"...this was another wall: not quite as old as the other one, with fewer red-string vendors and a little less atmosphere, perhaps, but probably just as symbolically potent."

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Being in Israel makes a lot of things possible - the kind of things you might never have dreamed you would actually get to do. Last Friday I found myself standing quietly before one of Jerusalem's most famous landmarks. It was the kind of moment to which you feel you need to pay attention, even as it's happening to you, because you know it will be important not just as something to tell your friends about at home but also because you will keep the experience inside you for a long time - that it will colour your beliefs and dreams in a thousand small ways, maybe for the rest of your life. I was aware of lots of small things - my toe itching inside my shoe, the noise of a car somewhere, a paper bag gusting poetically around above my head. But I was trying my best to concentrate on the moment. So I just stood in front of the wall.

But that's enough of the fake reverence - because it wasn't the Kotel. (Which, by the way, was a drastically disappointing experience for me. I got to the front of the crowd, deposited my obligatory prayer, and left, wondering why I felt as if I had just been to the post office rather than the holiest site in Judaism. Which just goes to show, really, how sometime meaningful things are best left to their own devices, in the trust that they'll come in their own good time.)

No - this was another wall: not quite as old as the other one, with fewer red-string vendors and a little less atmosphere, perhaps, but probably just as symbolically potent. I was there courtesy of MASA's Security Issues seminar, which brought together a hundred and forty participants last weekend to thrash out the thorny issue of Middle East peace in the aim of handing something elegantly gnomic to Condoleezza Rice at Annapolis next month. Well, perhaps not entirely. But for me, at least, the experience was comparably intense, and clarified just how difficult Israel's situation is.

Perhaps it was typical, then, that I was left standing rather vacantly, nose-to-nose with the Security Fence, and thinking about how this was kind of cool, to get to be here, to stand quietly, and to think. The only problem was trying to figure out what to think. I really got no further than the feeling that these two barriers are a kind of bookend for Israeli society. Or that maybe these two barriers – one so celebrated, so dreamed-about, so apparently close to God; the other built bitterly in the realization that there are some situations in which God helps those who help themselves – are Israeli society, rather, in a kind of architectural microcosm.

I walked away from the wall feeling smug about my rather poetic insight. What I meant beyond the self-congratulatory waffle was, of course, another question. I didn't know, and still don't understand, how the Arab-Israeli conflict can generate so many mutually exclusive arguments with which I am able to agree simultaneously. It puzzles me how a wall can have more than two sides. But then, maybe not knowing is kind of the point after all. 
 
Deborah Frenkel is 22 years old and a graduate in English Literature at the University of Sydney. She is currently an intern at the Jerusalem-based publication www.israel21c.org under the auspices of the 5-month Career Israel program. 

The shabbaton was sponsred by MAP -- MASA Activities for Participants -- and took place the weekend of October 19-20th.