“Hello?”
“This is The Milton-Whitlaw Survey Institute in Pennsylvania, sir. What age are you?”
“Um-m-m… I’m sorry, we don’t give information out over the phone.”
“Sir, this will only take a moment of your time. With national elections coming up, you’ll want your voice to be heard. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your age.”
“Hello, young lady. Thank you for calling, but we don’t give out information over the phone.”
“You understand our purpose, sir. We are a nationally recognized public opinion research institute. Your opinion is important to us. Without your input, our results may be badly skewed. Each demographic needs to be represented. When people such as yourself abstain from the process, you and your contemporaries risk being under-represented in the marketplace of public opinion. To avoid that, I have only a few simple questions that won’t take more than an additional three minutes of your time.”
“This is a commercial survey?”
“Most definitely. We at Milton-Whitlaw take great pride in the exactitude of our techniques. Sir, if confronted by a food product on the shelf of a grocery store, which of the following colors would you find most attractive? Red, blue, pink, orange—“
Click!
The local Russian news sheet, Kommersant, contains an ad for Peace In the Middle East, a conference at Congregation Addis Ababa. I wonder if I can get a movie idea out of it? Even Hollywood has felt the oppression of the regression in the recession: Box office receipts are down. I can pitch, but will they catch? I go on-line, sign up and pay my $10 registration, plus a booking fee through Ticketmaster. As time goes by, Ticketmaster seems to get pricier and pricier. Or is it just me?
Dare I say it, I am also looking for a little romance. I’ve come to the conclusion— sadly— that I have been judging books by their covers! A cute face, big blue eyes, 22-years-old, sexy? That’s not necessarily a recipe for disaster, but most 22-year-olds find it an uphill battle to delve into the minutiae of a policy wonk comme moi. Maybe I ought to stop shopping in the kiddie aisle and face a grown-up challenge. ‘Bout time and all.
We participants trudge through an ice storm to reach the shul. A cornucopia of arabesques, it looms over the avenue threateningly. Some poor college student reading a paperback has been hired to sit in the cloakroom and guard our coats. What a way to spend the afternoon. I thank the man.
The average age of the audience is pushing 50, so when our 35-year-old hostess Julie Newman begins her welcoming speech, I am all ears. This is my kind of woman: sandy-blond hair; hazel eyes (smolder, smolder); rhinestone eyeglasses, but discreet; a nose like a French fashion model (lots of character); a serious, business-like expression and a black suit. Her looks are such a turn-on, I cannot believe what she says.
“It’s such a pleasure to see you all,” she tells us. “There are so many more of you than last year. I would like to take a moment to thank our sponsors… Allow me to thank our moderator… We’re so pleased to have as speakers and experts the following luminaries…”
Uh, luminaries? Cross Julie Newman off my list! Must everything she says be a cliché? If the rest of the conference deflates as rapidly as Julie’s introduction, we’ll experience peace through narcolepsy.
No such worries. As the Israelis told me 42 years ago, “You get four Jews in a room, you hear five opinions!”
I’m sorry, but the Rabbi is named Franklin Nathan Stein. It says so in the printed program. Not my fault. Talk to his parents. So Frank N. Stein is telling us: “Let’s start with today’s premise. Grand gestures at the negotiating table have failed miserably. The only thing the Israelis got from Camp David was a good tan. Peace must be built by fostering understanding between people on a daily basis… at street level.
“That’s the basis of this event. If it works for you, stay! Talk! Argue! If not, okay. This discussion may not answer all your needs. But don’t look so disappointed! We won’t present any grand strategies. We’re discussing peace through face-to-face, one on one, hand in hand contact between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.
“On with the show! Refreshments will be available during the break. We have more food than you can eat!”
The lady rep from the Israeli Embassy says, among other things, “We are making some progress in Israel toward basic, human equality. Assimilation didn’t work. When the country was young, we thought, ‘Everyone comes here, we put them through the kibbutz and the army, they all come out Israelis.’ Now we see that this leads to unsustainable inequality and a lack of individual identity. Today, we emphasize, instead, multi-culturalism, where every ethnic minority has an equal right to their own identity and a fair share of society’s opportunities.
