From Jaffa to Jerusalem on Israel’s 60th
May 2008
Abu Hassan
It’s a late weekday morning and Abu Hassan’s humus joint is hopping. This has become a veritable landmark here in Jaffa, on the southern edges of Tel Aviv. Most tourists are familiar with the restaurants, galleries and cobblestone streets of Jaffa’s old quarter, but the pulse of life in this multiethnic town beats elsewhere - in the commercial and residential areas around Yefet and Jerusalem boulevards. Further west, along the seashore lies the largely Arab Ajami neighborhood, where stately old Arab mansions and dilapidated apartments share majestic views of the Mediterranean. Abu Hassan symbolizes Israeli cosmopolitanism at its best. My interlocutor, T., a prominent Arab activist, sits under a Hebrew sign reading “Sabbath and holidays.” The sign on the pillar behind me reads, in Arabic, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” Hebrew and Arabic mix freely in the air, the animated conversation of dozens of hungry patrons shattered by the occasional shouts of the waiter, his booming voice yelling orders across the room to the kitchen. He’d have made a good stock broker, I think to myself. “People in this country have it backwards,” opines T. “In just 60 years Israel has become an industrialized society, a world technology leader and a regional superpower. Quite an achievement when you consider it. But the Jews still think and act like they’re a minority. The Arabs, on the other hand, are a minority, but they think they’re the majority.” His last point, presumably, refers to the tendency on the part of Israeli Arabs or, as they prefer to be called, Palestinian Israelis, to see the Jewish state as some temporary anomaly, an historic injustice waiting to be undone. T is a politically savvy figure with a strong sense of Palestinian identity. His anger is evident when he discusses the rapid gentrification of Ajami, with wealthy Jewish housing developments displacing the community’s 3,000 or so Arabs, remnants of a Palestinian population ten times as large who lived here prior to Israel’s war of independence. Independence, of course, is my term. The Arabs call it the Naqba, the catastrophe. Conventional academic wisdom today holds that Israel actually has no history, only “narratives” – two mutually exclusive ones – about what happened here, how and why. A guy walks in off the street looking for a handout. From his gait and his gaze, he’s obviously high on drugs. His tzizith, the ceremonial fringes on his garment, hang down to his knees. His yarmulke boasts a slogan favored by the Lubavitcher Hassidim, but his visage and clean shaven face betray Sephardic features. Most observant Jews would never wander into an unkosher restaurant. But this is Jaffa. Expect the unexpected. And so, stuffed to the gills with Humus, I head back to Jerusalem.
On a Silver Platter
The children gathering in the school auditorium all wear white shirts. A third grader begins the ceremony with a reading from one of Israel’s great national poets, Natan Alterman, “a country is not given on a silver platter.” Another one lights a memorial candle. At 11:00 AM the air raid siren sounds off. Parents close their eyes in silent prayer. The children do their best to stand at attention. A standard ceremony like hundreds of others in schools and community centers around the country, commemorating the 22,000 soldiers who have lost their lives defending the Jewish State. But this is not any ordinary school. It is Jerusalem’s only integrated, bi-lingual school, where Jews and Arabs study and play together, both groups learning the other’s language and culture. Each class has an Arab and a Jewish teacher. The school has an Arab and a Jewish principal. And nothing is more complicated at the bilingual school than Memorial Day, a time of national mourning followed immediately by Independence Day, a national holiday of celebration. For Jews that is. For Arabs, it is a time of confusion. In their view the soldiers mourned by Jews have established and maintained an alien state on Palestinian soil. The school’s Arab children are not present at the memorial service. Instead, they work on an art project which they present in the school courtyard after the ceremony, whereupon Jews and Arabs join together in a song of peace. I peruse the drawings with great curiosity, noting how they change as the children grow older. Palestinian flags are ubiquitous, Israeli flags rare. The smaller kids draw more innocent sketches. One stick figure says in Arabic “I am sad when I hear that Jews died.” The 8th graders are much more politically conscious. One sketch shows a map of Palestine in place of Israel, bound by a metal chain and lock. A small key figures nearby. The caption reads, “We will return.” Another shows a large missile emblazoned with the word Palestine taking off in the direction of a small bird representing Israel. Somewhat chilling at a time when Hamas rockets have turned Sderot into a ghost town, and a year and a half after Hezbollah’s missile barrage against northern Israel. Finally, I notice a sketch of an Israeli flag. It is surrounded by barbed wire and tanks. From what I can tell, the cannons are pointed inward. The motif of the key is ubiquitous. It is the touchstone of Palestinian identity, both on the West Bank and in Israel proper. For many politically conscious Arabs, coexistence is indeed desirable, but the political history of the last 60 years is a mere blip on the screen. Five million Palestinians will ultimately return to homes and communities that ceased to exist before their parents were born. The students are gracious in showing me their work. They translate the captions for me into flawless Hebrew. One school. Two narratives.
