The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

I left the hospital confused by the signals Israel was sending me. Here was a state that prided itself on having one of the best medical systems in the world. And access to health care seemed not to be affected overtly by grounds of race or creed. But it was also clear that some Israelis had an unhealthy admiration for violence and an appetite for what did not belong to them. Israel did not appear to place many controls on their behaviour.

My strong humanist values derive from an understanding of both my family’s history and my people’s. My father raised me on stories about my great-grandfather, Zussman Hershovitz, who lived in one of the Jewish ghetto communities, the shtetls, in Lithuania. I was taught as a small child the consequences of being Jewish for men like my great-grandfather, how it was not possible for him to go to school as a boy, how he ended up as a peddler moving from place to place to avoid the pogroms. In addition my father, Samuel Levy, a respected Harley Street doctor, instilled in me a deep appreciation of Jewish ethics, culture and history. I cannot claim he was a good father. Much of my childhood was spent living in terror of his rages and under the shadow of his disappointment. But outside the immediate family circle he was never less than a flercely loyal and dedicated healer. Although he was very successful, he believed he had wider social responsibilities than simply accumulating money from the wealthy clientele who visited his London practice. He continued to dedicate much of his time to a practice he started when he was younger in a deprived part of Essex. After he retired in 1973 he returned to the country of his birth, South Africa, during the apartheid years to be medical health officer and practise in a clinic for blacks only in Groote Schuur, Cape Town.

So even though I was soon earning good money as an English teacher in Tel Aviv, I could not simply accept the privileges that came with being a successful ‘new Israeli’. A few months after I had recovered from the eye operation, I was approached by a student organisation called Mahapach, which had heard of my experience in community work and raising money for Aids charities in London. They asked if I could write a funding application in support of their work for disadvantaged communities inside Israel, particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent, known in Israel as the Mizrahim. Much of Mahapach’s work involves encouraging students to go into deprived communities to teach such youngsters core subjects like Hebrew, Arabic, English and maths outside the often limiting arena of the formal classroom.

I sat down and read about these communities and their problems. I knew about the difficulties of the Mizrahim, who because of their Arab culture—they originally came from Morocco, Iraq, Syria and Egypt—have long been treated as inferior Jews by the European elite, the Ashkenazi Jews, who run Israel. But questions quickly began to surface in my mind about the indigenous Arab communities. Where did these Arabs I was writing about live? Why had they been so invisible, except briefly when I was in hospital, during my first two years in Israel? In those days I had little time for anything except my work as an English teacher. I would usually be up at 5 a.m., start work at six (before my clients’ offices opened), and finish at 8 or 9 p.m. Still, I was not satisfied with simply regurgitating the dry statistics I found in newspaper articles which suggested that Israeli Arabs were discriminated against. They were as faceless and unconnected to my life as bacteria living at the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to meet these Arabs for myself. When the chance arose to visit an Arab town as part of the research, I leapt at it. The destination was Tamra in the western Galilee.

Within minutes of driving into Tamra I felt that I had entered another Israel, one I had never seen before. It was almost impossible to believe that I could turn off a main highway, close to the luxurious rural Jewish communities of the Galilee, and find myself somewhere that was so strikingly different from any Jewish area I had ever visited before, and not just culturally. It was immediately obvious that Tamra suffered from chronic overcrowding. The difference in municipal resources and investment was starkly evident too. And a pall of despair hung over the town, a sense of hopelessness in the face of so much official neglect. It was the first time I had been to an Arab area (apart from visits as a tourist to the Old City of Jerusalem), and I was profoundly shaken by it. A disturbing thought occurred to me, one that refused to shift even after I had driven back to Tel Aviv. Tamra looked far too familiar. I thought, where have I seen this before? I recognised the pattern of discrimination from my experience of apartheid South Africa, which I had visited regularly during my childhood. I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships.

These initial impressions were reinforced by a meeting at the home of Dr Asad Ghanem, who lives in the neighbouring village of Sha’ab. One of the few prominent Arab academics in Israel, Dr Ghanem impressed me with his direct and unemotional explanations of the discrimination exercised in all spheres of Israeli life against the Arab population, from employment and education to land allocations and municipal budgets. But he found it difficult to remain detached about one topic he brought to my attention, an issue that would later become the theme of many conversations with my new Arab neighbours and friends. In Arab communities across Israel there are tens of thousands of homes judged illegal by the state, and under threat of demolition. In Tamra, Dr Ghanem told me, there were 150 homes facing destruction. Intermittently the police would target an Arab community, bringing in bulldozers at the crack of dawn and tearing down the illegal homes. The razing of these buildings, some of them up to four floors high, might mean dozens of extended families, comprising hundreds of people, were made homeless at a stroke.

