You victim, sacrifice; me murderer, worse.
And yet, and yet, all this comes at a time when
Trickster-like, peace, change, transformation is now more
than ever a possible reality, a dove to be
Stroked and cuddled, nested and brooded; in the
Long run, there is much to be hopeful about
If the PLO has recognised Israel, then surely even Israel can
and will (alas in her sad slow time)
Do the same; and so for once a mutuality
And shoulder-to-shoulder work of reconciliation
Together-apart.
The vision is there but like the punishment of Tantalus
It disappears only when we reach for it.
But less strife shall come, and who knows even
For a time, hopefully for a long time, a peace will come.
Yes, the hate, the misgivings, the pull and take
Will simmer ready to rouse to the fuse
But
But for now, it is horror, murder, infanticide
Become banal.
And we Jews on the Israel side who strive for peace
We make acts and gestures but we are not yet committed
Enough, to bring the change we need to share Palestinian
Fate, to be brutalised, checked, jailed and more
To leave off the luxury which we have of attending
To their cares, but stay stuck to this goal
Of opposing oppression, even in God’s name.
So what I want to say to you,
My eyes are filled with tears
I am still your friend
If you or your condition will allow.
Upon receiving this letter, I felt that I too missed him, yet our friendship was a luxury I could not afford. Despite his words, I was not sure he really understood the full impact of Israel’s policies and the suffering they were causing us. Words were not enough. Tears were not enough. It was action that was needed now. Everyone, Israeli and Palestinian, had to do their part to fight the injustice and I was not sure that Henry had yet understood this.
We arranged to meet at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. As usual, any ill-feeling I had towards Henry melted away when I saw him. We sat in the cellar bar with our drinks and talked. And I left feeling well disposed towards him. But after that, with the more frequent closure of Ramallah, our meetings became sporadic. It was harder for me to get to Jerusalem and with Henry’s beard he would be taken for a settler, which would make it unsafe for him to be in Ramallah.
On the Jewish New Year, 14 September 1989, Henry sent me another letter:
I wish I could write you words of hope but in the short run there will be more horror, more blood, more dead. As I said at our last meeting at the American Colony, I have tried to express my feelings in more active ways. I am now an active member of four anti-occupation organisations. 21st year, which I urged to protest house demolitions as illegal, immoral collective punishment, and for which a group was arrested. A religious peace group, Netivot Shalom-Oz Veshalom, which does symbolic vigils and actions to stir the repressed Israeli moral sensibilities. Imut, a group of psychologists, mental health workers who, alas, true to their trade, are more committed to talk than action. And one ad-hoc anthropology protest group concerned with cultural issues and oppression. I have been on condolence visits, e.g. to the village of Nachaleen, and for at least five months met regularly with a small group of Palestinians in Ramallah on dialogue and helping each other achieve a real political change and alleviation of suffering. So in a way I am more active and I refuse to lose hope that peace, reconciliation, fellowship is possible despite all to the contrary. I have been writing about Abraham as a model of a peacemaker and I will send you that soon. It is important in Israel to show how my namesake, Enoch, related to the land and its native inhabitants in a way so different from today’s fanatics and with moral vigor unmatched.
At the end of his message he wrote:
Did you not teach me that life is like a cucumber, sometimes in your mouth sometimes in your ass? Oh God, let there be a stop to all that – must stop – and a new year of justice, peace and more.
Yours,
Henry
PS The Israeli army finally caught up with me and I wrote that I was a pacifist and would not learn to bear arms and kill and miraculously I was given a deferment!
The letter left me cold, even though what I’d told him seemed to have had an impact. It seemed too little too late.
7
An Interlude
Jerusalem, 1980
Perhaps I was slow, but it took me more than a decade after the start of the Israeli occupation to realise that it was not going to end any time soon. The Israelis, I understood, were here to stay and we would have to live with them. I decided I should learn their language so that I could communicate with them and practise law in the Israeli courts, where the work would be more challenging and professionally more satisfying than in the West Bank. On that point, I was mistaken. Israeli military courts were a parody of real courts. Israeli officials used their legal expertise to devise ways of justifying the theft of our land.
Many Palestinians, however, would not learn Hebrew. I recall a professor at Birzeit University who made no effort to study the language and was frustrated when Leumi, the Israeli bank, refused to send him statements in Arabic. ‘They make me feel like a complete illiterate,’ he complained to me angrily. ‘I sent a stiff letter to the manager of the bank and threatened to withdraw my money if they didn’t, but nothing came of it.’ Half a century of occupation and despite its large number of Arab customers Leumi continues to avoid using a single word of Arabic in any of their statements and letters.
I should have understood that Israel did not seek to cultivate neighbourly relations with the Palestinians, nor did it have a vision of future peace and coexistence. Instead, it was looking for ways to encourage the Palestinians to leave. The fact that the military government, which was responsible for education in the West Bank and Gaza, did not introduce Hebrew into the school curriculum should have been a strong hint.
