Which brings me to the second important development of the week: Spanish amigos. It’s Wednesday and I’m sitting outside eating my lunch. I’ve never been one to worry about appearances, so yes, I’m sitting alone in the middle of the quad. I see two guys having a picnic, and turn back to my own lunch, zoning out. I hear people speaking Spanish, but since this is Spain, it doesn’t phase me. Then I hear, clearly, “¡Oye, tía!” (the equivalent of “Hey, dude!” referring to a girl), and realize that the two picnic guys had been talking to me in Spanish, and I hadn’t heard a single word they said. Good start. I’m flustered because they’re speaking quickly, using slang I have to think about to translate, and all of the sudden, they pause like I’m supposed to answer them.

Oh geez. What’s the last thing I heard? Something about “liar” (pronounced: lee-ar). Wait, doesn’t that mean to roll? Roll what? I think they’re smoking. I don’t smoke. I don’t like smoke. Wow, I need to answer them. What if that’s not what they said? Is my face turning red? They’re being nice to me, maybe I should go sit there to eat. Or maybe they’re being creepy. Why is there not a class on determining creepiness level in Spanish? I think I’ll just shake my head no. They look confused…I’ll just say “no, gracias” a few times. Okay, phew.

I finish my lunch and realize I still have two hours to kill before class. I can’t just continue to sit in the middle of the quad with nothing to do. I have two options: move to a less conspicuous location or go talk to them. Mental pep talk: You can do this. You have to move either way, so you might as well try and make friends. Go on. Really? You can’t stay here all day. Just move already! So, I went to go sit down with them, and we talked for an hour and a half. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how I made my first Spanish amigos. We even have plans for this week!

At this point, you might be wondering, has Kaitlyn lost her mind from speaking so much Spanish? What in the world do these stories have to do with each other? And why do I care what she eats? Here is the connection: frame of mind. I now have proof that with the right mentality, I can enjoy the most unexpected things (eating a previously unapproachable food or awkwardly making friends at school). So, my mantra while in Spain will be to put myself out there, and try everything once (within reason).

I’d like to dedicate this blog post to our seminar professor, Estela, whose refrain during this first week was “Cuando hablo con vosotros, hablo como Forrest Gump” (When I speak with you all, I speak like Forrest Gump). But life in Spain isn’t like a box of chocolates, it’s like a cup of flan.

Budva, Montenegro. He was in the black speedo whose ubiquity I had anticipated, perhaps too readily underestimating the influence of American culture. I was staring down past my toes, into the turquoise water—it waited, welcomed, mocked and threatened.

The only other man wearing this uniform that day was the vendor, a leathery man in his late sixties, selling oils for improved sun-soaking. He strode confidently up and down the path, stretched on the pier leading to more shallow water, before approaching to offer his encouragement.

“You have to jump!” the vendor said enthusiastically. “You’ll be the first Jew to jump from here!”

Only a four-meter jump.

But it wasn’t until Danilo came, in his black speedo and with a gap in his wide smile, that I leapt.

Danilo, from Novi Sad, Serbia, dove flawlessly again and again before I was shamed into the water. We watched a boy, maybe six years old, run off the drop, not even bothering to glance below him, as he followed older friends and cousins.

“Come on,” Danilo said. “That’s just humiliating.”

So I, too, met the water, out of peer pressure. That basic human cave-in linked us three–Danilo, this boy and me.

Were we also connected, based on the most rigid of technicalities, in our raisons d’être on this beach? Were we so different from the Russians who filled the restaurants, who streamed into the streets at all hours, for whom every signage and interaction was reinterpreted to their version of Cyrillic? Who here was a tourist, a foreigner, who qualified as a local?

My friend Nico and I had been studying the language now known as Bosnian/Croatian/ Montenegrin/ Serbian for almost two years when we received grants to travel to Serbia to continue our studies over the summer. We flew from Chicago to Belgrade immediately after finals ended in June, traveled through Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia for two weeks and stayed in Novi Sad, Serbia, for six. It was my first time in Europe.

Even within a single country there are spaces unfamiliar to most citizens. Mlađa Nataša (Younger Natasha), one half of a sibling duo growing up in the countryside, would be our guide to the terrain surrounding her family’s homes during a weekend trip. I had seen her kind before, during our bus rides from city to city, smacking gum while waiting for the bus, texting those nearby, running in tight jeans and bright t-shirts to red-roofed houses beyond the bus’s route.

