Catch The Jew!

by Tenenbom, Tuvia

  ***

  Maurice, a man whose life mission is to achieve global peace, has checked around the world and found the one power that threatens international peace: Israel.

  Just a few days ago, according to news reports, Muslim extremists entered a shopping mall and slaughtered the shoppers while cutting off their limbs one by one, in an attack that shocked the world in its gruesome brutality. This happened in Kenya, Maurice’s homeland, and you’d assume that if Maurice wants to apply his Conflict Resolution techniques in a troubled spot, he would be doing so in Kenya. But no, he is here.

  I ask him to explain this to me but, in reply, he gives me a nervous smile and stares at me as if I were the Devil Incarnate.

  Abu Rami of Jerusalem is the van driver. He used to drive the former MK Uri Avnery, the oldest Israeli peace activist alive, and now he works with Rabbi Arik. As he drives, he points to places of interest. For example, to a house on top of a hill: “This is the house of Moshe Zar, the Chief Settler!” Don’t ask me what this means; I don’t know.

  In due time we reach the village, and soon will be on our way to the olive grove, to protect the olive harvesting Arabs there from the brutal Jews.

  A Palestinian farmer welcomes us. He has been shot by two settlers the other day, a year or so ago, and the marks on his body are still there, he says, for us to see. What’s your name? I ask him.

  “Bruce Lee.”

  Did he really say Bruce Lee, or was he trying to say something like “Brosely”? I’m not sure but I answer: Nice to meet you. My name is Kung Fu.

  The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the wind is blowing nicely on our faces and the settlers are just near us, I’m told.

  The mood is hot. A fight may be brewing soon with the settlers and I’m as excited as can be.

  But first, we have to go up the hill to the olive trees. I almost fall ten times, as the way up is quite steep and some stones slide the moment I step on them, but what won’t I do to help people from being killed by Jews? I would do everything.

  We reach Bruce Lee’s trees and we pick olives. I thought we would serve as guards against evil, not work like farmers, but I was wrong. Obviously, I neglected to pay attention to the word “serve” in “serve and protect.”

  Dan and Maurice, motivated servants, are hard at work with Bruce Lee on an olive tree, picking the little devils that fall into a sack lying on the ground.

  “The settlers kill us,” Bruce Lee says as the black man and the Jew are sweating to serve him.

  How many of you have been killed by the settlers’ fire so far? Dan, eavesdropping on my conversation with Bruce Lee, immediately interjects: “You can see it on the Internet.” I don’t respond to Dan and keep at Bruce Lee, asking again: How many have been killed by the settlers here so far?

  “Two.”

  When?

  “In 1999 or 2000.”

  That’s quite a few years ago, and Bruce Lee looks at my face and realizes he didn’t succeed in making me worry about the Jews. But Bruce Lee is smart and he knows that some white people might need a good story to get them scared of the Jews. Stories create emotions and Bruce Lee wants to touch Kung Fu.

  The other day, he now tells me, a settler saw an Arab who was praying on the hills and asked the praying man to stop praying. The Arab didn’t obey the Jew and continued to pray. The settler immediately got off his horse and shot the Arab in mid-prayer.

  I never knew that settlers ride horses, but I don’t know everything.

  Did you see this with your own eyes, Bruce Lee?

  “My neighbor told me.”

  Bruce Lee asks me who I am. A German journalist, I tell him.

  “Thank you for reporting the Palestinian problems to the Europeans. We are happy with the European boycott” of settlement products.

  You’re welcome, Bruce Lee.

  Bruce Lee is smart. Give a German like me compliments and I will fall for him head over heels.

  Dan and Maurice, I notice, don’t stop working. When watching them, it becomes clear that they are not professional olive harvesters, but their drive and motivation compensates for their lack of skill.

  Hour follows hour and no murderous settlers show up, which is really not good news for Rabbi Arik. He must have prayed hard that God help the cause and that I see Jewish brutality first hand, but God got lazy lately and He has not sent the marauding Jewish settlers to kill us. Soon enough the rabbi decides to intervene in God’s lack of reacting to his prayers. He calls me to offer his help: Would I like, he asks, to be taken around by a car, another car, to see the evidence of the horrible crimes that have been committed by the Jews in the past?

