Streets apart: two women’s view of people, not politics

By Khaled Diab

Two books I read back to back do something that few books about the Israel-Palestinian conflict achieve: they look at the ordinary people, with the politics serving as mere backdrop to their human stories.

Since my tour of Israel and Palestine was all about humanising the conflict, I think it would be approporiate to meet the Palestinians and Israelis Suad Amiry and Linda Grant encounter in their highly readable and compassionate books: Sharon and my mother-in-law and The people on the streets: a writers’ view of Israel.

The first of the two books I read was Amiry’s – whom I had planned to meet while in Ramallah, but unfortunately she was delayed in Amman – which contains her regular correspondences from her house arrest in reoccupied Ramallah during Ariel Sharon’s famous offensive in 2002. The version I read also collected together this Palestinian architect’s diaries from the past quarter of a century and chronicles her move from Amman to Ramallah, including the epic journey to get official residency there, her PhD; her first-ever visit to Jaffa, her ancestral home; juicy gossip from the Ramallah grapevine; not to mention the cynicism, humour, compassion, resourcefulness and monotony of everyday life.

Linda Grant, a British Jewish novelist and journalist of a progressive persuasion, long ago came to the conclusion that there was not much she could do to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but decided that there was a human angle to it she was duty bound to highlight. And she does just that in her book, which mainly revolves around life in the colourful Ben Yehuda neighbourhood of Tel Aviv where she stays when she visits the country. But she also goes to Jerusalem and visits the Gaza settlements during the period of evacuation. She even recalls her first visit to Israeli as a starry-eyed teenager in 1967, just after the Six Day War; more interested in meeting boys than in politics and her anti-Zionism of the time being as much a teenage rebellion against her father as against the politics of the Israeli state.

Explaining her motivation for the book, she told me: “As I writer I can expend my energy on something which no writer should stand by and watch – the demonisation and dehumanisation of Israelis and Palestinians by each other and by their cheering sections abroad. That’s why I am such an admirer of your blog and your willingness to enter into dialogue.” In fact, I’ll be meeting up with her and some Palestinians and Israelis in London in a couple of weeks.

The human face of war
Between 29 March and 1 May 2002, there was a general curfew in Ramallah which was lifted for a few hours every few days to allow residents to run essential errands and restock their cupboards and fridges. Unfortunately for Amiry, her husband had been abroad on business and was stuck in Jerusalem for much of the duration, leaving her alone to rescue and live with her 92-year-old mother-in-law.

“Writing was an attempt to alleviate the tension caused and worsened by Sharon and my mother-in-law,” Amiry explains in the foreword.

Another unfortunate coincidence was that Amiry’s mother-in-law lived very near to Al Muqata’a, Arafat’s besieged and destroyed headquarters. The old lady’s electricity and water supply were cut off for all the days before her daughter-in-law could reach her.

After tremblingly coming face-to-face with Israeli tanks and military jeeps one time too many, Amiry decided to jump over the walls of people’s backyards in order to get to her mother-in-law’s house. “Those few hundred metres felt more like a few hundred kilometres,” she confesses.

Despite Amiry’s amateur heroics, her mother-in-law, Umm Salim, was not impressed when she opened the door: “Where, in God’s name, have you been?” she cried out, “I’ve been waiting for you for days.”

The distressed old woman flitted around her apartment fussing over what to pack. “Shall I pack my purple dress?” she asked concerned. Amiry, more concerned about how she was going to get the 92-year-old over all the walls, replied: “Just leave it. We’ll be back soon to pick everything up.”

“That’s what we said in 1948, too, when we left our house in Jaffa, and then it was also May,” recalled the worried old woman. When Amiry heard this, she stood still and began to cry.

A neighbour dissuaded her from trying to get the old woman over the walls. “You have to take the front door,” he told her. And, so, a terrified middle-aged woman and her aged mother-in-law stepped out into a war zone.

“You have to see these tanks,” Umm Salim. “Goodness me, look how big they are!” But the last thing Amiry wanted to do was to stop and admire the size of those killing machines.

