The Forgotten People: life through the eyes of Israel’s Arab minority
Written in April 2013.
O n a balmy early-summer morning in the port city of Jaffa, Irene Nasser fidgets with her fork, gently prodding the milky skin of an egg-yolk resting on top of her shakshuka — a traditional North African dish brought to Israel by Jewish immigrants from Tunisia and Morocco in the early 1950s. On the surface, Irene is a mystery. Her mop of wavy, sun-silhouetted hair, pensive dark eyes, black tank top, black jeans and black motorcycle boots all shroud her origins in monochromatic ambiguity. In this country (or two or three, depending on who you ask) beset by a century of conflict between Jews and Arabs, it is not always easy to distinguish what common conviction would have you believe are two entirely distinct people. Both run the spectrum of ethnic physiognomy, the broad palette of skin tones and eye colors, of religiosity and wealth, some of which, often enough, overlap.
Our conversation takes place in English, but Irene also speaks Hebrew and Arabic with equal fluency. Even our locale, the Old City of Jaffa with its narrow cobblestone streets and angular buildings arcing out into the open expanse of the Mediterranean, offers no clues. Almost seamlessly integrated from the south into Israel’s cultural and economic capital, Tel Aviv, over the years Israel’s Jewish residents have steadily taken over this once predominantly Palestinian space. Today, Jaffa is a mixed city and a wellspring of cultural activity, of hip bars and restaurants, art galleries and shops, as well as poverty-stricken neighborhoods afflicted by drugs and violent crime.
In places of hostility and war, identity tends to develop rigid confines. Yet Irene is one of those rarities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a child of mixed birth perpetually trapped between rival notions of “the Other.” Her Palestinian-Muslim father met her Israeli-Jewish mother while the two were theatre students at Hebrew University in Jerusalem during the 1970s. Their first meeting was serendipitous in that the theatre program’s director had asked the two of them to go on stage and act like “ducks in love.” In 1977, they wed in London because Israel does not allow civil marriages — making it impossible for citizens of different religious backgrounds to marry in the state. Irene’s Jewish grandfather summarily disowned his daughter for marrying a Palestinian, sitting shiva or mourning for an immediate relative, as if his daughter had died. It was not until twenty-two years later, as he was on his own deathbed, that Irene’s mother, Hannah, would see her father again.
“People are talking,” were his first words to her.
In the early years of their marriage the couple moved around frequently, finding it difficult to rent apartments. Irene’s father, Riad, avoided being on the lease. His Arabic name dramatically limited their options because of discrimination in the hotly contested city of Jerusalem. Eventually, they settled in his hometown of Tira where they were more accepted, but life remained challenging. When she was twelve years old, Irene’s parents took her and her older brother to live in the United States in order to offer them a life free from the anxiety of growing up in a mixed household in Israel. When Irene was seventeen she returned on her own to the only place she ever felt was home. For years she would slip seamlessly between both communities without ever enjoying full acceptance in either one.
“I think most of my life there has always been a sense of feeling rejected,” she says, her words slow and measured. “I even went through cycles of hating my parents for getting married and for putting me in this position. It was more tough when I went through phases of being confused — not confused about my identity — but confused about categorizing it and how I spoke about it. Is it tough now? I think sometimes maybe I feel a sense of shame.”
While Irene’s personal struggle with identity brings into sharp focus what it means to be both Arab and Jewish in a society where national identity means everything, there are over a million and a half Palestinians struggling with what it means to be both Palestinian and Israeli. In fact, nearly twenty percent of Israel’s population is Palestinian Arab — Muslims, Christians, Druze and others — a serious glitch in the idea of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. In 1948, around 750,000 Palestinians were exiled during the war that would birth the State of Israel. Some 160,000 Palestinians, however, managed to stay put and became citizens in a country that was no longer theirs. They are the forgotten people, who both societies and the rest of the world conveniently ignored for much of the past sixty years. From Israel’s standpoint, they are both a demographic threat and an unwanted minority that complicates the national project of Zionism. For other Palestinians and much of the Arab world, their naturalization in Israel was an act of betrayal, akin to a daughter who had eloped and was now living with the enemy. Caught in the middle is a community whose future hinges on the resolution of a conflict that has no end in sight.
Over the six decades since the saga of Israel’s Palestinian minority began, much has changed in their daily lives and circumstances. In 1948, the Palestinian upper-class and urban intelligentsia had, by and large, been part of the exodus of refugees that was now living outside the borders of the new Israeli state and those who remained were mainly the poorer and less sophisticated villagers and farmers. From the beginning they were viewed suspiciously and were an easy target for the new government, especially in the tense atmosphere following Israel’s founding, when the infant state was trying to survive and consolidate its position. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, considered the remaining Arabs a potential fifth column and his government instituted a system of control that would prevent the emergence of a strong, united minority.
Between 1948 and 1966, the Arabs in Israel were placed under a system of military administration separate from the civil government established for Israel’s Jewish citizens. The community was bound to a regime of travel restrictions that kept them isolated in their individual towns and villages. By the early 1950’s, the government had enacted a series of laws used to seize the Arabs’ vast landholdings and property. In only a few short years the Israeli government would expropriate some 750,000 acres of land owned by refugees and Arab citizens alike and make them available for Jewish-use only, including more than 25,000 homes in urban areas, 35,000 acres of vineyards and citrus fields, over 10,000 shops, businesses and stores, as well as moveable property such as furniture, art, books, bank deposits and stock shares — an issue that is still at the heart of grievances towards the state. Most importantly, through these early policies Israel succeeded in creating a largely destitute, dependent and acquiescent minority that has never posed any collective challenge to Jewish control of the State — or at least effectively opposed the discriminatory policies leveled against them.
A close examination of the Palestinian-Arab community reveals an Israeli society that is deeply divided and a democracy that is not as vibrant as it appears from afar — despite the community’s active participation in elections. Ethnic affiliation governs a person’s acceptance and full and equal participation in political, social, economic and cultural life. Israel was established to provide a national home for the Jewish people, and for the Jewish people alone. This underlying spirit informs all aspects of life and leaves the Arab minority excluded from the rights and privileges afforded to their Jewish peers. Loyalty to this Jewish state is both their requirement and their paradox. It is a paralyzing complexity that most wish to never think about, preferring a form of voluntary amnesia in order to make life possible.
Within the Arab community there is a cacophony of perspectives and ways of negotiating the Kafkaesque circumstances in which they live. Broadly, they fall into three categories. There are those whose desire to belong to Israeli society, and not feel like outsiders in their own country, encourages their assimilation. To fulfill that sense of belonging they are willing to shed aspects of their identity that the majority insists upon, sometimes molding themselves into the Israeli conception of Aravit Tov, the Good Arab: one who doesn’t complain about prejudice or display any sense of nationalist identity; a non-threatening, passive and palatable citizen. On the opposite end of the spectrum are those who reject Israel entirely and actively seek a future free of Zionism. They want a state that is fully equal for all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, insisting that Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic. The vast majority, however, fall somewhere in the middle and are simply concerned with their own survival and economic well-being, resigned to the difficult situation to which they have been fated.
Renowned Israeli-Jewish sociologist Sammy Smooha explains the delicate balance between the Jewish majority and Arab minority in terms of “red lines” that keep the entire edifice intact.
