They were happy to hear it.
I said to them: “I am Chosen not because any God chose me. I chose Him. Do you understand? I chose Him because of His teaching: treat the orphan and the widow with justice, rest on the seventh day. He started socialism, do you hear me? When everybody was working seven days, God said, ‘No!’ That’s why I chose Him.’”
It’s been over thirty years since I left this country. I have taken thousands of cabs since, in whatever country I have been to or lived in, but the cabbies in Israel are different. It makes me think of what Amos Oz told me. In Israel, even a “bus stop is at times a seminar.”
As luck would have it, on the very next day Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, where the main campus is located, is going to conduct “The International Human Rights Competition” from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
As my cats were sipping their kosher milk (today I gave them settlement-made goat milk, which you can get in Jerusalem but not in Tel Aviv, where it’s boycotted), the cats told me I should attend the competition, provided I left for them a big enough portion.
I’ve watched how people prepare for the possibility of war; it is now time that I find out how people prepare for peace.
Gate Thirty-One
Roadmap to peace: paint a swastika and win an international human rights competition.
I TAKE A BUS TO ABU DIS. WHAT A WONDERFUL RIDE. WE PASS THROUGH A great display of mountains weaving into each other, as if protecting the Holy City in a majestic show of strength. Passing towns on the way to Al-Quds University I see swastikas here and there, of different sizes and colors, but to a Syria-loving German like me they look fantastic.
In case I forgot to mention it, today I’m wearing my Syrian flag baseball cap and the youngsters of Palestine, those who occasionally get a kick out of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, cheer me when I pass by them. “Syria,” they call out.
At the entrance to Al-Quds University I’m told that the Israeli army tried to enter the campus yesterday but the guards and students wouldn’t let them in. A fight ensued and eventually they got in.
I don’t know. I wasn’t here then, I’ve just arrived.
All Palestinian female students I encounter are wearing the hijab. Females without it are foreign students. Al-Quds and the American Bard college, I learn here, are sister universities. I would’ve talked more with the Americans but I don’t want to be late for an international human rights competition.
There’s one little problem: I can’t find the competition. Where is the International Human Rights Competition being held? I ask a fat man passing by me.
“Go there,” he points at a group of four men, “they are Human Rights Professors.”
I approach them. They know of no competition. Well, I’m here already and I’d love to discuss the subject matter with you. They would be willing to sit down with me and talk, they say, but they are so sorry because the classes they teach start in just minutes. Human rights classes, of course.
I walk to the public relations center of the University, where I meet Rula Jadallah. Where can I find the human rights classes? I ask Rula.
She calls up various departments, checks schedules, but finds no human rights class taking place anywhere on this campus at this time of day.
The professors, sadly to say, sold me a story.
Of course, I’m not upset. This is the Middle East, and in the Middle East it’s all about the story. Nothing about reality.
Behind Rula’s desk is a USAID letter hanging on the wall, plus an official letter announcing a $2,464,819 grant for the year 2006–2007 by the US government. “This is the only time we have so far gotten money from the US for this program,” Rula tells me. But Germany is good. The Nano Technology Lab of this university was sponsored by Germany, Rula tells this German with a smile.
Does Rula know anything about the Human Rights Competition taking place today at the university? No. Or, better said, yes, she knows: there is no competition anywhere near here.
I tell her that I saw on the university’s Internet site that a competition was taking place there right now. Rula checks the website of her own university and discovers there is a competition. So, is there or is there not? The answer is yes and no. Yes in cyberspace, No in reality. Why is the university announcing something that doesn’t exist? What a stupid question! The competition gets funding, but except for this Syrian German, no other European bothers to come all the way to Abu Dis to take part in such an event.
Life is a fiction. Period. And Rula is laughing. The best PR, I can see now, is laughter.
I think of the difference between Arabs and Jews. When Arabs make up stuff, they laugh it off once they get caught. Jews, like the atheist Gideon or believing Arik, get very tense.
How do Jews believe, even in their wildest imagination, that they will survive in the cruel, funny landscapes of this Middle East? Maybe that’s why Arabs have lived here for so many years, whereas Jews just pop in for a visit once in two thousand years, to rest a while after an Auschwitz.
The south of Israel, I once heard, is different. Maybe I should go there and see how they view war and peace.
***
I hop on a bus going south and soon arrive in Ashkelon, where I meet Ofir.
Ofir lives in this city, Ashkelon, which is near Gaza, but he can’t go to Gaza. “There used to be a bus here, public bus number 16, and we would go to Gaza whenever we wanted. We were on good terms, the Gazans and the Israelis. We worked with each other, ate with each other, and visited each other. Life was different then. Now Gaza is a world apart. We can’t go to them; they can’t come to us. But this is the Middle East and things turn around; you need to have patience. I hope that one day my daughter will get to live the life that I had, that she will be able to go to Gaza like I did: get on a bus and be there in minutes. Sadly, she is growing up without this experience.”
I ask Ofir to tell me about Ashkelon, and how he got there to start with.
