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

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СКАЧАТЬ simply reinforce in a very negative fashion this sense of Jewish victimhood. I understand this well. Like most Jews, I was brought up to see myself as a victim too: in a collective sense, as a Jew raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and in an individual sense, as a Jew growing up in a post-war Britain tinged with anti-Semitism.

      I was born in January 1949 into the grey, tired world of Britain under rationing. My family in Grays, Essex, appeared to me even at a very young age to be unlike those around me: there were no grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. My father’s family were thousands of miles away in South Africa, and my mother’s immediate family were all dead, victims of the First World War, tuberculosis and bad luck. There were only me and my parents. But my isolation did not end there. My parents, preoccupied with the heavy duties of running a successful medical practice, abandoned me to the care of the cleaning lady. I was banned from playing with the local ‘rough’ children, who arrived with the building of a council estate near our home, and instead consoled myself with games with our Golden Retriever dog, Laddie, and my rubber doll, Pandora, in the back garden.

      My only early recollection of true friendship is with a black servant called Inyoni who looked after me—effectively as a substitute mother—when I was two years old, when my father tried a brief experiment in returning to South Africa. It did not last long: after spending six months just outside Cape Town we headed back to Britain. But Inyoni is a vivid feature in all my memories of that period in South Africa, much more so than my grandparents, whom I can barely recall. In that half-year I formed a deep attachment to him. He would teach me to strap Pandora to my back and carry her the way the local black women carried their babies. (Back in Essex I would see other little girls in the street holding their dolls in their arms and tell them off, showing them how to do it properly.) I would also spend hours squatting with Inyoni on the floor in his servant quarters at the back of the house as he prepared the vegetables. At other times we would play tea-party games on the lawn with Pandora. After my family left South Africa in 1952 I felt the loss of Inyoni deeply.

      I was a sickly child, suffering repeated bouts of severe sinusitis which served only to provoke anger and resentment in my father, whose repeated interventions with drugs and operations failed to improve my condition. In total contrast to the way he treated his patients, he had no sympathy for my suffering and would simply tell me to get a grip on myself. I suppose to a highly respected doctor my recurrent illnesses must have seemed like a reproof: in the very heart of his family was a sick child he was powerless to heal. This failure was compounded, in his eyes, by my lack of success at school by any of the yardsticks he held dear. The many days I missed from school, and his overbearing demands, took their toll on my academic performance. I was constantly being dragged off to teacher-parent meetings to discuss my poor results. Eventually, at the age of seven I was packed off to the first of my boarding schools, cut off from contact with my parents apart from one weekend out of every three. Even when I returned home my father was usually too busy with patients to spend time with me.

      Before leaving for boarding school, during the long periods when I was sick at home my father would lock me in my room with what he considered educational material. He would give me a National Geographic magazine to read, or throw me a pile of postcards he had been sent from around the world and demand that I find the country or city they had been posted from in an atlas. Sometimes he would want me to draw the outline of the country too. I would be beaten if I could not answer his questions on his return. By the age of six I was an expert at finding foreign places.

      There were compensations in this harsh regime, trapped in the small world of my bedroom, deprived of companions. The biggest was the National Geographic itself, which opened up another, far more exciting, world to me. In my head I had incredible adventures in places most British children had never heard of. Remote South American hill tribes became my friends, as did the pygmies of the Congo. They never seemed any stranger to me, maybe less so, than the children at school. My favourite place was the Himalayas, somewhere that looked awe-inspiring and magnificent; I would think that if only I could climb to the very top I would be able to see the whole world. I felt a huge desire to go to these places and experience them for myself.

      One of the features in the National Geographic that fascinated me most was about India. I was attracted to the pictures of that country, as I was to those of Africa, because of the bright colours, the beauty of the landscapes, the different way of life and the great variety of groups living within one subcontinent. What fascinated me most about India was the caste system, and in particular the group classified as the lowest caste: the Untouchables. I would study the pictures that accompanied the article, and then read the copy that explained that the Untouchables were supposed to be the ugliest, dirtiest, most stupid Indians, and had to live on the outskirts of the towns. I would trace my fingers first around the faces of the Untouchables and then around those of the highest caste, the Brahmans, flicking backwards and forwards between the pictures. But however long I looked at them, I could not see where the difference lay. Why were the Untouchables supposed to be uglier? I could not understand how you could designate one group as dirtier or less worthy than another.

      Although I have always rejected this fear of the Other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. At the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand. At an early stage of the Aids crisis I trained to be a therapist at Great Ormond Street hospital in London. In the late 1980s, when without the slightest shred of scientific evidence there were stories all over the British media warning that Aids was highly contagious, I was working at the London Lighthouse Project with infected women and children, and with the partners of infected people. At the Project we tried to challenge people’s prejudices by bringing Aids into the community: we even established a commercial restaurant, where the staff were all Aidsor HIV-infected, so people could see that they were not going to catch the disease simply by eating there.

      Nonetheless, some evenings I would attend social functions with my husband Michael, and would wait for the moment when another guest would ask what I did. My reply—that I was an HIV/Aids counsellor—always elicited the same response: overwhelmed with revulsion, the other person would take a step back. There was a double disgust: the fear that I might be carrying that terrible disease, and also the incomprehension that a nice, presentable middle-class woman would be doing a ‘dirty’ job like mine. It was as though they thought they were shaking the hand of a Brahman only to discover that they had been tricked into making contact with an Untouchable.

      Moving to Tamra seemed to cause equivalent offence to my former Jewish friends. While Israeli Jews looked at the Palestinian uprising and responded by choosing to disengage—either by building a wall to separate themselves from the occupied population their army rules over or, inside Israel, by boycotting Arab areas, refusing to buy felafel or get their cars fixed in Arab garages—I elected to put myself right in the middle of the problem. To join the Untouchables. The response of my friends, like that of the well-heeled party crowd in London, was to withdraw in revulsion. Now that I am outside the Jewish collective, outside the herd, I must be treated like the enemy, as if I have committed a crime of treason or incitement.

      Although the decision to leave Tel Aviv and cross the ethnic divide seemed the natural reaction to my new understanding of what was happening inside Israel, it was never easy. There were days when I felt tearful and isolated. I cried not out of fear but out of a terrible sense of how much my country was failing not just its Arab citizens but also its Jewish ones, and how catastrophically fragmented it was growing. It dawned on me at an early stage that I had to be 100 per cent committed to my new course. My Jewish friends chose to dismiss my decision as a silly passing episode, and even some of my new friends in Tamra appeared to doubt whether I could withstand the pressures. Hassan’s son Khalil said to me in the first few days: ‘After three months you’ll go back. You won’t be able to stand it here without cinemas at the end of the road or elegant restaurants.’

      Neither side could understand why anyone would choose a primitive life over a sophisticated one. There was a double СКАЧАТЬ