In Mandatory Palestine my father used to talk with his Jewish colleagues in English, which was also the language of the higher courts. But when he tried to do the same with Israeli officials after 1967 they responded in Hebrew, defiantly, as though to assert that they were Israelis, this was Israel not the British Mandate, and Arabs were now under their jurisdiction and must speak their language.
For four and a half months in 1980 I crossed every day into Jerusalem to attend all-day Hebrew classes at an ulpan, a school for the intensive study of Hebrew designed to teach adult immigrants to Israel basic conversation, writing and comprehension skills. I knew about the revival of the ancient biblical language as a language of daily use, but I was still surprised at its success. All Israelis, young and old, recent immigrants or long-time residents, spoke the new language, albeit with a variety of accents.
In one of our discussions about Israel Henry had said that the revival of the language was perhaps Zionism’s greatest achievement. Having a common language was indeed vital to the creation of the new Israeli nation. When I attended classical music concerts at Beniani Haoma in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, I never ceased to be impressed listening to the old ladies, who were the majority of the audience and who had evidently been born and raised in Germany, Poland or some other European country, conversing in Hebrew rather than in their native tongue. Hebrew had replaced their first language, just as they had exchanged the names their parents had given them for Hebrew names. They had tried to become fully Israeli.
The Israeli linguists worked hard. They managed to find Hebrew equivalents for musical terms and for different kinds of food, plants and flowers. Yet when it came to the Nakba, there was no word for it in Hebrew. The media and officials chose to use the Arabic word instead. It was the same with intifada, or uprising, which was deemed to sound more threatening in Arabic than its Hebrew
equivalent, hitna’arut. Likewise ceasefire, tahdi’a, for agreements instigated by the Palestinians. The Hebrew, hafsakat esh, which came to sound more trustworthy, was reserved to designate ceasefires declared by the Israeli army.
Except for one other Palestinian, a young engineer working for the Jerusalem municipality, all the other students in my class were Jews who had come to Israel from a variety of countries, including Australia, Iran, the United States and Uzbekistan. In my class there was an attractive woman from Australia who had short black hair, intense intelligent eyes and a curious, active mind. She and I often conversed during the hafsaka, the fifteen-minute break. When I asked her why she had come with her husband from Australia she told me that she had been sickened by the rampant anti-Semitism there. But now what disturbed her here was the orthodoxy she encountered in Jerusalem.
‘You ask them why this is forbidden and why that,’ she said. ‘You genuinely want to know. They always answer you by saying, “Kakh katov” [so it is written]. And this is supposed to end all discussion. It’s intolerable.’
Our teacher was in her early forties, stout and maternal with a deep voice and an impressive fifteen years’ experience at teaching the language. She had been born in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate and her father had studied at the American University in Beirut, where I’d studied. She was able to pronounce the strong guttural sounds that Hebrew shares with Arabic and yet she taught the language with a European pronunciation. I found this strange. It meant that I learned to pronounce Hebrew like an Ashkenazi, though at that point I was unaware of what this signified.
On the first day of class, before the hafsaka, I was told that the teacher wanted to see me. She was keen to make sure that I knew I was welcome in her class. She told me she had taught Arab students before (she didn’t say Palestinian) and that Arabic speakers found Hebrew much easier to learn than most of the other students. She told me, not without pride, of her star pupil, Ziad Abu Zayyad, who was the very best student she had ever had and who now works as a translator from Hebrew to Arabic. She was as good a guide as anyone could have, having seen thousands of students embark on a new life in this country. The message she wanted to pass on to me was that I should not be impatient with the others and should not act as the star of the class. She wanted to make me feel welcome but remind me that teaching Palestinians was not her priority.
From that very first day I was impressed with how she handled the class, insisting that everyone speak only Hebrew. It was a stressful job, having to teach such a motley crew from different countries and with different abilities. I later learned that she had a wooden frame like a stretcher at home on which she wove floor mats using a large needle and thick woollen threads. This was what she did for relaxation, digging the thick long needle in and out to thread in the colours.
Besides teaching Hebrew, the ulpan offered insight into how people from countries east and west were socialised and absorbed into Israel. The school had a number of Jewish-American students who came here in their summer holiday to learn not only the language but also about Israeli ‘folklore’ and to hear lectures to encourage them to ‘return’.
We learned the classic Hebrew songs. At first I would find myself singing along, until I learned enough of the language to understand that these were songs sung by the early Jewish settlers about the joy of settling the land. Then I stopped and just listened to these young people from around the world joining together in propaganda songs in a new language that they were keen to acquire so they could partake in a new life here.
Every few weeks the class would be visited by a short, energetic man with a large yarmulke that covered most of his head and a proud bushy moustache. He would proceed to play Israeli folk music on his accordion and invite us to stand and stamp our feet to the beat, singing, ‘Come what may, we will stay and continue our yearning for peace.’ Then, having stirred up the class, he would nod to the teacher and walk away, still playing his instrument, leaving us to calm down and return to our less rowdy studies.
