SAN DIEGO— It may not come as a surprise that young Israelis have strong opinions—
about the Arabs, about Israel and about what is ahead for the United States now that it has won the military war in Iraq.

However, what may come as a surprise is that, after a two-week goodwill trip on a program called Israel at Heart, three Israelis in their 20s have come to consider Americans to be incredibly naive and unsophisticated about the ways of the world in general, and the Middle East in particular.

Look into the mirrors that three former Israeli soldiers hold up for Americans.

"Americans are very two-dimensional in thinking," Shahar Amit, 26, of Tel Aviv, told me during an interview. "I am not saying it is a bad thing, but I think Americans are very naive. Americans divide the world into the (good and) the evil axis, just as George Bush called it, black and white, good and bad. 'You are either on my side or the other side. If you have done something that I consider as bad, you can't be good. You must be evil.'  It is a pretty hard job to explain to people, to Americans, that the world doesn¹t work like that, not where we come from."

Iyar Semel, 24, son of a former consul in Israel's consulate-general in New York, said "every time I go in front of an average American, I feel that I need to shock him, to punch him— not violently, I don't mean like that. They are asleep. It feels like most of the American people are asleep and they are used to getting their information and their awareness of the world,
everything, streamlined into the house, by the computer, by the TV, by the parents, by the education system.

"I don't see this hunger for knowing the world as it is. I traveled to the Far East for a year and I hardly saw Americans. I saw Canadians, I saw a lot of Europeans, South Americans....and a heckuva lot of Israelis."

Rona Davis, 23, an Israeli born of parents who emigrated from the United States, said she believes the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have shaken up a lot of Americans, "but there are still a lot of naive people. There are still people for whom the war is something that they see on TV; it is not something that they feel around here.

"They still have their regular life. They still go to school. The kids don¹t know what is going on, don't care what is going on, and have a regular life. For them, nothing is happening.

"And then there is the other side: We met in a synagogue some hysterical, hysterical people. One of the ladies was saying 'my neighbors are Egyptians, maybe their kids are terrorists. I don't know what they are, how can I know?' That is over-hysterical because they have never dealt with such a situation.

"We grew up practically in a war. Since I can remember, there were buses exploding and horrible things, and all the soldiers getting killed."

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Israel at Heart was created by New York philanthropists Joseph and Carol Low after "Joey spoke to a few (American) Jewish students— those that weren't in Birthright (a program that sends young American Jews on a tour of Israel)—and found basically they didn't know anything about Israel; they were just replicating, and quoting the regular stereotypes from the media," Semel said.

As the son of an Israeli diplomat, Semel has known the Low family since he was 9 years old. Carol Low had worked in the Israeli Consulate-General in New York City, and Semel was among the first Israelis to be recruited for the Israel at Heart program.

Earlier this month, 16 three-member teams of Israelis, most of whom did not know each other previously, traveled to different parts of North America to encounter and be encountered by Americans and Canadians.

"We tell the stories of our lives," Semel said. "I highly recommend that it will not be more than two weeks, because it is exhausting emotionally because you speak from the heart."

Amit said wherever he went in Southern California, where his team was assigned, "I asked every single person a very simple question. 'Why did 9/11 happen?' And the smartest answer I got was that 'they hate us.' Oh, so someone hates you— why? And no one has been able to tell me the answer. 

"Three thousand people died and no one seems to want to know why.  It's not something that the media is hiding, or that the Bush administration is trying to hide. It was on CNN, Fox News, big headlines in Time magazine, you can't miss it— but most Americans don't know it.

"This is amazing to me. In Israel you have so much written material and spoken material about why Hamas is like it is, why the territories are like they are, why the conflict with the Arabs. Anyone over the age of 15 or 16, they know these things. We grew up in a different sort of mentality."

To understand the motivations of the Sept. 11 terrorists, said Amit, one must "look at the Arab world today (and) see hundreds of millions of people who were oppressed. Arabs have no rights, none whatsoever. The concept of due process is nonexistent. You have a very small, very powerful group of families that control everything in the Arab world, and Arabs are pretty
much born with nothing....

"When a Palestinian from Jenin looks at Tel Aviv, he thinks, 'he has everything; I have nothing,' and that promotes anger. I think that the Arab leaders consciously, ever since they lost in the 1973 war, are channeling all the anger toward Israel and in some respect toward the United States and Europe.

"It is easy to control the minds of the Arab people because they are not educated...You look at a textbook of a Palestinian first- or second-grade school, you will see the same things that you saw in nazi Germany, even the same pictures. In Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, you see the exact thing, and I think that is what drove 18 very young, very angry Arabs into the World
Trade Center (and other American targets)."

Semel said that after Israelis won the 1967 Six Day War, occupying the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights, "everyone was in euphoria. ... It blinded us. It was complete hubris, and every time the Palestinian issue was raised, after '67, it was either nonexistent or don¹t worry about it, everything will be all right.

"Because of this attitude over the last 35 years, we had it explode in our face. That is why we started losing uncles, cousins and friends and neighbors. And when you start losing people you actually know, you have no choice but to sober up."

He added that until Palestinians have their own state, with a capital in Jerusalem (Al Quds in Arabic), there will be no peace. "Until every Palestinian feels that he has Palestine and Jerusalem, you won't uproot the terror.

"My main criticism of this (U.S.) administration is that they got their priorities wrong. In my opinion, first take care of Al Quds; give Al Quds to Yismael (the Arabs)."

Davis said Americans should know that "we don't hate the Palestinian Arabs. I think most Israelis don't hate them. I think we really want to get along with them. We really want everyone to have a place and be happy with it, without all the situation that is going on because it is crazy. Everyone
knows that it can't go on because innocent people are dying every day—not only Israelis, but also Palestinians, and there has to be a solution."

In traveling around Southern California, the students spoke at many kinds of forums, but one encounter, they agreed, will remain with them for a long time.

They spoke to a group of high school students in Los Angeles. Among them was a 16-year-old boy whose mother was Jewish and whose father was Palestinian Arab. Amit observed that the youth was "probably the most interesting person and one of the brightest people I have met in the past two weeks."

Their discussion, he said, "wasn't in a form of an argument; we didn't raise our voices for one second. It was a totally intellectual, I would say even philosophical, discussion about the Palestinian problem. He said his piece. I said my piece. I don't think we changed anything in each other's perspective, but I do think that we gave each other—I would say— hope.

"He is exactly the kind of person that I want to see on the other side. This guy wasn't angry. He wasn't mad at me. He didn¹t look at me with hatred. He looked at me as someone on the other side, but he really wanted to understand and to make me understand his point of view. It was the most amazing experience I had here."