I knew from my research that there was widespread illegal building in Arab communities, which was represented by the Israeli authorities as the act of law-breakers, people who were squatting on state land or who did not want to pay for a building licence. But as Dr Ghanem pointed out, no one chooses to invest their life savings and their dreams in a home that could be razed at any moment. Arab families have been forced to build illegally because in most cases the state refuses to issue them with building permits. And then he delivered the knockout blow: he told me his own beautiful home was illegal and threatened with demolition.

There can be little doubt that the land on which Dr Ghanem’s home stands has belonged to his family for generations. From the salon, visitors can see the old stone foundations of his grandparents’ house. A few years ago he had decided, with the arrival of his own children, that he and his wife Ahlam could no longer live in his parents’ apartment; they would build a home on the only land the family had left. But the authorities refused him a building permit. Effectively branded criminals by the state—like tens of thousands of Arab families—he and Ahlam had been paying regular heavy fines ever since, as much as £15,000 sterling a time, to ward off demolition. Their lives have become a routine of paying the state to prevent the destruction of everything they hold dear.

The question that echoed in my mind as I heard Dr Ghanem’s story was: where were he and his family supposed to live? What was the future envisaged for them by the state? I knew well that there were endless housing developments springing up all over Israel, and illegally in the occupied territories, for Jewish families. But where was the next generation of Arab citizens to live? Dr Ghanem and Ahlam are the pillars not only of their own community in Shaab, but of the whole Arab community inside Israel. Nonetheless, the state is forcing them to live with a terrible threat hanging over their heads. They are raising their children in an environment of continual insecurity. Every day when they leave home they do not know whether they will return to find a pile of rubble. They have been made to live in an unstable world which I have no doubt is deeply damaging to them and their children.

My meeting with Dr Ghanem ended uncomfortably. In a matter-of-fact tone he asked me whether I had made aliya, whether I had claimed my right as a Jew to come to live in a country from which the overwhelming majority of his people had been expelled little more than half a century earlier. These Palestinians still live in refugee camps across the Middle East, refused the opportunity to return to their former homes in Israel. It was the first time I hesitated to answer this question. I understood that my privileges as a Jewish immigrant had come at the expense of his people. Sitting in his home, reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.

As is my way, I could not live long in ignorance. So I began the long and difficult task of becoming informed. I read and absorbed anything I could find on the position of the Israeli Arabs, questioning the official narrative. My left-wing friends in Tel Aviv, mainly academics and people working in non-profit organisations whom I had met through a fellow inmate of the absorption centre, were quick to reassure me they had Arab friends. I asked who exactly were these friends? Where did they live? What did they talk about together? The reply was always more or less the same. They were on good terms with the owner of an Arab restaurant where the felafel was excellent. Or they got their car fixed in a garage in an Arab village where the prices were low. What did they talk to these ‘friends’ about? When did they meet outside these formal relationships? What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs.

In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all. I was mortified. The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on.

When I was stronger, I returned to Tamra. Asad Ghanem’s wife Ahlam invited me to spend the night with them. We ate dinner together, and then she and I sat on the terrace in the warm evening air and talked. We exchanged confidences and intimacies that people rarely share until they have known each other for a long time. I remember thinking as we sat close together that here were an Arab and a Jew getting to know each other at a very deep and personal level, and that this was the way it was supposed to be. Cut off briefly from a society that always privileges Jews, we could feel like equals. I went back to Tel Aviv firm in my resolution that something in my life would have to change. Israel, as it was presently constituted, required me to choose a side: would I carry on with my life in Tel Aviv, turning a blind eye like everyone else to the suffering of the Arab population; or would I do something to highlight the reality and work towards changing it?

As it happened, my mind was effectively made up for me. I started to see much more clearly the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes of my left-wing friends. Being around them became unbearably suffocating. Invited in the winter of 2001 by Asad to teach English to Arab professionals at his Ibn Khaldun Association in Tamra, I had little hesitation in agreeing to take up the position. The Abu Hayjas, whom I knew through my work for Mahapach, offered to rent me the empty top-floor flat in their home, on the hillside overlooking the town’s central mosque.