Future Vision
A quarter page ad in last Friday’s edition of the Haaretz newspaper touts the traditional perspective of the Israeli right. The Palestinians, it explains, are a “fiction,” invented by the Arab League in 1964 to delegitimate Israel. “The existence of an Arab state called Palestine has never been historically documented.” Forfeiting territory to the Arabs rewards aggression. Etc., etc. There was, indeed, a time when Israel officially took such positions. As late as the 1970’s Golda Meir remarked that there are no Palestinians or, that if there are, she is one of them, since she still has an identity card issued by British authorities during the Palestine mandate. Of course, even then she was opposed by the Secretary-General of her own Labor Party who called for a Palestinian State. Theodore Herzl characterized Israel as a “land without a people for a people without a land.” Zionism, however disabused itself of Herzl’s error as soon as Jewish colonies started emerging in the 19th century. By 1947, Ben Gurion had led the leadership of the yishuv (the pre-independence Jewish community) to accept the partition of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Golda Meir notwithstanding, it was Menahem Begin, right wing champion of the West Bank settlement movement, who officially recognized the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination when he signed the Camp David accords. And since the signing of the Oslo agreement, almost the entire political spectrum in Israel has come to recognize that a Palestinian state of some sort will be part of any peace settlement. Most importantly, however, no one but the extreme political fringes in Israel would today deny the existence of a Palestinian people. The country’s political coming of age in 1977 following the decimation of Labor’s long standing political hegemony brought about two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a pro-active peace movement dedicated to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine; on the other hand, an energetic settler movement, fed by clericalist annexationist fantasies, with proto-fascist and racist elements on its fringe. Both sides, however, understood that Zionism was in conflict with another people. The only question was what to do about it.
The political coming of age of Israel’s Arab communities has taken them in another direction. Since 1948 they have witnessed wave after wave of Jewish immigrants settled in kibbutzim, towns and cities, often in houses once owned by Arab refugees or on lands which formerly hosted Palestinian villages, denuded of their inhabitants in the “naqba.” They, meanwhile, the ones who stayed behind, faced systematic discrimination, despite the country’s legal guarantees of equal rights under the law. In the continued state of war that has existed between Israel and the Arab world, few challenged the culture of security that justified this situation. But recent years have witnessed a sea change. An entire generation of Israeli Arabs, eagerly pursuing educational advancement in Israeli universities and cognizant of the intifada of Palestinians in the occupied territories, have become politically radicalized. Their representatives use the Israeli parliament as a forum to express solidarity with the Hamas and Hezbollah. They have developed independent political institutions of Arab municipal and public officials, using the Israeli court system to challenge discriminatory practices and appealing to Europe to recognize their plight as an oppressed minority. In a landmark document published in 2006 the political leadership of Israel’s Arabs put forward a comprehensive statement of the Arab perspective, one that leaves no room for Israel as we know it today. The “Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” not only demands that equality of rights for Israeli Arabs be guaranteed in the fields of housing, employment, education and development. It insists, time after time, that the very idea of a Jewish state is inconsistent with democracy and equality.
