Israel/Palestine as a Shared Homeland
with Israeli anthropologist David A. Wesley, Ph.D.

Two engagements:

Sunday, March 1, 1:00-3:00 p.m.
First Unitarian Church
605 Morewood Ave in Shadyside, Pittsburgh

Monday, March 2, 8:00 p.m. –
Kurtzman Room, William Pitt Union, University of Pittsburgh

We hear much about Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza. Dr. David A. Wesley looks at policies toward Arab Israeli citizens living in Israel. Wesley is an American-born Israeli citizen who lived and worked in a kibbutz for thirty years. He began to question the historic premise for why the former Palestinian owners of the land, displaced in 1948, were now the day laborers hired to pick the fruit in kibbutz orchards.

Engaged in study at Tel Aviv University, he launched an investigation of the relationship between Jewish and Arab towns in the Zipporit industrial area near Nazareth between 1992 and 1997. During this time, the Israeli Ministry of Industry was instituting a program of industrial development in that area. What Wesley observed was that industrial development of Jewish towns was promoted, while development in Arab centers was denied.

Wesley observes that in recent years, Arab towns have become involved in the planning process and are more actively articulating their demands for inclusion. He asks, “Might these efforts offer hope for a future in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims come to be incorporated as equal citizens, in law and practice, in a single national project?”

He and his wife, Elana, live in a mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood in Jaffa, which is greatly to their liking.

Sponsored by: Pitt Students for Justice in Palestine, Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME), Muslim Students Association, Pittsburgh Palestine Solidarity Committee, Pittsburgh Jews for Peace, OPTICS (Organizing Pittsburgh to Increase Community Solidarity, the Tel Rumeida Circus for Detained Palestinians, International Solidarity Movement- Pittsburgh Chapter