“There is a system built between Arabs and Jews in Israel — which is not fair to the Arabs, I am saying it is not fair — but it strikes a deal between the Jews and the Arabs, or between the state and the Arabs, which works out for both sides,” Smooha explains to me in his office at Haifa University.
“Arabs in Israel are stakeholders in Israeli society. This means they will not break up the system because it works for them. The deal is: this is a Jewish State. The Jews control the state; the symbols of the state. Decision-making is made by the Jews. The Jews control immigration, the Law of Return, they control national security, they control the culture of the state, the language — the language is bi-lingual but we know Israel is run by Hebrew not Arabic. So this is the Jewish nature of the state. It is a national state of the Jews. But Israel is at the same time democratic and I take Israeli democracy seriously. Israel is a democracy and Arabs have rights. They are not equal in rights to the Jews but still they have these rights and they appreciate very highly their Israeli citizenship.”
“Red lines” is also an expression often used by Palestinians to describe the limits of their freedom in Israel, in terms of how far they can go without backlash from mainstream society. Often the lines are psychological, self-imposed and internalized boundaries that govern daily behavior. Many Palestinians I spoke with talk about ceilings they say Israeli society places on their potential achievement; aspirations they say were stifled; and positions in the workforce they feel they are unable to get. Arab citizens also see Jewish immigrants from all over the world come to Israel and go through a process of integration that they have never experienced, something that fuels their resentment and bitterness towards the state.
More than that, however, there are always lingering questions over what it means to be a non-Jewish citizen in a Jewish state? Or what it means to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel in an Israel that is at war with Palestinians?
Dr. Smooha anticipates that the political situation will deteriorate in the future unless the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership can reach a two-state compromise, which he believes will make the internal tension between Israel and its Arab minority easier to solve. Without it, he says, Israel will continue to view a large portion of its citizenry as belonging to the enemy and will avoid empowering them in any way. Time, however, is quickly running out on the peace process and the window for a two-state compromise may have already closed for good. In the meantime, most Arabs in Israel are living in the precarious space between assimilation and rejection.
* * *
I n a sleek television studio on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Sayed Kashua is getting ready for another season of his hit television show, Arab Labor. Kashua meets me in the large parking lot outside the building. He is friendly but quiet, cracking jokes in muted tones and snickering at himself. With short dark hair, fair skin and wide set eyes, he has the mild manners and introspective nature of a bookkeeper with a sardonic sense of humor.
Sayed Kashua’s diffidence belies his celebrity status in Israel. Now one of the country’s most famed and controversial novelists, Kashua is also a columnist for Israel’s preeminent left-wing intellectual newspaper Ha’aretz, and a screenwriter who has done the seemingly impossible in Israel: create a TV show that is almost entirely in Arabic, with a predominantly Arab cast, and get Israeli Jews to tune in. Arab Labor, which takes its name from a pejorative term used to describe shoddy work or menial labor jobs in Israel that Arabs usually occupy, is a sitcom based on a theme woven into all of Kashua’s work: the Arab male citizen of Israel desperately trying to fit into the dominant Jewish-Israeli society. The show satirizes the life of Amjad, a quirky journalist and family man who walks the delicate balance between the Arab and Jewish communities, while trying to convince his wife and young daughter to do the same.
Kashua has been recognized for his cross-cutting criticisms of both the Jewish and Arab communities inside Israel — often using his dark humor as a vehicle for social commentary. In the highly tense atmosphere of inter-ethnic relations in Israel, his work has been met with both praise and criticism, particularly from inside the Arab community, which, feeling embattled, is sensitive to opprobrium within its own ranks. He is also the author of three books of fiction written in Hebrew that are loosely based on his own life and experiences.
Like Irene, Sayed Kashua was born in the Palestinian town of Tira, which is wedged in on the country’s narrow coastal plane between the Mediterranean Sea and the hills of the northern West Bank. Tira is located in a region known as the Little Triangle that was ceded to Israel by Jordan as part of the Armistice Agreement of 1949. Through a trivial act of diplomacy, Sayed Kashua was born in Israel and not the occupied Palestinian territories.
Kashua describes growing up in Tira as pleasant, a place he never envisioned leaving. When he was fifteen years old, however, he was accepted into a prestigious program at a new Jewish boarding school for gifted students called the Israel Arts and Science Academy in Jerusalem. Despite the tremendous opportunity, Kashua was wary of leaving his hometown and casting out into the wider world of Israeli life. For young Palestinians who grow up in all-Arab towns and villages, full immersion into Israeli society can be daunting.
“It was terrible,” he says of the early experience. “I did have a few friends but it was very tough at the beginning. I was a stranger, it was very clear.” The biggest obstacle was the Hebrew language, which he, and many like him, spoke inadequately compared to their Jewish-Israeli peers. He was teased for his “Arafat” accent. Arabs in Israel generally study in separate Arab schools, which have different curricula and where the main language of instruction is Arabic. The schools are often substandard and lack the resources of the nation’s Jewish schools, leaving many young Arabs unprepared for entry into the real world. Most Palestinian citizens do not make this encounter until they reach the college level, where many initially feel unable to compete with their Jewish counterparts, who begin university at a later, more mature age, after fulfilling their mandatory military service.
Kashua went on to study sociology and philosophy at the Hebrew University. After graduating he worked as a journalist at a local newspaper in Jerusalem where he says he was considered a star writer until October 2000, when political realities would put him in conflict with his Jewish colleagues. In September of that year, the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were once again in a state of revolt that came to be known as the Second Intifada, and tensions inside Israel’s Arab communities were on high alert. In Arab towns inside Israel, a general strike was called and demonstrations in support of the Palestinians across the Green Line (the Armistice Line of 1949 that distinguishes the occupied territories from Israel) and against discriminatory policies inside their own country culminated in the killing of thirteen Arab citizens by Israel’s security forces. Kashua’s coverage of these events alienated him inside the newsroom.
“Suddenly, I became the enemy and people started talking to me differently,” he says. “Then the manager of the newspaper asked me to stop writing ‘that way’ because advertisers [were] quitting.”
In his second novel, Let it be Morning, Kashua’s semi-autobiographical protagonist describes the same course of events that he had endured in real life:
Two days and more than a dozen casualties later, the riots were over. I went from funeral to funeral, mourner to mourner, interviewing parents as they wept and assigned blame and expressed horror. Then things calmed down. No more tires were burned in intersections, there were no more rallies, no more funerals, and life seemed to be going back to normal. No more spontaneous outbursts like the ones that had cost the locals so dearly. If only it could really have been over in two days — but no, nothing had gone back to what it was before. Ever since those days, something had been broken, something had died. Two days of demonstrations had been enough for the state to delegitimize its Arab population, to repudiate their citizenship. Two days that only served to stoke the Jewish fires of vindictiveness. Those two days had changed my life.
Kashua began to receive death threats and felt that life had become unsafe for him and his family in the Jerusalem neighborhood where they lived. He decided to move his family to Tira, as Irene’s father had done nearly two decades earlier. The episode is indicative of the perilous situation endured by the Arab minority when events in the larger conflict between Israelis and Palestinians force them into confrontation with the Israel’s Jewish majority. Tensions rise, identification becomes sharper, and loyalty becomes the imperative issue. Caught in the middle, many shirk away from these moments for fear of being branded traitors by both sides.
