In 1942, as part of the underground movement in Poland, he threw Molotov cocktails at German soldiers in a café, then engaged in armed robbery, was caught and ended up in Auschwitz in the year 1943.
Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, he says, “is exact. Nobody else told the story as exactly as he did.”
Did Yehudah know what was happening?
“In 1943 we knew that they were exterminating the Jews,” though he didn’t know how it was done.
When did you get out of Auschwitz?
“I escaped at the start of the death march, on 20 January 1945.”
After Germany’s defeat, and before leaving Europe for good, he took his revenge. “We made an operation inside a POW camp, where SS officers were held,” he tells me, still enjoying the moment. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is fiction, but Yehudah is real.
Yehudah doesn’t mince words when he talks about the Yekkes at this nursing home.
“We are very lucky that Hitler did not recruit German Jews to the SS,” says this Polish Jew, meaning every word and syllable he pronounces.
At long last somebody’s making me laugh.
I meet Amos Schocken later on, to ask him why he doesn’t offer Gertrud a free subscription to his paper, Haaretz. I cannot believe his response: he doesn’t even know that this woman is alive.
I am not Amos, and I like to know people and what they are about. I know, for example, Toby, my American lady who can’t cook, and I know about her son, the man dedicated to an NGO called Adalah. It is time that this Master Agent finds out what Adalah is doing these days.
Gate Thirty-Seven
Alone among Bedouins: What will happen to you if you walk into a Bedouin home and fondle the most attractive hijab-covered lady you see?
ON THE TWO BUS SEATS NEXT TO MINE ARE MICHÈLE AND ALESSANDRA, OF France and Italy. They are going to the Negev on a fact-finding mission about Israel. They want to know how Israel treats its Bedouins and they are determined to find the truth.
They represent two NGOs in their respective countries, and they work with another NGO, EAPPI, the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel I have encountered before.
For the last two days Michèle has spent her time in Tel Aviv, working with Zokhrot (Women Remember), an Israeli NGO dedicated to bringing into Israel millions of Arabs worldwide who claim Palestine as their homeland and to remembering the “looting, massacres and incidents of rape of the Palestinian inhabitants” that the Jews have been afflicting on the Palestinians. What did Michèle do with the Zokhrot women? Well, great stuff: working to rename Tel Aviv streets according to their “original Palestinian names.”
I guess Michèle doesn’t like the fact that Jews live in Tel Aviv, a city founded by Jews.
Why are you interested in Israel?
“I don’t want people speaking in my name,” she says, and explains that she is Jewish and she is fed up with other Jews and Jewish organizations spreading lies all over the planet.
“The Israeli government is paying money to extreme-right Jewish organizations in France to manipulate the truth. They say that there’s anti-Semitism in France but it’s a total lie. There is anti-Islamism in France, not anti-Semitism.”
Why is the Israeli government paying money to French organizations to say that France is anti-Semitic?
Michèle looks at me in total disbelief. She has never, ever met an idiot like me. Why don’t I understand something so basic? Well, I don’t. Could she please be patient with me and explain? Well, okay: Israel wants to make sure no one is criticizing it and that’s why it accuses people ahead of any accusations from them and calls them racist before the others have a chance to charge Israel for its racism.
A bit complex, but brilliant!
These two ladies, as luck would have it, are going to Adalah’s office in the city of Be’er Sheva, the queen city of the Negev region of Israel, which is where I’m heading, too. The office of Adalah is, of course, also good place for doing objective research on the Bedouin situation in Israel.
As I arrive in Be’er Sheva I see many women dressed in niqabs and burkas walking past me, and I ask myself if I’m not perchance walking backwards in time and am again in Istanbul Airport. But then I look at Michèle, the renamer of Tel Aviv streets, and I know I must be in a Jewish state. I proceed to Adalah’s office, and so do the two European female research fellows.
