Catch The Jew!

by Tenenbom, Tuvia

  I ask Dr. Thabet to tell me where he lives.

  Well, he lives in Beer Sheva, with the Jews.

  Is this what you call apartheid?

  He screams at me. “You, Jews!” he yells. Me? A Jew? This is totally unacceptable. But I let it go for the moment, as I want to know if my new friend is only busy with Adalah or whether there are other things he does with his time. What do you do for a living, Dr. Thabet? I ask him.

  Well, this poor soul, please don’t cry, is a professor at Ben-Gurion University.

  How can you complain that the “Bedouins stand no chance of succeeding” when you are doing so well?

  The Europeans keep their mouths shut, but their eyes spew hatred.

  Dr. Thabet understands that his good life is not good for his cause, and so he moves on to the best defense known to man: attack. What kind of a journalist am I? he wants to know. He has never met journalists like me. Why do I ask questions?

  I patiently ask His Professorship to explain to me what is his problem with a journalist asking questions. He is smart, my professor friend, and he knows that the best way he can get out of this is to find fault with me. What are my faults? Well, says the professor, you have shown no sign of wanting to really find out the truth about the Bedouins. I beg him to explain himself and he does. You have never, he charges me, asked questions such as: How do the Bedouins live?

  That’s the height of chutzpah, and I say it to him. I asked his associate, Halil, to take me to visit Bedouins at their homes, but Halil wouldn’t cooperate. Instead of visiting Bedouins at their homes I have been treated here to speeches. Do you really think, Dr. Thabet – and I raise my voice – that I came all the way here to listen to you and Halil? Couldn’t I just have called you for that? Why the heck do you think I came all the way here? To see the life of the Bedouins, but you wouldn’t let me! Instead, I have to sit here, like a stupid student of yours, and listen to you talking.

  Do you really want to know the truth? I don’t care what you say, zilch. I’m no human rights activist who came here to “find out” what he already believes is fact. I don’t want your speeches, I don’t want Halil’s speeches. I want to be with the Bedouins, to visit them in their homes, sit at their tables, drink and eat with them – I don’t mind paying for the food – and see everything for myself. Get it?

  Master Agent has spoken.

  As fast as his professorship allows it, Dr. Thabet realizes that the time for propaganda is over. The ball is in his court and if he doesn’t act quickly he is going to turn into a laughingstock. He promptly tells a young activist by the name of Amir, a quiet guy who studied in Germany and is now back home, to take me around.

  Dr. Thabet and the European researchers, the yapping Bronx Jewess with her Italian sidekick, exit; I stay with Amir.

  I feel like being in Paradise. Finally.

  ***

  I am at a Bedouin settlement by the name of Abu Kweider, which is made of a number of shacks in an indefinable order, but Amir helps me through the maze.

  We walk toward a shack in front of us. Welcome to the shack of Hanan, an attractive Bedouin lady standing in front of the ugliest structure you can imagine to be called a home: a shack that is the mother of all shacks.

  I am invited in. No more sitting on plastic chairs outside, like I experienced earlier today and with Atef of B’Tselem a few days back. Nope. I am invited in. I hope I won’t vomit when I see the inside.

  As I enter, I forget all proper German manners and I let out a huge “Wow!”

  Wow. What a beautiful home, what a gorgeous house. How wonderfully decorated. How warm. How richly done. I wish it to be mine. Now.

  Yeah. Now I know why Adalah people, and those of other NGOs, don’t want me inside these houses, these shacks.

  Hanan is not an activist, she is just human. She is religious, with hijab and all, the kind of human you would be told by any NGO personnel to respect and not to touch, God forbid, if you happen to be a man.

  But I’m not an average man. I’m a Master Agent.

  I put my hands around Hanan, caress her lovingly, and tell her that she is gorgeous, that her house is beautiful, and that I would love to have a photo of both of us together.

  No journalist, certainly no white Peace and Love man, has ever done this with her and to her. It’s the first time for her to feel the touch of a white man who shows her this basic human gesture of affection: a touch.

