If you look at my Twitter or Facebook profiles over the last week, you won’t see any opinions about Student Senate President Megan Marzec’s controversial video. I have retweeted many articles and opinion pieces, but I haven’t posted an opinion. I felt I needed some time to think about how I felt.
If you look at my Twitter or Facebook profiles over the last week, you won’t see any opinions about Student Senate President Megan Marzec’s controversial video. I have retweeted many articles and opinion pieces, but I haven’t posted an opinion. I felt I needed some time to think about how I felt.
I saw Marzec wearing the same shirt she wore in the video on the day before classes started. I remembered it because I didn’t know what the word “divest” meant and made a mental note to look it up later that night. In case you don’t know, Merriam-Webster defines “divest” as, “to deprive or dispossess especially of property, authority, or title; to undress or strip especially of clothing, ornament, or equipment; or to take away from a person.”
After reading more about what Marzec meant when she said Ohio University needs to divest from Israel, I learned she is calling for the end of OU’s Tel Aviv study abroad program.
I was lucky enough to go on that program in 2013, the summer after my freshman year. I turned 19 along the Mediterranean with my newest best friends, who hailed from many different places, from Ohio to India.
It’s hard for me to put into words what that program meant to me. I don’t know why I needed to go on the program, but I felt like something bigger than myself was pushing me to go, and so I did.
I came into the program not knowing any more than most teenagers do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I attended Catholic school for 11 years, so I grew up hearing about the Holy Land. I felt like going was an important part for me realizing who I was.
I had always been an Israeli sympathizer before I went to the program.
In absorbing all I could over that summer, I began to see just how scary, convoluted and messy the conflict was.
When I talked to some of my Israeli friends whom I had grown to love and respect, I realized their views of the conflict were so different from mine. When I asked one of my friends who was my age why she hated the Palestinians and why she thought it was okay to attack them, she talked about having to spend her 12th birthday in a bomb shelter because her hometown was being overrun with attacks. And then, when I asked why she thought it was okay to do the same thing to the Palestinians, who were so much weaker militarily, she talked about how the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) often would not bomb in retaliation because Hamas would use children as human shields.
After our program was over, I had the opportunity to spend a day in Bethlehem, which is just outside Jerusalem across the wall in the West Bank. I saw how the Palestinians were living — often in too high capacity, and at the mercy of the Israelis to be able to cross the border.
This conflict is not as black-and-white as Ms. Marzec makes it sound.
If you talked to 20 different Israelis and 20 different Palestinians, you would probably get 60 opinions on it. But the only thing I know for sure is that divesting university ties with Israel would be entirely counter-productive to the cause Ms. Marzec advocates.
I learned more by seeing, asking questions and experiencing the hostilities and fear of the conflict myself than I ever could by reading about it in books or watching the news.
Meg Omecene is a junior studying strategic communication and the Public Relations Director for The Post. Email her at mo403411@ohio.edu
