The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. Susan Nathan
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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 even a Jew, but a ‘good Jew’. I came to realise that for most Arab children living in Israel their first lesson—something they learn from watching what happens in Jenin, Nablus, Hebron or Gaza—is that Jews are bad. They have to be taught that not all Jews kill and destroy. This is something the older children understand: they have learned it as part of their survival training for later life, when they will have to venture into a society which will mostly treat them as an enemy. When they are old enough to leave the safety of Tamra, they must know when to conceal their Arabness and keep their mouths shut.
When I think of those children throwing stones at me, I don’t get angry with them but with all those Jews who tell me that the Palestinians living inside Israel are unaffected by the occupation, that it has nothing to do with them. They forget or choose to ignore the fact that, although Palestinian citizens of Israel are separated from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by the reality that one has citizenship and the other does not,* the bonds of their shared nationality—the fact that they are all Palestinians—are far stronger. Many Palestinian citizens, whether living in Tamra, Nazareth or Haifa, have family living under occupation in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, or in extreme poverty in Lebanon and Syria. When they see a child being shot in Jenin or Nablus, it could be a cousin or a nephew. Even progressive Jews appear deeply blocked in understanding this reality. When I explained the complex identity problems faced by Israeli Arabs to a left-wing friend from Tel Aviv who belongs to Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which vehemently opposes the occupation, he told me simply: ‘But they live in the state of Israel. The occupation doesn’t touch them.’
How wrong he is was proved one evening while I was still smarting from the stone-throwing incident. I was sitting in my home with a group of twelve Arab friends watching a video of Mohammed Bakri’s controversial documentary film Jenin Jenin, originally banned in Israel and a powerful record of the traumatic effects on Jenin’s inhabitants of the violent invasion by Israel of the West Bank city in the spring of 2002. It was a disturbing moment at many levels. Sitting there as the only Jew, I was aware that I had to choose where I stood in this battle between two peoples, and that I had to be committed to the cause of justice and humanity. I watched the film through my Arab friends’ eyes, learning exactly how they see us Jews as occupiers and oppressors. It made me question very deeply how I had been able to identify with a country that could send its child soldiers to behave in this fashion.
The film prompted in me a recollection of a conversation I had had on one of my increasingly rare and strained visits to my religious cousins, Jeffrey and Doreen, in Ashdod shortly after Operation Defensive Shield. Their granddaughter’s husband, a medic in the reserves, had been sent to the Jenin area, and Doreen was apoplectic at the media suggestions that there had been a massacre there. ‘Good Jewish boys who serve in the Israel Defence Forces like our Ofer don’t harm people,’ she asserted confidently. And then, as if providing the proof, she told me that Ofer had even been asked by his commanders to give medical assistance to a Palestinian woman who was having a heart attack during the invasion. This level of naïety and self-satisfaction I found profoundly unsettling. I told her: ‘The reality is that no one can know what their children get up to in a war. Soldiers carry secrets they will never divulge to their families.’
Although I am sure there are soldiers who attempt to hold onto their humanist values while in uniform, I am also convinced that the inherent immorality of enforcing an occupation makes good intentions