I again need religious people to offer me a break from the heady, humorless secular high class.
==========
Here’s an item called Shikshukit. What is it? I ask the waiter. “Minced meat with tahini and yogurt. It is good for your health, good for salvation, cures cancer, good for having male children, and it comes with roasted tomatoes.” I think Al-Jazeera should hire this person as their chief correspondent.
==========
“Arieh King, who works for Irving Moskowitz [an American tycoon], told me about this place. Irving buys Arab properties and sells them to Jews, and Arieh told me that they were looking for people to move into this house.” Why here? “Before us, an Arab family lived here. They uprooted tombstones from Jewish graves in the cemetery and put them on the floor here. Whenever something broke in the house, they went out, uprooted some tombstones and put them here.”
==========
I ask Dr. Ehab, who used to be a professor before joining this ministry, to define for me Palestinian culture. “Tolerance and coherence define Palestinian culture.” In this tolerant environment, I ask him, how come Christians like me can’t smoke during Ramadan? “This is about respect.”
==========
Joshua bin Nun occupied Jericho in 1200 BCE, who was there at that time? Palestinians. Of course! In the Torah itself it tells about wars between Israelis and Palestinians and it says, letter by letter, the word Palestinians. The BBC, before 1948, and in every news broadcast, they called this land Palestine and the people they called Palestinians.” I’m happy somebody is finally able to pinpoint exact dates of Palestinian history. But here’s an entry from the Encyclopædia Britannica on the subject: “In 132 the emperor Hadrian decided to build a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of Jerusalem. . . . The province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina (later simply called Palaestina), and, according to Eusebius of Caeseria (Ecclesiastical History, book IV, chapter 6), no Jew was thenceforth allowed to set foot in Jerusalem or the surrounding district.”
==========
Would you like for Palestinians and Israelis to solve their conflict by dividing the land into two states, Palestine and Israel? “No. Zionism is racism. As simple as stealing my country, my land, and daring to find excuses for it, trying their best to erase me. Israel has stolen my mother’s dress; they call this dress ‘Israeli.’ They have stolen my food; they call my food ‘Israeli.’” What on earth is going on today with this falafel thing!
==========
Nadia, who lives in Jerusalem, is an Israeli citizen and carries an Israeli passport, tells me that “life under occupation” is awfully bad and that the Jews “almost killed my daughter.” What happened? Well, this is what happened. Nadia was coming back from the West Bank the other day and the occupiers had put a roadblock before the entry into Israel. She was in the first in a line of cars, she recalls, on a very hot August day. She had her baby daughter with her and the baby wanted to be fed, breast-fed that is. Nadia begged the soldiers to allow her to just drive on but they said, “No, it’s a roadblock.” The baby was crying, and she had no choice but to feed the baby in the car. How this translates into murder, or almost murder, is beyond my capacity to comprehend.
==========
Wait a second: You got free higher education for God knows how many years, right? You, as an Israeli citizen, get medical care, free or for a token payment, you are a famous singer – “Occupiers have to pay a price for their occupation: they must pay for the occupied’s medical expenses, food, and higher education,” she cuts me off.
==========
I’m not sure which law book decrees that a state, of whatever nature, must pay for five years of music classes, in addition to over two years of social studies to its citizens who are not Jewish (Jews don’t get free university education in Israel), but if this is called Occupation, I’d like to be occupied for the rest of my life. Nadia, who is a Christian and married to a Muslim, blames the Israelis for another thing.
==========
I’m not sure which law book decrees that a state, of whatever nature, must pay for five years of music classes, in addition to over two years of social studies to its citizens who are not Jewish (Jews don’t get free university education in Israel), but if this is called Occupation, I’d like to be occupied for the rest of my life. Nadia, who is a Christian and married to a Muslim, blames the Israelis for another thing.
==========
Fania is proud of her people and her culture. “Israel is the greatest exporter of meaning in the world, and we have done this since the time of Jesus. This land proves that size doesn’t matter.”
==========
Fania doesn’t stop here, she keeps on: “This place works like a magnet and is also radioactive, spreading out. Call it mystical. I don’t know what it is. Think of the Crusaders: why did knights mount horses and come here? Why did prophet Muhammad come here to fly to heaven from Jerusalem? Why did the Jews come here again? There are forces at work here, call them magnetism and radioactivity. This place draws energy in and it spreads it out.” Fania has a fresh voice, whether you agree with her or not, and I listen. “This place is the densest in the world in terms of words. Ten kilometers from here is Armageddon. Every place in this country has an in-built library. This crowdedness of textuality is the meaning of this place.
==========
“Jews and Arabs are killing one another. Arabs and Arabs are killing one another. But Jews and Jews don’t kill each other, they scream at each other. This is because Jews are made of words, words that are in books and have been in books for twenty-five hundred years.”
