West Bank Stowaway

A long way from home: Danielle Sara Frank espouses her views on the Israel/Palestine conflict on the frontlines.

A 22-year-old Jewish woman from Montgomery County is on the frontlines as a Palestinian activist. So why is she there on Israel’s dime?

by Daniel Brook

For the past six weeks, Blue Bell native Danielle Sara Frank has been monitoring Israeli military checkpoints and videotaping protests in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, where she lives with Palestinian hosts. There, she’s a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group which, according to its website, is "committed to the principles of nonviolent resistance." But along with that declaration, the ISM also recognizes "the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle."

Frank, 22, is Jewish and has been an anti-occupation activist since her days as a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. While there, she founded a campus chapter of SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Tax-funded Aid to Israel Now) and spoke at a University of Michigan conference urging American universities to divest from their holdings in Israel.

On American college campuses, there is no shortage of criticism of Israel, some of it coming from liberal Jews. But what sets Frank apart is the fact that she's one of only two known activists in the occupied territories who got a free trip to the Middle East, thanks in part to the Israeli government.

In June, Frank flew to Tel Aviv as part of Birthright Israel, a program that offers 10-day trips to connect young diaspora Jews with the state of Israel. Today, she concedes that she took the trip because it was free. "It was my only way of getting here," writes Frank, who followed in the footsteps of Laura Gordon, a 20-year-old Grinnell College student from Pittsburgh. Like Frank, Gordon arrived, thanks to Birthright, in December. She now serves as an ISM spokesperson in the Gaza Strip.

Though this stowaway phenomenon has gone widely unreported, ISM made international news in March when activist Rachel Corrie, an American, was killed while trying to protect a Palestinian home from Israeli bulldozers.

Early on, Frank kept her cards close to the vest. Soon after landing in Israel, a tour leader asked group members why they chose to participate. "I said that I came because I didn't like what I saw on TV about Israel and wanted to see things for myself," explains Frank, via e-mail from the West Bank. She admits it was "a calculated answer that was somewhat cryptic because if you ask anyone who is pro-Israeli, they'll tell you that all of the news is biased against Israel, but any activist working for Palestine in the U.S. will tell you that the American media is decidedly pro-Israel."

Gidi Mark, a Jerusalem-based spokesperson for Birthright Israel, says program officials are aware of the potentially embarrassing practice but insists it is not widespread. "Out of the 48,000 people from 35 countries that we brought over in the last three years, these are the two names I've heard about," he says of Frank and Gordon.

According to Mark, two or three other Birthright participants who intended to become pro-Palestinian activists were sent home immediately after their intentions were discovered. As a result, the central office has urged organizers "to better scrutinize the registrants to see that they really want to come on Birthright Israel [and not travel to the Middle East] for any other purpose," Mark says.

The only stated qualifications to participate in the program are being a Jew between 18 and 26 years old who's never before gone to Israel on a group program. Most of Birthright's budget comes from foundation grants and gifts from wealthy individuals, but the Israeli government does foot about one-third of the bill. Birthright estimates the total cost of the trip to be roughly $2,000 per participant.

While the program is open to diaspora Jews of all political persuasions, Mark points out that the Israeli government ought not be expected to subsidize the travel of individuals whose goal is to protest its policies. And because it is government-sponsored, Mark defends the way Birthright addresses the Mideast conflict in its programming. "When political issues are raised," he says, "participants usually get a wide picture, but mostly from an Israeli point of view of course."

Since Birthright only coordinates the tours but does not run them (nearly two dozen groups of varying religious and political outlooks set up the tours), there is a lot of variation from group to group. Some, Mark says, meet with experts who reflect or convey "the other side of the coin," but they don't hide where their support comes from.

"We are actually quite proud of the fact that the Israeli government is one of the leading partners in the project," he says. "This is not an objective, academic program. This is a Jewish and Israeli partnership which is aimed at fostering Jewish identity and fostering ties between Jewish youth all over the world and the state of Israel. That explains our policy towards those who don't come bona fide, but come to sympathize with the Palestinians."

Frank says she found the program's pro-Zionist outlook intellectually stifling. While the Palestinian-Israeli dispute was addressed by program speakers, she says they used the historical oppression of the Jews to justify a nationalist ideology that itself relies on oppression of the Palestinians. While Frank found some of what the speakers said sympathetic, she remained committed to her activist plans. "There were many points during the lectures that I felt confused and conflicted emotions about what I was hearing and what I came here to do. These people are good -- really good -- but not so good that your heart forgets what it means to suffer."

Frank says her activism is rooted in her own suffering from her mother's untimely death in 1990. From her reading of Jewish history and her own life, Frank writes that she sees the world as "a place where people are dealt hardship by no fault of their own." Sadly, she says, this does not appear to be the lesson that the Birthright speakers have gleaned from Jewish history. "The people in the Birthright organization imply that the only Œgood Jew' is a Zionist and that there is no room for conversation that says anything otherwise."

At the very least, by using the Birthright Israel program for pro-Palestinian purposes, Frank raises questions about the conflict and people’s assumptions about it. Despite religion and nationality, Frank writes, "the thing to remember when dealing with these people is that the occupation equals suffering and that’s all that matters at the end of the day."