of the most interesting topics that came out of this hour conversation was about the crime against Arabs and how 6 in 8 of the murder victims of women this year were Arab despite the Arab population only making up roughly 20% of the population.
After we talked about the news we took a short break. When we resumed we started talking about the politics of Israel. To put it simply there are 13 different parties that make up Israeli politics and each of them has a very different agenda. This is where the problems begin. For the government to function a majority party needs to control 61 or more of the seats in parliament, but in order to do that multiple parties have to form a coalition. Even when they form a coalition if one party or member of a party decides that they don’t want to be part of the party anymore, they can send the whole parlament into an imbalance and possibly lead to the need for another election. Consider that there have been 4 elections in the past 4 years and could possibly be a 5th one as soon as the end of the month.
All in all today’s lectures with Jamie Salter taught us that what you see on the surface of Israeli news and politics is far from the truth and can actually be very misleading to those who aren’t aware of the many relevant factors.
During our first session, we learned that what comes to mind at first (the Palestinian conflict) didn’t even begin to be discussed until 38 minutes into the hour. Although Palestine is a big topic in Israel there are many other topics such as crime against Arabs, politics, ex prime ministers, and so much more. One of the most interesting topics that came out of this hour conversation was about the crime against Arabs and how 6 in 8 of the murder victims of women this year were Arab despite the Arab population only making up roughly 20% of the population.
After we talked about the news we took a short break. When we resumed we started talking about the politics of Israel. To put it simply there are 13 different parties that make up Israeli politics and each of them has a very different agenda. This is where the problems begin. For the government to function a majority party needs to control 61 or more of the seats in parliament, but in order to do that multiple parties have to form a coalition. Even when they form a coalition if one party or member of a party decides that they don’t want to be part of the party anymore, they can send the whole parlament into an imbalance and possibly lead to the need for another election. Consider that there have been 4 elections in the past 4 years and could possibly be a 5th one as soon as the end of the month.
All in all today’s lectures with Jamie Salter taught us that what you see on the surface of Israeli news and politics is far from the truth and can actually be very misleading to those who aren’t aware of the many relevant factors.