The Watson Fellowship requires its Fellows to submit a final report exlaining what we have gained from our fellowship year.  I am reprinting the report I submitted to them below as an appropriate conclusion to all that I have learned and how I have changed over the last year.  Enjoy :)

Before I left for my Watson journey, even before I graduated from Colgate University, I was talking to one of my favorite professors about my plans, excitement and anxiety for the coming year. On that day, she said something to me that I understood but could not quite conceptualize at the time; however, upon the completion of the Fellowship, I have realized the breadth of her wisdom: “You are going to learn more about yourself and who you really are in the next year than most people can hope to learn in a lifetime.”

This idea is the embodiment of Thomas J. Watson Fellowship’s mission, as a year of self-discovery, and one I have known since the early days of the application process, even if I was never able to imagine the details of how/when/where/why I would “find myself.” Thinking back on the past 12 months, I cannot exactly pinpoint a moment, place or trigger when my identity became shockingly clear, but I know that in the past few months there has been a fundamental awakening in me that leaves me feeling more like myself every day. This realization happened in phases, and I believe that both research and personal issues contributed to how I now feel. In this final report, I will try to trace my transformation into “myself” through a few formative research and personal moments from the past 12 months, and reflect on the lessons these have taught me.

My research, particularly in Morocco for the first three months, was inherently personal. My goals in that country were to learn about the Jewish community and its recent history, to juxtapose my family’s Moroccan history, traditions, mentality and culture with those Jews still living in Morocco and to judge if I understand my identity more from it. Aside for meeting and building relationships with the members of the Moroccan Jewish Community’s Organization, and religious and cultural leaders, I also attended events and religious services at synagogue every week for Shabbat and holidays, in order to meet as many different kind of Moroccan Jews as possible. The most striking aspect of their culture that I observed was the extremely high level of Moroccan hospitality offered by most Moroccan Jews and Muslims that I met, especially now that I can compare it to other countries. The Jewish community in Morocco numbers less than 3,000 people and the congregations of each synagogue (of which there are dozens) are even smaller; so, when I sat in synagogue alone, everyone knew that I was a foreigner. In many situations that may have been (and in fact was) awkward, but not in Morocco. They all wanted to know who I was and why I was there, and once they determined that I was “safe,” they invited me to their house for a meal almost unanimously. There were actually incidences when Moroccan women argued over who would take me home that day.

After three months in Morocco, it became clear that this hospitality is a very rigid cultural norm that transcends religious and ethnic affiliation, and also hit very close to home for me. The Moroccan-Israeli side of my family, in traditional fashion, respects and upholds the importance of this norm; any person is welcome at any of our houses, usually even without an invitation. This was not just familiar and comfortable to me, particularly during a difficult adjustment period at the beginning of my journey, but also helped me realize that there are definitive aspects of my personality, character and identity that are inextricably embedded in Moroccan culture and values. The value system that is at the root of the Moroccan hospitality holds loyalty and devotion to family and religion paramount, a cultural trait that has always been of the utmost importance to me and always set me apart from my fellow Americans and American Jews.

On the other hand, there were some aspects of the Moroccan culture and mentality with which I have never and could never identify. Witnessing and experiencing the tangible manifestations of the oppression of women for the first time was shocking, even after studying it at Colgate for many years. Simple, daily events are shaped by this cultural norm, and the most prevalent and telling is the café culture in Morocco and elsewhere in the region; most cafes are de facto all-male establishments where a woman would feel uncomfortable enjoying a cup of tea or coffee. The cultural attitude of woman as inferior intellectually and socially, and their resulting segregation, pervades the mentality of many of the Moroccans that I met, Jewish and not. I have one Jewish friend who grew up in Morocco, but moved to Strasbourg, France to attend boarding school when he was 13. After university and a year of work, he decided to try to move back to Morocco and has since moved back to France. Because he is an educated, Westernized, and relatively secular Jew, his opinion on men and women sitting together in synagogue surprised me. He proposed and I accepted the traditional argument; men and women cannot sit together in synagogue because it would cause distractions when people should only focus on prayer. I then offered him a compromise; what if the women’s section was positioned next to the men’s and separated with a barrier (instead of above it on another floor), with both having equal access to the bima (stage)? He could not accept this solution and could not explain why.

As the granddaughter of an ardent feminist (one of the first women Fulbrights in Paris) and an independent and strong liberal woman, this is one part of Moroccan culture that is not reflected in my personality and character. On the other hand, gender and racial equality are prominent American values and my time in the Middle East taught me to appreciate the freedoms and opportunities granted to women and minorities, and their cultural acceptance among Americans, whereas beforehand I never considered them out of the ordinary. The societal acceptance of the value of liberty was never demonstrated more clearly than the definitive moment of the 2008-2009 Watson Year: Barack Obama’s victory. The fact that a person of such a diverse background could rise to the most powerful position in the world speaks wonders to American progressivism, and caused immense pride in me as people of all walks of life exclaimed, once they found out I am American, “Obama, good!” and offered a thumbs-up. In making these comparisons all year, I actually reconnected to my American identity and I believe I will be able to appreciate these liberties once in America.