“We are getting there, but slowly. Don’t say bad things about the country. No one claims we cannot do better! We are trying. Today’s screaming match is tomorrow’s oral history.”
In 1970, right out of college, I went and spent a year in Israel. My intrepid little brother Timothy came to visit me there. Active in the local chapter of the AZA, the youth organization of B’nai B’rith, Tim was much more militant than I.
“I ain’t afraid of no Arab!” he said. “Let the ferbludgevit Arabs watch out for me!”
Among the things we did that summer was to visit the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. I kept having to pull Tim away from these Palestinian gentlemen in western business suits who seemed to be standing on every street corner. A neophyte, a high-schooler, Tim didn’t realize at first that their spiel was always the same: “The Jews can have the land,” they chanted in fluent English. “All we want is compensation!”
“Boy, that guy’s really wack!” Tim would say, turning away.
“Goddam it, Tim, we’re supposed to be looking at the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher. It’s right down the street. Let’s just hurry up and go.”
“What’s your thing, man? Let’s rap!” I hear him asking, and sure enough, he’s talking with another Palestinian!
“The Jews have appropriated our land. We welcome their efforts to improve Palestine. All we request is just compensation.”
Uh huh.
“Boy, that guy is really wack!” said Tim.
So I know there was a fraction of West Bank Arabs who saw dollar signs where their brethren saw oppression. Not having visited Israel since 1982, I would not venture a guess how it is today.
Shlomo Rappaport, a kibbutznik, takes his place behind the lectern and says in a heavy Hebrew accent: “In America, you have six million Jews surrounded by 300 million non-Jews. Yet the Jews in America have learned to navigate these disparate numbers and succeed. We have basically the same conundrum in Israel, around six million Jews surrounded by about 300 million non-Jews. We Israelis must learn from the Diaspora how one deals with this inequality in numbers. How one makes peace with the neighbors and succeeds in an unfair world. That is the challenge facing Israel today.”
Raida Suleiman, startlingly beautiful, a fire and ice redhead, speaks to us of the Palestinian narrative: “Your birth pangs were our nakba, ‘catastrophe.’ When you gained a country, we lost everything. How can you have security, economic development, a sense of democracy, if 20% of the population in Israel is disenfranchised? You can’t.”
Ah ha, one of those conference tables with a white table cloth and individual microphones is trundled to the front of the room by a motley crew of volunteers. We sit and wait while the electrician plugs in the mikes. Then Frank, Shlomo and Raida sit down for the Sturm und Drang, the push and pull of dialogue— or at least competing monologues.
Shlomo: “We children of the kibbutz were brought up to be Masters of the Land. As a grown-up and a Jew, I see that I interact with an Arab as if I am his master. This is very wrong. It is inexcusable that the Palestinians in Israel, who have citizenship, lack basic equality. An equal partnership is required.”
Frank: “American Jewish philanthropy is a wonderful thing. Mazel tov! But while we contribute to every form of Jewish development in Israel, inadvertently, we have created a gap between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Diaspora Jews don’t always see the need for helping Palestinians. But until both peoples have a sense of progress— economically, socially, in education and human rights— there can be no peace.”
Raida: “There are 1.6 million Arab citizens of Israel, 20% of the population! A test of any democracy is how it treats its minorities.
“I refuse to be a victim. The security apparatus complains that Arab Bedouin families have 10 to 12 children. Open a high school for women and the problem will resolve itself! Women who get an education are not going to put up with bearing that many children!
“Per capita income in the Arab sector is 50% of what you see in the Jewish population. Jewish kids get six times as much from the welfare budget as Arab Bedouin children.
“Position Papers won’t change reality on the ground: In the Negev, Bedouins are 30% of the population, but live on only 3% of the land. The Israeli government is consolidating their holdings, uprooting 100,000 people into the seven villages recognized by the Netanyahu government. At that point, Bedouins will be living on 1% of the land!”
During my year in Israel, I worked six days a week for Israeli Educational Television, across the road from Tel Aviv University. My Israeli cousins fixed me up with the job. I became an assistant cinematographer.
