Pleasure spiked with pain

Khaled Diab
In a Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song, Anthony Kiedis sings about how he likes pleasure spiked with pain. That crossed my mind as an apt description of this time of year in Israel and Palestine.On Sunday evening and Monday morning is Memorial Day, while on Monday evening and Tuesday morning is Independence Day for the Israelis and the Nakba (Catastrophe) for the Palestinians.

On Monday morning, Amos and I set off to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. “To truly understand Israel,” he told me, “you have to understand the painful history of the Jewish people in the diaspora.”

To get there, we took the train to Tel Aviv. The carriage was packed full of young male and female soldiers, many casually donning their scary-looking M16s. It is a constant source of surprise to me just how militarised this society is. At times, it seems like there are more people in uniform or carrying a gun that the opposite. A sign of this is how routine and unremarkable the question everyone is asked at the security check outside every station, many supermarkets and public area: “Are you carrying a weapon?”

On the train, we talked about this suffering. With Anat, Tzachi and other Israelis and Jews, I have discussed the question of Jewish persecution and suffering. While I am painfully aware of the extent to which Jews have episodically been oppressed and persecuted, with the Holocaust the crowning achievement of anti-Semitism, I feel it is important for some Jews to take a more balanced view of their history. It has not all been ugly – the Jews have had periods of great integration and prosperity since ancient times.

In addition, other migrating peoples, such as the Roma, have also faced persecution. In fact, you don’t have to leave the supposed comfort of your own home to be oppressed, put down and persecuted. I gave the example of Egypt, which lived under foreign rule (which was sometimes benign but often cruel) for more than two millennia, longer than the Jewish diaspora. Or the fact that the Inquisition was targeted at much as the Muslims and Arabs of Spain as it was against the Jews.

The diaspora is a subject which has interested me for some time, so I didn’t learn anything revalationary, except perhaps for the fact that, according to one display, Egypt had 1 million Jews out of a population of 8 million in the first century. It was perhaps befitting that while we were on the final leg of our tour around the museum, the sirens marking the end of Memorial Day sounded.

Amos had wanted to take me to see one of the largest settlements built in the Occupied Territories, but decided that it was too hot and we would go back later.

One people's poison is another's meat

In the afternoon, I caught up on some much-delayed writing, while Tzachi hosted his young boys’ school friends in what turned out to be an exhausting – for parent and offspring alike – inflatable pool party.

On Monday evening, the dark clouds of mourning over Israel’s skies are dispelled and the country is bathed in the moonlight of joy, as people partake of the Independence Day festivities. “The swing from utter misery to euphoria is a hard one to make," Anat admitted to me.

But the dichotomy between the two days is not the only contrast. It is nearly 60 years since the 1948 war and 40 years next month since the West Bank and Gaza were occupied. In Jerusalem, there was to be an alternative Independence Day celebration, which I had been invited to, that also commemorates the ignored aspect of 1948, the Palestinian Nakba, when the Arabs lost the war with the Jews and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were either forced out of their homes or fled out of fear. Yesh Gvul, a group of Israeli refuseniks, were holding their tenth Alternative Beacon Lighting ceremony in Jerusalem that evening.

In the evening, we went to a local Independence Day celebration. The fair, with its charcoaled meats, hustle and bustle, and children carrying flashing toys, reminded me of muwlids in Egypt. The actual ceremony began by commemorating veterans from previous wars with a beacon-lighting ceremony, followed by some singing, a fireworks display, then more singing. I was reassured and heartened to see that kitsch and bad taste knows no borders. Tzachi jokingly warned me not to circulate pictures of this event because it would shatter the illusion that Israel was a slick and well-oiled machine.

Back home, they put the children to bed and Tzachi informed me that he would be playing his favourite computer game, World of Warcraft. Tzachi, who had been calling all my ideas for peace ‘great but Utopic’, shared his own zany, leftfield peace vision with me, a sort of ‘make virtual war, not war’ idea. “Everyone in the Middle East should join an online, multi-player combat computer game. They’re so addictive that people will forget about conflict and become friends.”

©Khaled Diab. Text and images

Don't grieve me alone

Khaled Diab

"The Jewish people have suffered for 2,000 years and now we'll make you suffer with us," was Tzachi's friendly introduction to the coming Memorial Day ceremonies that evening.

And pain, grief and loss were all around and almost tangible on my second day. In the morning, Amos and I went off to a nearby Arab village, Meyser. There, we met with the town's unofficial council of elders, the local senior citizens' club, some of whom were friends with Amos.

We started by chatting about their activities and the importance of sport at their age. They told me how things were gradually getting better over the years for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. But they also complained about how difficult it was for their community to send their children to university because of the cost and some bureaucratic obstructionism. "Many of our children go to Jordan or Europe to study because it is easier," one of them told me.

On the way, Amos had told me about all the left-wing Kibbutzim in the area and how good their ties were with the local Arab population. The subject with the elders soon switched to the sense of grief they still feel at the loss of their land, being as they were from the 1948 generation.

"We miss our confiscated land," one of them asserted. "The memory of our loss is alive in our children," rejoined another.

"My father's land is 250m down the road from here. They told me that you're father isn't here and so it is not yours."

The others went on to list the various legal tricks that they claimed were used to dispossess them of their land.

"Our youngsters need houses but they cannot get permission to build in the village," the oldest of the elders, who had been nodding off in a corner under the apparent weight of his kifeya, suddenly piped in.

They also complained about how they are neither her nor there. "Here we have Israeli identity cards but are not considered full citizens. In the Arab world, we're seen as Israelis. Neither side accepts us," one described.

But the conversation ended on a note of hope.

"The Jews around here are from Argentina and South America and so they have an 'eastern' outlook and it makes it easier for us to live together."

They discussed an experimental council of eight Jews and eight Arabs which went some way towards building bridges between the two communities.

"There are joint Arab-Jewish schools in some villages which is promising for the future generation," one of the old men observed.

©Khaled Diab. Text and images.