Visiting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

Picture of the “Wailing Wall” To the extreme right is tower of the Al Aqsa mosque 

I have just completed a two-week visit to Israel. When it became ever so likely that I would make this trip, I had coined a mantra to underscore its essence to both my career and faith. The words I used were: two birds, one stone. By this, I was expressing a resolve to kill two birds using a single stone in the course of my visit. The major reason I was in Israel was to attend the AGORA (the Greek word for an open place of assembly), a yearly summer workshop program that brings together doctoral students from up to ten member institutions of the Association of Transnational Law Schools (ATLAS). This year’s attendees included students from the University of Melbourne, London School of Economics, Osgoode, Canada, National University of Singapore, Universidad Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, New York University, University of Montreal, Bucerius University in Hamburg and the host institution, Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv. At the AGORA, the first of which was hosted at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2008, participating students discussed the theoretical and methodological challenges of their research. They also shared their work with peers from the other participating Law Schools and got helpful feedback. (A more complete account of the history and objectives of the AGORA could be found in Philip G Bevans and John S Mckay, “The Association of Transnational Law Schools’ Agora: An Experiment in Graduate Legal Pedagogy” (2009) 10 (07) German Law Journal 929).  The second reason for making the trip was mine entirely. But that notwithstanding, it had providentially been incorporated into the social aspects of the AGORA program. I had to see Jerusalem, the Holy City and perhaps the most important historical site for all the Abrahamic religions, including Christianity to which I subscribe. The 2012 AGORA turned out to be a huge success. What Professor Oren Perez and his team served up was extraordinary and matches my earlier experience of the program at New York University in the summer of 2010. The most significant part of the doctoral project, as programs like the AGORA show, might be completing research and writing up a dissertation. Yet it is not the only one. As important as the dissertation is as a major goal, it still has to go hand in hand with other career-building experiences like creating a community of peers with whom one can be in scholarly conversation. Networking is a huge part of developing an academic career and the earlier one starts is often the better. What AGORA achieves in one brush-stroke is to translate this goal into an achievement for its participants. They could learn at the feet of experienced faculty from the host institutions and elsewhere while making friends with peers that could help their academic developments going forward. On all these fronts, the 2012 AGORA more than delivered the expectations of its attendees. But if the AGORA in Tel Aviv was great, the Jerusalem experience put the icing on the cake of my Israeli adventure. Not only from a religious context was this a reality, it was more so in shedding light on the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which one had hitherto only observed from a safe distance. I came away with many impressions. The representation of the conflict in the media is often far removed from actual on-ground situation. Here I recall that some worried friends were concerned for my safety and a few in fact tried to talk me out of making the trip. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself had I given in to those concerns that turned out a little far-fetched. Though there are hardliners at both ends of the conflict, my sense is that they are fewer in number than others who have come to the realization that sustainable peace is more in the interest of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. I also found out how come Jerusalem is very central to the resolution or non-resolution of this conflict. As Jews prayed at the Western Wall which was recaptured from Arabs following the 1967 six-day war, just across from it stood the Al Aqsa mosque which sits comfortably on the Temple Mount. Jews and Moslems lay equal claims to this site as of strong historical and religious significance. To the Jews, the Wailing Wall is remnant of the second temple erected after the first one built by King Solomon was destroyed. On their part, Moslems claim the Temple Mount as the place from which Prophet Mohammed took off to heaven. Though I was told this is not the real cause of persisting disagreements on both sides, the challenge of resolving looked distinctly huge from a neutral perspective.