In the summer, even given time off without pay, I often left my little bro Timothy alone to wander. He went everywhere, bringing back empty rifle shell casings from the Six Day War and shards of pottery from the Byzantine Empire. (An archeologist at the university told us, “Oh, that stuff is nothing special. You find it among the ruins. It’s from about 450 A.D.”) There were blue, inter-city Eggèd busses that would take you anywhere in the country for a pittance. The little white tickets were the size of confetti, but they cost next to nothing and they got you there. The Tel Aviv Bus Terminal was in a notoriously rough neighborhood. Tim walked through there like Daniel in the Lions’ Den. “Don’t be angry with me, man. My brother works for the goddam television!” he would tell the vendors selling nuts wrapped in newspaper, newspapers, cheap plastic toys made in Japan, small kitchen appliances and children’s clothes.
Jerusalem was Tim’s beat and he did me up proud. He met and charmed four Sephardic teenage immigrants fresh off the boat. They were from Tunisia, three boys and a girl, cute as kittens. My mom had insisted that Tim and I be fluent in French, a hold-over from the Russian aristocracy. Our Tunisian friends treated us like lost members of their tribe. They took Tim to the souk in Jerusalem and introduced him to Mahmoud and Fawzi, themselves teenagers. These Palestinian boys ran a stall, selling brass coffee sets, robes, scarves, jewelry and T-shirts to the American tourists.
The following Saturday, Tim couldn’t wait to haul me onto an Eggèd bus and take me to meet them.
A week later, with many tears, our Tunisians disappeared into the Negev to join the kibbutz where their families awaited them. I went and visited them on Chanukah. Meanwhile, Tim and I began spending our Saturdays at the souk, arguing with the American tourists who gave Mahmoud and Fawzi a hard time, haggling over prices. “You never pay what they ask,” these middle-class matrons from Iowa and New Jersey had been instructed by their guides, so they marched into the alleyways jammed with people and donkeys and fought with the merchants. What a madhouse!
Because what united us young people was our abiding gentleness. In a country teeming with edgy, angry people, we were the hippies, preaching peace, love and understanding. In Tel Aviv, we met on the grassy circle in front of the Central Post Office, talked, laughed, played guitars, sang songs and complained about the hard-nosed Israelis. One of the boys could do a word-perfect rendition of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. I carried a stash of hashish with me at all times. We were often so laid-back, we couldn’t stand up.
Ten years later, I visited Mahmoud and Fawzi in Jerusalem, as part of an American military delegation. We were on one of those friendship, fact-finding missions to the Israelis: “Hi, guys, tell us what you need! This is Kevin, he speaks Hebrew and French. If you can’t make yourselves understood, everyone else on the delegation speaks English.” The brass didn’t have a whole lot of faith in my abilities as a communicator.
Fed up with Mahmoud and Fawzi’s didactic claims of victimhood, I finally exploded, “Enough already! Ma-speek! Stop with the complaints about your poor orchard and how the Israelis took it away! Jesus Christ! Show me this goddam orchard.” Surprisingly, they took me on a bus into the commercial section of New Jerusalem. Standing on a street corner in the middle of the city, they declared, “Here! This was our orchard!”
“Fuck me, guys!” I told them. “Look at this place. A high-rise on that corner, another apartment house here, office buildings on the facing corners. There ain’t no orchard here, boys.”
“We know,” Mahmoud said in his dainty, Arab way. “We are willing to have our land returned as it is.”
“Buildings and all, huh?”
“We wish a return of our property. We will accept it in present conditions.”
I laughed. These boys didn’t want to grow lemons, they wanted to become landlords!
*
Rabbi Frank N. Stein cedes his place at the table to local activist Esther Rosenwasser. God bless her, right away, she starts with hard facts: “Israel has a four year election cycle. If you can get it! The average lifespan of a government is 2 years and 2 months. That means that policies already decided upon don’t get implemented. A new school plan was developed by the previous government. Everything was complete. All they had to do was hire the teachers and implement it. When the current government took over, the Minister of Education said he wanted more time to read through the new curriculum. He’s still reading!