Arab-Jewish relations inside Israel reached their peak after 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel’s prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, reached out to the Arab citizens of his country in an effort to alter the negative dynamic between them, and to garner domestic support for his divisive peace process. Rabin’s coalition hung together by a thread, having only 61 of 120 seats in the Knesset, one more than what was needed to form a government. Although the Arab parties were not included in the coalition (no Arab parties have ever been a part of a governing coalition or held a cabinet level post), Rabin used their support from the outside to keep his government afloat. The experience allowed Arab politicians in Israel to exercise more influence than ever before in their history. The good times did not last however; after Rabin was killed in 1995, relations have been in steady decline.
October 2000 was a watershed moment in the Arab minority’s relationship with the state and society. Hundreds of Arabs had been arrested for “rioting” and many were jailed. Despite the killing of thirteen Palestinian citizens, no one was found directly culpable and not a single police officer was prosecuted. In 2003, the Israeli government released the findings of a state-sponsored inquiry into the events known as the Or Commission after its chief investigator Theodore Or. The report was highly controversial and most official blame was laid at the feet of Arab politicians for “incitement.” The report, however, also highlighted systemic problems in Israel’s treatment of its minority, including official failure “to allocate state resources in an equal manner,” and “to create equality for its Arab citizens or to uproot discriminatory or unjust phenomenon.” Despite the groundbreaking acknowledgements and recommendations contained in the report, the state failed to take concrete steps to implement them.
Smooha, the Israeli sociologist, describes the 2000s as the “lost decade,” when rapprochement between the majority and minority was possible but squandered. Many analysts began pointing to an inevitable clash between the two groups and disaffection on the part of Arabs became more palpable. For one thing, Arab participation in national elections, which had always been remarkably high, plunged between 1999–2009, sliding from 75 to 53 percent. Protests against state policy also became more frequent and the nature of Israel’s wars — in the occupied territories between 2000 and 2003, Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008 — were more one-sided, chauvinistic and violent — engendering greater dissatisfaction from within the Arab community. The decade also witnessed a dramatic rightward shift in Israeli society, as well as the rise of extreme ultranationalist politicians to power, who have been more openly hostile to the Arab minority. One example is Israel’s most recent Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, himself and immigrant from Moldova, who routinely advocates that the Arabs should be subjected to loyalty oaths and population transfer.
In the television studio, Kashua muses over the concepts of loyalty and equality. He says he identifies himself as a Palestinian but tries to work within the Israeli system in order to make life better for his children’s future.
“For me, I do act like a citizen of Israel. And it is strange, too. I know I am an unwelcome citizen but this is the only citizenship that I have now. It’s technical but still it’s the only one that I got.’”
Kashua, who writes in Hebrew, tells me that symbols like the Star of David on the flag and the hatikva as the national song would not bother him if he felt really accepted and that Israel was a Jewish state only in name.
“If it [is] just a symbol, if I feel totally equal and Palestinian citizens in Israel feel totally equal, feel secure and in no way discriminated against by the Israelis, and there was no occupation, then, of course, maybe I will put a picture of Herzl in my bedroom!” he says jokingly, referring to the father of political Zionism.
Kashua’s positions on identity, citizenship, and Israeli nationality are reminiscent of another Arab-Israeli writer and poet named Anton Shammas. In the 1980’s, Shammas worked feverishly to lay the ideological foundations for an Israeli identity that would include Palestinian-Arabs. In his book, Arabesques, which was published in 1986, Shammas wove a complex tale of history and identity that became the first novel written by an Arab in Hebrew. Shammas ended up losing the battle over Israeli identity, however, and eventually retreated from Israel to the United States, where he teaches at the University of Michigan.
Writers and poets have been a formative part of the Palestinian-Arab community in Israel and have produced some of the most recognizable names in Palestinian letters, including the late Mahmoud Darwish, who many considered to be the Palestinian poet laureate. Beginning in the late 1960s, literature and poetry had a transformative effect on the way Palestinians and Arabs outside of Israel viewed the community, realizing that the message was generally one of resistance and not accommodation. An excerpt from a poem by Darwish, titled As He Walks Away, stirringly conveys the complex feelings held by Palestinian-Arab citizens toward Jewish-Israelis:
Relaxing in our shack, the enemy
slings his rifle over my grandfather’s chair
eats our bread like any guest,
dozes off for a while on the wicker couch.
Then, as he stoops to pat our cat on the way out,
says: “Don’t blame the victim.”
“And who might that be?” we ask.
“Blood that won’t dry in the night.”
His coat buttons flash as he walks away.
Good evening to you! Say hello to our well!
Say hello to our fig trees! Step gingerly
on our shadows in the barley fields.
Greet our pines on high. But please
don’t leave the gate open at night.
And don’t forget the horse’s terror of airplanes.
And greet us there, if you have time.
That’s what we want to say at the doorstep.
He hears it well enough,
but muffles it with a cough,
and waves it aside.
As long as the earth turns around itself inside us
the war will not end.
Let’s be good then.
He asked us to be good while we’re here.
He recites Yeats’ poem about an Irish Airman:
“Those that I fight I don’t hate,
Those that I guard I don’t love.”
Then he leaves our wooden ramshackle hut
and walks eighty meters to our old stone house on the edge of the plain.
Greet our house for us, stranger.
The coffee cups are the same.
Can you smell our fingers still on them?
In Let it be Morning, Kashua’s protagonist moves back to Tira for the very same reasons as Kashua had in real life, after having been isolated in his newsroom for reporting on the events of October 2000. The book quickly turns dystopian when the Israeli military, for an unknown reason, puts the village under a complete siege. As food and water supplies dwindle, and no one is able to leave the village or find out what is happening, people start to panic and turn on each other. The novel ends with a sudden announcement that Tira, along with most Palestinian citizens of Israel, has been ceded to a new Palestinian state as part of rapid negotiations between the PLO and Israel. In effect, the community has been bartered away in a manner in which they have no say — deus ex machina.
The fictional scenario symbolizes the role of the powerless bystander that the Palestinians in Israel have played and the fear of not having a voice in their own destiny. Arab citizens of Israel have had almost no role in the peace process that will ultimately have an immense impact on their lives. Some Palestinian citizens of Israel feel disinclined to lose their Israeli citizenship if peace is eventually made. Others harbor more irredentist sentiments about repatriating to a Palestinian state should it come into existence. Some have not waited around and have already picked up and left.
* * *
I n her cozy, one bedroom apartment in Ramallah, Abir Kopty is hard at work organizing an upcoming protest against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In a matter of days it will reach the highest levels of government, including the Israeli Supreme Court, and provoke an executive order from the Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, to shut it down. Abir is petite with straight, collar-bone length black hair and small, attractive features. She talks with her hands, a cigarette perched between her index and middle fingers, her accented speech rising at the end of every sentence as she explains the motivations behind how she went from an accountant working in a small town in Israel to a full-time activist and spokeswoman for the Palestinian popular resistance.