“My grandfather settled in Ashkelon, when it was called Majdal, around 1948. He came from the Ukraine and I don’t really know how he started here. He told us that the Arab men of the town left and that he and the other immigrants lived in the same houses with the Arab women and children who had stayed. My grandmother told me something else. She said that they came to Majdal and entered the Arab houses, you know, after a fight, and moved in. Only some Arabs stayed in the houses together with them, she said, and they took care of the animals and the farming together. This used to be an Arab village, but this city is mentioned in the Bible more than one time.”
If this is what has happened here, I think, that Jews just showed up and kicked out the Arabs by force, this would mean that those Jews behaved in a manner compatible with the cultures they came from, the rest of humanity. A tribe comes in, kills those who live in the place and nicely moves in. It’s harsh, cruel, and horrible and some Jews indeed didn’t like this, like my grandfather; they ended up in Auschwitz and such places.
Not all Jews agreed with this arithmetic, and they said that there are more colors than just black and white. Most of them, in fact, preferred the grey color. They “skipped” or survived Auschwitz and Treblinka but did not act in the manner of their brethren in Ashkelon; they did not force the Arabs out but opted for coexistence instead. Decades later, today, Ashkelon has only Jewish residents and Ashkelon doesn’t find itself lambasted by foreign circles for its cruelty to Arabs.
Ofir doesn’t think it really matters what happened back then; this is the Middle East and bad things occasionally happen in this region. In fact, something equally bad happened to him as well. “I was evicted from my own house in Gaza. I had built it, I lived in it, we were one big family and then the Israeli government forced everybody out of the town and bulldozed all our houses. There was nothing we could do.”
Born in Ashkelon, when he was older he moved to Nisanit on the northern tip of the Gaza Strip, where he built a home for himself and his family. But the house didn’t last. Former p
rime minister Ariel (Arik) Sharon’s government evicted all residents of Nisanit in August 2005 and demolished the town. The state offered compensation to the residents, mostly just a fraction of their homes’ worth, but the mental and psychological sufferings they endured went uncompensated. Many of Ofir’s former neighbors, he tells me, suffer severe depressions to this day and the divorce rate among them is extremely high.
Ofir, who knows that life can at times be turbulent, has come back to Ashkelon and is doing okay. He is a manager at the local Dan Gardens hotel and has his own computer business as well. Two jobs are better than one, because you never know where life will take you.
***
My life takes me to Josh, at Ashkelon National Park. Josh, an archeologist from Harvard University who’s spending his summers digging in Ashkelon, gives me a better understanding of who lived where and for how long, and which group kicked out the ones who had lived there before.
The history of this place did not start in 1948, Josh tells me, and he gives me a short history lesson:
“Canaanites, early to late Bronze Age, 2850–1175 BCE.
“Philistines, 1175–694 BCE.
“Phoenicians, 550–330 BCE.
“Greeks, 330 to . . . I don’t remember now the exact year.
“After the Greeks, these are the others that came in: The Romans. The Byzantines. The Umayyads. The Abbasids. The Crusaders. The Ottomans. The British. And now Israel.”
You didn’t mention the Jews. Did they not rule here before?
“Archeologically speaking we have no proof that Jews ever controlled the area of Ashkelon.”
So says Josh Walton, lab director and archeologist, Ashkelon National Park.
Is he saying that there’s no proof that Jews lived here before?
“I am talking only about this area, about Ashkelon.”
Omri, who works at the National Park, prefers to talk about modern times and not about ancient times. He tells me of the rockets from Gaza that used to land here mostly before Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009, though some occasionally still fall today.
Here?
“You want me to show you a Grad missile?”
Yes!
“You’re standing right next to one.”
What! I look behind, and sure enough there it is.
I pick it up, to feel its weight. Oh, boy, this is heavy!
Why would the Palestinians fire a missile into a park? Well, they tried to kill a few living Jews in the city but ended up shooting some dead Canaanites in the park.
This is an interesting park, an open museum on the sands of the Mediterranean seashore. You walk around and you see statues from three or four thousand years ago, columns and other objects lying around as if they were stones of no value. Here you can even see “the most ancient arched gate in the world,” from the Canaanite period. Interestingly, not one tourist can be spotted here. The Israeli government’s tourism office should get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the worst job in marketing.
Nir, a man who works for the Israel Antiquities Authority, comes by, and he has a pistol. No, his job is not to kill you but to make sure that real estate developers in the area don’t build over ancient ruins, or that the Israeli army doesn’t destroy ruins when paving a road to a base. I ask Nir to take me to the Israeli border with Gaza; I want to see how far it is from where I am at the moment.
Six minutes and thirty seconds is the total amount of time it takes him to drive from Ashkelon to the Gaza border at the Erez crossing. Knowing about this crossing only from countless media reports, I expect tough Israeli soldiers with assault rifles and beastly faces to greet me, and no other but them. This picture I had does not materialize. The first thing I see when I get to the border is an Arab ambulance crossing from Gaza into Israel. The sick of Gaza, it turns out, come to be treated in Jewish hospitals in Israel.
I advance toward the point of crossing. A young woman, with a smile bigger than all of Gaza, greets me. The tough males I thought I would see ain’t here.
How many people have crossed here today? I ask her. “By this time, about three hundred. Would you like to cross?”