Future Vision is at its best when analyzing the practical impediments to Arab equality in Israel. It is at its worst when attempting to “narrate” modern Jewish history: “Israel is the product of colonialist activity initiated by the Jewish-Zionist elites in Europe and the West, was established with the assistance of colonialist states, and was strengthened in the shadow of increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine” after WWII. Is this the whole story of 120 years of Zionism, I am tempted to ask? Of the emergence of a mass movement of national rebirth in every Jewish population center in Europe in the late 19th century? Of the transformation of Israel - in just a few generations - from a geographical backwater to a modern state, soon to be home to a majority of world Jewry? Of the emergence of Hebrew as the language of arts, science, literature, business, sports, love and crime for an entire nation? Of the development of universities, political institutions, economic infrastructures, cities, towns and rural settlements? Of the absorption and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, tripling the country’s population in its first 20 years, followed by another million from Russia and Ethiopia in its last 20? Of a Jewish national revolt against British colonialism? All just a plot hatched by Jewish Zionist elites in Europe?
As Independence Day draws to a close, I visit an Arab friend in East Jerusalem. Its late afternoon and we sprawl out on the furniture in his living room, sharing a water pipe loaded with cherry scented tobacco. M, a colleague I used to work with at a human rights organization, has long been involved in Jewish Arab encounter meetings. I exhale a series of fragrant smoke rings into the air, following each one until it dissipates. No one makes a nargilla like M. I pass him the pipe and resume a political discussion that was briefly interrupted by the lighting of the nargilla. “Why,” I ask him, “is Palestinian nationalism predicated on the denial of Jewish national identity? After all, Zionism has put aside its denial of Palestinian identity, why can’t Palestinians accept ours?” M. let’s out a long and narrow stream of smoke. “Jewish national identity?” he responds. “Judaism is just a religion.”
St. George and St. Andrew
M’s two small children enter the room bearing trays of sweets and fruit. They’re fascinated by the Jew in their salon. I’m fascinated by their manners. Jewish children tend to be outgoing and rambunctious. I try out the few sentences in Arabic I know. The boy responds bashfully. The girl giggles at my grammatical errors. M’s wife, a social worker with the Jerusalem municipality, joins us in the salon. She’s come for a smoke but now she’s caught up in the conversation. “If Israel were to guarantee full equality and take pro-active measures to eradicate discrimination,” I ask her, “would you accept it as a Jewish State?” “I don’t deal in hypotheticals” is her reply. “But we all do,” I rejoin. “What is the human rights movement about if not a hypothetical future?” She removes a hot coal from a brass container and places it in the bowl of the water pipe. “Look,” she says. “Your symbols are not my symbols. I cannot identify with your flag. I cannot sing your national anthem - ‘deep in the heart, a Jewish soul yearns.’ A Jewish state is incompatible with democracy. It’s an oxymoron.”
“There’s a country,” I tell her, “where the head of state is also the head of the national church, and the national flag consists of the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew. And still, the country’s 300,000 Jews consider themselves full and equal citizens.” “Nu,” she responds, eager to get to the point. “I’m talking about England,” I explain. She takes another draw from the pipe. “OK, forget about the Jews,” I continue. “Do you, as a Moslem, consider England to be a racist state because you’ll never be allowed to apply for the job of monarch?” “England is not the issue,” M. chimes in. “Indeed not,” I continue. “The national symbols of every democracy in northern Europe are Christian. The constitution of Ireland begins "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority…Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ.” “Don’t compare Europe and Palestine,” he says. Here we are the natives. The Jews are the guests.“ Now I understand what T. meant when he said that Arabs think they are the majority.