  It is absurd that a rabbi would try so hard to prove that Jews are murderous creatures, but I love theater of the absurd – haven’t I mentioned this already? – and I say that I’d be glad to be driven around places where Jews have killed the innocent.

  A guy by the name of Zakaria, Rabbi Arik informs me, will soon come to pick me up.

  But before Zakaria arrives, Bruce Lee invites all of us to eat with him, hummus with ful and pita.

  As we eat, under a lovely olive tree, Bruce Lee tells me again that he was shot by the two settlers and adds two details: they are brothers, and he knows them.

  What are their names?

  He doesn’t know their names, he says, only their faces.

  Does anybody know?

  Yes. There was an Israeli police inquiry into the case and charges have been filed in court.

  In court, as far as I know, charges cannot be filed against faces; there must be names. Who has the names? I ask him. Yehudit from Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO that protects the legal rights of Palestinians, he says.

  I write a note for myself to find this lady and get the details.

  Meantime Zakaria arrives. He is a Palestinian from the village of Jit, and he has a business card that defines him as a “human rights coordinator.”

  ***

  I mount his impressive big van, with the latest technology inside, and he drives me around.

  “What do you want to see?”

  Everything.

  He takes me to the village of Burin. We were in the olive grove of the village, and now we go to the village itself. In minutes we’re there. It is a place, I think as I look at it, where the Angel of Misfortune dances every day. Wherever I look I see utter poverty that’s really hard to look at.

  Yes. This is what most news consumers of the world think Palestine is, and here I see it with my own eyes. International media, I’m confirmed, are honest brokers of the truth.

  I need to inhale clean air and I go to buy cigarettes in a little shop, more like a hole in cement, and I stare at the smoke coming out of my mouth.

  Beyond the smoke and across the street I see a bunch of kids and soon enough I start playing with them. They like it. And I like them. Sweet, happy – God knows why – they easily open up to me, a stranger. If anybody anywhere needed proof that kids can be happy on Angel Poverty Street, he or she should come here. I try to compare it with Great Neck, New York, where I lived quite many years ago. Great Neck is one of the richest suburbs of America, where kids get the best care the world knows of, best education, best toys, best food, best housing, best everything. Are they happier? Would you see them walking the streets together with so many smiles, and ever-sharing laughter? No way. The kids of Great Neck suffer from affluenza, but the kids of Burin don’t even know that a disease like that exists.

  I marvel at the sight of Burin’s kids and play more with them.

  Before long, more and more kids join me. I make up a song, “a o e I a o o,” and we all sing together, real loud: the best street theater Burin has ever witnessed.

  To Zakaria, of Rabbis for Human Rights, the kids and I seem really crazy. He looks at me and the kids, and tells me this show reminds him of an Arab proverb: “If your friends are crazy and you are not, your mind will not help you.” This means, of course, that now I’m free to do whatever I want and that he will
have to play along with me. I like this.

  A man on the other side of the street is trying to find out what kind of show this is, and he comes over. He introduces himself: Munir. And Munir, believe it or not, is also a human rights activist. Or, to be more exact, this man works for Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO that’s generously funded by the German IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), amongst others.

  This developing scene – two Arabs paid by Jews to catch bad Jews, meeting on the same street corner – strikes me as a scene in a Franz Kafka novel. What happens here in front of my eyes is this: Israeli leftist NGOs are ever in search of their own people’s wrongdoing and in competition with each other for recruiting local spies.

  In any case, I ask Munir if he knows Yehudit.

  Yes, of course he does. Why didn’t I ask him before? She was just here!

  Well, I didn’t know Munir before. Can he call her?

  He gives me her phone number.

  Yehudit tells me she knows everything about Bruce Lee and the settler brothers, only there’s a tiny problem: “I don’t know the names” of the settlers. It’s on my computer, she says, and it will take her ten minutes to find out.