Looking from the other side of the fence, Linda Grant visited and spoke to some soldiers. “I wanted to meet some soldiers, to find out what they thought and felt,” she writes. “because one thing I was sure of, they were not metal men, not terminators, manufactured in a Negev factory out of cyber-energised spare tank parts, but flesh and blood.”

She visited a mobile military unit charged with patrolling and guarding the West Bank. “… all around were these soldiers and all I could think of to say, on this first impression, was, ‘Kids! They’re just kids!”

“We peered inside the huts. I thought I was going to see bunks with neat rolls of olive-green bedding, anally retentive army tidiness, gleaming weapons. I was expecting order, and instead there was juvenile chaos.”

Every dog has its days
It took Amiry some seven years of toing and froing before she managed to get her permanent residency – and only after a dramatic confrontation with the city’s Israeli military chief. For her dog, it would prove to be an entirely different affair. “I didn’t know what would be harder: to end my boycott of Doctor Hisham [Ramallah’s only vet, who was sexist and bigoted] or to go to an Israeli vet who probably would have something against Arabs, but not against dogs,” she writes.

In the end, she decided the Israeli would be the better bet and headed off to a nearby settlement. The friendly vet, Dr Tamar, vaccinated Nura and delivered Amiry with a surprise: she gave the dog a Jerusalem ‘passport’. while her mistress could only dream of the human version. “You know what, Nura,” Amiry told her dog. “With this document, you can go to Jerusalem, while I and my car need two different permits.”

But, with some lateral thinking, Amiry put it to good use when she pretended to be the dog's chauffer to get through a checkpoint to Jerusalem without a permit. "As you can see, she is from Jerusalem and it is impossible for her to drive herself," she told the bemused Israeli soldier, who patted the dog on the head and waved the car through.
"All you sometimes need is a sense of humour," Amiry reflected.

Amiry also recounts a memorable incident of non-violent resistance. In September 2002, her entire neighbourhood got up in the dead of night to bang on pots, pans, lampposts, pylons, bins and even water tanks on rooftops to protest their house arrest and annoy the Israeli soldiers who had reoccupied Ramallah. Looking around to observe the madhouse, Amiry noted: "Even if Sharon and his occupation forces never get this message, it was good group therapy."

The trappings of nationhood
Israel was partly built on the Jewish desire to avoid future persecution and the dream of the Jewish people to enjoy the ordinary trappings of nationhood. “The urgent need for a superhero, for a Jewish tough guy who could take on the bad men of Nazi Germany, was rooted inside my father and all of his generation,” Grant observes. She tells of how her father’s most vivid and bewildering memory of his first trip to Israel was that a Jewish soldier was guarding a Jewish prime minister.

In the 1950s, some observers began asking why it was that Jews had gone “like sheep to the slaughter” in World War II. “And many Jews took that question personally… and decided that the Jews’ best defence was going to be not only retaliating, but getting the retaliation in first, to be on the safe side and to make sure the enemy knew what was what,” Grant describes.

And many of the older Israelis she met had moved there for the reason of not wanting to be ‘guests’ in ‘someone else’s’ land. The Russian grandmother of one Israeli she met had decided that “she was never going to live at the beck and call, generosity and mercy of a goy ever again”.

The Palestinians share with Israelis a sense of embattlement and having been betrayed by the entire world. In fact, it surprised me just how many Israelis believe, despite the obvious advantage of their position and their government’s efficient PR machine, the international media is against them. Palestinians, of course, believe the opposite.

Palestinians also possess the earlier Jewish yearning for the ordinary trappings of nationhood – which the Israelis managed, ironically, to achieve but only by, so far, denying it to the Palestinians.

In her book, Amiry expresses the desire for the normal things most of us take for granted. “One of my dreams;” she writes modestly, “is that my husband can come and pick me up from the airport or the Allenby Bridge when I come back home from abroad.”

“I have always been envious of my parents, as well as my grandparents, who lived at a time when travelling between the beautiful cities of the Levant was not such a huge ordeal,” Amiry recounts.