“I can’t be an individualist,” she says, emphatically. “I can’t think about myself and say, ‘Okay, I have a career, I have a good life. I have a nice apartment. I have a car. Everything is fine.’ I cannot watch the injustices and just close my eyes.”
Abir Kopty was born in Nazareth in 1975, the eldest daughter in a family of Coptic Christians. From a young age, politics played a formative role in her life, shaping her perceptions of the world around her. Her family home, located in downtown Nazareth, was next door to the headquarters of the Communist Party, a mixed Arab-Jewish party that was for a long time the most influential political force among Palestinian citizens of Israel because of its stance on equality between Arabs and Jews, and the growing space it provided for the expression of anti-Zionist sentiments. In periods of tension between the community and government, her street was often a flash point for major clashes between demonstrators and Israeli police forces. She remembers vividly witnessing men shot dead in front of her eyes during the same protests that would bring Sayed Kashua at loggerheads with his Jerusalem newspaper.
“Since I was a child, I was inhaling tear gas, watching the shabab (young men) escaping through our alley near the house, giving them onions to counter the teargas. So it was part of my childhood. All of these scenes I have them in my head all the time.”
Her father, a school teacher and theatre actor, was politically-minded and imbued his children with a strong sense of Palestinian identity. In school, she was outspoken and argumentative, a trait she says her teachers appreciated and encouraged. Abir, like many others, says her generation is vastly different from that of her parents and grandparents. They were born and raised in the Israeli system, educated in Israeli schools and colleges, without the direct experience of the Palestinian Nakba or ‘Catastrophe’ that resulted from the War of 1948. People of her generation often describe their elders as weak, afraid of the Jewish majority, and uneasy about pressing too hard for their rights. For decades the Arab citizens of Israel believed that if they remained passive and made the Jewish majority feel they could be trusted, then they would be granted equal rights. History has not played out that way and the younger generation seems more willing to be assertive.
“I think the older generation, the generation of the Nakba, they feel incapable of changing anything,” explains Abir. “The Nakba was a trauma. It took years until people understood what really happened and for many years after [they lived] under a military regime. They accepted the reality and that’s it. I think my generation, the one born with citizenship, having a better life but still seeing this picture, that there is occupation, they are not willing to be silent and accept the reality. I think my generation is more willing to challenge.”
Despite her strong interest in politics from a young age, Abir decided to study accounting at Haifa University. She would go on to work at a small firm in the city of Afula, twenty minutes south of Nazareth. It was not until the events of October 2000 that she felt unable to stay out of the political situation any longer. Along with others, she organized demonstrations and various activities. In an act that could have gotten her killed, she hiked across the Green Line into the West Bank in 2002 in order to sneak into a refugee camp in the Palestinian city of Jenin, shortly after the Israeli military reinvaded at the height of the Second Intifada. With political activities consuming so much of her time, she no longer felt she could commit fully to her day job in accounting. She began working part time, devoting the rest of her hours to working as a spokeswoman at an organization based in Haifa called Mossawa (Equality): the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel.
Abir became a frequent spokeswoman for her community in the Israeli media. It was a challenging role to play. Mainstream Israeli society pays very little attention to the Arab minority. Their issues and grievances receive minimal coverage in the media or attention in Israeli politics, outside of the frequent references to the demographic “ticking time bomb” used to describe the Arab population’s faster growth rate relative to the Jewish one. Yet, it is no secret that the Palestinian-Arabs are treated unfairly by the state. Not only are they handicapped by state and private discrimination, but almost nothing is done to bridge the vast inequality that exists on all levels, from wealth to employment to education. Arab communities only receive a fraction of development funding from the state, despite paying taxes and comprising approximately twenty percent of the population. Many communities are rife with crime and drugs, problems the police regularly avoid. Elected Arab politicians have little affect on policy, partly because they have never been offered a position in a ruling coalition. All this, in turn, has imbued the Palestinian-Arab community with a fatalistic attitude about creating political change. In recent years there has been increasing recognition that the Israeli economy is failing to reach its potential by not better integrating the Arab population into the workforce, but little has actually been done to rectify the situation.
Some of this can be attributed to the way Israeli society is structured. For instance, because military service is mandatory for Israeli Jews, as well as smaller segments of the non-Jewish population like the Druze, being a military veteran becomes an unofficial prerequisite for managerial positions in the employment sector. Arabs are not mandated to fight in the military for multiple reasons, particularly because they would likely be taking up arms against other Palestinians and Arabs. This, however, disadvantages them from the outset. Some Israeli politicians have proposed that Arabs should be mandated to perform civil service after high school instead of military service, but this has been met with a negative response from most Arab citizens and their elected leaders who feel that they do not owe service to a state that treats them as inferior. Each side seems poised for the other to make the first step before they are willing to engage. Civil service may become the most hot button issue of Arab relations with the state in the near future and it has already provoked heated exchanges between Arab leaders and Israeli-Jewish proponents.
In 2005, Abir Kopty appeared on an Israeli reality TV show called The Leader, in an effort to reach a wider audience for her views. Similar to Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, contestants were given group tasks, but of a socio-political nature rather than business, such as recruiting volunteers for an organization that dealt with at-risk youth. Each week one contestant from the losing team was dismissed by a panel of judges. Despite Abir’s confrontational politics and strong Palestinian identity — or maybe because of them — she moved on to become one of the show’s finalists. A telling incident from the final mission, however, would seal her fate.
The task for that episode had been to organize two soccer teams from two neighborhoods with mutual hostility. Before the game began, the Israeli national anthem was played and Abir refused to stand up and pay her respect. The cameras swarmed and the fallout from the incident overshadowed everything else. During the season finale, when the judges were determining the winner, she was grilled over her political views rather than her performance during the entire season — and then dismissed. The incident created a national buzz. What may have seemed like a trivial episode was in effect a litmus test for loyalty to the state and society. Not standing for the Israeli national anthem was a redline that Abir had crossed.
It would also be the last time she oriented her strategy on reaching out to the Jewish-Israeli public. In 2006, Israel launched its second war into Lebanon with the stated intention of destroying Hizbollah, the armed Shi’a militia and political party that has been fighting with the Israeli military in the south of Lebanon since the mid-1980’s. The atmosphere had been tense along the border for years with tit-for-tat operations between the two sides. However, after Hizbollah had killed and captured some Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid in July of that year, Israel responded with a massive air and ground invasion that left over a thousand dead and billions of dollars in infrastructure destroyed. During the war, Abir saw an uglier side of Israeli society that she could no longer cope with, something she describes as a turning point in her life.
“During the war it was a very, very fascist atmosphere. You couldn’t speak with anyone. The discourse was, ‘Kill them all! Destroy them all!’” she said. “Even when we were going to the streets to demonstrate, the massive hostility that we faced, it was beyond any imagination. And you see this collective mindset in the Israelis. No one argues. No one raised any challenge to the debate, to the discourse.”
At one demonstration, Abir was arrested for the second time in her life, and she says she was verbally assaulted and threatened with violence by female soldiers who cursed her violently, calling her ‘sharmoota’ and ‘bat zona,’ ‘slut’ and ‘daughter of a whore.’
