A colleague of mine at Kol Hair , fled from Jerusalem on Friday, 8 October, taking with him his wife and the two months old baby daughter to seek a refuge at his parents’s home in the Israeli-Arab village of Tirah. The story is chilling enough, to remind any Israeli with some sense of history the events in the weimar Republic of Germany in. say, 1932. My colleague, a young man who writes a remarkably impressive Hebrew prose, made a name for himself in Israel for his personal column in Kol Hair, describing his wife’s pregnancy and the rather nervous expectation for the happy event in a humerous and humane manner. His column became so popular, that it was serialised by numerous weekly magazines in the country. All this took place in the relative sanity that had prevailed until Ariel Sharon carried out his old plot to put the Middle-East ablaze. In the last edition of our weekly paper, my colleague described the events in the Arab environment that he knows so intimately, and harnessed his weekly TV review to attack “journalists”, who had turned up to be collaborators with the establishment. To be honest with MEI readers, his stuff was pungent, but almost polite compared to my own column, which was printed more or less next to his. But my friend is an Arab, educated in an elitist Hebrew school in Jerusalem, brave and a bit naive. Naive enough to have his real name in the telephone directory. The anti-Arab demonstrations in his immediate neighbourhood and even the Molotov cocktail hurled at his local mini-market did not seem to deter him, but then he got some threatening telphone calls, actually informing him that the callers intend to kill his little baby. The fear was acompanied by an acute sense of betrayal. The baby had been the darling of Jerusalem even before she was born, and the intimidation campaign symbolised the evaporation of our old life in my beloved native town. Some friends try to console me, to promise that the ugly manifestations of hate are nothing but a phase, but it is all talk, stemming from understandable, but futile, wishful thinking. We can handle the shaky political situation, the danger of war and even the blatant treachery of most of our dovish-Zionist friends. These things have occurred before, during real or false emergencies, and I can make out for you a list of at least 200 good peaceniks, which behaved like monsters during the first two weeks of June 1982, when the war criminal Ariel Sharon bombarded and invaded Lebanon. But this time we have the internal factor, the heroic uprising of the Arab citizens of Israel, and the racist backlush of the oppressors.
So far, the trigger-happy Israeli police, especially in Northern Israel killed 11 Israeli Arabs. This is by no means a coincident. The commander of the Galilee Police, Elik Ron, is a well-known racist and Arab-basher. He is also a personal friend and political supporter of Sharon. But the minister of internal-security, the “liberal” Shlomo Ben-Ami, consistently rejects the pealding of his numerous Arab backers, to fire Ron. The bitterness of the Israeli Arabs is more than understandable. Collectively, they are haunted by the memory of the naqba, the destruction of their community in 1948 and the deportation of two third of the nation from their native land. It is undeniable, that the so-called 1948 Arabs, have assumed a complicated identity over the years.
ירושלמי אדום 