Let's hope one day that kind of freedom and mobility can be enjoyed again in the region.

©Khaled Diab.

A better weapon

Palestinians are beginning to discover the value of non-violent resistance.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/khaled_diab/2007/05/a_better_weapon.html

A peaceful oasis in the desert of war

By Khaled Diab

Jerusalem is the most potent symbol of the chasm dividing the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Just outside the holy city with its unholy politics, a group of dedicated Israel Jews and Palestinians decided they did not need to wait for their leaders to deliver peace for them to live side by side peacefully in a three-decade-old joint community.

When I learnt about the village before I came, through a friend, Tom, I decided it was a 'must see' on my tour. Debby, an American Jew living here who was also part of the METalks forum, has also been meaning to go there, so she tagged along (I should say, gave me a lift). En route, the topic drifted towards co-existence and the separation wall.

Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom (Peace Oasis) is perched on a beautiful hilltop overlooking lush green valleys. It was set up by a colourful Dominican monk called Bruno. This monk started life as an Egyptian Jew in Cairo. In Europe, he not only decided to convert to Christianity but also took a vow of chastity and poverty. He moved to the Holy Land and joined the Latruin monastery. Today, it is home to 50 families, half Jewish and half Palestinian, most of whom are successful professionals working outside the community. The oasis has its own school, hotel, conference facilities, and even a meditation dome overlooking a stunning valley.

Convinced that one of the biggest obstacles to peace was the lack of contact between the two peoples, he persuaded his brethren to give over some land for a village where Israelis and Palestinians could live together as an experiment in co-existence and a model for the future.

Avoid Utopian visions

Rita Bolos, the village's visits director, talks me through the oasis's reality and mission, as well as the situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, in between the chirping phone and the traffic of staff passing through her office as they finalise preparations for a big conference.

"The residents of the oasis came here believing that we are all humans and need to live side by side. We, Arabs and Jews, know it isn't going to be easy living here with this conflict blazing around us," she told me. "We live in equality and respect. We didn't come here to change Jews or for Jews to change Arabs, but to show we can live co-habit and empathise."

The community is not without its tensions, but all issues are debated and resolved democratically. At first, the oasis was under a lot of pressure from sceptics to deliver some sort of harmonious, ideal republic. "Because we were under a lot of pressure from outside, we were in a hurry to create a utopia - to show the outside world that life could be harmonious. But today we are more realistic and taking it one step at a time," said Rayeq (whose manner is as tranquil as his name suggests, despite the suggestion of inner turmoil), the village's ex-mayor, as he painted on the terrace of the only cafe in town.

"Most of us came here convinced that our narratives were the right ones. Now we've learnt to empathise with the other side," he added. "All the difficulties we, the founding generation, had are not visible among the new generation. They get along very well."

State of pragmatism v states of mind

For Rita, their community is living proof that a confederated binational state is not only feasible but desirable. "I think a single state would be richer and more attractive for all its citizens," she explains. "Because I believe in a single state, I see the oasis as a model for this. Other residents who believe in a two-state solution live here to build the bridges necessary to reach peace."

"For it to work, it has to be a completely secular state in which religion is an issue in the private domain," she noted.

Rayeq, who also supports the idea of a bi-national state, explains his vision. "Israel confronts the same multi-ethnic challenge facing a number of other countries," he says, giving Lebanon and Iraq as examples. "We need a system in which all the ethnicities are represented proportionally and justly. Minorities should also have their rights protected by law. The constitution should protect all groups and provide them with fair political representation."

He advocates the idea of separate Israeli and Palestinian parliaments where each group will be able to vote regardless of where they actually live in Israel-Palestine, rather like in Belgium. The Israeli government would run affairs in the Jewish majority areas and the Palestinian government would run things in the Palestinian majority areas and they would manage Jerusalem jointly.

Put down your weapons now

Rita is a dedicated advocate of non-violent Palestinian resistance. "The only losers in violent resistance are the Palestinians themselves. My resistance is to raise my family and give them the best education I can," she said. "If I were a Palestinian leader, I would collect all the weapons and melt them into a massive statue dedicated to peace."

