nondeterministic . net

Once again I have composed at length without posting. So: here goes nothing. Yesterday Roni, the woman who took us on a quick tour of Jerusalem the day we arrived, took us on another tour of her workplace: The Israel Museum. The place is wonderful. We saw artifacts from any number of civilizations, including some beautiful blown glass, and the only known artifacts from the First Temple: a pair of tiny carved pomegranates, one afixed to a tiny rod. Based on inscriptions in minute ancient Hebrew script, they appear to have been offerings, and may have been replicas of an actual pomegranate staff carried by the high priest. The pomegranate has long been a significant symbol in Judaism and is known to have appeared elsewhere in the Temple and the priest’s costume. Also at The Israel Museum is The Shrine of the Book, the home of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That I know enough Hebrew to read some bits of text from the pieces of parchment was unbelievable. These are nearly the oldest known biblical writings, with some of the scrolls containing previously unknown (or known only in translation) apocryphal texts. The architecture of the place is a little silly but very cool, and the whole extended exhibit is fascinating. If you travel to Israel and Jerusalem, first go to the Old City. But then go to this museum.

Today, August 5th, was the last day of MEET 2004. We had a ceremony with certificates, a demo of final projects, and time to hang out, eat food brought from home by the students, and play soccer, or chess, or cards. At the end, most of the girls were crying, and the boys were trying to act as if it were no big deal. But the fact is that it will not be so easy for a certain fifteen of these students to see a certain other fifteen of them any time soon. We hope, however, that this is not the end. These students will continue to work collaboratively in Java, slowly but deliberately through the school year, says our plan, so that next summer they can meet again in Jerusalem or perhaps elsewhere in the world as part of an expanded, improved, even more amazing MEET 2005.

Hopefully I’ll be able to send out URLs or download links soon, but for now let me say that I am extremely proud of many of the students I’ve worked with this summer. Several kids from my recitation took part in coding a MEET instant messenger, an initial version of which was demoed successfully this afternoon. And one of the web-based final project groups I coached created an RSS news aggregator that grabs and displays Middle East headlines. They plan to develop this simple page into a sort of Israel/Palestine Google News, with all sorts of exciting features. But I’m very pleased at the speed with which they picked up Java’s complex XML-parsing library (use a DocumentBuilderFactory to get a DocumentBuilder that parses a file into a Document containing Elements with child Nodes, etc.) by reading the Javadocs and getting some explanation from me. With the help of email and instant messenger, I may be able to keep in touch with some of these kids (as much as I am capable of keeping in touch with anyone). And I hope this is not the last MEET I have a chance to participate in.

And, I have just returned from the West Bank. The whole MEET group went to the house of one of our Palestinian students for dinner. He lives in the eastern part of Jerusalem, but their house is outside of what is technically the city. It is, therefore, in what is technically the West Bank. On the way there, the only difference was declining road quality and signs in Arabic. But on the way back, we took a long route around to west Jerusalem in order to pass through an easier checkpoint in a more Jewish area. This route took us past long rows of concrete slabs lying on the ground, slabs that will someday soon be planted upright as part of the Israeli government’s separation wall. I wrote some weeks ago about one student who will be separated from the city by this wall; she is not the only one. The dinner was wonderful. My favorite was meat and rice with Arab spices cooked in a squash sort of vegetable, but there was also stuffed eggplant, chicken, fish, salad… then fruit and a sort of tiramisu-like dessert with Turkish coffee. The English ability of the Palestinian parents varies widely; our host for this evening speaks only a little English, while his wife speaks it perfectly. Their oldest daughter also speaks English, and she talked at length with Anat (remember: Anat is Israeli) in what appeared to be a very earnest conversation about her future. Towards the end, an uncle was added to the mix, also a good English speaker and a much more politically vocal person. He spoke to Dylan for some time about the occupation and the intifada, and it was difficult for me to listen. I certainly have a much more developed understanding of the Palestinian predicament now than I did one month ago, but there are still some things, like blowing up nail bombs on civilian busses, that I refuse to treat as explicable phenomena. I should emphasize: it is not that this man supports the suicide bombing of civilians; rather, he sees the suicide bombing of civilians as an explicable consequence of unjust occupation. I refuse to explain away such a thing.

So, in conclusion, yay MEET!

maxg

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