On Sunday morning, Kacey telephoned the public relations department at Hebrew University requesting permission to come on campus and interview students for her project. HU’s spokesperson granted the permission and we jumped in a cab to go across town to the campus.
We interviewed a dozen people at HU. Mostly students but some other people too, including the librarian.
The best interviews were a group of four young men with differing opinions of why things were the way they were. At one point, their discussion swung to Hamas and Hezbollah. One of the security guards, who I’d noticed loitering near us where we sat on the grass lawn, came over and spoke to one of the young men.
While the interviews carried on, I went over and told the security guard that we had permission from the public relations department to be on campus conducting interviews.
“It’s okay,” the student said. “I tell him we are open-minded campus and discuss politics openly. No problem.”
But apparently it was a problem.
After the student sat down with the rest of the group. I stayed with the security officer and talked some more. Apparently, it wasn’t okay to have open discussions about politics, especially regarding the Arabs.
“We have lots of Arabs here,” the security guard explained. “No political discussions like that about Hezbollah or Hamas. It could create big problem.”
“Okay, okay. It thing they are done now,” I said. “We were just talking to them about life here and, you know, the situation in Lebanon just came up.”
And how could it not have? Hezbollah rockets being fired into northern Israel where two dozen Israelis, mostly civilians, had been killed during the past two weeks was on everyone’s minds and permeated every discussion we had, especially with Israeli Jews.
