Bay Area-laid back façade aside, I’m a pretty intense person – often more so than I would like, which explains why I love California and loathe New York. The intensity of Israel/Palestine strikes me as what New York would be like if you turned up the temperature and gave people a reason to hate each other.
Partly because of that ubiquitous intensity and partly because of my inability not to pay attention to the tense dynamics here, my time in Israel/Palestine has not exactly been “chill.” When I came for the first time, in 2005, I got stuck in a traffic jam on my way from the airport due to a suicide bombing that had just occurred close to where I was going to stay. A couple days before I left, an extremist AWOL Israeli soldier went to an Arab town and shot residents in a bus before an angry mob killed him. In between, I watched Israeli Jewish society engage in one of its most polarizing debates since the creation of modern Israel, over the upcoming pullout of soldiers and settlers from Gaza.
I planned to return the next summer, but the day I left for a stopover in Eastern Europe on my way to Israel, Hezbollah kidnapped and killed some Israeli soldiers and the 2006 Lebanon War began. As a result, just about everything I had planned for myself – mostly in the North and regarding Jewish-Palestinian coexistence work – was cancelled, and I didn’t go.
The next summer, I did return, intending to volunteer for any do-gooder organization I could find. I inadvertently found myself staying at a hostel/volunteer organization staffed and occupied by people with some of the most despicable beliefs I have ever encountered. I heard Arabs called “animals,” and Rabbi Meir Kahane – who advocated expelling all Arabs from the land Israel controls and whose political movement has been branded a terrorist organization by Israel – called “righteous.”
And what’s the situation like now? If you’ve opened a newspaper in the last two years, and especially the last 6 months, you’ll unfortunately have an idea.
For all of you who actually live here, I don’t know how you do it!
And then there’s the other conflict that has chained itself to my mind. When I was last in Jerusalem, I was going through the beginning of what I would call a spiritual…not a “crisis,” that sounds too dramatic – I’d call it more of a case of “acute spiritual questioning.” As I told people after I returned to the US, never had I felt so alienated as a Jew interested in the Jewish religion as I did when I was in Jerusalem. I suppose I’ve made some “progress” since then, but it’s gone about as slowly as the decentralization process in Macedonia – that is to say, slower than an aging turtle in lethargy-inducing hot weather.
Luckily, I’m not here to deal with either of those two issues! (yeah, right.) I’m here to research the Palestinian Arab population that too many people forget about – the one that makes up about 20% of Israeli citizenry. Their situation has some similarities to the Albanians, but also some important differences. One of those disparities is that while an Albanian party is always in the Macedonian government coalition, no Palestinian party ever receives an invitation to the Israeli coalition. Perhaps partly as a result of that reality, many Arabs in Israel – unlike Albanians in Macedonia – vote for the majority ethnic group’s parties. I want to try to understand how Palestinian citizens of Israel decide whether or not to vote, and if they do vote, whether to vote for a Palestinian party or a Zionist party, and how they choose which party within each category. Similarly, I want to know how the parties – especially the Zionist parties – try to recruit voters from the Palestinian community. So far, the key word seems to be “$$$.”
But while “$$$” can buy the Labor party votes, it can’t buy inter-ethnic love (at least, not in the context of everything else going on). Even in one of the few areas where Palestinians and Jews still co-mingle relatively amicably, a small incident can reveal the state of inter-ethnic relations:
The other day, I spent a few hours with an Israeli teacher-turned-good friend of mine, who is my go-to guy when I’m confused or conflicted about something Israel/Palestine-related (i.e. always). We decided to have lunch in a predominantly Palestinian area of town called “Wadi Nisnas” because he had heard the hummus there is supposed to be THE BEST. We asked a group of people at a café where the stairs to Wadi Nisnas are located. One man responded, in Hebrew and sarcastically, “If you want to see the Arabushim (derogatory term for Arabs), we are sitting right here!” “Well, actually we just wanted to get some good hummus,” my friend responded. “Oh, well, yeah, then you should go to Wadi Nisnas. Yeah. The stairs are right over there.”
We stumbled down the stairs and into a restaurant where an elderly woman sans teeth served us hummus that was, in fact, quite delicious (but the best…??). I told my friend that I didn’t think I had enough interview subjects yet, so he called over a young waiter (apparently with a better dentist, given the state of his teeth) and we began talking about “the situation,” as they call the inter-ethnic conflict here. In an unintentional move that demonstrated just how complex things are here, the man directly contradicted himself in less than a minute. First, he told us that the following should be done: a strong leader should say this (he grabs a saltshaker) is ours, this (now an ashtray) is yours, and this will be the border, he concluded, running a plastic cup in a straight line between the ancient table accessory adversaries. “And if any of you step on to our side, we’ll kill you.” But then, just seconds later, as if he hadn’t just said what he just said, as if he was arguing with something I had said rather than something he had said, he exclaimed, “How can you draw a border when I live here (in Saltistan), and my brother lives over here (in Beit Ashtrei)?”
My friend later pointed out that across the political spectrum, one always hears people speak of the need for “a strong leader.” It’s enlightening to dissect that phrase. The first and third words are singular. And why is the second word so often “strong,” rather than “courageous,” “visionary,” or “bold?” One strongman, gettin’ it done. Sounds vaguely dictatorial, no?
As I got up to leave the restaurant, feeling confused and a little depressed at hearing yet another pessimistic evaluation of the situation, a friend of the waiter’s offered one of the best political suggestions I’ve heard in a while: “Drink a lot of water. It helps.” Can’t argue with that.
Ugh, this place exhausts me (and dehydrates me). You know, another friend of mine recently pointed out that my updates from Macedonia read more like stories from The Onion than an account of actual experiences. If one accepts the idea that “everything is relative,” then I think Macedonia may be on to something, because on some level it is my most sincere realistic wish for Israel/Palestine that the news here would resemble The Onion instead of being what it is now.
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In other news, last week in Zagreb I randomly saw the Croatian Prime Minister walk out of a meeting. The next day, he shocked the country by suddenly resigning. Was it something I said?
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Pictures:
Bahai gardens with Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, world headquarters of the Bahai faith:
Haifa, older and newer:
House on top of the steep hill that is the entire city of Haifa:
I thought I'd left Macedonia, but Alexander keeps following me wherever I go, including to a Haifa archaeological museum:
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