I knew breaking away from the Jewish collective would be traumatic, but I could not know how profoundly I would alienate those I thought I was close to. Almost overnight I lost my Jewish friends. Individualism is highly prized in many societies, but not in Israel, where the instinct of the herd prevails. Doubtless the reasons can be found in Jewish history, in the centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. There is an attitude of you’re either with us or against us. No one should step outside the consensus, or question it, because this is seen as weakening the group. But human beings are immeasurably more important to me than labels or institutions. By choosing to live as a Jew in a town of Muslims I hoped I could show that the fear that divides us is unrealistic. It is based on ignorance, an ignorance that the state of Israel tries to encourage among its Jewish citizens to keep them apart from their Arab neighbours. I know Jews who have lived on a left-wing kibbutz near Tamra, yet have never ventured into the largest Arab community in their area.

I have pondered long and hard why I was able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with their state and their people, right or wrong. At the core of modern Jewish identity is the idea of victimhood, shaped by our history of persecution and the singular outrage of the Holocaust. The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated. Victimhood has become something akin to a cult among Jews, even among the most successful in Europe and America. It is developed as part of the Jewish nationalist ideology of Zionism, creating an ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ world for most Jews: they sincerely and incontrovertibly believe that Israel, a nation with one of the strongest armies in the world, backed by the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is in imminent danger of annihilation either from its Arab neighbours or from the remnants of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories.

The improbability of this scenario, however, can safely be ignored by most Jews as long as suicide bombers wreak intermittent devastation on crowded buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. No one can say I do not understand the suffering inflicted on families by these attacks. One day I was waiting at Ben-Gurion airport for a flight to the UK when a good friend called, her voice barely audible, to tell me that her son, a serving soldier, had been horrifically injured by a suicide bomber. I had introduced this young man to my daughter Tanya the previous summer, and the two had formed a deep bond. Since then he has undergone more than thirty-five operations to try to repair the damage done to his body. His father has suffered eight heart attacks. All their expectations about their life were destroyed in an instant. That suicide bombing has torn apart the lives of my friends as easily as a piece of paper can be ripped.

But while I understand that these attacks can be terribly destruc-fitive of Israelis’ lives and their sense of their own security, they can easily become an excuse not to confront the reality of what is taking place, the wider picture. They can simply reinforce in a very negative fashion this sense of Jewish victimhood. I understand this well. Like most Jews, I was brought up to see myself as a victim too: in a collective sense, as a Jew raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and in an individual sense, as a Jew growing up in a post-war Britain tinged with anti-Semitism.

I was born in January 1949 into the grey, tired world of Britain under rationing. My family in Grays, Essex, appeared to me even at a very young age to be unlike those around me: there were no grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. My father’s family were thousands of miles away in South Africa, and my mother’s immediate family were all dead, victims of the First World War, tuberculosis and bad luck. There were only me and my parents. But my isolation did not end there. My parents, preoccupied with the heavy duties of running a successful medical practice, abandoned me to the care of the cleaning lady. I was banned from playing with the local ‘rough’ children, who arrived with the building of a council estate near our home, and instead consoled myself with games with our Golden Retriever dog, Laddie, and my rubber doll, Pandora, in the back garden.

My only early recollection of true friendship is with a black servant called Inyoni who looked after me—effectively as a substitute mother—when I was two years old, when my father tried a brief experiment in returning to South Africa. It did not last long: after spending six months just outside Cape Town we headed back to Britain. But Inyoni is a vivid feature in all my memories of that period in South Africa, much more so than my grandparents, whom I can barely recall. In that half-year I formed a deep attachment to him. He would teach me to strap Pandora to my back and carry her the way the local black women carried their babies. (Back in Essex I would see other little girls in the street holding their dolls in their arms and tell them off, showing them how to do it properly.) I would also spend hours squatting with Inyoni on the floor in his servant quarters at the back of the house as he prepared the vegetables. At other times we would play tea-party games on the lawn with Pandora. After my family left South Africa in 1952 I felt the loss of Inyoni deeply.

I was a sickly child, suffering repeated bouts of severe sinusitis which served only to provoke anger and resentment in my father, whose repeated interventions with drugs and operations failed to improve my condition. In total contrast to the way he treated his patients, he had no sympathy for my suffering and would simply tell me to get a grip on myself. I suppose to a highly respected doctor my recurrent illnesses must have seemed like a reproof: in the very heart of his family was a sick child he was powerless to heal. This failure was compounded, in his eyes, by my lack of success at school by any of the yardsticks he held dear. The many days I missed from school, and his overbearing demands, took their toll on my academic performance. I was constantly being dragged off to teacher-parent meetings to discuss my poor results. Eventually, at the age of seven I was packed off to the first of my boarding schools, cut off from contact with my parents apart from one weekend out of every three. Even when I returned home my father was usually too busy with patients to spend time with me.

