With reports that Israel may take over the Gaza Strip, I was working this morning on yet another column on the situation in Gaza, a story that has captured world headlines and left Israel more isolated than ever.
But because my friend Richard Sandler suggested a meeting with someone from Jerusalem, my column took a surprising turn after we met today.
For months I’ve been consumed with Israel’s longest war and the plight of the hostages, looking for any sign of a breakthrough. The war itself, and the humanitarian tragedy it has triggered, has become such a source of controversy it has come to dominate virtually any story about Israel.
So when I met this person from Jerusalem, at first I had trouble relating to what he was saying. My mind was on the IDF taking over the Strip and he was talking about Parkinson’s disease and cherry tomatoes. I was anxious to return to the news of countries recognizing a Palestinian state, but my visitor was going on about Albert Einstein and miraculous advances in agriculture.
I was meeting with Hebrew University Vice President, Ambassador Yossi Gal, who is visiting Los Angeles this week. The man is quite remarkable, and not just because he hails from Morocco, where I’m from.
Knowing that Gal has held high positions in Israel’s foreign ministry and was directly involved with some of the country’s most important initiatives in Europe and the Middle East, I was planning to pick his brain on the situation in Gaza and in Israel’s government, figuring he’d have some interesting insights.
But as Gal went on about how the brain works and shared ideas such as “education first” which he learned from his parents, I got distracted. My mind started forgetting about the war. Another column began to take shape.
What is this “other Israel” the ambassador was talking about? Why do we so rarely hear about it, except in galas or fundraisers?
We hear plenty about Smotrich and Ben Gvir and Bibi and the Haredi parties in the coalition who want to be exempt from serving in the army, we see stories about a war that never ends and hostages that are never released and Israelis who never stop demonstrating, but when do we get to hear about an Israeli university that turned 100 this year and where a quarter of its students are Arabs?
This new column took shape because of my realization that in our frenzy to keep up with the news, we’re missing a whole other Israel that has little to do with the war and everything to do with what keeps a country thriving.
Israel’s extraordinary network of world-class universities that have shaped the nation gets very little media attention because no bombs are exploding, no one is starving and no one is demonstrating. Instead, thousands of students and professors wake up quietly every morning and go to their labs and classes and faculty meetings to advance the world of higher education.
They don’t go to the Knesset to fight over the firing of officials; they go to their universities to fire up their minds and contribute to the welfare of their nation.
When Gal mentioned the value of “education first,” he wasn’t just being philosophical, he was also being literal. Hebrew University was born in 1925, decades before the birth of Israel. The nascent Jewish state would be nothing without a foundation based on the search for knowledge.
This is as true today as ever. The problem is that this search for knowledge that shows Israel at its best has gotten submerged by a political class that has sucked up all the media attention. Politics is where the action is. The more action there is, the more the press covers it.
Those politicians in the Knesset who have become the face of the nation should remember the thousands of Israelis they are hiding when they call their press conferences and expose their ugly infighting. They’re hiding the part of Israel that bonds the country with the world rather than isolates it.
Maybe one day, Israel will be blessed with political leaders who will know how to get out of the way so that the best part of their country will get the attention it deserves.