“Until then I still believed there has to be dialogue with the Israelis; that we have to speak with the Israelis; that we have to convince the Israelis, etc. Since then I have kind of detached myself. I lost the faith that I can change anything [that way]. With time I came to the conclusion that it is not going to help. There has to be a way to force Israelis to let go of their privileges. And it’s not by convincing them.”
A year later, Abir moved to the United Kingdom to pursue her Master’s degree in political communication and media from City University London. After she returned, in 2008, Abir ran for a spot on the municipal council of Nazareth. She was elected on the list of Hadash, an Arab-Jewish offshoot of the Communist Party, and became the youngest member and one of only two women on the nineteen-person council. Deep down, however, Abir felt she needed to go further in her activism. She began applying to jobs in the West Bank to assist in any way that she could. Eventually she was offered a position at the Government Media Center of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
The job was bureaucratic, however, and Abir felt constrained. On the weekends, she found herself joining the burgeoning non-violent protests in small Palestinian villages that were being directly affected by Israel’s wall and expanding settlement network. The grassroots organizing by village residents allowed her to play a more effective role in challenging the occupation on the ground. Eventually she quit her job in the PA and today, she is the spokeswoman for the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committee, an umbrella organization for the various villages involved in non-violent protest against Israel’s activities in the West Bank.
“I really faced a lot of conflicts because I was critical of the Palestinian Authority and I wanted the freedom to express my opinions openly,” she says of why she left.
On the day of our final interview, Abir had just returned from participating in a wedding staged at the Hizme checkpoint, one of the main crossing points for Israeli settlers between the West Bank and Jerusalem. The ceremony, an act of political theatre, was held to protest the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law passed in 2003 and upheld by Israel’s High Court in 2006. In effect, the law prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying Palestinians from the occupied territories by refusing to grant citizenship to the latter based on marriage and family reunification.
In a wedding dress and black and white checkered kuffiyeh (headscarf) draped over her shoulders, the bride from Jaffa, approached the checkpoint carrying a Palestinian flag while activist-supporters sang wedding songs to the rhythmic sound of hand drums. The groom, who was from Ramallah, was carried in on the shoulders of his friends in a traditional Palestinian fashion. The two never saw each other, however. Both wedding parties were prevented from reaching the crossing by Israeli soldiers, but managed to block traffic for over an hour until the soldiers used stun grenades and tear gas to disperse the wedding parties. Two people were arrested. One woman from the West Bank side held a sign that read: “In sickness and in health… until Israel do us part.”
“Before I came to live [in Ramallah], I would speak about the occupation as a slogan, as a term,” says Abir. “But when you come to live here, you face daily life under occupation. You understand how the occupation functions and you understand that you also live under occupation [in Israel] in a different form. And when you see that bigger picture, you belong to the bigger cause.”
Abir Kopty’s physical migration from Nazareth to Ramallah helped to spur an evolution in her perspective on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Tracing the continuity of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as a singular process of settler-colonialism, she views the division among Palestinian communities as a policy of divide-and-rule initiated by Israel to ensure Jewish hegemony over the larger indigenous population. It is a rejection of the dominant tendency among analysts of the conflict to compartmentalize Palestinians inside Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the refugees into separate issues with separate problems and solutions. According to Abir’s point of view, all Palestinian communities are vestiges of the same nation — disbanded through war and colonization — and cannot be separated by the individual circumstances of their day, however different they may now appear. For Abir, this single problem of Palestinian oppression demands a single answer: one democratic state for all Arabs and Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
* * *
O n one of my trips to Nazareth to see Abir, she introduces me to her friend Tareq Shihada, a paunchy, intelligent, and good natured man of forty-five with dark skin and deep creases under his eyes. Tareq does not share Abir’s uncompromising approach to Israel. He is a pragmatist who believes in working from within the system to get things accomplished for his community. Everywhere he goes, people stop to say hello and shake his hand. Others give a salutary honk from their cars as they pass by, subtle recognition of the work he does for his community. Twelve years ago, Tareq made it his mission to change the face of this city, which like other Arab towns and neighborhoods in the country, was relatively impoverished despite its religious and historic significance and the potential goldmine in tourism revenues it was failing to capture.
Partnering with a wealthy local businessman named Walid Afifi, Tareq established the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association, aimed at galvanizing local businesses to stimulate the economy. The association began a marketing campaign to generate tourism and encourage local businesses to get behind the effort. They petitioned for entrepreneurial grants, lobbied for state funding, and organized activities throughout the city that would draw crowds and cause people to take an active interest in revitalizing the city. They even pushed teachers to educate their students about Nazareth with the hope of nurturing the next generation of residents and influencing their parents in the process. The plan worked and Nazareth has succeeded in turning around its fortunes. It now boasts many of the best restaurants in Israel and a steady flow of domestic and foreign tourists that have brought life back to the city.
“We gave people a sense of pride in their city again,” Tareq says, with a smile. “They look around and see what is happening here. There are more hotels, more restaurants, more bars, more outdoor events. Suddenly they start to feel, ‘wow, we can live here. It is beautiful to live here.’”
Ironically, Nazareth is not even Tareq’s hometown. His family comes from a place just north of Nazareth called Saphouria, which dates back to the Greco-Roman period, and which some experts believe to be the birthplace of the Virgin Mary. Once the second largest city in the Galilee, the region in the north of the country still densely populated by Arabs, Saphouria was destroyed by the Israeli military in the War of 1948, its homes leveled with bulldozers, and eventually replaced with the Jewish community of Tzippori. The original residents of Saphouria, many of whom stayed in Israel as citizens of the new state, were designated “present absentees” and lost their land to the Custodian of Absentee Property, a governmental body set up to incorporate all the property left behind by Palestinian refugees.
Tareq’s family were considered refugees despite never leaving the country and were forbidden from returning to their village to claim their property even though they held Israeli citizenship. The case is hardly uncommon. Over one quarter of all Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel in 1948 were designated as “present absentees,” compelled to forfeit all their property to the state, much of it to make way for the flood of new immigrants the country was absorbing. Many people turned to the courts in the hope of receiving justice, but were unable to get their property back. The case of the present absentees is one of the most agonizing in the history of this land because the people were treated like ghosts, visibly present to see their land and property taken from them but considered absent in the eyes of the law. Hillel Cohen, a respected Israeli academic and expert on the issue, called it “one of the most concrete expressions of the structural conflict between the state of Israel and its Arab citizens.”
On my second visit to see Tareq, I ask him to drive me to Saphouria, which he agrees to willingly, although I know it must be difficult for him. We drive north out of Nazareth, passing large billboards displaying political advertisements in the run-up to the Israeli parliamentary election. The Galilee’s modern highways are carved through ancient stony hills, which the winter rains have turned verdant. Israeli soldiers on leave crowd every bus stop. Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” improbably plays on the radio as Tareq tells me how his family was forced to flee their land, whose lush pastures he points out along the way. For many years, Tareq’s grandfather was able to lease back part of his agricultural land from the government annually in order to farm. As a young boy, Tareq would help his grandfather till the soil and harvest the olives, tomatoes, and mulukhiyya, a nutritious spinach-like green eaten throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
“Until my grandfather died, every year he would go to farm the fields he rented from the government,” he explains. “They couldn’t build, just tend the land.” Eventually, the younger generations of his family were no longer interested in farming anymore and they stopped renting their land back.