  She asks me, laughingly, if I know what will happen when her husband comes in and sees us together like this. We laugh about it. And we connect.

  No lecturer or activist, of any kind or sort, can make you feel one tenth of what I now feel by touching her, being with her, looking at her as a human being and not as an observer and defender of a political cause.

  It is on this occasion that I grasp one basic reality: activists, on the Left or on the Right, by their very nature don’t relate to people as humans.

  I feel at home. Hanan asks me if I’d like some water, and I ask her if she has lost her mind. What water? Do I look to her like a white man, like all those cold idiots that she has seen before? She gets it. “Tea or coffee?” she asks. Coffee to drink, I tell her, and some food too, please. Have you got any food?

  Lucky for Michèle that she isn’t here; had she been here, she would have had a stroke.

  I like Hanan. She possesses warmth that you’ll be hard-pressed to find in modern Europe, warmth that you will find in New York only in tanning salons.

  Hanan feeds me. What labneh, what olive oil, what bread, what coffee. This is a Seven-Star Shack Hotel.

  I ask Amir, as my belly is about to explode from all the food in it, to take me to another shack.

  ***

  Welcome to Najakh’s shack: excessively ugly exterior, bewitchingly gorgeous inside.

  Plain unbelievable.

  As Najakh goes to bring tea and cake, after my belly has miraculously emptied and whispered in my ears that it has arranged room to accommodate sweets, Amir talks a bit about himself. He is one of thirty siblings, he shares with me. His father, you see, has three wives, and each gave him kids aplenty.

  The tea and cake arrive safely. I ask Najakh how many wives her husband has.

  Well, only two. Najakh is wife #1, and ten years after their marriage her husband married a second wife.

  How did you feel when it happened?

  “Very bad.”

  What did you say to him?

  “Nothing.”

  Why not?

  “I don’t know. There was nothing to say. Honestly.”

  Did you cry? Did you scream?

  “Of course I cried. I screamed. I was upset, I was sad. Everything.”

  And he saw it all and didn’t care?

  “Of course he cared. But in our culture, whatever the man feels like doing he does, even if he is going to get hurt from it. This is what he wanted and that’s it.”

  How do you live with the second wife?

  “She’s in her home and I’m in mine.”

  You don’t live in the same house?

  “No. Of course not!”

  And where does your husband live?

  “One day here, one day there. One day honey, one day onion.”

  Does it still hurt you? Do you still feel the pain?

  “Every day.”

  Do you talk to with the second wife?

  “No.”

  How old is she?

  “She is three years older than me.”

  Your husband likes older ladies?

  Najakh laughs: “I married too, too young . . .”

  Tell me, don’t you want to just run away from it all?

  “God forbid! I have children!”

  Let me ask you another question: Did you at the time try talking with your father, asking him to intervene against your husband’s second marriage?

  “My father did this stupid thing!”

  What do you mean? Did your father marry him off to the other woman?

 
“No, no.”

  She explains what she means: “My father also married two women. How could he tell him not to do the same?”

  Did your husband talk to you about this before he got married?

  “That he wanted to marry another one?”

  Yes.

  “Definitely. He didn’t do it like: boom, here is another woman!”

  How did he explain it to you?

  “Just like that. For no special reason. He just wanted to marry. That was all.”

  Her own brother, she goes on to say, cooked the food for her husband’s second wedding party.

  She laughs as she says this, as if this was at all funny.

  Do you have anybody here you can talk to about this, about what you feel?

  “Hanan. She is my sister-in-law.”

  If Allah showed himself to you in the middle of the night and said: “Ask of me one thing and I’ll grant it to you,” what would it be?

  “That my husband be healthy and good.”

  Wouldn’t you ask Him to take that second wife and throw her into Satan’s hands?

  “No. I don’t even think in these terms. She has a child now, what can I do?”

  She says that “this is my fate,” and that her husband “suffers now” because of what he did.

  He suffers? From what?!

