Students who traveled to the Palestinian territories during February break on a trip funded by former President Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize called the journey "a once-in-a-lifetime experience" that offered them a unique perspective on the Middle East. Eleven Brandeis students went on the trip, an initiative of the campus club Students Crossing Boundaries. SCB hired an organization called Birthright Unplugged to help them make the finishing touches on the trip's itinerary.

Justin Kang '09, founder of SCB, said, "We hired Birthright Unplugged as an important asset because of their access and expertise of the area."

Birthright Unplugged is an organization that helps groups plan and facilitate travel programs within the Palestinian territories. According to its Web site, "Birthright Unplugged offers opportunities for people to gain knowledge through first-hand experiences and to use that knowledge to make positive change in the world."

Members of SCB emphasized that the club doesn't have any particular political affiliation, and that every student on the trip came in with a different perspective.

Participant Alison Schwartzbaum '08 said she approached this trip from different points of view. "I so much feel like I went on this trip for myself, to learn, to have this experience and this opportunity for me," she said. "Another part of me feels like I went as part of this unit, this group of people, and together we were experiencing."

Noam Shuster '10 said the trip provided her with a perspective that is usually not available. "This trip gave us the initiative and we saw human suffering . We went and we met real people. We went to see what is not available for us to see; we saw the real people," she said.

For Deborah Laufer '08, being able to have tangible imagery about the situation in the Palestinian territories was a valuable aspect of the trip. "To seek out an opportunity that challenges your core identity and everything you may or may not have believed is something that I would encourage anyone to do," she said.

However, not everyone was entirely pleased with the way the trip unfolded. A junior who went on the trip, who did not want to disclose his name for the Web site, said, "I found the cultural encounter element excellent, but this was overshadowed by the inappropriate simplicity of the political aspects of the trip."

"I found it to be incredibly interesting to be on a trip organized by people with hateful biases [Birthright Unplugged], but I was very disappointed by my peers' intellectual approaches to this experience," he said.

Various participants on the trip said one of the most meaningful parts of the trip was their stay with host families in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. Noam Shuster '10 said, "It was amazing to feel such warmth and optimism in a house that barely has running water."

"They just want peace; they just want to live," she added.

Other highlights from the trip included meeting with Amal Jadou, the U.S. foreign policy advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian Legislative Council member and former Palestinian Authority Minister of Information.

Students also had the opportunity to meet with Allegra Pacheco, United Nations officer for humanitarian affairs in Jerusalem, born into an American Orthodox Jewish family.

Another profound aspect of the trip was having the opportunity to see the Israeli West Bank Wall from both the Israeli and the Palestinian points of view, participants said.

Lisa Hanania '10 described kindness she experienced: "One day we were in a cab, and the cab driver just stopped in the middle of the street and got everyone coffee at his expense. We tried to offer money but he just said, 'No, you're in my cab, so you're in my house.' I have never seen anything like it."

"Part of what we were learning was not just the gravity of the situation. It was also just about, in general, telling a story of the Palestinian narrative," Laufer said.

An example was the story of Yousef El Azeh, a 10-year-old boy, involving a settler grabbing him by the throat, choking him and then painfully scraping away his teeth by rubbing a stone hard against them.

Lisa Hanania '10, however, said, "The fact that we were going and listening and learning doesn't mean we were only seeing the Palestinian perspective."

Upon returning, SCB began discussing plans for future programs. The group plans on holding some type of open panel or forum, and possibly a photo exhibit, to share their experiences with the Brandeis community, Kang said.

"It's hard being back to the Brandeis routine after such an eye-opening experience," Shreeya Sinha '09 said.

"I feel that I have a responsibility to represent all that I've seen to help our generation move closer to peace and coexistence in the Middle East," Sinha said.