Last Thursday evening, I attended a lecture/workshop titled "Palestine 101" - a seminar to inform the University population of the "human rights violations" currently occurring in Israel. The organizer of the event was a young Israeli-born woman in her twenties, Ora Wise, a rabbi's daughter and a master's student in Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

As I entered the seminar in the Michigan League, I was immediately handed a flyer that outlined why Israel lends itself to institutionalized racism. Although not part of the program, two pro-divestment supporters, with their "If you are a Zionist then you are a racist murderer" and "Divest from I-(swastika)-rael" posters held high, entered soon after, adding to the purportedly peaceful environment. I found it peculiar that while the program preached putting an end to racism, I sat face to face with a swastika. While this extremism is not wholly representative of the pro-Palestinian movement, it is frightening to know there are people on our campus with such intense hatred.

When the program began, I cringed in my seat as Wise sketched a general history of Israel. This history was so general, in fact, that it mysteriously neglected to mention three major wars. As I sat at the workshop, it became clear the supposedly unifying Israel/Palestine seminar I thought I was attending was actually a cover for pro-divestment, anti-Israel propaganda.

After the event, I had a conversation with a pro-Palestinian girl that illustrated to me an underlying reason for this hatred against Israel. This conversation helped me to learn that many pro-Palestinian advocates do not understand that Israel has and continues to make solid efforts to aid the "oppressed," yet their aid (including help in the form of land) is constantly refused.

One example was seen following the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel offered its Arab citizens and neighbors a state of their own. The offer was refused. It was seemingly not enough as long as Israel continued to exist at all. As recently as the summer of 2005, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and territories in the West Bank to offer more land to Palestinians, but this effort too was only met with violence. While it is true that Arab-Israelis often suffer in the fields of employment, education and social services compared to Jewish-Israelis, as stated in the Or Commission Report, the Israeli government recognizes this and has increasingly allocated aid and offered support to eradicate this inequality.

It is important to remember that Israel has a democratic government where Arab-Israelis are full citizens with equal rights to Jewish-Israelis. While they have and continue to endure job and educational discrimination, it must be recognized that Israel desires to and has taken legal steps toward ensuring and enforcing Arab-Israeli equality. This information, which was cleverly skipped over in Ms. Wise's account of the ensuing conflict, continues to be left out of pro-Palestinian info sessions. It is easy to see why - in my friend's mind, she being someone who rarely hears the pro-Israel side, Israel's goal is to be as discriminatory and as neglectful as possible to its Arab citizens. To my friend, Israel is the oppressor and the mastermind of an apartheid state.

After the program and the conversation with my friend, I began to think about what could be done to ease this tension and inform students of what they may not know involving Israel's attempts to aid Arab-Israeli citizens. This past summer I worked on a task force whose aim was to bring to light these issues of inequality faced by the Arab-Israeli community and to gain support from the American Jewish community to press the Israeli government to extend even more help. In my opinion, the way to reduce the hostility is to bring both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian people together in order to find ways to educate others about the status of the Arab-Israeli citizens, what Israel is currently doing to help, and what is not being done but should be done to aid the Arab-Israeli situation.

Those who view Israel as an apartheid state would benefit a great deal from learning the facts about Israel's history and policies. Many would agree that peace and equality are goals for which Israel strives. I'm convinced a fair and balanced discussion on Israel would prove to many people that this is true.

Monica Woll is an RC senior and former chair of Hillel's governing board.