Here, in western Serbia, close to the Bosnian border, she and her brother Slavko played with kittens and puppies, led us to a stream where fresh, cold water flowed thin and dignified; they walked us to fields of wheat overlooking barns and chicken coops, green and yellow paysages, trees tripping on the slopes; they served us honey in the morning to spin around spoons and played Uno with us as rain passed over the porch in rhythmic bouts. Slavko split open šlivu, plums, for us, and predicted which fruits would come of age and when they would taste super. Staying in the room that was apparently once, or seasonally, Mlađa Nataša’s, we glimpsed into the beginning of her earnest decorating skills.

Posters of musicians and tennis stars.Glittering stickers adorning desk drawers. There was a sense of temporary residence: In a few years she will move, most likely to Novi Sad, to study medicine.

That commitment, representing the forethought of a girl who shrugged and said she didn’t like the movie we watched one night because the characters cursed too much, was not a betrayal of “the old ways,” of the countryside or her family. How can one dishonor the romanticized versions of a lifestyle lost long ago? No, her family had decided to stay here, the tourism merely a form of extended hospitality that could afford them what they could not grow or make themselves.

And the guests, what brought them? As our professor Biljana declared, “They go to eat.” Thrice daily, we were invited into a small building reserved exclusively for our meals, for devouring soups and stews, pastries and breads, cheeses and meats, drinks and desserts, while the family of chefs and servers looked on, offering us homemade cherry juice or heart-shaped waffle biscuits. Helping clear the table could not offset the discomfort of being observed while dining, nor could the acknowledgement that this was the family’s business, a veritable profession, that the children might be apprentices…Did conversing with the family in their language, asking about recipes and winters, mean we were more than shameless visitors? These are questions no one can answer while abroad.

While in Novi Sad, Nico and I considered ourselves less obviously foreign than the Brits who packed the city during the EXIT music festival, returning to the town’s center by bus each morning with locals on their way to work. The rainy day of our quest for tickets, an EXIT volunteer, a long-haired college student, acquiesced to our mispronunciations, answering all our questions in Serbian. We were an amusing oddity, and she was willing to play along, provided she could probe us for a little further entertainment.

“So, why Serbian?” the volunteer probably asked early on in the conversation. It was a question posed to us many times over the summer, and before and after, by different strangers, genuinely bewildered, not to mention the family members who still quietly lament my ambivalence toward Spanish. I have given up on explaining the interest; it’s as useless as trying to understand an attraction to a painting.

Gradually I felt less and less like a stranded backpacker in Novi Sad, but I was still surprised by a tap on my shoulder one night walking home from a bar on the Dunav river called Tel Aviv. When I heard someone ask, “Do I know you?” I turned around.

Standing next to the Baš-Baš fast food hut at the end of my street was Danilo, fully dressed.

“I’ll be in Belgrade this weekend,” he said. “I’ll be on the beach from eight till eight. Meet me there. ”

Nico and I would be in Belgrade that Friday, on a trip with our program to see some museums, including Tito’s tomb and Beli Dvor (the White Palace), and planned to stay over the weekend. An acquaintance of the city’s rabbi, an American living in Belgrade, was my hostess; in her I saw a collision of the worlds between which I was trying to make peace. Some of her experiences of living abroad echoed my doubts, others encouraged my international job search. Despite her seven or so years in Serbia, I still wondered how advice from a “native,” Belgrade born-and-bred, might have differed.

Nico and I found our way to Danilo Saturday afternoon, keeping watch on our rented bicycles as we waited for him to change out of his wetsuit. Danilo had been surfing on a board with built-in boots, hanging onto a handle attached to a rotary on a wire that circled high above the water. He spoke to us primarily in Serbian this time, glad to hear we were enjoying Novi Sad, even if we’d had to come to Belgrade to tell him about it.

Traveling between these two major cities might give you an incomplete impression.

All of Serbia is not like Belgrade, or Novi Sad. People there can find work, even if moving out of their parents’ home isn’t immediately feasible. Outside of these cities, you see bus or train stations, not decrepit, but faded, not falling into disuse because they are depended on, though not dependable. These smaller towns make up one of Serbia’s faces, a face more often found in the south, where unemployment is a constant fog that clouds the mirror, obscuring any beauty.

Back in Novi Sad, where he works in a bank despite a degree in physics, Danilo leaned over our small table on the balcony of a bar overlooking a side street, Nico and I on either side. He recounted stories of small-town southern Serbia, as he experienced them through the writings of a journalist several years ago. For example, a widow’s lawsuit against her neighbor, who drove a stake into her husband’s grave to protect his family from a vampire, and her insistence that her husband took medicine before his death that would have prevented the transformation. Our questions and disbelief filled the time we waited for our lethargic waitress.