Before leaving for boarding school, during the long periods when I was sick at home my father would lock me in my room with what he considered educational material. He would give me a National Geographic magazine to read, or throw me a pile of postcards he had been sent from around the world and demand that I find the country or city they had been posted from in an atlas. Sometimes he would want me to draw the outline of the country too. I would be beaten if I could not answer his questions on his return. By the age of six I was an expert at finding foreign places.

There were compensations in this harsh regime, trapped in the small world of my bedroom, deprived of companions. The biggest was the National Geographic itself, which opened up another, far more exciting, world to me. In my head I had incredible adventures in places most British children had never heard of. Remote South American hill tribes became my friends, as did the pygmies of the Congo. They never seemed any stranger to me, maybe less so, than the children at school. My favourite place was the Himalayas, somewhere that looked awe-inspiring and magnificent; I would think that if only I could climb to the very top I would be able to see the whole world. I felt a huge desire to go to these places and experience them for myself.

One of the features in the National Geographic that fascinated me most was about India. I was attracted to the pictures of that country, as I was to those of Africa, because of the bright colours, the beauty of the landscapes, the different way of life and the great variety of groups living within one subcontinent. What fascinated me most about India was the caste system, and in particular the group classified as the lowest caste: the Untouchables. I would study the pictures that accompanied the article, and then read the copy that explained that the Untouchables were supposed to be the ugliest, dirtiest, most stupid Indians, and had to live on the outskirts of the towns. I would trace my fingers first around the faces of the Untouchables and then around those of the highest caste, the Brahmans, flicking backwards and forwards between the pictures. But however long I looked at them, I could not see where the difference lay. Why were the Untouchables supposed to be uglier? I could not understand how you could designate one group as dirtier or less worthy than another.

Although I have always rejected this fear of the Other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. At the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand. At an early stage of the Aids crisis I trained to be a therapist at Great Ormond Street hospital in London. In the late 1980s, when without the slightest shred of scientific evidence there were stories all over the British media warning that Aids was highly contagious, I was working at the London Lighthouse Project with infected women and children, and with the partners of infected people. At the Project we tried to challenge people’s prejudices by bringing Aids into the community: we even established a commercial restaurant, where the staff were all Aidsor HIV-infected, so people could see that they were not going to catch the disease simply by eating there.

Nonetheless, some evenings I would attend social functions with my husband Michael, and would wait for the moment when another guest would ask what I did. My reply—that I was an HIV/Aids counsellor—always elicited the same response: overwhelmed with revulsion, the other person would take a step back. There was a double disgust: the fear that I might be carrying that terrible disease, and also the incomprehension that a nice, presentable middle-class woman would be doing a ‘dirty’ job like mine. It was as though they thought they were shaking the hand of a Brahman only to discover that they had been tricked into making contact with an Untouchable.

Moving to Tamra seemed to cause equivalent offence to my former Jewish friends. While Israeli Jews looked at the Palestinian uprising and responded by choosing to disengage—either by building a wall to separate themselves from the occupied population their army rules over or, inside Israel, by boycotting Arab areas, refusing to buy felafel or get their cars fixed in Arab garages—I elected to put myself right in the middle of the problem. To join the Untouchables. The response of my friends, like that of the well-heeled party crowd in London, was to withdraw in revulsion. Now that I am outside the Jewish collective, outside the herd, I must be treated like the enemy, as if I have committed a crime of treason or incitement.

Although the decision to leave Tel Aviv and cross the ethnic divide seemed the natural reaction to my new understanding of what was happening inside Israel, it was never easy. There were days when I felt tearful and isolated. I cried not out of fear but out of a terrible sense of how much my country was failing not just its Arab citizens but also its Jewish ones, and how catastrophically fragmented it was growing. It dawned on me at an early stage that I had to be 100 per cent committed to my new course. My Jewish friends chose to dismiss my decision as a silly passing episode, and even some of my new friends in Tamra appeared to doubt whether I could withstand the pressures. Hassan’s son Khalil said to me in the first few days: ‘After three months you’ll go back. You won’t be able to stand it here without cinemas at the end of the road or elegant restaurants.’

Neither side could understand why anyone would choose a primitive life over a sophisticated one. There was a double error in this thinking. First, I never saw Tamra as more primitive. Life was simpler, certainly, but my view has always been that life’s greatest pleasures are simple. Second, it ignored the fact that there are some values more important than being comfortable, such as developing a consciousness about the rights and wrongs of the society one lives in, and an awareness of what each of us can contribute to improving it. In this sense the sophistication of the West increasingly appears to me to be a veneer, concealing the fact that most of us have lost our understanding of where our communities are heading. We are encouraged to believe in the sanctity of the safe little bubbles we inhabit, to the point where we can imagine no other life, no other possibilities.