Have I been to the West Bank? It was a question a young adult from our community asked me recently, since the massacre by Hamas on Oct 7 had got her wanting to learn more about the conflict.

The question brought back memories of my first trip to Israel in 1982, when I was 18 years old I didn’t know what the West Bank was-I had never heard of the term. It wasn’t something I had learned about in school. I recall my secular cousin in Jerusalem taking out a map and explaining what the West Bank was, slowly and carefully, noting the fact that Jews were certainly not strangers to the West Bank, which was known historically as Judea and Samaria.  

On that 1982 trip with my graduating class at Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate we had spent a week at a field school in Gush Etzion, which had been settled by Jews but had fallen in the 1948 war, and been part of  Hashemite Kingdom   of Jordan from 1948 to  1967 Six Day War  when Israel recaptured it. We had gone to the nearby Herodian, where a Jewish guard at the site was murdered not long thereafter, and we had visited a glass blowing factory in Hebron, gone to the Cave of the Patriarch’s in Hebron, and visited Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem. We hiked toWadi Kelt not far from Jericho, and I recalled stopping at a nearby house outside Jericho to ask a Palestinian woman for water as I was dehydrated from the heat. She filled a large black pot with water and I gulped it down.

All of those places I had visited on that first 1982 trip were part of the West Bank. It was long before the first intifada, and touring there was commonplace.

Turning to the young adult who asked me the question, I asked if she had been to Jerusalem? ‘Yes many times.”

Do you know what Jerusalem was like before the Six Day War,? I asked, realizing that to a young person this was ancient history. That war had occurred over 56 years ago.

Have you heard about the green line,?  I asked, wondering whether she knew this term. But it didn’t seem to click.

I answered her question saying that technically speaking, certainly from the point of view of the Arab world, every time she had gone to the Old City of Jerusalem, she was in the “West Bank.”  I explained that from 1948 to 1967, the Jordanians had occupied the Old City, and Jordanian soldiers would stand on the ramparts of the walls of the Old City and shoot down at Israeli Jews.  As a result, the neighborhood of Yemin Moshe, where I knew she had been was in effect a no-man’s land. No Jews could go there without being shot at. 

She was now listening intently. She was interested, especially since on social media she was encountering all sorts of claims about Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians and wanted to know what was accurate and what wasn’t.

I continued, “You don’t realize that your generation has been incredibly blessed to be able to visit the Western Wall without a second thought. Up until June 1967, Jews couldn’t reach the Western Wall, or anywhere in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. 

After our conversation, I remembered that I had purchased a map on e-bay for $25.00 of the Old City of Jerusalem which was from 1965 when the Old City was part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. What grabbed my attention was that on the map it referred to the Jewish quarter of the Old City, as the “ex-Jewish quarter” as Jordan did not recognize a Jewish presence or claim to Jerusalem and in fact destroyed all the 55 synagogues in the Jewish quarter in the years it controlled Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Jordan also prevented any Jew (not just from Israel but from anywhere in the world) from worshipping at the Kotel.

In the conversation, it came up that this young adult had been to see Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus. “You realize that until 1967, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was an isolated enclave and couldn’t be reached since Jews had to go through East Jerusalem to reach it. In April 1948, a convoy of medical staff with supplies that tried to reach Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus right near Hebrew University was shot by Arabs leaving many dead. From then on, the were no classes at the Hebrew University of Mount Scopus.”  Classes were held at the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University which was in West Jerusalem.

She had not realized this, and we spoke about how complex the subject was. "The actual convoy that the medical staff rode on is something I have seen in a museum in Tel-Aviv.”

I pointing out that when if you take a bus to Hebrew University at Mount Scopus, you get there by driving through neighborhoods such as Ramat Eshkol, and French Hill, which were only built after Israel captured Jordan in 1967. I told her that right behind the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus the West Bank village of Issifya practically touches it.  If Israel were ever to withdraw from the West Bank, Hebrew University on Mount Scopus essentially would be close to the border. 

I added that Israel had annexed East Jerusalem , but later on Prime Minister  Ehud Barak had put forth a peace proposal in 2000 that  had offered to make East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected Barak’s offer and started a violent Second Intifada.

Under Barak’s plan, the Old City would have been divided, such that Israel would have retained the Jewish and Armenian quarters (since Armenians were not Arabs), and The Palestinian state would get the Christian and Arab Quarters.

I didn’t get into the fact that under the UN Partition Plan of 1947, the Old City of Jerusalem would have been internationalized. It’s ancient history that very few Jewish young adults in the Jewish Diaspora even know about-and it wouldn’t make sense to them as ever since they’ve been alive, the Old City has been Israel’s.

We spoke about peace plans . She had never heard of the Peel Commission Plan of  1937, which proposed a partition of the Holy Land into a Jewish and Arab state. Israel would have been very small indeed under that plan, but the Arabs never wanted a Jewish state in the region no matter its size, and rejected it. 

We had covered enough history. But we did touch on the issue of the Holocaust. I explained that Jews had a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for 300 years, but it’s also true that after the Holocaust there were many countries around the world that supported a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, because it was clear Jews could not remain in Europe and other countries did not want to take Jews in. Canada’s policy was defined as “none is too many.”

She was very quiet, as she digested this.