To me, this server, glancing at her nails and chatting with a girlfriend at the bar more readily than responding to guests, is an anonymous figurein a sea of Serbians, loosely defined. I can pick out my host brother Dušan, call by name his friends from school strewn about Novi Sad, his parents, my immigrant classmates from Israel, Portugal and Japan, the sisters who welcomed me into their restaurant near my temporary home.

I could gush about the hospitality, describe in detail our conversations or pine for nightlife in still-smoky clubs, but in doing so the summer would become stilted—a lifeless,two-dimensional memory.

I feel fortunate to have met the friends I did during my time in Serbia. Months later, I find myself back in Novi Sad, not to strengthen vague foreign relations but because I missed Vanja, Lana and Petar, because I’m still hoping for another serendipitous meeting with Danilo on some street corner or seashore. These individuals define the country, while I experience it and long after I leave.

One of my classmates looked out the window on the train ride to Tianjin and said that he’d heard a rumor that half of the world’s supply of cranes were in China’s growing cities. The number of cranes I’ve seen so far in both Beijing and (especially) Tianjin does not make me doubt that.

Tianjin is like a lot of Chinese cities in that it could be called “up and coming”. While there was a lot to do there, most of the buildings weren’t really finished yet. This seems to be a general trend in Chinese cities – there is a lot of construction, and if you came back in five years, the city would probably look completely different. Everywhere, Chinese cities are growing and morphing.

One example is the city of Chongqing, that used to just be a city in the Sichuan province. Now, if you look at a map of China, Chongqing is its own municipality, just like Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai – it is no longer part of a larger province, but an area with borders in its own right.

Therefore, the architecture was probably the most interesting thing in Tianjin. We spent most of our time walking around the various Western concessions, looking at buildings filled with European architecture and city planning. Now these buildings have been given different purposes, with many of them now housing major banks. The former Italian concession, on the other hand, has been turned into a tourist trap of Western restaurants and wine bars, sort of like a Little Italy in the States.

But that didn’t mean that there were foreigners there. In fact, I didn’t see a single Westerner outside of our group when we were in Tianjin. Tianjin has had a complicated past with the West, and for good reason. The concessions represent many painful memories for the Chinese. One building in particular, a Catholic church now covered in scaffolding, was the site of a violent protest against the French presence in Tianjin.

Today, most foreigners in Tianjin live outside the downtown area. The concessions are now part of the city, embraced by the Chinese. It is interesting to see that most of the European buildings are being kept, while the traditional Chinese courtyard-style buildings are being replaced.

Maybe this is a step in the direction of international diplomacy or forgiving the West. Maybe it isn’t. In any case, it makes Tianjin an interesting place to walk around for anyone remotely interested in architecture.

Each day as I ride the metro all over Paris- with increasing agility although I always, always fumble over the manual door handles- I have been reading Hemingway’s novel about Paris, A Moveable Feast. The book, which recounts the day to day activities of Hemingway’s life as a 25 year old writer scraping to get by in the City of Light, has been thrilling and enlightening to read.

Hem, as his friends seem to have called him, dedicates each short chapter to something small and simple about Paris. The first, for example, is called “A Good Café on the Place St-Michel” and describes the conditions in which he liked to write, the lighting in the café, the beautiful passersby, and the empty, almost-sad feeling he would get after he finished writing a good story. His stories about mundane aspects of life and his strikingly simple prose (something, I have learned through the book, which he worked tremendously hard to achieve, often eliminating every unnecessary word in his works, phrase by phrase, attempting to make the “truest sentence” he could) is somehow enthralling and I find myself eagerly turning the page to discover whether he’d get coffee with or without cream or if he would go to the horse races or straight home after lunch.

More than that, though, I have found so much in this little book that I can relate to. As depicted in Midnight in Paris, Hemingway would often stop by the famous writer Gertrude Stein’s apartment to talk about his writing or the works of his friends, who happened to be some of the most well-known artists of all time- Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (whom he called “Major Eliot” for some reason) and Pablo Picasso. The apartment was on 27 rue de Fleurus, directly across the street from my program offices here. Each day as I walk to my phonetics class or to the amazing boulangerie down the street, I literally take the same path that Hemingway and countless other American legends walked down.

