The history of the encounters between Arabs and Jews is told largely by the people who lived and fought and continue to fight them: from the early Zionist settlements to Israel's war of independence in 1948 and the wars that followed, up to today's ''intifada,'' the uprising in the occupied territories. There are some recollections of neighborliness before 1948, but the most deeply felt memories are of atrocities, by Arabs against Jewish settlers in the 1930's, by Jewish guerrila bands against Arab villages in 1948, by Arab states and terrorists against Israelis in the decades since, by Jewish soldiers against young stone throwers in the areas occupied by Israel after the 1967 war.
The most thoughtful comments come from journalists on both sides, who, though opposing one another's claims, acknowledge the feelings of their adversaries. An Arab attributes to Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, the observation that the conflict between Arabs and Jews is ''a fight between two rights.'' Referring to the mutual recriminations over the 1967 war, he says, ''I'm wise enough to know that in war, people do not exchange flowers.''
A Jewish journalist speaks with painful understanding of the Arab view of Jews as occupiers of ancestral Arab lands. The daily humiliations of the prolonged occupation are captured in scenes of roadblocks and official harrassment. As the program makes clear, however, the nature of the occupation cannot be understood without taking into account the years of attacks on Jewish villages, which one Israeli says, have bred ''fear and hardness.''
Turning to the situation within Israel itself, Mr. Shipler reports that Israeli Arabs, while possessing the rights of citizenship and doing better than those outside the country, remain an underclass. The most sympathetic witness here is a young Israeli Arab social worker who met hostility when she sought to move into largely Jewish upper Nazareth. A Jewish schoolteacher, a leader in the effort to keep Arabs out, says, ''They are our enemies.''
The abiding significance of the land to both sides is made powerfully clear. The two peoples, Mr. Shipler says, share ''the ideology of return.'' A Jewish settler on the West Bank, who holds that the territory was promised to the Jews by God, says, ''The Jew has to worry about the Jew.'' A West Bank Arab youth tells of throwing Molotov cocktails: ''My hatred has no limit.'' The attacks, he says, will end ''when Israel ends.''
A major theme here is the harshening effects on the young of years of occupation, terrorism and confrontation. Arab and Jewish parents alike see their children, whether they are among the stone throwers or the soldiers, as being at risk. A breath of hope is offered by efforts within Israel to bring Jewish and Arab boys and girls together and to remove discriminatory material from school curriculums. But, as Mr. Shipler says, such moves are ''fragile and vulnerable.''
2 comments:
Hi Amy
This is a great poem that we got from a friend of ours, Margaret Miller – and when I read your blog entry today, I thought it seemed rather poignant for your class.
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal
by Naomi Shihab Nye
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.
Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard any words she knew -- however poorly used -
She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her -- southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag --
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers --
Non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands --
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped
-- has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost.
Thank you for sharing the poem. What a great story.
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