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

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СКАЧАТЬ Life was simpler, certainly, but my view has always been that life’s greatest pleasures are simple. Second, it ignored the fact that there are some values more important than being comfortable, such as developing a consciousness about the rights and wrongs of the society one lives in, and an awareness of what each of us can contribute to improving it. In this sense the sophistication of the West increasingly appears to me to be a veneer, concealing the fact that most of us have lost our understanding of where our communities are heading. We are encouraged to believe in the sanctity of the safe little bubbles we inhabit, to the point where we can imagine no other life, no other possibilities.

      My rejection by my Jewish friends was matched by an early suspicion of my motives and my seriousness expressed by a few people in Tamra. An Israeli newspaper took pleasure in quoting a former Arab Knesset member and resident of Tamra, Mohammed Kaanan, when he was asked about me: ‘I want to believe she is an innocent woman working in the interests of the inhabitants here, but if a suspicion arises that she is working for an organisation that is against the Arab population that may harm her. We won’t stand for it.’ I was saddened by Kaanan’s comments, but understood where such distrust springs from: for the first two decades after the state of Israel was born the Arab minority lived under harsh military rule, and today their lives are still controlled by a special department of the Shin Bet security services, which runs a large network of informers inside Arab communities. In the circumstances good intentions from Jews are treated with caution.

      Far more disorientating was the initial reaction of a Tamran woman who would later become one of my closest friends. I met Zeinab, an English teacher at the local high school, on my first trip to Tamra when I was doing research for Mahapach. In her home she greeted me warmly and invited me to sit with her and have coffee while we discussed the discrimination in education. She explained the smaller budgets for Arab schools, the bigger class sizes, the shorter learning days, the shoddy temporary buildings in which Arab children learn and which usually became permanent classrooms, the severe restrictions on what may be taught (restrictions that do not apply to Jewish children), and the rigid control exercised over the appointment of Arab teachers and principals by the security services, which weed out anyone with a known interest in politics or Palestinian history. She added that Jewish schoolchildren receive hidden benefits not afforded Arab pupils, such as double the school allowance if their parents serve in the army. I learned that by law all classrooms must be built with air conditioners, a requirement strictly enforced in the construction of Jewish schools, but usually ignored in Arab ones. And she explained that in most cases heating equipment, computers and books have to be bought by Arab parents because Arab schools lack funds to pay for them.

      Then, after calmly informing me of this discrimination, her eyes turned glittery with suppressed anger and she asked: ‘Why all of a sudden are you so interested in the Arabs? Is it because of 9/11?’ It had not occurred to me that there was a connection between my being here in Tamra and what had occurred in New York. But her accusing tone suggested otherwise: it was as though she was saying, ‘We have been here all these years with the same problems and you Jews have always neglected us. Why the interest now?’ As our meeting came to a close she showed me to the door and said, ‘You are always welcome in an Arab home.’ I had rarely felt less welcome in my life. Although I felt confused by her barely contained rage, I was also impressed by her and wanted to know her better.

      On my subsequent visits to the Galilee I always called on Zeinab, and she was one of the first people I informed of my planned relocation to Tamra. As the day of the move neared I rang her from Tel Aviv. She answered, saying she had been cleaning the house and thinking about me. I asked her what she was thinking. ‘I was wondering whether I will be able to trust you,’ she replied.

      It was at this moment I started to understand the roots of Zeinab’s anger. I realised that she had always been let down by Jews, even those left-wingers who claimed to be on her side, and she had no reason to think I would be any different. The few co-existence groups in Israel operate mainly in the Galilee, often bringing together Jewish and Arab women, but they are almost always run by Jews, and the debate is always controlled and circumscribed by the group’s Jewish members. Off-limits is usually ‘politics’, which in effect means any discussion that touches on the power relationship between Jews and Arabs. These groups almost universally failed to survive the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, precisely because the central concerns of their Arab members had never been addressed. The Jewish participants had not been prepared to make any sacrifices to promote equality, believing that if they did so they would undermine the thing they hold most dear, the eternal validity of a Jewish state. Allowing their Arab neighbours an independent voice was seen as threatening the Jewishness of Israel. I felt Zeinab had set me a test in her own mind, convinced I would betray her like all the other well-intentioned Jews she had known. I began to persuade her otherwise by the very fact of moving to Tamra; she was soon at my door with a bowl of beautiful cacti.

      In those early days in Tamra I also came to understand that my image as a Jew was problematic. Months before my move, in the spring of 2002, Israel had launched a massive invasion of the West Bank, known as Operation Defensive Shield, in which the army reoccupied the towns that had passed to the control of the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo Accords. All summer and winter, families including my own in Tamra sat each night watching disturbing images on Israeli television and the Arab satellite channels of Israeli soldiers ransacking Palestinian homes in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin, or of tanks ploughing down the streets, crushing anything in their way, from cars to electricity pylons. For the people in Tamra, as in other Israeli Arab communities, these were even more dispiriting times than normal. Many had held out the hope that with the arrival of a Palestinian state next door maybe they would finally come to be accepted as equal citizens of the Jewish state, rather than as a potential fifth column. Now they saw that hope unravelling before their eyes.

      There were several disturbing incidents at this time which brought home to me the fact that I had little control over how my image as a Jew was being shaped and distorted by my country, my government and my army. One came when I joined Suad, then aged fifteen, for a walk on the far side of Tamra. We reached a spot where a group of a dozen or so children aged between seven and eleven were playing outside the neighbourhood homes. It is a point of honour for most Arab families that they and their children are immaculately dressed, but these children were wearing ragged clothes. When they saw us, they rushed out shouting to Suad: ‘Is she a Jew, is she a Jew?’ and ‘Jews are dirty, they kill people.’ Looking upset, Suad refused to translate straight away, and called out to them: ‘Stop it!’ She wanted to run, but I told her to stay calm. As we walked away, the children picked up stones from the roadside and threw them in our direction, though not strongly enough to hit us. It was a symbolic demonstration. Shaken, I thought afterwards that I understood their message: ‘We hate Jews, so stay away. They only ever bring trouble with them.’

      On another occasion, when I was out with Samira, we took a shortcut through a school playground in front of a group of transfixed ten-year-olds. A few came running up behind me, shouting, ‘Yehudiya, Yehudiya!’ and throwing handfuls of leaves that I could feel caressing my back.

      When I reflected on these incidents I understood that what most Arab children learn about Jews comes from the media, and what they see is violence, oppression and abuse. The image of the strong, aggressive Israel that had so enthralled me in my early Zionist days I now saw in a very different light. These children—lacking the sophistication to discriminate between the media image of the Jew as an ever-present, menacing soldier and the reality of many kinds of Jews living in different circumstances all around the world—related to me in the only way they knew how. They saw the children of Jenin or Ramallah throwing stones at the Jewish soldiers, and now they were mimicking them.

      This problem of my image as a Jew was illuminated for me on another occasion when I visited the home of Asad Ghanem. As he introduced me to his two young children, they asked: ‘Is your friend who doesn’t speak like us a Jew?’ Asad answered: ‘Yes, but she’s a good Jew.’ I had been reclassified in a way that shocked me: I was not a human being, not an Israeli, and not СКАЧАТЬ