  “He has two wives. It’s not easy. I don’t give up, she doesn’t give up. He is living with a dilemma.”

  I assume that “giving up” means sex. I ask: Does he sleep in different beds every night, one night with you and the other night with her?

  “Yes. He has got used to it already.” She laughs again. “Three years like this. It’s not simple.”

  She is sad. Her voice lowers. Her laughter is actually tears.

  I’m probably the only stranger she has ever spoken to so freely about this.

  Najakh’s husband has built another house next door, a house that sticks in her eyes every waking moment, but Najakh never enters that house.

  Amir and I exchange looks. It has never occurred to him, the human rights activist, that the women here lack basic human rights. Obviously it hasn’t occurred to Adalah, neither has it occurred to the other NGOs working here or the various European diplomats working here as well. A note to Her Excellency Marion Fesneau-Castaing: Najakh’s husband wouldn’t mind having a third wife; I would gladly volunteer to take care of the wedding party.

  ***

  My next stop is Lakia, a Bedouin town of eleven thousand residents that was built by Israel. No Jew is allowed to live there, says Ari of the pro-Israel NGO Regavim. There are fifty-three pro-Bedouin NGOs, says Ari, and there’s Regavim. One against fifty-three.

  Moving from Adalah to Regavim takes one phone call, but the distance between them is infinity. I hook up with Ari and with Amichai, a research fellow for Regavim, for a tour of Bedouinland as they know it. Amichai, like Ofir of Ashkelon, is formerly from Gaza and he, too, was evicted from his home in Gaza, demolished by the Israeli army.

  Before the entrance to Lakia there is a water reservoir and we stop there. On the side of it I see a pile, one that looks like remnants of an older reservoir with graffiti on it, including a swastika.

  Amichai explains to me that the old reservoir, made of thinner materials, used to be repeatedly damaged by Bedouin youngsters, who would poke holes into it over and over again.

  Why would they damage their own source of water?

  “They knew that the Israeli government would fix it back, since Israel cannot afford to leave them without water. Now the government has built a new reservoir, made out of cement, and much thicker than the older one, and put a fence around it, plus security cameras.”

  He tells me more: two thousand new illegal structures are being built in Bedouinland every year, but Israel demolishes only about 10 percent of them because various NGOs take the government to court and it can take up to fifteen years for the courts to decide.

  What is usually the result of these court cases?

  “Those that finish the process, they usually end up in demolitions.”

  Why are the NGOs doing this, if they end up losing?

  “Good PR against Israel.”

  Honestly, I start getting confused with the number games played here. Halil told me that Israel demolishes a thousand Bedouin units per year, and this guy now tells me that the Bedouins build two thousand illegal units per year. Both figures seem to me wildly exaggerated.

  NGO people are more interesting to listen to when they don’t mention figures.

  Amichai, for example, tells me this: “Fifteen years ago if you called a Bedouin ‘Arab,’ he would hit you in the face. Today, with NGOs like Adalah working on their behalf, they see themselves as Arab and as Palestinian.”

  If my memory doesn’t fail me, and speaking of the time I lived in Israel, I think he got this one totally right.

  ***

  Regavim, being a lonely goat in the huge NGO farm, hardly has a chance of succeeding in its mission. There are simply too many NGOs working in the opposite direction. To make up for this discrepancy they spend more money than they would wish showing journalists what NGOs like Adalah would never show them.

  Would you like, they ask Mr. Master Agent, to fly on a small plane? It’s a plane of only one engine, and at times the flight is quite shaky, with turbulences here and there, but I can see what the birds see. If it’s okay with the Master, Regavim would get the plane and foot the bill. Their idea is shockingly simple: If I agree to fly above the desert and see for myself what the Bedouins are doing down below, they wouldn’t have to add another single word to convince me that they are right.

  I’m a sucker for planes. To own a single engine, tiny plane that flies with the birds is one of my biggest dreams. I have never flown in such a beauty, didn’t even know you could rent them, and I immediately accept.

