The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. Susan Nathan
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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 error in this thinking. First, I never saw Tamra as more primitive. 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