  Okay. I have ten minutes, ten hours, whatever she needs.

  Some minutes later she calls. She has no name.

  Wait a sec: Is there no court case, cases, or whatever?

  “This you’ll have to check with Muhammad.”

  Who is Muhammad?

  “A lawyer.”

  Can you give me his telephone number?

  “He is in Umm al-Fahm,” she says, referring to an Arab town.

  I say thank you and hang up. No point in chasing this any further.

  ***

  Life moves on and Zakaria takes me to a house of which the Israeli army has burnt one room. Munir joins us. Zakaria parks his big black van by the side of a burned black room in a house. It’s a beautiful image, I must admit. I enter the room, a small room, and indeed it seems to have had some fire visiting it.

  Munir tells the story: “Last Saturday, 4:30 p.m., the army came to the village. Two soldiers got off a jeep, came close to the first house and threw a bomb inside the house. They started to say, ‘You are not allowed to get outside any of the houses in the village,’ and went to the second house and threw three bombs into the first floor. Then the kids and the people started throwing stones, and a lot of army soldiers came after this, ten jeeps. They threw three gas bombs into this house. Two small daughters and a baby were inside the house and the kids suffocated. People came in and took the kids out. I called the fire station and they extinguished the fire from the outside, the window.”

  Why did the army do this?

  “It happens every day that the army comes here and throws bombs, and the children throw stones.”

  Every day?

  “Every second day.”

  Were they here yesterday?

  “No.”

  So they will come today. What time do they usually come?

  “Around 4:00 p.m.”

  It’s 2:00 p.m now. I’ll wait here. Only two hours to go.

  Now I have two hours to kill, and I think how best to use my time. An idea comes to me: since the Israeli army is coming here every second day throwing bombs into houses, I should be able to see many burnt houses. Can I see more burnt houses? I ask.

  “No.”

  This doesn’t look good. The German wants proofs of Jewish brutality and all they offer him are stories and no evidence. Germans, what can I do, are natural proof-seekers.

  Well, this is the East and Allah is no dummy. Allah gave people brains, and so the lady of the house says that she took pictures of the event on her cellphone. It can all be proven!

  Could I see the pictures, in case you have the phone with you?

  Yes, she has the phone and I can see the pictures.

  Please.

  The lady goes out to bring the phone. And then she comes back, with the phone.

  Great.

  Can I see the pictures?

  Well, not exactly. The pix are gone. The phone, how sad, has broken.

  I realize that I’d rather wait for Prophet Mahdi than for the IDF to show up here, and so I walk with Zakaria back to the van and we drive on.

  ***

  Rabbi Arik calls. The phone is on loudspeaker. Rabbi Arik and Zakaria speak in Hebrew, a language Tobi the German doesn’t understand. I’m a German goy. Rabbi Arik tells Zakaria that if I’m willing to stay longer, for whatever period of time today, he should drive me around and show me places. Rabbis for Human Rights will pay the cost, Rabbi Arik says.

  Good.

  Zakaria tells me that this was Rabbi Arik on the phone and that he, Zakaria, will drive for an hour and then drop me back with Abu Rami, who will take me back to Jerusalem.

  I protest. Rabbi Arik asked this German, me, to come here and I want to know what exactly my Jewish friend said to him. Zakaria has no choice, since the rabbi is my friend, and so he must be straight with me. He goes around and around, telling me that Rabbi Arik offered some different options but that he, Zakaria, thinks that one additional hour of driving around would be enough.

  I tell Zakaria that I want to be driven around for as long as it takes. That’s what I want and I think the rabbi would be very happy if this was to happen. I want to see more, I tell him. I want to see places, I want to see people, and I want to see houses. I’m a crazy man, I remind him, and I want to be driven around and see all the horrible things the Jews have been doing here. Let’s go on this mountain, that hill, this and that road, I suggest.

  Zakaria, realizing he’s dealing with a really crazy man, a German friend of a Jew, drives on.

