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

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СКАЧАТЬ there was widespread illegal building in Arab communities, which was represented by the Israeli authorities as the act of law-breakers, people who were squatting on state land or who did not want to pay for a building licence. But as Dr Ghanem pointed out, no one chooses to invest their life savings and their dreams in a home that could be razed at any moment. Arab families have been forced to build illegally because in most cases the state refuses to issue them with building permits. And then he delivered the knockout blow: he told me his own beautiful home was illegal and threatened with demolition.

      There can be little doubt that the land on which Dr Ghanem’s home stands has belonged to his family for generations. From the salon, visitors can see the old stone foundations of his grandparents’ house. A few years ago he had decided, with the arrival of his own children, that he and his wife Ahlam could no longer live in his parents’ apartment; they would build a home on the only land the family had left. But the authorities refused him a building permit. Effectively branded criminals by the state—like tens of thousands of Arab families—he and Ahlam had been paying regular heavy fines ever since, as much as £15,000 sterling a time, to ward off demolition. Their lives have become a routine of paying the state to prevent the destruction of everything they hold dear.

      The question that echoed in my mind as I heard Dr Ghanem’s story was: where were he and his family supposed to live? What was the future envisaged for them by the state? I knew well that there were endless housing developments springing up all over Israel, and illegally in the occupied territories, for Jewish families. But where was the next generation of Arab citizens to live? Dr Ghanem and Ahlam are the pillars not only of their own community in Shaab, but of the whole Arab community inside Israel. Nonetheless, the state is forcing them to live with a terrible threat hanging over their heads. They are raising their children in an environment of continual insecurity. Every day when they leave home they do not know whether they will return to find a pile of rubble. They have been made to live in an unstable world which I have no doubt is deeply damaging to them and their children.

      My meeting with Dr Ghanem ended uncomfortably. In a matter-of-fact tone he asked me whether I had made aliya, whether I had claimed my right as a Jew to come to live in a country from which the overwhelming majority of his people had been expelled little more than half a century earlier. These Palestinians still live in refugee camps across the Middle East, refused the opportunity to return to their former homes in Israel. It was the first time I hesitated to answer this question. I understood that my privileges as a Jewish immigrant had come at the expense of his people. Sitting in his home, reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.

      As is my way, I could not live long in ignorance. So I began the long and difficult task of becoming informed. I read and absorbed anything I could find on the position of the Israeli Arabs, questioning the official narrative. My left-wing friends in Tel Aviv, mainly academics and people working in non-profit organisations whom I had met through a fellow inmate of the absorption centre, were quick to reassure me they had Arab friends. I asked who exactly were these friends? Where did they live? What did they talk about together? The reply was always more or less the same. They were on good terms with the owner of an Arab restaurant where the felafel was excellent. Or they got their car fixed in a garage in an Arab village where the prices were low. What did they talk to these ‘friends’ about? When did they meet outside these formal relationships? What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs.

      In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all. I was mortified. The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on.

      When I was stronger, I returned to Tamra. Asad Ghanem’s wife Ahlam invited me to spend the night with them. We ate dinner together, and then she and I sat on the terrace in the warm evening air and talked. We exchanged confidences and intimacies that people rarely share until they have known each other for a long time. I remember thinking as we sat close together that here were an Arab and a Jew getting to know each other at a very deep and personal level, and that this was the way it was supposed to be. Cut off briefly from a society that always privileges Jews, we could feel like equals. I went back to Tel Aviv firm in my resolution that something in my life would have to change. Israel, as it was presently constituted, required me to choose a side: would I carry on with my life in Tel Aviv, turning a blind eye like everyone else to the suffering of the Arab population; or would I do something to highlight the reality and work towards changing it?

      As it happened, my mind was effectively made up for me. I started to see much more clearly the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes of my left-wing friends. Being around them became unbearably suffocating. Invited in the winter of 2001 by Asad to teach English to Arab professionals at his Ibn Khaldun Association in Tamra, I had little hesitation in agreeing to take up the position. The Abu Hayjas, whom I knew through my work for Mahapach, offered to rent me the empty top-floor flat in their home, on the hillside overlooking the town’s central mosque.

      I knew breaking away from the Jewish collective would be traumatic, but I could not know how profoundly I would alienate those I thought I was close to. Almost overnight I lost my Jewish friends. Individualism is highly prized in many societies, but not in Israel, where the instinct of the herd prevails. Doubtless the reasons can be found in Jewish history, in the centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. There is an attitude of you’re either with us or against us. No one should step outside the consensus, or question it, because this is seen as weakening the group. But human beings are immeasurably more important to me than labels or institutions. By choosing to live as a Jew in a town of Muslims I hoped I could show that the fear that divides us is unrealistic. It is based on ignorance, an ignorance that the state of Israel tries to encourage among its Jewish citizens to keep them apart from their Arab neighbours. I know Jews who have lived on a left-wing kibbutz near Tamra, yet have never ventured into the largest Arab community in their area.

      I have pondered long and hard why I was able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with their state and their people, right or wrong. At the core of modern Jewish identity is the idea of victimhood, shaped by our history of persecution and the singular outrage of the Holocaust. The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated. Victimhood has become something akin to a cult among Jews, even among the most successful in Europe and America. It is developed as part of the Jewish nationalist ideology of Zionism, creating an ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ world for most Jews: they sincerely and incontrovertibly believe that Israel, a nation with one of the strongest armies in the world, backed by the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is in imminent danger of annihilation either from its Arab neighbours or from the remnants of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories.

       The improbability of this scenario, however, can safely be ignored by most Jews as long as suicide bombers wreak intermittent devastation on crowded buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. No one can say I do not understand the suffering inflicted on families by these attacks. One day I was waiting at Ben-Gurion airport for a flight to the UK when a good friend called, her voice barely audible, to tell me that her son, a serving soldier, had been horrifically injured by a suicide bomber. I had introduced this young man to my daughter Tanya the previous summer, and the two had formed a deep bond. Since then he has undergone more than thirty-five operations to try to repair the damage done to his body. His father has suffered eight heart attacks. All their expectations about their life were destroyed in an instant. That suicide bombing has torn apart the lives of my friends as easily as a piece of paper can be ripped.

      But while I understand that these attacks can be terribly destruc-fitive of Israelis’ lives and their sense of their own security, they can easily become an excuse not to confront the reality of what is taking СКАЧАТЬ