“When, miraculously, good intentions surface, they get stymied by the bureaucracy.
“There are five bilingual schools in all of Israel. Five! At the same time, 25,000 elementary school children— 15% of elementary school students— now study Arabic in the 5th and 6th grade.”
Shlomo: “An ugly stream of racism seems to dominate the debate in Israel over the place of the Palestinian citizens. The younger generation hates the Palestinians. Nu? Why? The Intifada. When they were ten years old, suddenly they couldn’t go to school, leave the house, play in the street. The Palestinians were rioting. What possible motivation would they have for liking Palestinians? 80% of our young people believe the Israeli Arabs have never accepted the State of Israel and would destroy it if they could.
“My generation, more experienced with both the good and bad sides of every person, at least is willing to judge people as individuals. We censure someone who behaves badly, be he Jew or Arab. We praise those who work together with us on individual issues. When these shared communities of interest spread sufficiently, they will have a significant impact on public policy and debate.”
In 1999, the Israelis tired of the stalemate with the Palestinians. The One Israel Party, a new political entity, won the national election. Led by Ehud Barak, their platform was simply to, once and for all, reach an accord with the Palestinians. A two-state solution, along whatever lines were hammered out between the warring factions. In 2000, President Bill Clinton invited Yasser Arafat and his delegation to meet with Ehud Barak and the Israeli delegates at Camp David. In three days of recriminations, caterwauling and bitter concessions from both sides, they reached an agreement. Amazing. It touched on all the issues: Borders, Palestinian rights of return to the land of Israel, economic compensation, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, further issues to be discussed and settled. Barak signed. He and President Clinton turned to Yasser Arafat and extended the pen of reconciliation.
“If I sign that,” Arafat told them, “when I return home, I am a dead man.”
Refusing to sign, he traveled back to Ramallah and called for a general strike, the Second Intifada. Apparently, Palestinian anger knows no bounds.
The current, conservative Netanyahu government of Israel didn’t come out of nowhere. The Likud party got elected as a direct Israeli reaction to public disappointment in the failed peace process. If the Palestinians won’t negotiate anyway, why bother trying to reconcile with them?
Having selected Yasser Arafat, a smarmy, sneaky charmer as their leader, the Palestinian people were led by the nose. Arafat was the perennial negotiator, totally uninterested in resolving the conflict. As long as he could keep the ball in play, his countrymen needed him. The power struggles within his own party, Fatah, never end. Should peace ever be declared, he worried that he would be retired emeritus and younger hands would take over. Since he and his wife were milking the treasury for all they could get, the longer Yasser could stay in power, the greater his fortune. After his death, the leadership of Fatah came for his wife Shula, put a gun to her head and said, “Give us the Swiss bank account numbers for the billions you and your husband stole or you’ll never see tomorrow’s sunrise.” She gave them the bank account numbers and the Palestinian Authority was able to reclaim the money.
The Second Intifada, billed as “the anger of the Arab street,” featured daily confrontations with the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, where young Palestinians, and even some of their elders, pelted Israeli soldiers and civilians with rocks.
Furious at the rock throwers, I emailed Fawzi and Mahmoud. “What in the world are you doing?” I wrote. “This is not the way to gain concessions regarding peace with Israel. This will only make the Israelis more obstinate, angry and distrustful.”
Fawzi wrote back, respectful as always:
Dear Mr. Kevin,
Mahmoud and I study with great interest your ways of protest. You march in street with banners. You shout slogans. We also have ways of protest. For us, is stone throws. We speak with arm. Stoning. Throwing stone.
Yasser Arafat say: Palestinian anger knows no bounds. The occupier must be forced from our land.
Also we feel so.
We personally are so sorry you angry, Mr. Kevin. We liking you, as you know. Many years have we friendship.
Also this freedom of expression is important issue. Please allow to express ourselves as we choose.
You friend, Fawzi and Mahmoud and families.
“My god,” I told my mom, “they see rock throwing as a form of free speech protected by First Amendment rights! Rock throwing is their idea of a dialog with the Israelis.”