  We see beautiful houses and I want to take pictures. Zakaria doesn’t like the idea, just like Atef didn’t want me to see the nice houses of the rich poor, but I insist. He must stop driving for a minute so that I can take pictures, I tell him.

  Which village is this? I ask him.

  “Burin.”

  Yep. The same Burin as before. Only Zakaria, before I told him where to drive, took me to the worst part of Burin. And only there. He and the rabbi wanted me to see poverty, and I almost believed their story.

  I snap some photos on my iPhone and we keep driving.

  As we drive on I see two flags on top of many electricity poles and other tall structures, and I ask Zakaria whose flags they are.

  “The green flag is Hamas, the yellow flag is Fatah” (the PLO).

  There seems to be a big contest here between the two.

  We keep on driving, village in and village out. I notice one repeating sign in various villages and roads: USAID. I guess that America is spending in Palestine much more than I had ever imagined.

  ***

  We keep on driving. Suddenly, on one of the roads we are driving on, we see an Israeli army jeep ahead of us. Arab youngsters will throw stones at it, Zakaria says, and the soldiers will then “respond with fire.”

  Let’s follow the soldiers, I say to him, and see what happens. I want to see the fire! Naturally, of course, this German wants to see the Jews firing at Arab youngsters. We keep following the jeep, until it abruptly stops. Why did the Jews stop? I wonder.

  “They make a checkpoint!”

  Just like that. The Israeli army drives people crazy here. Israeli soldiers, when they are bored, amuse themselves by torturing the Arab people – suddenly putting up checkpoints, arresting people, and God knows what else.

  We reach the jeep’s position but it’s not a quickie checkpoint as Zakaria said it would be. No cars are being stopped and we pass freely. I take a look at the jeep now behind me and I see one of the soldiers getting ready to pee. Zakaria’s checkpoint jeep is in actuality a urinating-position jeep. Pee is free, as the Russian prostitute told me.

  We keep on moving.

  I drive Zakaria crazy, I know. I make him drive through many, many beautiful homes and neighborhoods in Palestine. If Rabbi Arik knew how I am spending his money he would
have a heart attack.

  And as we ride alongside the various gorgeous houses and rich landscapes of the Arab, Zakaria’s phone rings. A North American man is on the line and he is very, very, very eager to help the Palestinian people and save them from the Israeli criminals. Where should he go, he asks Zakaria, in order to bear witness to the horrible crimes of the Israelis?

  Zakaria is also very eager to help this poor North American caller.

  The North American caller, for the record, is a member of the Christian human rights organization EAPPI, the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel I have run into already. He is a good Christian, and he wants to help the needy between prayers. EAPPI, I can see, is very busy in the Holy Land. Anna Maria, the Swiss beauty I met at Al-Quds, and Michèle, the ugly French woman I met on the bus, are also with EAPPI.

  Zakaria tells him that it’s really great that he has called. We are not working on Saturdays (Rabbis observe the Sabbath), he tells him, and Friday is only half a day (for the same reason), and so a good-news Christian would really be helpful. It would be great, Zakaria says to the lovely Christian, if he would also record what he sees.

  Amazing how this system works! People land in this country with cameras in order to find bad Jews. If this guy had dedicated the amount of energy he’s spending here to South Central LA, he would have found quite a number of horrible images to show to the world, but I guess he’s too scared to walk around South Central’s streets.

  Zakaria drives on. We get to Qalqilya and I have no clue where else to ask Zakaria to take me. And so I tell my man that now I need a falafel. Grudgingly, Zakaria stops by a falafel stand. Master Agent is thinking hard where to go next, while munching his falafel, when he notices a road sign: Rawabi.

  Rawabi. I remember the name. The other day I was given a brochure, I don’t even remember by whom, about Rawabi, the “first Palestinian-planned city,” a city built from scratch by the Palestinians of our time – not fourteen thousand years ago. The pictures in the brochure were splendid, and I remember that this new city has raised the biggest Palestinian flag in existence.

  I would love to see it!