The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. Susan Nathan

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СКАЧАТЬ got to know a range of Israelis with different political views and insights into the ‘Israeli experience’. I heard from some of them about their own problems as immigrants being absorbed into Israeli society, about their concerns at their children serving in the army, and about the country’s economy.

      Four months after my arrival I suffered a devastating blow when I was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. I had to begin a crash-course in negotiating my way single-handedly around Israel’s health care system, and eventually found myself in Jerusa-lem’s Hadassah hospital, awaiting an operation on my eye. Hadassah occupies a striking position, set in a pine forest overlooking the old stone houses of Ein Kerem, a Palestinian village that was cleansed of its population in the 1948 war and is now a wealthy suburb of Jerusalem to which many rich Jews aspire to move. It has state-of-the-art medical equipment and is staffed by a mix of Israeli Jews and Arabs, and it was there that I got my first inkling that the country I had so longed to be a citizen of might not be quite what I imagined. I was lying in a ward surrounded by beds filled not just with other Jews but with many of the diverse, and confusing, ethnic and religious components of the Holy Land: Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. This was before the intifada of September 2000, but still it was surprising to see Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward. Even more confusingly, many of the Palestinians were Israeli citizens, members of a group I discovered were commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli Arabs’. The Jewish state was clearly a lot less ethnically pure than I had been led to believe.

      It was another experience on the ward that started me questioning what was really going on inside Israel. One day a young Orthodox woman arrived on the ward clutching her month-old baby, who had just undergone surgery on an eye. That evening her husband came to visit. He was wearing a knitted kippa, long sidelocks, and had a pistol on one hip and a rifie slung casually over his shoulder. This is the uniform of the nationalist religious right in Israel—better known abroad as ‘the settlers’. The thought that a heavily armed civilian could wander freely around a hospital where women and children were ill appalled me. I engaged him in conversation as he was leaving. In a strong American accent he told me: ‘I’ve just requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem. I never leave home without a weapon.’ I suggested to him that he would be better off living in the Jewish quarter in the Old City. No, he retorted. ‘All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.’

      His words left a nasty taste in my mouth. Why was he stealing homes from Arabs in the Palestinian part of the city, the section captured by Israel in the 1967 war, when there were vast tracts of the country he could choose to live in? And why did I appear to be the only person on the ward who thought it strange for a visitor to arrive in a hospital wearing a gun?

      I left the hospital confused by the signals Israel was sending me. Here was a state that prided itself on having one of the best medical systems in the world. And access to health care seemed not to be affected overtly by grounds of race or creed. But it was also clear that some Israelis had an unhealthy admiration for violence and an appetite for what did not belong to them. Israel did not appear to place many controls on their behaviour.

      My strong humanist values derive from an understanding of both my family’s history and my people’s. My father raised me on stories about my great-grandfather, Zussman Hershovitz, who lived in one of the Jewish ghetto communities, the shtetls, in Lithuania. I was taught as a small child the consequences of being Jewish for men like my great-grandfather, how it was not possible for him to go to school as a boy, how he ended up as a peddler moving from place to place to avoid the pogroms. In addition my father, Samuel Levy, a respected Harley Street doctor, instilled in me a deep appreciation of Jewish ethics, culture and history. I cannot claim he was a good father. Much of my childhood was spent living in terror of his rages and under the shadow of his disappointment. But outside the immediate family circle he was never less than a flercely loyal and dedicated healer. Although he was very successful, he believed he had wider social responsibilities than simply accumulating money from the wealthy clientele who visited his London practice. He continued to dedicate much of his time to a practice he started when he was younger in a deprived part of Essex. After he retired in 1973 he returned to the country of his birth, South Africa, during the apartheid years to be medical health officer and practise in a clinic for blacks only in Groote Schuur, Cape Town.

      So even though I was soon earning good money as an English teacher in Tel Aviv, I could not simply accept the privileges that came with being a successful ‘new Israeli’. A few months after I had recovered from the eye operation, I was approached by a student organisation called Mahapach, which had heard of my experience in community work and raising money for Aids charities in London. They asked if I could write a funding application in support of their work for disadvantaged communities inside Israel, particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent, known in Israel as the Mizrahim. Much of Mahapach’s work involves encouraging students to go into deprived communities to teach such youngsters core subjects like Hebrew, Arabic, English and maths outside the often limiting arena of the formal classroom.

      I sat down and read about these communities and their problems. I knew about the difficulties of the Mizrahim, who because of their Arab culture—they originally came from Morocco, Iraq, Syria and Egypt—have long been treated as inferior Jews by the European elite, the Ashkenazi Jews, who run Israel. But questions quickly began to surface in my mind about the indigenous Arab communities. Where did these Arabs I was writing about live? Why had they been so invisible, except briefly when I was in hospital, during my first two years in Israel? In those days I had little time for anything except my work as an English teacher. I would usually be up at 5 a.m., start work at six (before my clients’ offices opened), and finish at 8 or 9 p.m. Still, I was not satisfied with simply regurgitating the dry statistics I found in newspaper articles which suggested that Israeli Arabs were discriminated against. They were as faceless and unconnected to my life as bacteria living at the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to meet these Arabs for myself. When the chance arose to visit an Arab town as part of the research, I leapt at it. The destination was Tamra in the western Galilee.

      Within minutes of driving into Tamra I felt that I had entered another Israel, one I had never seen before. It was almost impossible to believe that I could turn off a main highway, close to the luxurious rural Jewish communities of the Galilee, and find myself somewhere that was so strikingly different from any Jewish area I had ever visited before, and not just culturally. It was immediately obvious that Tamra suffered from chronic overcrowding. The difference in municipal resources and investment was starkly evident too. And a pall of despair hung over the town, a sense of hopelessness in the face of so much official neglect. It was the first time I had been to an Arab area (apart from visits as a tourist to the Old City of Jerusalem), and I was profoundly shaken by it. A disturbing thought occurred to me, one that refused to shift even after I had driven back to Tel Aviv. Tamra looked far too familiar. I thought, where have I seen this before? I recognised the pattern of discrimination from my experience of apartheid South Africa, which I had visited regularly during my childhood. I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships.

      These initial impressions were reinforced by a meeting at the home of Dr Asad Ghanem, who lives in the neighbouring village of Sha’ab. One of the few prominent Arab academics in Israel, Dr Ghanem impressed me with his direct and unemotional explanations of the discrimination exercised in all spheres of Israeli life against the Arab population, from employment and education to land allocations and municipal budgets. But he found it difficult to remain detached about one topic he brought to my attention, an issue that would later become the theme of many conversations with my new Arab neighbours and friends. In Arab communities across Israel there are tens of thousands of homes judged illegal by the state, and under threat of demolition. In Tamra, Dr Ghanem told me, there were 150 homes facing destruction. Intermittently the police would target an Arab community, bringing in bulldozers at the crack of dawn and tearing down the illegal homes. The razing of these buildings, some of them up to four floors high, might mean dozens of extended families, comprising hundreds of people, were made homeless at a stroke.

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