Wise, my mom said absolutely nothing. As far as she is concerned, Fawzi, Mahmoud and I are all nincompoops.
*
Raida: “The Israeli educational system does not teach Palestinians their history.
“My mother says, ‘I am a Palestinian.’ My father says, ‘I am a citizen of Israel.’ He feels compelled to say that, because to call himself Palestinian costs him job opportunities.
“Only when Palestinians can be proud of their identity, can they cooperate with Israelis.”
I met plenty of Palestinians in the 1980’s working on moshavim— private farms run communally, like a kibbutz, but each family owning their own holdings— as hired hands, as well as in the building trade. They didn’t need to be proud of their identity in order to cooperate with the Israelis. They worked for shekels and they were paid in shekels. End of story. But I get Raida’s point. You can’t ask concessions of the Palestinians at the negotiating table, if they already see themselves as total underdogs.
Raida: “We use language in designing and building consciousness. The way one identifies the Palestinians does matter. Are we the fellahin, hopelessly backward peasants? Are we Palestinian Arabs? Israeli Arabs? Israeli Palestinians? Palestinian citizens of Israel? Palestinian Israelis? Believe it or not, in Israel, each of these terms reflects a political viewpoint!”
Shlomo: “155,000 Palestinians— Israeli Arabs— remained in Israel after 1948. They received citizenship.
“250,000 Palestinians from Israel were uprooted and became refugees, living in camps in neighboring countries. There are no refugee camps in Israel. These people’s lives were based on their ancestral land. Now they have no land. I’m a kibbutznik! Land means everything to us. What is the identity of someone who has no land?”
Raida: “The Bedouins of the Negev demand 800,000 dunams, 30% of the land. The land issue for the Netanyahu government consists of cramming the maximum number of Arabs onto the minimum amount of land.
“My father owned vast tracts of land handed down through generations, but he has no written instruments to legally support this claim. Under the British and the Turks, land agreements were oral.
“Once a Palestinian state is declared, 87% of the Palestinian people would go to their own state.”
Shlomo: “Arab Knesset members still need to be allowed at the grown-ups’ table. Since the government doesn’t push for a shared, equal citizenship, our NGO’s must push for social inclusion and equality. ‘Democracy’ today is defined as ‘majority rule,’ not ‘minority rights.’ Israel has no Bill of Rights. Instead, there is a Law of Human Dignity, but the Knesset and courts can change it at any time.
“I’m an optimist, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. 450,000 Israelis took to the streets during the summer to demand social justice. The Arab community supported this protest. Together, we are working toward a pluralistic society.”
Uh. We take a break. We eat meatballs and veggies on plastic plates using plastic forks and plastic knives. The variety of cookies is staggering. There’s bottled water and there’s coffee. What more could anyone ask?
Fine. Time for the Question & Answer session. We are 346 Jews, three Palestinians and one Christian university student.
We Jews wail in frustration, tear the hemlines of our shirts and cry, “Next year’s conference, more Palestinians!” The three we have— professional activists— have visited more Jewish congregations in Greater Washington than I knew existed.
Palestinian man: “I live in East Jerusalem. Because of my Arab name, I have less rights than an American tourist.”
He could be Mahmoud or Fawzi. Palestinians, they’ve always occupied the lowest rung in Israeli society. When I arrived in 1970, you had sabras at the top— native-born Israeli Jews— then Ashkenazi immigrants, then Sephardic immigrants and finally Arabs. With the arrival of the Ethiopian black Jews, the Arab population was moved down one peg in the social hierarchy, to make room for the arrival of society’s struggling newcomers.
Answering a question regarding growing nationalism, Shlomo suggests this: “Post-Intifada, nationalism pits a Jewish state against a democratic state. Israel can only survive by becoming a little less Jewish and a little less democratic.”
Raida: “There is a Jewish narrative and a Palestinian narrative. The future must be a shared narrative.”
The printed program promises a comparison of the situation for the Druze, the Bedouin and the non-Bedouin Palestinians inside Israel. Raida the Palestinian is regaling us with an activist tale of the indignation she caused by demanding the microphone at her local mosque. A woman! An activist! Speaking in a mosque! Unheard of! It’s very entertaining, but the clock is ticking and as Jimi Hendrix sang, “… the hour’s getting late!” My hand shoots up.