Rayeq agrees. "The Palestinians have been calling for armed struggle for 60 years. This has got them nowhere. This attitude needs to be changed."

Rita also talked at some length about the situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and their Palestinian brethren in the Occupied Territories, the refugee camps there and in other Arab countries. She told me that Israeli Arabs definitely have a better life than the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and they have more freedom than the citizens of many Arab countries. Nevertheless, they are not full citizens and the system piles many subtle and not-so-subtle obstacles in their path, particularly when it comes to education, employment and buying land.

She had harsh words for Israels treatment of Palestinians in the refugee camps and cities of the West Bank and Gaza, but she had equally tough words for the Arab worlds treatment of Palestinians. "Palestinians are oppressed generally throughout the Arab world and not just in Israel," she described, although she acknowledged that other Arabs had also shown generosity - but not enough considering the close emotional ties every Arab feels for the Palestinian cause.

She criticised the refusal of some Arab countries to integrate their Palestinian population with the excuse that this was keeping the Palestinian cause alive. "If they want to keep the Palestinian cause alive, then the Arab League could've created a special status Palestinian passport or write 'of Palestinian origin' on their new local passports," she suggested. "Even if you keep them in refugee camps, keep them there humanely."

She expressed frustration that Lebanon, for instance, often refuses even to let Palestinian refugees out of their camps which have turned into towns in their own rights. She also found it unacceptable that most Palestinian Christians had, she said, received Lebanese citizenship, but not the Muslims.

©Khaled Diab. Text and images.

Why do Egyptians never come here?

Late on Monday evening, Zipora was hosting two good friends whom she described as "very left wing".

They had a long series of questions about politics and society in Egypt for me - and since not many Egyptian pass this way, I felt obliged to answer them all conscientiously. However, the question that seemed to trouble them the most was ‘Why do Egyptians never come here now that we have peace?’

This reminded me of how, in an earlier conversation, Zipora had told me that her family had lived here for seven generations, and she remembered with nostalgia the time when Jews and Arabs lived together peacefully. And her parents and grandparents, were constantly going to Damascus and Beirut on holiday.

Zipora's radical Kibbutz friend - who was not the type to mince her words and was so avant garde that the cavalry could not see her for the dust - seemed a little sad and disappointed by this dashed hope. She recalled fondly President Anwar Sadat's spectacular visit to Jerusalem and she had thought that, after the peace deal, she would get to meet thousands of Egyptians.

I had to spend some time deconstructing Sadat to temper their enthusiasm for the man, for, although he delivered peace, he became something of a despot at home and Egypt was at its corruptest during his watch.

I can sympathise with how lonely it must be for progressive and liberal Israelis who want better ties with their neighbours but find that their neighbours seem only to want a cold peace. I tried to explain that, for many Egyptians, it's nothing personal and a lot of Egyptians profess to wanting better ties with our 'cousins'. However, many ordinary Egyptians feel that schmoozing with Israelis would be a betrayal of the Palestinian cause and say that they refuse to normalise relations on all levels - economic, political and even personal - until a fair peace deal is reached and the Palestinians gain their rights.

I had used an analogy with Amos earlier which I reapplied here. In the morning, he had explained to me that Israel so its function as a safe haven for all Jews to protect them from persecution wherever it may occur in the world, and he gave me some examples of how seriously the government took this pledge. I pointed out to him, that many Arabs share the same sense of solidarity with their 'Arab' brethren in other countries. "If a country were mistreating or persecuting Jews, would you want Israel to continue to have normal relations with that country?" I asked Amos earlier and our friend now.

She nodded earnestly in understanding. "Then, Egyptians won't be coming for a long time," she said, a little sadly. "Perhaps we won't be around long enough to see that day."

Personally, I believe that Egyptians, diaspora Palestinians and other Arabs need to 'normalise' cultural relations with Israelis, reach out the hand of compassion and begin a heartfelt dialogue. We can hold off from economic and political normalisation until there is peace, but each one of us is responsible for giving that process a friendly shove through communication.