As we enter the moshav of Tzippori, an Israeli communal village similar to a kibbutz, Tareq becomes visibly upset. A large wooden sign at the entrance to Tzippori welcomes new people to come join the community. It is not an offer extended to Tareq and his family.
“This makes you feel very angry. This is what they call chutzpah, and they don’t know what you feel. The young [Israeli] generation comes here and says, ‘we own this place.’ They can build, they can do whatever they like,” he says in an aching tone, as we enter a newly constructed section of upscale single-family homes and cottages.
Tareq has spent years doing research on his family land. Over ten years ago he went to the Israel Land Administration, which keeps historical records, and found deeds in the name of his grandfather and his four brothers totaling some 3,200 dunums (approximately 790 acres), he says. It is property he will likely never have access to, but he does not give up hope.
“I think information is important to have. You live your whole life with people telling you about Saphouria — your grandpa, your grandma — and you can feel it that this is something you grew up with,” he says, “and this is something they have taken from you.”
Tareq finds a place to park and we set out on foot. Much of the old village, now only ruins, is fenced off. It takes a keen eye to see the remains of what once was: the uneven mounds of earth; cut stones poking out of the ground. We walk along a muddy path, past some of the older homes of Tzippori that have been here for decades, now. Several times I worry to myself that someone will come out of their house with a shotgun and tell us we are trespassing. Tareq has none of these qualms, or at least he doesn’t show them. He walks around with all the confidence of ownership.
“You see stones, I see houses,” he tells me. “This is where my family residence used to be. Can you hear the stones talking?”
* * *
I n the brisk dawn, I flee south from Haifa toward Jerusalem on Road 6, the superhighway running along Israel’s spine. My tiny rental car drifts dangerously in the strong wind coming off the sea, a grey speck zipping forward beneath the wide, cerulean blue sky. To my east, I pass a string of Arab towns and cities, identifiable by the minarets of their mosques standing erect in the morning light rising over the foothills of the West Bank.
In a single year, the Arabs of Palestine went from an overwhelming majority to a slim minority. And within the course of a single generation the names of rivers, mountains, cities, towns and streets were changed from Arabic to Hebrew at a dizzying pace. For those old enough to remember the way things were, it is a disorienting transformation that is hard to truly fathom. Four hundred former villages remain buried like unmarked graves under cacti and pine trees, or the construction of new towns built on their ruins. For Zionism, it is an integral part of the rebirth of the Jewish nation. For Palestinians, it is the liquidation of their living memories and the supplanting of their heritage. They are narratives like oil and water.
I wonder to myself what other intangibles have changed? Do the familiar smells of an ancient landscape still reach the senses of those who remember a country as it was? Does the earthy-metallic scent of tilled soil beneath the olive trees evoke Tareq’s memories of running at his grandfather’s feet as he harvested his orchards in late November? Or the winter grasses and wildflowers freshly plowed so that the precious rains could reach the hulking roots and make the olives grow fat?
What do these people share? The birth of one seems to mark the death of the other. Where is the common ground?
I steer my car into Tira. It is no longer the small town that Sayed Kashua described. Still, the drive in feels isolated from the surrounding Jewish communities, and visibly poorer as well. Over the years it has become plagued by gangs surviving on the drug trade. Its buildings are shabby, a mix of stone and concrete and plaster. The town is bustling, however, full of cars and people going about their business.
Parking my own car along a dusty street, I enter a coffee shop. Men are seated around playing cards. I order Turkish coffee and a warm boreka and splay out my papers on the table. The man running the shop, dressed in a white track suit, eyes my notes warily and asks me where I come from and what I am doing. I give him a straight answer that appears to ease his suspicions.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” he says, which means welcome, but is taken from the literal phrase meaning, “you are among family, may your path be easy.”
The day has begun to warm up. I get back in my car and don’t look back.
* * *
A t a restaurant along the swanky Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, I meet Qais Tibi, a handsome, hipsterish looking man in his late twenties. Endowed with certain ostensible qualities — fair skin, wispy chestnut hair, eyes that share the glassy blue-green calm of the Mediterranean — Qais has spent years of his life mired in duality. When it comes to living in Israel, camouflage can be advantageous, but it can also cause you to forget who you are.
Over burgers and fries, he tells me how the week before he was sitting at a cafe in Jaffa with a friend of his, a Jewish girl, when a group of her friends — whom Qais did not know — joined them. They began to talk negatively about Arabs not knowing that he was Palestinian. He sat quietly, he says, listening to their conversation. One of the girls in particular was telling a story about how she had gotten into a car with an Arab man while hitchhiking — a very common practice in Israel — and instantly began fearing for her life. Qais began to ask her questions about why she felt the way she did and what she thought of Arabs. He then revealed that he too was an Arab, to which he says, she was shocked. He could instantly tell that she knew there was something problematic in her thinking.
“I feel the situation between Arabs and Jews more than the person that looks Arab because sometimes I overhear things that they don’t,” he says. The experience at the cafe is common. He said he is often dealing with similar situations in this manner, hoping to change people’s opinions.
Qais Tibi was born in the town of Taiba, the second largest Arab city in the area known as the Triangle. After college he lived sporadically in several different cities, from Haifa to Jerusalem, eventually settling in Tel Aviv. Home to a world-renowned party scene, Qais was drawn by the desire to be a part of it, but acceptance on the inside meant that he felt he had to hide his Arab identity.
“When I was going out I would leave my Arab identity at the door,” he says. “I was another kind of person, then. I was having some issues with who I was. Maybe you could say I was being a Tel Avivian-Israeli guy. I was not an Arab guy in Tel Aviv. Maybe I was walking in Tel Aviv and trying not to speak in Arabic. But now I am an Arab guy in Tel Aviv. Now, when I speak in Arabic I am proud that I am Arab. But before, for five years, I wasn’t like that.”
When I ask him if he was trying to blend into Israeli society, he says it was more Tel Aviv society than Israel as a whole, highlighting the difference between the two. Several times during our interview he distinguishes between Tel Aviv and other cities like Jerusalem, Eilat, and Hadera, where Arab-Jewish relations are much worse.
In Israel, some Arabs have been known to take on Jewish or Israeli nicknames as aliases to blend in easier with Israeli society. Qais says he never went this far but he understands the motivation. He explains how Israeli society forces you to acculturate in order to be accepted. In his hometown, he could not find the type of life he wanted to live. People were insular, conservative, and concerned only with their own affairs. For leisure, they went to coffee shops and smoked water pipes or played cards. Qais wanted to experience the clubs and bars that were in the bigger cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa. For that, he would need to fit in as a young, Israeli guy. Not as an Arab. When he went out, he would avoid the question of ethnicity. If people asked him where he was from, he would pivot and ask them to guess. He says never once would they guess Arab, instead believing he was from any one of the diverse countries of the Jewish diaspora.
“Eight years ago, I was just going out in Israeli bars every night of the week,” Qais tells me. “There wasn’t a place that I could go out and find Arab girls and guys. So, slowly I became one of the Israelis who was going to the bar. If I wanted to talk to a girl and she doesn’t know I am an Arab — they would talk to me. And then they will ask, ‘where are you from,’ and if they knew that I am Arab, they stop talking to me. And for whatever reason my reaction was not to be angry with them over this, but it was to be shy about who I was.”