Once we are there, Dr. Thabet Abu Rass, in charge of the office, speaks to us: “We are representing the rights of the Palestinian people. I have some papers to hand to you about the discrimination of Palestinians and the violations of their rights.” He points to a map in his office. In Arabic it says the following: “Map of Palestine before Nakbah in 1948.” (Nakbah means catastrophe, meaning the founding of Israel.)
When Dr. Thabet talks about Palestinians, he’s not talking about the West Bank. What he’s talking about are the Arabs who live in Israel proper and who are its citizens. And Adalah, Toby’s son’s favorite pro-Palestinian NGO, is deeply into these Bedouins.
I try to evaluate what I see and hear during Dr. Thabet’s speech: Adalah, which, as I found out a while ago, would like to see Jews losing their homes, is working hard to make sure that Arabs keep theirs intact.
Dr. Thabet keeps plodding. The Negev, he says, “is 60 percent of the total geographic area of Israel.” Dr. Thabet likes to talk about percentages: 95 percent of the Negev, and 93.5 percent of the land all over Israel, is “defined as state land. There’s no country in the world which owns so much land, excluding North Korea.”
Michèle jumps to protect North Korea. North Korea is not a racist state that excludes people due to racist ideology, but Israel is “discriminating on the basis of race, excluding Arabs from owning lands.”
Fine.
“Israel moves in the direction of Judaization of Israel,” says Dr. Thabet, and asserts that Israel “confiscates all the rights of the Bedouins.”
Joining Dr. Thabet is Halil, who works in this office as well, and both accuse Israel of everything bad under the sun. Michèle, the researcher, doesn’t ask questions but is constantly nodding in approval and frequently mumbling “Exactly!” and “Of course!” every time someone says something horrible about Israel.
“What Israel is doing is a creeping apartheid,” Dr Thabet raises his voice in our ears. And Michèle says: “Of course.”
Research.
I ask Dr. Thabet how many Bedouins are there altogether. “Two hundred seventy thousand,” he answers, “of whom 210,000 live here and 60,000 in the Galilee.” This afternoon, he tells us, he will take us to see some of them. But first, Halil will take us to a village, to see Bedouin life firsthand.
Introductory speech done, Halil takes us to his home. He drives a Mercedes.
We talk while he drives.
Halil says that Bedouins are not nomads, unlike the “myth propagated by the Israeli government and media.” Bedouins, he says, were nomads “four hundred or five hundred years ago.”
***
We reach his village. At the entrance there’s a sign denoting the name of the area in green and white, a sign similar in shape and image to official road signs elsewhere in Israel. The sign reads: “Alsra” (the name of the village), and “Founded: Ottoman Era.”
Underneath this sign is another sign, an image of a bulldozer, which means: this is a demolish-able area. Why so? Because the Jews are planning to demolish it. They actually “demolish a thousand Bedouin homes every year,” Halil says to me.
I make a fast calculation: Israel is about sixty-five years old, which means that according to this statement, Israeli authorities have by now demolished sixty-five thousand Bedouin homes. I ask Halil if this is indeed the case and he says: Yes, that’s true. I ask him how many Bedouins are there altogether, as sixty-five thousand homes, with Allah knows how many children per family, would add up to more Bedouins being evicted from their homes than actually exist.
Halil doesn’t lose tim
e and promptly corrects his figures: the figure of one thousand units is this year, but it didn’t start like that. Every year the Israelis are demolishing more and more and more.
Figures, naturally, change with a stroke of the tongue.
This does not proceed well with our researcher, Michèle, and she’s getting upset with me. I am of the “other side,” she accuses me, and am just playing naïve by asking the questions I do.
At the entrance to Halil’s home there is a sign on a sheet of paper: “Welcome in Alsira [sic].” His home is made of cement, looking like the average ugly shack you see in various TV reports featuring Bedouin lifestyle. Glued to the door of his house there is a paper he received from the Israeli authorities, “warning” him, he says, of their intention to demolish his house.
There’s the figure 67 at the top of this warning, and Halil says that in the eyes of the Israelis the Bedouins are just figures, like in those “other places,” Auschwitz, for example, where people were also no more than numbers.