==========
This is not exactly true. Former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin died by a bullet of a Jewish assassin. The Zionist leader Haim Arlozorov was most likely killed at the hands of Jewish assassins. The journalist Rabbi Jacob Israël de Haan was murdered by the Haganah (a pre-state paramilitary Jewish organization that eventually became the IDF), probably by order of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. And of course there’s the Altalena Affair, in which nineteen Jews were killed by other Jews. Yet, these numbers are minute in comparison to other nations.
==========
And Fania keeps charting her course. “I like some Greek books, from the ancient era, more than most Jewish books. But no other nation, except the Jews, ‘forced its children to go to school at the age of three.’ I never thought of this, though I should have. When Fania says it, she magically brings me back to my baby years. I started studying Judaism at the tender age of three.
==========
I ask him if any of his political views were changed after being in Hebron or on the Lebanese border. “Yes. I’ve become more of a rightist. Standing at a checkpoint is not easy. You don’t know what will happen next. Every day, almost every day, they [Palestinians] push their ten-year-old children, sometimes even younger, to come near the checkpoint and throw stones at us. What can you do to a child? You can’t fight children. The parents teach their children – and sometimes I could hear the lessons in the nearby school – to hate Jews. It’s not the children’s fault, but it’s the children who throw the stones. I heard and I saw, and now I’ve moved to the right. When you stand at a checkpoint, sooner or later you’ll change your views, if you were a leftist. You experience the hate and you know there’s no chance for peace.”
==========
They pound me with super brainy words of no meaning, and as I sip my Chivas Regal I reminisce about one of my favorite rabbis from the days of old, a genius by any standards: “He who cannot explain his thesis in simple words is he who has no thesis.”
==========
Europe, as a rule, sides more with the Palestinians, while the United States sides more with the Israelis. What do you think is the reason for this? “Europe is much more ideological, complex, intellectual. America is shallow, everything in black and white, and brainwashed.”
==========
Why, do you think, are the Europeans so interested in this land? “Very complex. For one thing, you can’t ignore the past. In some European countries, I’m sure, and I’m talking about feelings they have in their sub-subconscious, there is this thinking: ‘if our victims are engaged in horrible acts perhaps it’s not that bad what we have done to them.’ It makes the Europeans feel better and it compensates for their guilty feelings. But it’s also true that Europe is more sensitive than America to human rights violations in general.”
==========
“King David was a Palestinian,” Sakhar tells me, as she poses next to the king to show me the similarities. “He was born in my village. King David was my great-great-grandfather.” They look like Siamese twins, same height same age.
==========
“You can’t smoke outside, the Muslims won’t let you. Until the year 2000 the Christians made up 95 percent of the population in Bethlehem, but now they are 1.5.” Why did the Christians leave? “The Christians left because there is no money here.” Why didn’t the Muslims leave? “They get money from the Saudis.” Christians don’t? “Saudis only give to Muslims.”
==========
Before I left the hotel, Warwick the Brit told me: “Here anything can happen. If somebody came to me and said, ‘There are goats flying over the hotel,’ I’d ask him, ‘How many?’”
==========
AS HIS NAME IMPLIES, DAVID BATSRI IS OF THE SEPHARDI COMMUNITY, AND reading the ad it appears that he is part of the Sephardi Haredi world, politically known as Shas. This part of society is huge in numbers and quite powerful. They are Jews who originated in Arab lands, but who have come under the influence of Ashkenazic fanatic rabbis. As a result, they study like a German and imagine like an Arab. This can be a great mix, but can also result in a huge mess.
==========
“USB stick is an Israeli invention. Voicemail is an Israeli invention. SMS. Computer chips that run laptops. Medical scanning devices, such as MRI. VOIP. Data security for cellphones. Flash memory.”
==========
Will peace prevail? I ask him. “There is no other option.” Will two states be here, living side by side? “Yes. There’s no other possibility.” Why? “If the two states are not becoming a reality, we will end up with one state and that state will be Arab. I don’t want this to happen.” Amos does not observe either the Sabbath or Ramadan, but he wants a Jewish state. And like his daughter, Fania, he knows what a “Jew” is. “Other nations built pyramids,” he tells me, while the Jews wrote books. “The Jews never had a pope who told them what to do. Every Jew is a pope.”
==========
Amos shares his thinking not only about the Israelis but also about the Europeans. “Europeans very often tend to wake up in the morning, read the paper, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, launch a demonstration against the bad guys, and go to sleep feeling good about themselves. Except that Israel and Palestine is not about good guys and bad guys, it is a clash between two perfectly valid claims over the same country.”
==========
“You know,” adds another, “it would have been very good if Rommel had succeeded.” He is referring to Nazi Germany’s attempt in WWII to enter Palestine. “We would have had all the land,” he says, since no Jew would have survived. “My blood is German,” another says to me. “All of us, all Palestinians, are German.”