Often the teacher would introduce some history into the classes. She would describe how Israel was established, how the land was mainly empty of people, and how the Jewish immigrants came back to develop their ancestral home and make it prosper. As she spoke I would become increasingly angry. One day I could take it no longer and asked to speak. She gave me the floor. Addressing the teacher, I asked how she could describe Palestine as having been mainly uninhabited when she grew up here. She must have realised there was a thriving Palestinian nation living here, most of whom were forced out in 1948. As I spoke in my shaky rudimentary Hebrew, an embarrassed silence fell on the classroom. When I had finished, the teacher smiled and, without comment on what I had said, she praised me, with evident pride: ‘Do you realise that you have been speaking Hebrew for the past five minutes?’ She was a good Hebrew teacher.
Many years later a number of the residents of the old Arab quarter of Hebron decided to learn Hebrew. Their mixed class of men and women was featured on Israeli TV. Asked by the Israeli reporter why they were studying Hebrew, they answered that it was in order to understand the orders the soldiers bellowed at them and avoid getting into trouble or being shot. A few added that they believed the Jews were going to be in their city for a while so they had better learn their language to communicate with them.
They were taken to the narrow streets outside the classroom, where their relaxed and confident young Palestinian teacher began pointing out various signs in Hebrew and asking them to read them. These were the new names that the Jewish settlers had given to the Arab quarter of the old city. They came upon some writing on the wall and the teacher asked if they could read it. They couldn’t.
So he began: ‘What is this first letter?’
‘M.’
‘And the second?’
‘A.’
Then he read it for them: ‘Mavet la aravim. You know what this means? “Death to the Arabs.”’
8
Allenby Bridge
1992
Penny and I were returning to Ramallah from Washington with the Palestinian Delegation, tired and despondent after a year of futile negotiations with the Israeli delegation that had begun with such high expectations the year before. The Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 had brought together representatives from Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinians, and it had been followed by bilateral negotiations between Israel and a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation in Washington. What we could not know, and would not learn until 1993, was that secret negotiations taking place in Oslo between Israel and the PLO would succeed in reaching an agreement between the two sides.
On the Jordanian side of the Allenby Bridge, which crosses the River Jordan, we had completed all the formalities and were waiting for the Israeli soldiers to give us the signal to drive across the border when a sprightly young Jordanian soldier leaped on to the lower step of the minibus. All we could see was his head. He had short-cropped hair and a thick moustache.
‘Are these the Israeli soldiers?’ he asked, indicating two soldiers on the Israeli side of the border. They had long, dishevelled hair and walked with heavy steps. They seemed self-absorbed, drained by the oppressive summer heat.
‘Are these their soldiers?’ he repeated. ‘These? I could squeeze a dozen of them with my bare hands.’
He turned to us and winked. He had a self-satisfied, superior smile on his face, his eyes dark and triumphant. Then, leaping down from the bus and waving to us, he said, ‘Assalam alaikum [Peace be unto you].’
The soldiers who gave us the order to proceed disappeared and we rumbled over the old, wobbly bridge, underneath us the loose planks of wood supported by the metal edifice that stretched over one of the most troubled waterways in the world. We were on our way home.
Khalid, whose puffy cheeks looked as though they had been inflated with an air pump, alighted from the bus first and the rest of us followed. We were accompanied by a Jordanian porter, who had piled our luggage on a
carrier. He pulled it to where there was a yellow metal gate just beyond the bridge and stopped. We could not go any further until the Israeli soldiers came to meet us. We waited but no one came. I leaned over the railing and looked down at the Jordan.
I remember seeing a photograph taken about a hundred years ago of a man rowing his boat along this same river. It had been so much wider then and the branches of the eucalyptus trees along its bank hung over the water. Ever since I had seen this photograph I had yearned to one day row my boat here after the mines had been cleared and the barbed wire removed and the river returned to what it used to be used for – irrigation for farmers, pleasure for visitors and a means of replenishing the dwindling waters of the Dead Sea. But with the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians as they were, this seemed unlikely.
Still no Israeli soldier came to escort us. Uncharacteristically, the bridge seemed deserted. Eventually, a Palestinian porter working for the Israelis walked over to pick up our luggage and the Jordanian porter went back. Khalid was still looking for someone to talk to, someone in uniform, but no one came.
How easy it is for things to be stripped of their significance and their emotional associations. A small yellow gate on the bridge was just a gate, a nearby observation post just a shabby little cabin, the River Jordan just another river.
On the Israeli side of the border we sat on a bench underneath a eucalyptus tree, where we waited like tourists or picnickers by the side of the river, enjoying the shade in the lowest place on earth. Finally, an Israeli soldier appeared. He was light-skinned and red-haired, with what looked like a two-day-old beard and a large, blue-rimmed yarmulke on his head. He was, of course, carrying his machine gun. He asked us in his poor English for our permits.
‘You are not important people,’ he said, examining them.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Not particularly.’
He caught the cynicism in my voice and explained, ‘You don’t have an Aram [the Israeli permit issued for Palestinian VIPs].’
Where the Line is Drawn Page 9