By Joshua Rosenstein, Special to JTNews
This is the last in a series of life in Israel outside of the “hot zones” that we normally read about in the news, and focuses on life between Israelis and Arabs in the northern part of the Jewish State.
Yasmin Dekel has held several jobs where she worked with Arabs; picking apples on kibbutzim, or working in a hotel.
“Working relationships are where good relations develop,” she said. “It’s a realistic meeting place, when you work with people every day you have a basis to develop a relationship. Without it, it is not so realistic.”
David Levi is a toy salesman in his 50s. While he is based in the Krayot outside of Haifa, he sells his wares to the Arab sector across the Galilee.
“Doing business with Arabs is much better,” he says. “They’re up-front, not like lots of Jews who will string you along forever until they pay you. The Arabs have respect for me and I for them, I am like part of the household in Tamra [an Arab village].”
Levi is clear about discrimination in the Galilee.
“Of course Arabs are discriminated against in all arenas,” he said. “Everyone carries pain, of course things are unequal. I won’t lie. One time, I was in a village and a guy started yelling at me; he wanted his land back, Israel took his land. I took a piece of paper and a pen, I wrote out, ‘I, David Levi, hereby give you your land back, God bless you.’ and I gave it to him. I told him he should take it to the government and see what they said.”
Achmed, a fix-it guy in his 30s from Sachnin, does odd jobs and repair work in and around Carmiel. He says that many of the people that stopped coming to Sachnin to bank and shop after the riots are slowly returning.
“The quiet has returned to the area,” he says. “The police come and sit and drink coffee right here almost every morning. In Kaukab, things have returned to normal.”
A return to the status quo can be confusing, however. People long for quiet, for business to pick up, for the fear to fade. On the other hand, it has become increasingly clear that the longed-for “quiet” means oppression for 80 percent of the Galilee’s residents.
It took the government several years to produce the Or Report, which blamed Arab politicians for incitement in the riots that rocked this area at the beginning of the intifada four years ago, and the police for total incompetence. Several upper-level officers lost their jobs. The report also blamed the Israeli government for not carrying out any of the promises that had been made to the Arab sector.
Sarah David of Moshav Shorashim sends both of her children to a cross-cultural school in the Misgav region called the Galil School. Though the project has met with a great deal of trials and obstacles, it continues to provide bi-cultural education for grades K-6, to Jews and Arabs, in both Arabic and Hebrew. The riots of ‘00 were difficult for both the school and the parents.
“I think I was kidding myself that the Jews and Arabs could co-exist side by side in the Galilee,” said David. “My eyes were opened by the riots to the fact that Arab-Israelis are discriminated against; they don’t get a fair chance, no opportunity, their lands have been stolen. But just saying that is not true – every land dispute has complications. Some land was indeed bought and paid for, some was clearly stolen, and then what about the people that fled during the war of ‘48? Should they get their houses and lands back after abandoning them? These are hard, complex questions.”
“Part of the problem is racism, but part is also our politicians,” says Ganiy, of Sachnin. “Our politicians are lazy, they sit all day in the air conditioning, half the people in the villages don’t even pay taxes. And don’t forget with Sharon in charge, we wouldn’t get anything anyway. When Rabin was in office, we had sports teams, funding, my cousin was commissioned to build a municipality building. As soon as they killed Rabin, the funds dried up and for the past 10 years the building my cousin started has just sat there unfinished.”
A meeting my father arranged for me on my last night home explains the situation. I was to meet with a teenage Arab girl from Sha’ab. Sha’ab is situated across the Cheelazon Valley from Shorashim. The main entrance to Sha’ab is all the way on the other side of Misgav, however, a good 20-minute drive. While it is a short two miles or so through the olive trees from the Carmiel road to reach the village, the government will not allow this road to exist.
All the years I grew up on the Moshav, I can recall cars from the village cutting through the olive trees to get to the road. Eventually Sha’ab residents graded the dirt path so that people wouldn’t rip out their mufflers trying to get through. The government first dealt with the problem by building a three-foot concrete guide wall along the side of the road.
People soon wore a path alongside the wall to keep getting through. Next, a locked fence stood across the path, but every night someone would cut the chain and open the gate. Then, last year, Sha’ab residents actually paved the road. The government reacted by bringing in bulldozers to rip out the road.
“This story illustrates the complexity of the situation,” explains my father, Rabbi Marc Rosenstein. “The government may or may not be opposed to the road for racist reasons. More likely the road is a problem for technical planning issues, like right-of- way, safety, and construction standards. In no modern state can you just go and build a road wherever and whenever you please. But why couldn’t there be a process that takes into account both the needs of the village and the requirements of the state? And how sad it is that the villagers have come to see even a legitimate prohibition as an expression of racist oppression.”
Whatever the interpretation, the road through the trees is now a rutted path that poses significant danger to anything vital on the underside of a car. We suffered through it in my father’s beat-up Skoda pickup to reach the village.
Mozay’in, 18, has been involved in many cross-cultural programs since she was a young teen. She organizes activities for Jewish and Arab children focusing on coexistence, plays Hebrew-Arabic games, and seeks to strengthen the desire for cross-cultural exposure.
Despite the strain of the riots of ‘00, Mozayi’n kept her past friendships with people of both cultures.
“I have friends on both sides, and I hear what they say. They are afraid of each others’ families,” she said.
Her friends in the village are angry and afraid.
“Why do you hang out with Jews?” they ask. But she feels she lives on both sides, understands both sides, and always tries to bring people together and help change their minds.
“It would only benefit Israel as a society to allow Arabs to rise above poverty. We would make Israel proud, it is so hard to see how the government doesn’t support us, how they say, you’re not an Israeli, you’re an Arab, a Palestinian that lives in Israel. It drives me nuts sometimes, I want so badly to change the world, but I’m nothing in the world’s eyes.”
Yasmin Dekel grew up in the same area as I did during the same years. She too hitchhiked around the Galilee, shopped in Sachnin, and grew to understand the deeper issues at play only as she got older.
“I don’t know that anything has changed since I was growing up here,” she said, “but I do know that I have changed.”
Whether the riots of ‘00 actually caused anything to change, or whether they were just a setback on the road to peace and co-existence, only time will show us. What they did do is open a lot of people’s eyes to the discrimination and racism Arab-Israelis experience every day in the Galilee.
What can we do against walls of cultural dissonance, fear and pain, but work one little step at a time, educating people, trying to see things through the eyes of the other, and working through the years of miscommunication in the name of continued existence in our shared homeland.