The discussion reminds me of an incident that had happened when I was previously working in the country. In July 2010, a 30-year old Palestinian man from Jerusalem was sentenced to jail time in an Israeli court for “rape by deception,” after having consensual sex with an Israeli-Jewish woman without revealing to her that he was Arab. Sabbar Kashur had given himself a Jewish sounding name during a chance encounter on the street and the two proceeded to have sex in a nearby building. In her verdict, the ruling judge Tzvi Segal stated that the law had a duty to protect women from “smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price,” according to an article in the Daily Telegraph from the time. “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated.”
Over the past two years Qais began to meet other Palestinians and Israeli-Jews, people he could go out with and carry-on his lifestyle without compromising his identity as he used to. He moved to Jaffa a year ago, where he says the young people are more open and accepting.
“I feel relaxed for the first time in a long time,” he says. Living a double life, where he had to hide who he was or feel embarrassed about it, had taken its toll. “I can tell you that in the last year I am feeling freedom.”
I ask him why he continued to live the way he did if he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“I tried to go out also to Ramallah or Bethlehem (in the West Bank) and it was also hard for me,” he explains. “It was supposed to be my home but it wasn’t like that. Because also there I am not one of them. For them I am Israeli. They think I am khatan, a traitor. I can understand them. I am not angry with them. Because I know it comes from another place, not from the place of hatred. It comes from the place of, ‘oh they are living good.’ They think we are living good. They think we are living the perfect life. But they don’t know that our lives are also not the best. They have their own country. I don’t have my own country. So I can’t have that kind of feeling. And we are in the middle. I can tell you that both sides hate the Arab-Israelis. And I am not angry about that, I can understand that.”
* * *
E yas Shbeta, a middle-aged father of three girls is a little tight-lipped when we first meet late in the evening in his home in the village of Neve Shalom — Wahat al-Salam. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, a plaid button-down shirt underneath a blue sweater and faded jeans. Eyas deliberates every answer thoroughly, ruminating with long uninterrupted pauses. He stops mid-sentence, intimates, balks. He goes silent, turns questions over in his head, asks me what I think. At times the interview feels like a contest, a sparring match, a shakedown. We are sitting in his comfortable living room at the corner of a large, glass coffee-table, and his wife Evi, a Jewish-Israeli of German origin, brings us Harrod’s tea and delicious homemade marble cake.
Neve Shalom — Wahat al-Salam, in Hebrew and Arabic respectively, or Oasis of Peace in English, is a Jewish-Arab communal village established in 1970 as a model of coexistence, and Eyas was one of its earliest members and the current village manager. The founder was a man named Bruno Hussar, a priest of the Dominican Order who received a land lease from a nearby monastery in the Latrun Valley, an area halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that was annexed by Israel after the Six Day War. In 1977, the first five families, both Arab and Jewish, moved in to Hussar’s experimental project. In 1980, a friend asked Eyas to join him in moving to Wahat al-Salam. He agreed, but when he arrived he was surprised to find only a few small houses. In retrospect, Eyas says this may have been part of his motivation to stay, in order to help build something from the ground up and create a haven for himself, a way of living in this country that he could feel at peace with.
“I came from Tira with all my baggage and stories from my father about how the army came to my village and threw them outside and told them they wouldn’t be allowed to come back. It is very difficult. The first two or three years [here], I lived with my baggage. It took at least three years to start to understand that maybe it is possible to live together. I had many stereotypes about the Jews. That it was impossible to live together. That I cannot live with the people that took my land, my identity, my future. Neve Shalom is the only place where Jews and Palestinians live together and understand each other. This place can be the example that it is possible to live together. If every person puts their baggage aside and lives as a human being.”
Eyas met Evi Guggenheim in Neve Shalom in the early 1980s, where she had come to work at the local school. Evi grew up in Switzerland in a wealthy Jewish family and immigrated to Israel when she was nineteen. They were married in 1988. Her family originally disapproved and threatened to cut her off, but accepted the marriage when their first child was born. Eyas says that Neve Shalom — Wahat al-Salam does not accept people into the village with weak or confused identities, but it is apparent how life here, as equals, can mitigate the tendency for ethnic hostility.
“Twenty years ago, I felt I am Palestinian first of all. I am an Arab living in Israel,” Eyas explains. “Now, I don’t think it is very important that I have to say this, ‘I am Palestinian.’ I belong to the Palestinian people wherever they are. I am living here. I am a man. I am brown. There is no difference in the life of Palestinians living in Gaza and Israel. Our life is much easier but the feelings are not different about what happened in this area.”
Eyas’s life would make interesting viewing as a reality show. Not only does he live in the only community of its kind in Israel, he has sisters living in Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank and a Jewish brother-in-law that lives in a settlement. He believes there is no way around learning to live with each other as equals, in one state in the future. In the meantime, everyone has to find their path to sanity, to the rationalization that makes life possible. He has found this in Neve Shalom but still carries with him the difficult questions about being a Palestinian-Arab in Israel, of being in an almost inescapable conflict with the society around him. Whether society accepts you or not, there is always the desire deep in every human heart to want to belong. When I ask him about this sense of belonging, Eyas thinks long and hard. For several minutes we sit quietly, a gulf of silence between us.
“I don’t know. I am not sure if my life here in Wahat al-Salam changed a lot from Tira or in Tel Aviv. I have the same feeling in Tira and Tel Aviv and I have the same feeling in Wahat al-Salam. And I try to bring that same feeling out everywhere I go.”
Which feeling, I ask?
Again silence, his head tilted skyward, his watery eyes staring into his own thoughts that hang like a cloud above him. When he finally speaks, his words eke out. “Where I belong to… who I am… Why I stay here in this country… Why I chose to marry a Jewish woman. What does that mean? It’s… I still, I don’t know.”
In the midst of our conversation Eyas’ eldest daughter, May, emerges from a lower level of the house. I feel Eyas is eager to redirect the spotlight and he invites his daughter to answer some of my questions. May, 21, is a third-year law student at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She still looks like a teenager and is bright and bubbly. Like Irene, she is half Palestinian-Muslim, half Jewish. Yet growing up in Wahat al-Salam-Neve Shalom is quite different than elsewhere in the country and May’s experience reflects this.
“There isn’t one answer of who am I,” she says. “I am just who I am. I don’t like to define myself as Palestinian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever. I am just myself, I’m a person.”
It is not easy to forget that this community is a rare exception, a tiny island in a sea of intolerance, and May says when she is on the outside she often feels compelled to identify with a particular side in order to satisfy others.
“When people ask me where are you from? I say, Neve Shalom — Wahat al-Salam. So they say what are you, Jewish or Palestinian. And I say I am both. And they say no, but you have to be something. You can’t be a Muslim and a Jew, you have to decide. And many times they don’t even ask me, they just decide for themselves. People always see what’s different, what is the difference between them. When I meet someone Jewish, he sees me as a Muslim. When I meet someone who is Muslim or a Palestinian, he sees me as Jewish, because they always see the difference.”