Even without the nerdy, literary star-struck feeling I get while reading A Moveable Feast, each day I am coming to understand more the feelings Hemingway had while he was writing this book. He speaks often of hunger. Not only his literal hunger which was made more evident by each warm, welcoming café whose sparkling patisseries in the windows seem almost too perfect to eat, but also a hunger of a deeper, more complex nature. Paris is so beautiful and yet in some ways so unattainable that one almost always feels as if you will never get enough, or never fully digest it.

But for now, I’m happy with the little movable feast I’ve been consuming, walking down the rue de Fleurus with a perpetual smile on my face, Hemingway in hand.

Few Americans can tell you a lot about Denmark, and before I decided to study abroad here, I was in the same boat.  After some research, I came to the conclusion that Denmark is an absolutely fascinating place.  Being here now has just reaffirmed this fascination.  Although there is a lot I didn’t know about, I did come with certain expectations, and this first week has been full of new impressions that have surprised me in many ways.  Let me share some of the ideas I had, and whether they turned out to be right:

Denmark is cold, but not as cold as Chicago.  For the past few months, whenever anyone found out that I would be going to Copenhagen, the usual response was something along the lines of, “Wow, isn’t it like freezing there?!”  I never really understood why it was such a big deal—after going to school in Evanston for two years, I thought a Copenhagen winter would be nothing!  Well, as it turns out, although it is more temperate here and much less windy, it is still cold!  My face still feels like it’s going to fall off, but it could also be because I am spending a lot more time outdoors as I explore the city.

Study abroad is a huge change, and it would hit me, hard.  Going to a new country for four months to live and study is indeed a big change that you don’t just get used to overnight.  So when I arrived and I didn’t experience any overwhelming emotions or culture shock, I felt like something wasn’t right.  I kept waiting for “it” to happen, some sort of “Aha!” moment, or big realization that changes everything, or anything to acknowledge the fact that I had arrived in this brand new place with only a vague idea of what I wanted to do here.  I guess I can partly attribute my calm acceptance to the fact that I have traveled a lot throughout my life.  Still, I know this will be an exciting semester with new experiences that will hopefully be life-changing.

Danes are reserved and might seem cold to foreigners.  As far as I can tell, this is not true.  Because of this stereotype, I was pretty intimidated to be around Danes at first, but every Dane that I have met so far has been so friendly and willing to help me out if I’m lost or asking for directions.  Anne, a Danish friend of my sister’s, says that in parts of Denmark outside of Copenhagen, people are not always as open.  But after experiencing the energy of a bar full of Danes boisterously cheering on their handball team (who knew that was a thing?) as they won against Spain in the semi-finals, I no longer buy into the whole quiet-and-reserved Danish stereotype.

Everyone is blonde, beautiful, and six feet tall.  Oh, and always stylish.  This is both true and not true.  Yes, there are gorgeous people everywhere, and some of them happen to fit the description as I had been forewarned.  However, like cities much larger, Copenhagen is extremely diverse and much more so than I had expected.  In the past decade, increased immigration has resulted in changing demographics, which has also led to some political tension (more on this later, I’m sure).  As for being stylish, I do admire the Danes’ fashion sense—I am taking a class on “The Meaning of Style” so hopefully I will pick up a thing or two.  What I wonder most is how they manage to stay warm while looking so good—it is a welcome change from the winter “fashion” at Northwestern, but I have seen one too many Danish women wearing the thinnest of tights, and sometimes I just want to direct them to the nearest North Face store.  Is there something I’m missing??

Anyways, the list goes on and on, but it’s time do some reading before my classes tomorrow.  (Some things remain the same…)  Here’s to the next four months, hoping it will be full of moments and memories that will meet, exceed, or perhaps completely throw off my expectations.

Let me back up a moment. Starting on Sunday, Beijing has been inundated with New Years celebrations. Monday was the first day of Chunjie 春节, literally “spring festival”, or more well known in the US as Chinese New Year. Everything about Chunjie makes your average American New Year celebration look like a group of Northwestern students the night before a midterm. Fireworks and firecrackers literally go off nonstop for days, people have abandoned Beijing to see their family elsewhere, stores are closed, feasts are consumed, and most importantly, the sky is weirdly blue.

In order to get in on some of the cultural activities, our class went to the Ditan Temple Fair a couple days after the start of the year of the dragon. It seemed like everyone was there – you could barely walk down the aisles without pushing against someone. There were decorations, games, concessions, and souvenirs, all commemorating the new year.

