Random housing selection can certainly make for interesting results. Just ask Hillel Bavli and Mike Figa, two of the most active participants in Boston University’s campus discussion of the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
On opposite sides.
Bavli, who last year helped bring back the Boston University Students for Israel, BU’s only explicitly pro-Israel group, and Figa, whose controversial pro-Palestinian letter to the editor last year began a flood of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine responses in The Daily Free Press, have been paired for the past three months in a Student Residences at 10 Buick St. apartment, sometimes bringing a conflict that has raged more than 10,000 miles away since September 2000 right into their own living room.
So far, they say, it has been civil.
Figa, the son of a father who converted from Judaism, said his experiences with Jewish cousins in California always made him feel the situation was uneven. A trip to Egypt two years ago introduced him to Arab culture, which he said gave him more confidence in sticking up for Palestinians and the Arab world. He has taken an active interest in the pro-Palestinian side of the conflict because of humanitarian concerns with how the Palestinian population has been treated, he said.
Though Figa said he believes Palestinian society has ‘degraded’ and become more violent since the beginning of the conflict, it is Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that has driven Palestinians into acts of terrorism and unrest, he said. Though a non-religious, one-state solution would be the ideal situation, Figa said, a two-state peace is the most promising and realistic outcome of the violence.
Bavli’s view of the situation is colored by different lenses. After growing up with two Zionist parents and attending Jewish day-school in New York City, he has seen the conflict first-hand through Israeli relatives and his own visits to the country. He said he reads up on the subject daily in six or seven newspapers and has attended numerous conferences about the issue, including the 34th World Zionist Congress.
The roommates agree both sides want peace, but Bavli said the Palestinian side has been dominated by a more extreme faction that must be replaced before peace is even a possibility. He said he supports a two-state solution, but does not think it is possible right now.
‘I’m all about it and I’d be willing to give up so much if I knew I’d get peace for it, but right now I don’t believe I would,’ he said.
The two met last year arguing for their respective sides in the George Sherman Union Link during Palestinian Awareness Week, though they said they knew each other beforehand by reputation. Unlike some people debating the situation from opposite sides, they said they were able to discuss the situation cordially and rationally.
‘On both sides, there are people who don’t know how to handle debate and are very hard to talk to,’ Figa said. ‘I found him very easy to talk to.’
But neither of them exactly signed up to live together. In fact, they didn’t find out they would be sharing living quarters until move-in day this year. Bavli was finishing setting his room when Figa appeared in the door with his belongings, Bavli said.
Neither was really sure what to say.
Their relationship in the room, however, has been much the same as their discussions last year calm and amicable. Though they say neither of them are in the room much, when big news does happen in the Middle East, they have managed to find each other and discuss the situation. Conversations do tend to go in circles, but both say they have learned a lot about the other side of the conflict from each other.
Bavli said Figa has even moderated his views on the situation to an extent.
‘It’s a perfect example of what an open college like this can give you,’ Bavli said. ‘The way we’re just glued together and we have opposite views it moderates my views and I’m sure I moderate his views as well.’
The relationship has worked out well because they are both political moderates on the situation to begin with, Bavli said. Because they agree on what the two sides must come to in the end, they have been able to discuss the situation with some degree of composure.
As for the situation itself, the two expressed varying degrees of hopefulness. Though Bavli maintained that people on both sides must be optimistic that a peace can be worked out, Figa said as long as Ariel Sharon is in power and the occupation continues, peace is not realistic. They did agree, however, that peace will happen in the relatively near future.
‘One thing that is remarkable is that almost everyone has the same idea for a final solution the moderates on both sides,’ Figa said. ‘I think people just differ in their fundamentals on how we can get there.’
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