The most personally and professionally formative event of my Watson trip was Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military campaign in Gaza in January. At the time, I was living in Cairo and decided to postpone a trip to Jordan until the situation in the region improved because of family pressures and advice from knowledgeable Egyptian friends. For the first time in my life, I experienced one of the worst recent outbreaks of Israeli-Palestinian violence not only somewhere anti-Israel, but actually at the heart of the Arab world. From the first moment of the Operation, it was on the forefront of everyone’s mind and lives in Cairo; televisions in restaurants were always playing the news, which was always reporting about Gaza, demonstrations were held often, people in the street were asking why Obama did not care that children were dying, bloggers were blasting the Egyptian government for not opening the Rafah crossing to refugees (and some consequently were getting arrested), and endless petitions and activities were circulated and advertised on the expatriot list serv of which I was a member.

As the invasion drudged on I became obsessed with collecting information. I spent countless hours in front of the television in my new apartment switching between BBC and Al-Jazeera in English, and reading every news article I could find. And I could not believe all that I was seeing and hearing; Israel, a country I always considered home and morally superior than any other nation, was becoming a source of shame and disgust for me. It was a deeply emotional time; I had a strong feeling of not only shame and disgust, but most interestingly, guilt. In some ways, I felt responsible for the atrocities I was witnessing on television, and in others I was outraged that the Israeli government would commit what I began to view as a masssacre. A few weeks after the fighting ended, I wrote a blog post trying to reconcile these different feelings and rationalize what it means for my search for identity.

This post (entitled Falling from Greatness, After the Israeli Defeat of Gaza at www.cecisibony.com) represents what is, in hindsight, my formal ideological break with the policies of the Israeli government and the values and opinions of my family, causing quite a stir. Recognizing the potential for influence of the media, I argued that Gaza “represents Israel’s final break from the moral, Judaic, and peace-loving principles that characterized its founding as a country.” As a Zionist and a Jew, I proclaimed it was my tradition and duty to question Israel’s policies, which, after much research, have rendered Israel morally inferior than in the past, and even less secure than before the Operation.

Some of my former professors and friends (particularly in Egypt) called my post “defining for my character,” while my parents bordered on tears as they told me they do not recognize their own daughter. I have come to realize that in some ways, they were right; my whole life my political beliefs were fundamentally shaped by the historical narrative I learrned from my parents, my Jewish private school and American media. By experiencing Gaza immersed in the “other” perspective, and living and learning from Arabs all year, I have been able to finally understand both sides of the conflict and formulate my own beliefs based on all of this information.

Probably more important than my political opinions, per se, was how Gaza and the emergence of these feelings and beliefs empowered me to finalize my independence from my parents, which began with my application and acceptance of the Watson Fellowship and ended not only with an ideological division, but also a financial one. The implications of this for my identity are evident; not a believer in mutual exclusivity in this case, I am a pro-Palestinian, pro-peace Zionist, who supports the Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian people, not necessarily the policies of their governments, in their pursuits of a better life for themselves and their children. My experiences on a beach camp in Sinai, witnessing Arab-Israeli coexistence unlike elsewhere in the world, confirms for me the possibility of the realization of this goal.

Months later, my arrival in Istanbul was very strange. I stepped out of the taxi from the airport and onto the most popular and hip pedestrian walkway in the city, and I was overwhelmed by the level of development, its resemblance to Europe and by how easy it was just to find my hostel. I had returned to the first world and not only did it feel supremely weird, but I did not like it. As I readjusted to the West and Istanbul as a city began to grow on me, I could not shake the feeling that my level of comfort in Turkey did not compare to the comfort I felt in each Arab country I visited. In a conversation with the same professor from Colgate that originally told me I was an Arab for the first time, she put it simply: “Ceci, its because you are an Arab.” Again, I realized the extent of her simple wisdom; my heart was not in Turkey the way it had been in the previous countries because I could not identify with Turkey the country, people and culture. The coldness and closed nature of the Jewish community was just one characteristic of Turkey with which I did not identify. Interestingly, the Muslim Turks maintain the same level of hospitality and openness that I love from the Arab world, but I still could not manage to feel at home there. I have come to realize that this feeling is something intangible and inquantifiable; sometimes the heart recognizes familiarity that the brain cannot reason.

After all of these experiences, the lingering question remains: who am I? The most important lesson I learned this year is that trying to define oneself by the things or ideas that describe you is an oversimplification of the complexities of human emotions and identity. I learned that ultimately, “me” is the amalgamation of how I feel, with what/whom I identify, and the things and ideas that describe me, all of which is dependent on my inherent personality. The fact that my brother and sister, who have identical backgrounds and upbringings, do not identify the same as I do helped me realize that first and foremost, I am ME, a dynamic and complex creature that changes over time and thrives on my own independence, the importance of family and humanism.

The implications of my new-found understanding of myself extend to all aspects of my life. Now, I understand that my innate passions, interests, and competence render me more suited to studying cultural Anthropology for my Master’s degree than International Relations, as I had previously thought. I have determined that I would like to use my skills, openness and broad understanding of history and cultures to pursue cultural coexistence among Arabs and Israelis as a grassroots movemont toward a positive peace. I have realized that all of my life decisions until this point have indicated that I prefer a challenging way of life versus the ease of living that characterizes most Western societies, and that this inclination even applies to my romantic life and the type of person with whom I would be most compatible. As I learn about myself and comprehend my own intricacies more every day, I am finding that my life path is being illuminated by my heart’s desire, and I have the Thomas J. Watson Foundation to thank for that.