She would like to help, in case I need anything.
I don’t think the average Lufthansa stewardess has ever been so eager to serve me.
And a thought crosses my mind: international journalists take courses at Al-Quds University.
Take me to Sderot, I say to Nir.
Sderot is a famous city, upon which and upon whose residents various Palestinian factions have many a time enjoyed firing rockets. In the follow-up of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, thousands upon thousands of rockets have been fired on Sderot for years and years. In fact, this is the most fired-upon city in the country, and maybe in the world.
Nir takes me to Sderot.
I get off the car and start a conversation with the first person I meet, young Daniel.
How do you like Sderot?
“I love it. Sderot is the safest place in the world.”
Did you lose your mind?
“Listen, I was born here, with the bombs. For me, this is still the safest place.”
Safest?? Flying bombs don’t scare you?
“Weak people are scared. This is not me.”
Will you stay here all your life?
“Always and forever. No one will take me out of here. Not even a girl.”
I wonder if a beautiful Tunisian girl with a firm ass and a pair of lovely breasts, the one Aviv and Bar are dreaming of, would also not be able to convince Daniel to move out of Sderot.
There is one city in Israel that stands for peace more than all others: Tel Aviv. I have been there before, but perhaps I have overlooked its “peace potential,” and so I go there again.
I bid goodbye to the south and move to the center of Israel, to the City of Peace.
***
Tel Aviv, the Bauhaus capital of the world known as White City (Tel Aviv is a UNESCO World Heritage Site) is a city that Sharon loves much. Sharon, a Sushi restaurant owner, is about to mount his bike when I approach him. I ask him to explain to me the essence of the average Tel Avivian and, luckily for me, he takes a liking to me, as if I were one of his fish, and he obliges.
“You want to know who we are? We walk, we like to walk, and then we sit in a cafe, drink and eat something, and then walk a bit more, and then we sit to have another drink in another cafe. They say that we live in a bubble, and it is the truth. There are problems in the north and in the south of Israel, Syria and Hamas and Egypt, but we are out of it. We just sit, hope that everything will be okay, and then we have beer. We like beer, but we don’t drink it as much as the Germans do; we don’t have their capacity of beer consumption.
“We have clubs and, very important, we have the sea. The sea gives us inspiration and offers us the calm of the waves and of the sea winds, and infinity. Every day, when I ride to work, I make a detour and ride along the beach. Sea is very important. Go walk a bit, sit down, have coffee, beer, and just feel good.”
I follow Sharon’s advice and walk a bit, to experience Tel Avivstyle peace. On the next building on my path of walk I see graffiti on a wall that’s quite funny: “‘Bibi’ is a name of a dog.” I walk a bit more and then I sit down at a café and drink a bit. And then I walk a bit. I see another café, and I sit. I have a cup of latte and then I walk a bit. Stop for a Coke Zero, sit, get up, walk, buy a cookie, sit, walk. Walk and walk. No direction.
I walk slowly, leisurely, turn right and left, and straight, and then I meet a man holding a loudspeaker. He speaks into it: “Tonight we take the illegal Sudanese, put them on the fire, and make kebab out of them.”
Did I enter some kind of enemy territory?
Maybe.
On the street I’m now walking on there are no liberal Tel Avivians anymore; I’ve obviously walked too far. The neighborhood I just entered is the habitat of the poor, dead poor. This is a neighborhood in whose residents’ names liberals and socialists engage in w
ars, only they don’t live here and don’t walk here.
The Supreme Court of Israel has just decided, I fast learn, that illegal Sudanese immigrants, known as Infiltrators, who have been arrested and jailed by the authorities, must be set free within ninety days, a ruling that scares the poor because once the Infiltrators are released, they will come here, where older Infiltrators live. Right next to the poor, in the area where the old central bus station used to be, thousands upon thousands of Sudanese and Eritrean refugees have taken over the old houses and the streets around in the past number of years. Where will the released prisoners go, the poor ask me? Here.
I walk over to see the Infiltrators.
Street after street, house after house, the neighborhood looks like anything but Israel. There are some “Luxurious Show Rooms” establishments right next to dilapidated houses and, if anything, this place looks like Harlem of the old days, where no white person could be spotted.
I try talking with them. A task that’s not so easy for a white man to accomplish. They see me and they think I am an immigration officer, coming to arrest them. “No pictures!” are the first words they utter when they see me.
***
I sit on a street bench, next to a couple of them, but they don’t talk to me. They are very busy, extremely busy, doing nothing. They roam around, sit about and sleep wherever they find a shaded corner. I look at them and I say to myself: I can do what they do. My world-famous specialty, after all, is doing nothing. If I were a site and not a living creature, I would no doubt win a UNESCO recognition.
Slowly the Infiltrators, people who got into Israel by trickery, talk to me. They realize, I guess, that I am a UNESCO candidate and not a government inspector. An Eritrean man, who tells me he sneaked into this country by foot via Egypt five years ago, takes a look at my iPhone and asks: “Is it yours?”
No New Yorker has ever asked me this question. This is a different world, I can tell, and in this world you don’t get your iPhone at an Apple Store.
Catch The Jew! Page 24