Perhaps the most frequently asked
question of Jeremy Dibbell '04 upon his return from Israel
this summer was, “How do they cope with the terrorism?”
“They deal with it,” he said after
returning from a trip with a dozen college journalists from the 11th annual
Anti-Defamation League Albert Finkelstein Memorial Study Mission to Israel,
Poland and Bulgaria.
“They deal with it because they
have to,” he said. “They are a very strong people. They know what they have to
get through and they do it.”
Dibbell, who at one point could
hear Israeli shelling in response to Palestinian terror strikes, said, “You don't
get used to it, but you get used to knowing that it could happen and to move
on.”
He said his group was
accompanied by an armed guard (as are most tours, he said) and that they never
felt in danger.
Dibbell, a political science major
and editor-in-chief of Concordiensis, met
with government officials, historians, journalists and others to learn about
the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the history of Jewish communities in Europe
and the Holocaust.
The group toured the Auschwitz
death camp, and visited Bulgaria,
which has a proud history of resistance against the Nazis, Dibbell said.
Bulgarian officials, Dibbell
noted, also talked of their tolerance. “They talked a good talk, but the
difference between talk and reality are huge,” he said. One poverty-stricken
community had no running water, while a prosperous adjacent community was
watering the lawns on their golf courses, he said.
Dibbell, who took copious journal notes
and photographs, said he plans to run a story on the experience in Concordiensis this fall.
He and others in the group
were chosen from about 100 applicants nationwide.