But really, outside of the connection to the most important national holiday, it felt so…American. The only thing there seemed to be to really do at Ditan was spend money – and very large amounts. The carnival games were hard to win, the food wasn’t great, none of the souvenirs seemed to have any purpose, and there were so many people. It reminded me of your average day at a theme park, minus the rides and with the added bonus of winter.

In a sense, though, that seems to be a theme here – China and the United States are freakishly similar. Americans are so quick to paint China as the “other” in any given situation or criticize the country based on very little actual knowledge, so it is nice to add the temple fair to the list of things I can point out to Americans and say: “they’re the same.”

Yesterday I witnessed two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of Spanish people’s views on foreigners. For the most part, people have been really nice to me (although they tend to be nicer when I’m with my host mom). However, there is a fair amount of, if not racism, then stereotyping, in Spain. When I was on my way to the Parque del Retiro (http://the195.com/northwestern/2012/01/22/madrid-trumps-new-york-city/), two women got on the bus. It seemed one of them knew a woman sitting near myself, so I moved to the window seat in case she wanted to sit near her friend. The first woman sat in the seat behind her friend and the second woman to get on the bus sat behind me. As soon as I moved over, the first woman began saying, loudly, a whirlwind of phrases about Spain and what is normal here. Her refrain was always, “¡Estamos en España! ¡Aquí, usamos la boca, no la fuerza!” (“We’re in Spain! Here, we use our mouths, not force!”). Her rant lasted about 5 minutes, until she got off the bus. I could understand her words, but I was still confused as to why she was saying it because I hadn’t seen anything that could provoke such a reaction. I couldn’t tell if the woman was addressing me, or the woman behind me, so after she got off, I asked. It turns out that the woman behind me was Latin American and that the rant was aimed at her for waving her arm to flag down the bus (something I have seen many Spaniards do). A friend later told me that there are many immigrants from Latin America in Spain, and they aren’t always treated with respect. In fact, they are more often confronted with discrimination. The public broadside of this woman stands in stark contrast to the genial grandpa who sat and talked to me for 40 minutes in a Starbucks later that day because I was sitting alone, waiting for a friend.

I am definitely treated differently in Spain. As a novelty, almost. Everywhere I go, the question lingers, “¿De dónde eres?” – “Where are you from?” Even if no one asks, I know people are thinking about it, from the cashier at a local café, to the two kids in the park, the security guard in the department store, and the people in my apartment building. The grandpa at Starbucks happily announced for everyone who was wondering,“¡Es americana!” (“She’s American!”). We’ll see how my first day of classes with Spanish students and professors goes tomorrow… hopefully they’ll remember my name and not just my country of origin.

The other day at dinner I told my host-mom about the babysitting job I just acquired, watching a set of Franco American twins nearby in our swanky neighborhood, the 16th arrondissement– comparable to the Upper East Side in New York. She smiled and told me what a great idea it was and how good it would be to earn some cash while I’m here.

Then, she got very serious. The smile almost always illuminates the strong, Peruvian features of her bronzed face was completely dispelled. “Ma-eve,” she said solemnly (the French have a lot of trouble with my name and always pronounce it in two, broken syllables, like a GPS would). “Ma-eve, you need to take our your nose ring. Here, Ça ce n’est pas marche,” she told me. She went on for several minutes about the stereotypes of people like me, with piercings and tattoos, and how in this neighborhood they will often be publicly scoffed at. Her husband seconded the notion later that day and when I told him I would buy a small stud to replace my silver ring, he exclaimed “Do it, do it” almost urgently.

Since the conversation I have become more wary of stares on the subway (and there have been several) and of the conservative nature of much French clothing. Earrings, in my neighborhood, are looked down upon and pretty much everywhere, necklines don’t brave past the collarbone.

So, at least in the 16th, it seems as if I’m better off wearing J-Crew than my original thrift store ensembles (I’m still wondering about my neon green running shorts). But more than that, the conversation has made me wonder what other social cues I’m blissfully ignorant of while I hum on the metro in my cheetah print boots. Stay tuned while I find out this quarter, one way or another.

Hebron is one of the largest Palestinian cities in the West Bank and home to some of Israel’s most extremist religious settlers. To get there, our bus took off from Jerusalem and wound its way south along Route 60, past Bethlehem and into the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba. As we edged into Hebron, a guard stopped our bus and asked if we were Jews or Muslims. Our driver, the only Arab in the group, promised to stay inside the van.

As we drove inside, our guide Avner smiled. “Hebron is a play, and the people always act their part,” he said.

