At a dinner with Peres, the party conversed about the importance of education and the tension of supporting an ultra-religious community in a largely secular population.
“President Peres was very inspiring,” Ofek said about Peres’ views on Israel’s ongoing search for peace.
“At one level he seems naive, but you have to be a believer and a dreamer, because if you don’t think like that it won’t happen.”
The group also met with Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
At that meeting, Fayyad commented that the Arab Spring has drawn attention away from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, according to one of the trip participants.
“After speaking with Fayyad, the message we all left with was that the important thing is to have a big vision, while recognizing the importance of solving smaller obstacles along the way to get there,” Ofek said.
The group also met with members of an elite naval commando unit of the Israel Defense Forces, who described the controversial mission in May 2010 in which they boarded a flotilla of boats trying to break through the blockade around Gaza.
The Harvard administrators said that they came home with a new perspective on Harvard’s growing international presence.
For example, the participants talked to the president of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology about the school’s plans to partner with Cornell to build a new engineering campus in New York City.
“It was interesting for us and for [Lapp] to think about how a campus approaches expansion,” Ofek said. “This is something that people discuss at the highest levels of the University.”
Despite an 11-item pre-trip reading list, along with panel talks, meetings, and a reception for Harvard alumni during the journey, the participants found time to see national landmarks, visiting the ancient fortress Masada, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, the city of Nazareth, and the site of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
“It really was a whirlwind,” Segel said. “All of us came away having learned something new.”
—Staff writer Michael C. George can be reached at mgeorge@college.harvard.edu.