==========
What’s your dream? “Peace.” With whom? “Between us and the Arabs. There is no reason, believe me, that we will not have peace with them. The problem is this: Ashkenazi Jews, and they are the ones negotiating with the Palestinians, will never reach any peace with them. If Israel sent Sephardi Jews to negotiate with the Palestinians, there would have been peace here already a long time ago. Ashkenazi Jews don’t want us, the Sephardi Jews, to talk with the Arabs. “Listen to me: the Zionist movement, from the start, didn’t get it that in order to speak with other people you need to understand the others’ culture. If you want to make peace with the Palestinians you must first understand them, their culture, and the nuances of their culture, but the Ashkenazi Jews have not internalized this fact yet.” As I leave his office I check the name on the wall: MK Yitzhak Cohen.
==========
Like Nadia, Eternity gets higher education for free. And like her, she studies with the Jews and she spits on them. These two women, I think, are smarter than the Jews who pay for their education.
==========
As far as I know about the history of American and European involvement in the Middle East so far, their records show close to a 100 percent failure rate.
==========
I think of the difference between Arabs and Jews. When Arabs make up stuff, they laugh it off once they get caught. Jews, like the atheist Gideon or believing Arik, get very tense.
==========
How do Jews believe, even in their wildest imagination, that they will survive in the cruel, funny landscapes of this Middle East? Maybe that’s why Arabs have lived here for so many years, whereas Jews just pop in for a visit once in two thousand years, to rest a while after an Auschwitz
==========
We are not racists, we are Jews. In Europe, I was told, the refugees say to their hosts: ‘You are not racists but, by God, you are idiots! Real idiots!’ If the Europeans want to be idiots, let them be. Those idiots, the European idiots, will pay the price, for soon Europe will cease to exist. But this country is not Europe!”
==========
The more I get to dislike the hypocritical leftists, the more I get to dislike the honest conservatives. The centrists, experts in adopting the worst of both their political rivals, are today quiet as fish.
==========
“I’ll tell you the problem: We, Muslims, call our children after Christian and Jewish prophets. We have Musa, Isa, and I’m going to call my daughter, the next one I’ll have, I’ll call her Maryam. But Christians and Jews don’t call their children after Muslim prophets, like Muhammad, May Allah pray for him and offer him peace. Why? Show me a Christian or a Jew calling their sons ‘Muhammad’!”
==========
(“Bet Lehem” means House of Bread in Hebrew, which conflicts with the Palestinian narrative of the ancient Palestinian state. Since Beth Lehem – or Bethlehem – plays a major role in the New Testament, its very name could prove that the Jews lived here and not the Palestinians in Christ’s time. To solve this problem, a little correction was introduced, by changing a vowel. “Bet Lahem,” with an ‘a’ instead of an ‘e,’ is giving a new meaning to the city’s name in Arabic: House of Meat.)
==========
It is on this occasion that I grasp one basic reality: activists, on the Left or on the Right, by their very nature don’t relate to people as humans.
==========
If you deduct from the total population of Israel those who believe in dead men or in flying horses or camels, the people you’ll have left are the NGO activists and the editor in chief of Haaretz.
==========
As one of them says to me: “God chose the Jews not because they are nice.”
==========
“The name of Jerusalem is Urushalem, the city of Shalem, a Canaanite god of the Middle Bronze Age period, around 2000 BCE. Jerusalem is the invention of King David, built around 1000 BCE. Earlier in the biblical text every person was allowed to build a shrine to God wherever he felt like, but King David decreed that there was only one place to worship God in. This was a political decision.
==========
The God of Islam loves the Germans.
==========
It just occurs to me, don’t laugh, that human rights activists are the biggest racists there are. Really, I’m not kidding. The normal racist fights within his own territory, wishing that his land be cleansed of those he hates. He is misguided, and his thoughts and deeds are deplorable, but at least he has a selfish motive: he wants his land to be only his land. No KKK member, for example, is dedicating his life to clearing Turkey of Turks. The European NGO folks are different. The Jew they are fighting does not reside in their territory, for he lives thousands of miles away, and yet, these Europeans travel thousands of miles to get the Jew – wherever they find him. I try to dig a bit deeper into these loveable kids.
==========
Fishermen love fish, Europeans love Jews, and both would like the object of their love well fried.
==========
5 Broken Cameras, the Oscar-nominated film about the Bil’in protests, “shows life in one Palestinian village,” the New York Times writes in a glorifying review of this film. If you sit in New York and watch a docu-film you may believe that what you see is real. When you are here in Bil’in, and if you understand Arabic, you know better. “The Bil’in protests” is a show, a show of “Allah is with you. Kill them!” Personally, I don’t believe in “Death to the Arabs” and I don’t believe in “Death to the Jews,” even if the latter has been nominated for an Oscar.