The man drives a Mercedes and thinks he is in Auschwitz.
I look at the date of this warning notice: 2006.
The house is still standing.
The Jews obviously keep forgetting to visit Auschwitz.
What is the real name of this village, “Alsira,” as he has at the entrance to his house, or “Alsra”? I ask Halil.
“Alsira,” he says. The name in green and white, that official-looking sign at the entrance to his village, is actually wrong.
Well, those Ottomans!
By itself, the missing i is negligible, but it raises a red flag in my mind because it might indicate that this “Ottoman era” village is an invention, a “fast job” done by the people here. I might be wrong, but I decide to probe deeper into the Bedouin story.
***
We’re sitting in the front yard of Halil’s shack, and I ask him if he would mind me going inside. I’d like to see how a Mercedes-driving Auschwitz-prisoner lives, though I don’t put it to him in these words. He says, sorry, I can’t go in, because his wife is sleeping inside. These are not normal sleeping hours, but what can I say? He thinks he’s done with me, but this Master Agent asks if I could see the inside of some other Bedouin homes, since it would be so enriching to see how the Bedouins live, but Halil says this is impossible at the moment because all the Bedouins are now at their jobs. No Bedouin is unemployed, and Halil’s wife is asleep. Sounds very reasonable, but this Master Agent doesn’t buy it. I know that I’ll have to come up with a scheme to get my body into one or two shacks before the day is over.
Meantime, we go on talking. Halil has just finished studying law at an Israeli university, at one of the best law schools in the country, as he says.
This afternoon, he shares with us, fifteen to twenty young people are going to come here to serve as witness to the horrible life of Halil and his friends. They have just come into this land from Germany, he explains to me.
As Tobi the German, I’m very proud of my fellow Germans who in 2013 have flown all the way down here to see a computer printout of a 2006 sign announcing a forthcoming eviction of a Bedouin from his shack.
And now, after we have seen Halil’s house from the outside, we drive back to Adalah’s office. During the ride Halil speaks of the horrible economic situations of the Bedouins, only to be interrupted by a phone call. He takes his phone, an iPhone, and he answers the call.
A Mercedes and an iPhone, coupled with a law degree from an Israeli university, are the truest trademarks of the poor. This is theater of the absurd, I think to myself, and we’re only in scene 1. It will be interesting to see how the plot of this play develops.
We talk, Halil and I.
I ask him to explain to me his real problems in life. If he views himself as an Israeli, he can indeed, I say, complain against the state and make demands for equal rights or for equal wrongs. But if he views himself as a Palestinian, I ask him, how come he demands that the state view him as its citizen when he is not viewing himself as a citizen of this state?
“I’m Palestinian, because I have Palestinian roots,” says Halil. “I’m a proud Palestinian.”
You should be proud. Palestine is a beautiful state.
Halil objects to the term “Palestine” since, he says, there is no state by that name.
I perfectly understand Halil: If Palestine exists, then the struggle is over, the NGO money well will dry up, and his biggest cause in life will die. But I don’t say this to him, as this would make him jump at me and our conversation would end right there. And so, I ask him another question instead: Why is it that Palestinian government buildings everywhere have “State of Palestine” signs on their entrance doors? Are the Palestinians lying and cheating?
Halil doesn’t like this. Obviously, he has not been to Palestine in ages.
Halil is not the only one objecting to my using the term “State of Palestine.” The Peace and Love ladies in the back of the car object to the term as well. There’s no Palestine, they assert, because Palestine has been occupied. And, as probably I should have seen it coming, Michèle is not going to let go, yapping and kvetching like an old Jewish lady from the Bronx. Slowly but surely, she starts getting on this Master Agent’s nerves. And guess what? I tell her so.
***
You cannot – repeat: cannot – criticize Peace Lovers. They have a monopoly on compassion and truth, and they staunchly demand their basic human right to state their opinion without anybody uttering another word once they have spoken.