“Yes?” asks Rabbi Stein, the moderator.
“I’d like…”
“No, get up and introduce yourself. Then you can ask your question.”
“Hi, I’m Kevin Feingold,” I slur, finding that the least interesting part. I quickly ask for the comparison. I see people shaking their heads “yes.” Anyone who ever read Leon Uris’s Exodus wants to know how life goes for the dear, little Druze families in their mountain-top villages astride Mount Carmel.
Shlomo the kibbutznik frowns impressively and turns to Raida. We expect some facts and figures. Her answer is what colloquially only can be called “anecdotal.”
Raida: “Some of the Druze serve voluntarily in the Israeli Defense Forces.” Pause. Grimace. “I have been to their villages and was not impressed.
“Categorizing the Arab population into subgroups is the Israeli government’s method of ‘Divide & Control.’ We are all Palestinians! We all demand our rights!
“Palestinians in the West Bank are under military occupation. The intelligence officer of the Shin Bet checks your documents whenever you travel and wants to know who you are. The West Bank Palestinians lack even Israeli citizenship. They are not considered Israelis. By both Israeli and international standards, the West Bank is officially occupied territory.”
Sighing contentedly, she gives a wan smile, a very Palestinian shrug and turns to Rabbi Stein.
“That’s it?” I’m thinking. “This 3rd grade level school report on What I Did During My Summer Vacation is her comparison of Druze/ Bedouin/ non-Bedouin conditions? Yeesh! Give me a break!” When I look around, I sense that the consensus is, we can get more meat googling the Internet.
“Yes?” Rabbi Stein asks.
The Christian university student gives his name and says: “The poor Palestinians chased off their land and deprived of rights in the Left Bank, deprived of their freedom by the Israeli blockade of Gaza, deprived of equality in Israel. Yes, yes, I’m getting to my question. The Jewish aggressor lays waste to Palestine, throwing people out of their homes, expropriating orchards, forcing the Bedouins into concrete villages, stopping Palestinians at checkpoints everywhere in the West Bank. My question is, how can you American Jews stand idly by and allow such criminal behavior by the Israelis, condemned by the entire international community, to continue?”
The guy is a jerk.
“We don’t,” says Rabbi Stein.
“ ’Scuse me?”
“We don’t condone Israeli behavior. Next question!”
*
My conclusions:
The Palestinians will never be satisfied. It’s hereditary. As the Philistines in the Bible, even 2,000 years ago, they had a reputation as cantankerous troublemakers. Delilah, anyone? There’s a reason we make generalizations about ethnic groups. Some traits truly do reside in the genes.
The Palestinians want their land back, and that means all of Israel. The only alternative that will satisfy them is the Jews marching backwards into the sea. Even then, knowing them, the Palestinians will have issues. Who left this shovel in this sandbox? An emotional people, the Palestinians too often let their hearts rule their heads. When the Israelis tired of Gaza and pulled out, the Palestinians “showed their anger” by dynamiting the concrete buildings left by the Israelis. They then bewailed their poverty and called on the international community to provide building supplies and to finance new construction.
The American Jewish community has trouble understanding Israeli conservative intransigence. We Americanos would like the Israelis to give more.
The Israelis have the thankless task of dealing with a Palestinian opponent who is never satisfied and not even grateful to be included in the dialog. As anyone can see, the longer the Palestinians dawdle— prolonging negotiations— the more land in the West Bank falls under Israeli control.
The Palestinians do not consider the State of Israel a legitimate entity. They see it as a clever way for the Jews to steal their country of Palestine. The maps in their school textbooks show a green, dagger-shaped Palestine going from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. The name “Israel” is nowhere on that map.
Dreamers, the Palestinians envision some wondrous Endgame where all the land is returned to them.
A thousand times more pragmatic, the Israelis repay every rebuff at the negotiating table by allowing the Settler Movement to appropriate additional acreage.
*
yustyoking 
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