She is 28. She grew up in California and Texas, believing as an American Jew that Israel was a country whose people couldn’t live in peace because their neighbors wouldn’t let them.
Then, after graduation from Columbia, she put on a backpack and traveled. She talked to people and stayed in their homes. She heard things that weren’t part of the conversation when she was growing up. And she became one of those people who goes to a place and brings back the kind of story that can be had only by talking and listening and living there.
She remembers two weeks spent in Iran during which she didn’t spend a dime because of the generosity of people who had been strangers when she got there. In Southern Lebanon, she stayed with a family of Palestinian refugees.
“There was so much I had never learned,” she said as we talked at the house in Tiverton where she is staying.
In 2003, she went to the occupied West Bank, the first of three trips as a volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service. And those childhood certainties about Israel seemed not so certain.
“One of the first impressions was the segregated road system,” said Baltzer. “The Palestinian roads are sometimes unusable. The Israeli roads are more modern. And there are different colored license plates, which makes it easier for the soldiers.”
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