“I must say that living here and going to school here was a little bit of a bubble. Because everything is fine, and Jews and Arabs go to school together. And I was also small, it was not like I saw the big problems of the world. As soon as I went to school, in the Jewish school, there was the Gaza War of 2008 and we suddenly started to hear our friends say things we didn’t imagine them saying. It’s difficult to hear… the difference.”
She says that when she went to university she did not talk politics, which made things easier. In the law school at Bar-Ilan, there were only four Arabs out of one hundred students, and two eventually dropped out. Most people did not even know she spoke Arabic. When fellow students finally did hear her speak, the deviation in her treatment became noticeable, she says.
“The difference is that if I don’t say anything then they see me as one of them, taking it for granted [that I was in] the army. When I say that I am an Arab or a Muslim, they immediately have some stereotypical thoughts. And they say, ‘oh you don’t look like an Arab. You don’t act like an Arab. You are different.’”
Evi, May’s mother, sometimes worries about her three daughters and their inclination to identify more with their Arab side at the expense of their Jewish one.
“Sometimes it bothers me and sometimes not,” Evi says. “It is most important that they are straight and good human beings. But I also want them to be ok with my side, with the Jewish side. And for instance Corrine (the youngest, aged nineteen), she is very militant against the Jews and against ‘the occupier.’ I am too. But she is from a point that is not me. And this bothers me. And not only because it is not me, but for her, because she is not at peace with this side of herself.”
“I really think they can be both,” she adds. “It is not an easy position but I think they are themselves. Today, identity has so many facets. You are not just Palestinian or Jewish. You are also a woman, you’re also so many other things. We should not just put such strong labels on this. That is something wrong in this country.”
* * *
I n philosophical terminology, identity means sameness, the unchanging principle that defines an object irrespective of its relation to others. In colloquial terms, we tend to perceive identity as more mutable, something that evolves over time and with our experiences. In a culture that emphasizes individuality, identity can empower acts of self-definition and self-expression. In reality, there are aspects of identity that we can choose and those we cannot. It seems we are born somewhere on the spectrum of gender, race and sexuality. On the other hand, we choose our politics, our profession, our subculture. We pick out the pinstripe and cufflinks, the thick-framed glasses and skinny jeans, the pierced eyebrow and forearm tattoo.
Identity can also be inherited — bound to a family, a tribe, a nation, a religion. It can be sharpened by power, politics and the competition between social groups, bringing people together or driving them to war. Identity, whether we accept it or not, is the prism through which we perceive and, in turn, are perceived.
In her parent’s home, Irene Nassar speaks Hebrew to her mother and Arabic to her father. If she has children some day, she says, she can’t imagine them speaking in any other way.
“I would want them to learn Hebrew as much as I would want them to learn Arabic. There’s this funny thing to think about. I call my mother Ima (Hebrew for mother), and I call my Dad, Yabba (Palestinian-Arabic for Dad). But I think that if my children would call me Yamma (Palestinian-Arabic for Mom), it would be really strange for me, because that’s not my association of mother. My association of mother is Ima. I also don’t think I could handle the idea of my children not speaking Arabic, or knowing Palestinian music. And I think the risk of that being gone, of being erased, is much higher if their father would end up being an Israeli-Jew. And I am not willing to risk that.”
Irene’s thoughts about children are in a sense reflections on her own future and the process of shaping an identity. She tells me how much she has had to do in order to hold on to her Palestinian sense of self and the fear that it could be undone. In some ways, it is illustrative of the dilemma all Palestinians face here, as part of a society that is hostile to “the Other.” As children, Arab citizens of Israel are made to sing the hatikva, a song about Jewish yearning to return to their ancestral homeland and reclaim it as their own. They are given Israeli flags to wave with the Star of David and pledge allegiance to the state of the Jewish people. On Israel’s independence day this polarization is at its most pronounced, as citizens of the state of Israel choose between celebration and commemoration of their own loss.
From the outset, the Israeli establishment tried to sever the connection between their Arab citizens and the rest of the Palestinian people. The term Israeli-Arab was used as an alternative, Palestinian symbols were outlawed, and any references to a Palestinian nation and their history and culture were kept from the class room and public life. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously said of the Palestinian people to the Sunday Telegraph in 1969, “they did not exist.” In the end, however, it was a process that failed to completely take hold. Ironically, it has probably been the persistence of the conflict with Palestinians outside Israel’s borders that has kept Palestinian identification alive within them.
“There was always a clear understanding that I was Arab as a child,” explains Irene. “But I think as I have become more politicized as I have grown up, that sense of identity as an Arab became a lot more grounded in a sense of identity as a Palestinian. And the blue (Israeli) ID that I carry throughout my life has become less and less significant in how it defines me and I have grown to reject it more and more.”
Irene says this is not just an individual experience, but one she believes is shared by Arab citizens in general. Yet for most Jewish-Israelis, Palestinian identification is still threatening and unacceptable. In an index report by the Jewish-Arab Center at Haifa University, an average of seventy-five percent of Jewish-Israelis polled over seven years believed that anyone who identifies as a “Palestinian-Arab in Israel” cannot be loyal to the state and its laws.
Without the prospect of peace with Palestinians, Israeli society has become increasingly concerned with the demographic stratification of the state. The number of Jews and Arabs have already become virtually equal in the country’s entirety, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are still ultimately under Israel’s control. This in turn has raised the question: what does Israel value more, its democracy or its Jewish character?
As the opportunity for partition into separate Palestinian and Israeli states slips away due to the increasing number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, the pressure on Israel to choose between its settlements and its democracy will continue to grow. Among Palestinians in the occupied territories, disillusionment with the peace process and the promise of national sovereignty has become ubiquitous. What happens if there is a third Palestinian intifada that begins to call for equal rights in a single, bi-national state? Will that call reach the ears of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who also feel themselves locked in a struggle for equal rights? Could those positions then coalesce into a single movement across the Green Line? It is a possibility that would fundamentally alter the nature of the conflict and the prospects for peace and equality.
How Israel chooses, or is able, to respond to the challenge of incorporating its current Arab citizens will be an important indicator of the way things are likely to proceed. Can an Israeli identity that is inextricably bound up in Zionism, the founding ideology of the state and of Jewish nationalism, be flexible enough to accommodate others in a civic rather than ethnic Jewish conception of citizenship?
Despite the myriad complexities that have formulated in the identity of Israel’s Arabs over the past sixty years, pulled between competing loyalties, a common denominator can be found: some people, like Sayed, Tareq, Qais and Eyas, have found various ways of accommodating and coming to terms with the complex arrangement of where they live. Others, like Abir and Irene, have not and will continue to resist. But none feel welcome.
Irene Nasser bemoans the false promise of assimilation, saying that no matter how far you are willing to go, no matter the extent of self-sacrifice, a Palestinian can never be an Israeli in the full sense of the word, or expect full acceptance.
“Look at me! I am a great example,” Irene says. “I’m registered as Jewish. I speak Hebrew fluently. According to the Jewish religion, I am Jewish. And I know Israeli culture. I can fit into Tel Aviv, you would never know that I wasn’t from Tel Aviv. But I am still, when it comes down to it, I am still not pure. I am still not good enough. According to your Jewish laws, according to your own ministry of interior, I am one of you, but I am still not one of you! Because of my last name and because of my father. That is all it is for them.”