I don’t like to accept orders and I insist on putting salt into what seems to be Michèle’s really sensitive wound: her research methods, I tell her, are ridiculous.
Michèle, the educated and mannered French European, screams at me: “If you identify with the Shabak, this is your problem! I’m not a Palestinian and I won’t lower my head for you!” Shabak is Israel’s internal security service, also known as Shin Bet.
Who told you that I identify with the Shabak?
“You behave like Shabak. You interrogate like them. You are such an ugly man that I can’t hold myself any longer. Me and my friend are Europeans and we won’t tolerate your colonialist rule!”
You called me an ugly man . . . ?
“Very ugly! You are a very ugly man. You are a terrible man.”
I understand: no French lady can tolerate colonialism. The French, as history will testify, never, ever engaged in colonialism. No European nation ever did, to be more true to history.
Michèle can’t stop. “You are a dominant colonialist person,” she goes on. She also calls me a “disturbed” man.
European NGO activists are also great linguists. “You called me ‘imbearable,’” she shouts at me. I ask her what “imbearable” means, since I don’t even know this word, much less use it myself.
“I want you to be as far away from me as possible,” she offers in response. “You are so ugly! You, Shabak!”
I think you’ve crossed all lines of proper human behavior–
“Then put me in jail, together with your friends!”
Halil doesn’t know how to react to this comedy show in his car. He drives on, but soon enough loses control of the car and bumps head on into a car ahead of us.
That’s all we needed here: a car accident.
The two cars stop, and the drivers examine the damage. Luckily, the impact was not too hard and the two sides decide to let go. We drive on.
Back in the office of Adalah I see something like a dart board on the wall, only what I see is not a dart board. I ask Halil what it is and he explains to me that this is a graph of the number of Bedouins and where they are from.
Total number is 800,000. “These are the figures for 2006,” he explains, but today there’s about a million Bedouins around.
We started with 270,000 and now we are at a million. This Bedouin issue starts looking to me like a copycat version of the Palestinian issue.
I notice that the name of the country these people come from is
“Palestine.” But since this is written in Arabic, it is assumed here that no outsider would get it. In short: they claim to be Israelis, demand equal treatment with every Israeli, but actually call this land Palestine, and themselves Palestinians.
It is time to go for a ride with Dr. Thabet, the man in charge of Adalah’s office.
***
We are in Dr. Thabet’s car, the European “researchers” and I, and we talk.
I ask Dr. Thabet: How many Bedouins are there? You told me earlier the figure was 270,000, but in your office I saw 800,000. Which figure is right?
“Two hundred seventy thousand. The 800,000 figure is the number of dunams (80,000 hectares).”
But Halil said the figure of 800,000 is that of the Bedouins in 2006 and that today we are talking about a million –
Dr. Thabet now goes in circles. He has something more important to tell me, about how “real democracy” works in Israel, meaning that there is none, at least when it comes to the Bedouins.
To prove his claim he points to an encampment, unrecognized by Israel, ahead of us that has no sign on the road pointing to it. Why a government would be forced to erect a sign to an encampment it does not recognize could make for an interesting PhD thesis for the lovely Dr. Eternity.
Dr. Thabet now takes us to a Bedouin village. We are seated at a simple table with plastic chairs in someone’s backyard, are given water in plastic cups, and Dr. Thabet talks. The European researchers write down every word he says, how bad the Israelis are, how they discriminate against the Bedouins, and what miserable lives the Bedouins live.
The Europeans love these words. They vociferously note that the whole world knows about the plight of the Palestinians and is doing everything to make sure that the Israelis – meaning the Jews – don’t kill them. It’s time to repeat what has already been achieved with the Palestinians and start protecting the Bedouins from the Israeli claws as well.
Dr. Thabet likes the enlightening comment very much but remarks that the Bedouins do not stand a chance of succeeding. After all, there’s a “creeping apartheid” going on here, he says, repeating a term he has already used before.
Catch The Jew! Page 29