The Girls of Maaleh Levona

This 8000-plus word article published at The Tablet, entitled "Girls at War: How a group of teenage believers could reshape the Israeli-Palestinian struggle" is authored by Elizabeth Rubin. I put some of their pics here.

She explains a bit of a difficulty she had at the beginning of which I have personal knowledge:

...I called Rav Gadi Ben Zimra, the founder of the school, and reached him. He passed me to his wife, Nurit, the co-founder. She passed me to a neighbor involved with the school who spoke better English—and who could vet me. Her name was Mina Browdy and she told me that she was thrilled that we wanted to come do a piece on their school, meet Gadi and Nurit, hang out with the girls. And of course we could stay there. Ten days? Wonderful. I booked a ticket, as did my friend, the photographer Gillian Laub.

Then two days before the flight, Mina emailed me:

Shalom Elizabeth,


We thank you for your interest to come and write an article about Ulpanat Levona but we reconsidered the idea and decided not to go along with it.


Thank you! Our beloved teacher Rut Fogel Hy”d was murdered with her husband and three children, a three month old baby that was slaughtered cruelly by the wild animals that some of you think are able to make peace.


All the best
Mina Browdy

We decided to go anyway.

What actually happened was the result of a big misunderstanding.  The school thought she would be coming to visit for a few hours, not to embed herself.  After a second thought, a spokeswoman of the Benjamin Council was approached and they decided to turn to me.  I tried to do some research.  As Elizabeth writes later on:

In the end, Rav Gadi refused to meet with me, and I decided not to push it by showing up at his office. After all, it was his work—the girls—that were the most interesting thing to me about Rav Gadi. He was, I was told, particularly upset that Gillian and I had visited the dorms, and that the girls had agreed to pose for photographs...”

I ended up speaking on the phone for a very long time with Mina, Shilat, Tamar, Nurit, Gadi, Elizabeth and her editor.  I tried to explain that there were two major problems:

a) Elizabeth, by focusing on the Maaleh Levona girls (and her editor told me he had been following their story for five years!), not only could she be creating an unbalance of focus but she was placing on their shoulders the responsibility to represent alll the high shcool pupils of Yesha - for that would be how the average reader would view the story.  They cannot (and many simply would not) understand the differences between non-religious and religious school programs as well as the many shades inbetween.  An add to that that Ruth Fogel, their teacher, had just been murdered by Arab terrorists.

b) moreover, Gadi simply did not know of her plan to be there for a few days and actually try to live in amongst the girls.  In addition, it was Purim week and for a few days, the girls wouldn't be there.  He felt no school would agree to such an arrangement, especially as few of the girls spoke English all that well.  She was 'setting them up', in a sense even if she had - and she assured me she did have - the best of intentions of letting the girls tell their story as teenage girls in a unique situation.

I disagreed.   I'm in here, the 'someone':

After visiting Moriya and Roni, I had someone from the Yesha Council call Rav Gadi to see if he’d meet with me. Still no. He said he’d had a reporter from Haaretz at the school and it’d done them no good. They’d also seen a 2002 piece I did on a Hamas suicide bomber in the New York Times Magazine and decided I might be a Hamas sympathizer...

I suggested that if she did a story on the religious educational framework in Yesha which would include Ofra's Ulpana and the Ulpana at Kiryat Arba, for example, then that would be a better story and more fair.

But she had purchased her ticket as had the photographer and she had made babysitting arrangements with her mother (one of her Afghanistan stories was done while she was pregnant).

I didn't hear from her after that, even to tell me she had arrived.  When I found out she spent Shabbat at Tapuach, my suspicions about political bias increased and note this:

...it is also no wonder that natives of Tel Aviv express the fear that it’s not Israel that occupies the West Bank but the West Bank settlers who are now annexing Israel, as they pour more concrete and have more children, who are taking key positions in the army, government, and civil administration, which controls everything here from electricity to water to schools. The settlers embody an essential conflict at the core of the state of Israel. The government acts like an erratic parent to its recalcitrant children, the settlers—sometimes berating and even beating them, other times adoring and financing them, for their messianic faith. The longer I stayed, the harder it was to determine who is using whom: the government that allows the expansion of settlements while hoping to use the radicals as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the Palestinians, or the radicals themselves, who offer the State of Israel the choice between civil war or abandoning them and their children to life in a Palestinian state.

In the end, it is a wonderful piece of writing and introspection into the Maaleh Levona girls.  But it is, nevertheless, unfair and unbalanced.  Kahane supporters stand out.  Almost no other Yesha-educated teenager is highlighted.  No true background is provided.

It will reflect not only on Yesha highschool girls but on Yesha in general.  There should have been more in it but you'lll make your own judgment.

Read it.

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