Bab El Wad
"Fix It Again, Tony.” That’s what they say FIAT stands for. Well, that’s certainly what my Fiat stands for. Independence Day has come and gone and I’m now on my way to a meeting in Tel Aviv. Was on my way, I should say, before my clutch burned out. Something like this happens every few months. So now I’m standing on the edge of the highway, waiting for a tow truck, taking in the fumes of the rush hour traffic. Israeli flags still line the sides of the road leading to and from Jerusalem. On a cliff up ahead stands the “Kastel,” a fortress in an abandoned Palestinian village that saw heavy fighting during the war of Independence. Further down the road, in the direction of Bab el Wad, dozens of flag draped hulks of rusted armor line the hillsides. This is the Jerusalem “corridor,” a narrow strip of land linking Jerusalem with the coastal plane, bounded on two sides by Arab controlled territory prior to 1967. In 1948 Arab forces besieged the Jewish population of the capital. The Palmach (pre-state Jewish army) sent armored columns - at one point under the command of Yitzhak Rabin - to break the siege. Arab irregulars darted out of villages overlooking the road, attacking and looting the convoys, of which the tin skeletons bear evidence. By the time the armistice agreement was signed in 1949, many of those villages - including Bet Mahsir, Saris, Susin and Qoloniyeh - no longer existed, though the casual hiker can easily detect their remains.
The Palestinian narrative has Jewish forces systematically driving 400 villages into exile with the birth of the Israeli state. The Jewish narrative has a small community of 600,000 Jews successfully fending off and invasion by 5 Arab armies. The Palestinian narrative has Jewish colonialists expropriating an Arab country. The Jewish narrative has the Arabs attempting to crush, by force of arms, a UN sanctioned political arrangement that would have established a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. The truth, as always, contains elements of both. Some 60 or 70% of the prewar Arab population lost their homes in the territories that became Israel. 100% of an albeit smaller Jewish population fled their communities in the territory that came under Arab control. These include the settlements of Gush Etzion and the Jewish quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. It was a bitter sectarian struggle, where battle lines ran through towns, roads become the front lines, and an Arab leadership openly declaring that this was a winner-take-all fight. Such, in any event, is my narration of a complicated story. But I, too, have an axe to grind. The flags overhead are my flags, their symbols are my symbols, and the achievement that is the State of Israel fills my life with meaning.
In a few days I will join a tour, organized by the bilingual school, of an abandoned Arab village. It is their way of commemorating the naqbe. I seek to understand, to feel the pain and anger of those whose historical memory clings to every stone and every hilltop, inspiring even school children with the vision of a mass return. But I know that my empathy will ultimately arrive at a chasm that cannot be crossed. My grandfather came from a forlorn Byelorussian village called Drohytchen. A Yiddish language memorial book documents 500 years of Jewish life in the sthetl that came to a violent denouement in 1942. The book’s yellowing pages contain pictures of dozens of men, women and children - some of them bearing my family name - who were gunned down into a tank trench by German einzatzgruppen. Drohytchyen is my lost village, but just the thought of returning there makes me want to spit. I think of my Drohytchener Yidden, their Yiddish language, their Hebrew cultural schools, their Jewish newspapers and political parties. My Drohytchen is here and now. On the road to Tel Aviv, near Bab el Wad.
Theodore Herzl envisioned Israel as a cooperative society where Arabs and Jews live in harmony, enjoying the bourgeois pleasures of opera and theatre. His book Altneuland did, indeed, foresee air-conditioning, but he definitely missed the mark on the issue of coexistence. Palestinian national identity is predicated on the denial of my own, and nothing can bridge that gap. Perhaps, however, Arabs and Jews can each live with their own narratives, sharing the same country, living by the rules of a parliamentary democracy, and struggling to carve out an ever widening joint civic space where questions of identity and history weigh less heavily. They will still live with their justified anger and we with our justified fears, but maybe, one day, the harmony of every day life will become strong enough to withstand the dissonances of history