  They hope, they say, that I didn’t eat beforehand, as my stomach might be jumping too much and react strangely. But, of course, I don’t listen to them. I get myself something to eat – did I already mention the fantastic food in this land? – and a drink as well, and then I am ready to fly.

  And fly I do. In a Piper Cherokee C.

  What a sweetie! You would hardly get a pleasure like this, the immense greatness of flying in such a baby, almost anywhere else. You can fly First Class Plus on the most expensive airline there is, and you won’t get one tenth of the pleasure I get by flying on this cutie. And sorry to say it, but this beats my Turkish Airlines hands down.

  I fly on this Piper and in no time I transform from a fat man into a lovely bird. This is heaven!

  Heaven is above, Bedouin is below: on this hill and on that, on this mountain and on that, in this valley and in that. Wherever I look I see the Bedouins. I don’t count the numbers, but I get the picture: If Israel, or a real estate developer, would want to to build in the Negev their options would be limited. If they wanted to build on this mountain right below me, a huge mountain, they would have a problem: there are two Bedouins there who claim the whole mountain belongs to them. And if they try to build in this valley now under me as I fly, quite a big valley, they’d have the same problem. Every Bedouin wants a couple of wives and a couple of mountains. Try doing this in Stockholm or Washington, Paris or Berlin and you’d be taken to the nearest mental institution in an ambulance. And sorry, really sorry, but no NGO will get you out.

  What I see down below is Bedouins all over, on huge swaths of lands. The Bedouins might have stopped wandering, but the mountains have not. Whenever a mountain sees a Bedouin, it invites him in. Don’t believe me? Get your zekel beiner on a Piper.

  It is on this lovely Piper that I make an oath: Once I land I will go to a tanning saloon, get darkish, put a keffiyeh over my head, catch me five brown ladies, and settle on the next available five virgin mountains. The Negev is huge, and there are quite enough mountains for me and my babes. Adalah will make sure I’m represented well, and European diplomats will build me my tents. A brigh
t future is waiting for me once I’m on solid ground.

  Back on mother earth, I check for Toby’s telephone number. It is an urgent matter and I must talk to her son immediately: I need special funding for my tanning-salon sessions. Unfortunately, Ari and Amichai are waiting for me in their car next to my pretty Piper and they hijack me. We drive from one settlement to the other and then we get to al-Araqeeb, which I’m actually interested in. This is a settlement that Rabbi Arik, among many others of my future NGO funders, is working hard to support.

  ***

  Al-Araqeeb is a village of twelve families that, according to a man named Aziz we meet while wandering around, has been demolished fifty-eight times. It was first demolished in 1948, and last in 2013. So Aziz. Ari, and Amichai listen, and I say nothing. Aziz continues to talk, giving us a short history of the place: all the residents here were employed, 573 of them, and the Israelis didn’t like the fact that all of them were employed and so they destroyed the place.

  Why would Israel want them unemployed?

  “The Israelis want that all the Arabs be their slaves.”

  Not good news for me, a future five-ladies Bedouin.

  Salim, another Bedouin, shows up and happily shares with me that foreigners come to visit them every day to offer help.

  Aziz lives in a shack, which, he says, is actually a mosque, and others live in tents and corrugated structures by the cemetery. For a second there I ask myself if I’m in the Mount of Olives but no, I’m not. This place is geared to European NGOs, not to prayers by the grave of the Jew Menachem Begin. Salim asks me to join him a few feet away, at a “media center” inside a mobile home. A place kindly donated by the good souls of the NGO world. Here I see computers, a projector, printers, posters, and a variety of printed materials.

  Most likely, this is the only press center in a cemetery.

  A video is playing. In it we see a man in his beautiful house, walking in it room by room, followed by images of a woman passing by with a tray in her hands. Probably coffee, tea and sweets. Very cozy home. But minutes later we see a fire and many demonstrators who are trying to stop the coming demolition. We also see Israeli police cars, a helicopter, and then bulldozers. Houses are being destroyed. Foreign and local demonstrators are clashing with the police.