Avner Gvaryahu is slim, blonde and soft-spoken. He does not look like a military veteran, but for three years was the sergeant of a sniper unit in Hebron. Now he works for Breaking the Silence, an NGO run by Israeli military veterans who collect and publish the testimonies of IDF soldiers who have served in the Occupied Territories. For him, Hebron represents the heart of the occupation, and epitomizes the starkest consequences of using a national defense force for the purpose of civilian control.

“When I joined the army and found myself in the West Bank, I was pretty much in shock,” Avner told us. “What we’re going to be seeing today is kept quiet in Israeli society.”

We climbed out of the bus outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a large and stunning religious site believed to be the burial place of Abraham. The first thing I noticed was a concrete barrier, about waist-high, running the length of the road in front of the Tomb. This barrier, along with the armed soldiers standing at either end, forces Palestinians and Jews to walk on separate sides of the road. The image is surreal, particularly because the Palestinian walking lane is about the third the width of the Jewish one. As Avner began talking, a few Palestinian four-year-olds climbed over the barrier and stood quietly among our group, glancing mischievously at the soldiers on duty. Moments later, the soldiers chased them back over the top. I felt like I was in the set of a dystopian novel; the sensation was absurd.

Walking through the Israeli-controlled section of Hebron, also called H2, is like crossing a lurid no-man’s land. Every storefront is shuttered and every residential window facing the street is encased in iron mesh. The pavements are weedy and silent, and the roads are traversed only by military trucks. At nearly every street we were watched by armed soldiers from a concrete pillbox. There are eighteen of these checkpoints scattered across H2’s notorious “sterile buffer zones,” which are off-limits to Palestinian businesses, vehicles and pedestrian travel. The most extreme case I saw was Shuhada Street, which is packed with Palestinian homes whose front doors must remain shut. Even in a medical emergency, these Palestinians must take a fifteen-minute detour via the rooftop in order to get out.

Hebron’s sterile zones have been built up over time in order to protect around 850 religious Jews who in the past 30 years have moved into the heart of this city. In H2, there are about 30,000 Palestinian residents who have been subject to the harshest curfews and travel restrictions in the West Bankin order to allow the settlers to maintain their way of life. For a soldier, this even requires escorting the settlers as they conduct tours calling for Arab expulsion. Every Purim, soldiers must impose a curfew and guard the settlers as they parade through the streets on the anniversary of the death of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians during Friday prayers in 1994.

We stopped outside the Casbah neighborhood, where young settler girls a few years ago began battering Palestinian market stalls with baseball bats. Soldiers do not have the authority to arrest or detain settlers; they can only call the small and scattered police force and wait. As the soldiers watched over the Casbah helplessly, a group of angry Palestinian men began to push the girls out. The soldiers used their authority and arrested the Palestinians. Breaking the Silence has collected dozens of similar stories of soldiers who could only yell at the settlers as they spat on women, kicked children, and threw stones at Palestinian homes.

“It doesn’t matter who is violent, the Palestinian will always pay the price,” says Avner. “And the soldiers are always caught in the middle.”

That doesn’t mean soldiers can’t be wrong. We spoke with one who recited Hebron’s ancient Jewish heritage and unknowingly complained about tour groups which “spread Arab lies.” Another demanded we stop walking after learning who we were. During their difficult service in Hebron, these soldiers share living and eating quarters with the settlers; many form friendships and even ideological ties. Avner spoke gently but persistently at every exchange. At one point he agreed to stop the walking tour, even though we were legally unhindered, because the soldiers were new to their posts and still learning the rules. As he led us through this complex territory, Avner made one point clear: Individual soldiers are not at fault for the wreckage of the occupation. An immoral situation leads to immoral acts, and Hebron is the archetype.

I left Hebron feeling ashamed, and not just because of Israel’s role. Hebron’s settlers are largely funded by Americans, including the tax-deductible donations of millionaire Irving Moskowitz. American money has helped build the context for a tourist like myself to stand in a grassy park off-limits to Hebron’s Palestinians, built in the name of Jews like me only 30 minutes from the capital city. Yet I also left Hebron with a profound and unexpected pride. Although the Israelis who work for Breaking the Silence and the soldiers who speak with them are often branded as traitors to their country, for me they have renewed a long-faded sense of hope. They have proven to me that Israel is not just defined by its unconscionable policies, that it is indeed a society of moral conscience and courage, and that ultimately its heroes can rescue this country from itself.