An Intifadeh Of the Soul

(6 of 9)

THE ZEAL OF THE ABSENTEE

Samar Dudin Karajah has a sharp and beautiful face. She is 28, the daughter of a former Jordanian minister, and dresses like a European woman of privilege. Married to a young lawyer, she lives in Amman and teaches drama at the Aliya Girls School. She is now on a maternity leave.

"A Palestinian always has a sense of pain wherever he is or whatever he does," she says. "Every Palestinian is in exile." When she teaches grade- school children, she makes up plays. Here is a Palestinian girl crossing the Allenby Bridge from Jordan to the West Bank. An Israeli soldier gives the girl candy, but then he breaks open her doll to see if she is carrying anything dangerous. The girl throws the candy back at the soldier.

"We were brought up," says Samar, "to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. My mother had many Sephardic Jewish friends. But Zionism emerged out of the Holocaust. So why do the Palestinians have to pay for that? They were the victims. Now we are the victims. They came and took our land! They cannot solve their agony by victimizing the Palestinians."

She chokes on her outrage. "Why do we have to explain ourselves so much?"

THE POLTERGEIST'S TALE

Steep Nazareth in a bright sun. The 60,000 Arabs here are Israeli citizens, but the character of the town is distinctly Arab, with winding streets and souks. The Jews live on an opposite hill in modern houses with broad streets that might have been transplanted from suburban America.

In Israel more than 700,000 citizens are Arab. They regard themselves as third-class citizens. They have made a double-jointed accommodation with the Israeli state.

Johny Jahshan works as an accountant in the Galilee Christian College. His house on a hillside overlooking Nazareth has a middle-class comfort that makes a stranger think twice. This is a dissonance one sometimes feels among Palestinians who live very well. Their comfort does not invalidate their grievance, but it subtly shifts the moral ground, or at least complicates their status as victims. Israel has been economically profitable for many Palestinians, even as Israelis have exploited Palestinian labor and markets. Now, however, Palestinians are boycotting as many Israeli products as they can.

The Palestinians living in Israel feel thrice removed. First in privilege and status come the European Jews, then come the Oriental Jews, then, a distant third, the Israeli Arabs. Many of their grievances sound like the complaints of American blacks, and sometimes Israel gives off something of the Old South, of race hate and sheer meanness. The other evening on Salah el-Din Street in East Jerusalem, a middle-aged man in a business suit was stopped by a beefy policeman who addressed him in Arabic: "Ya, walid ((Hey, boy))!" The policeman took the Palestinian's left hand and twisted it back slowly, painfully, saying softly all the while in Arabic, "You do intifadeh, boy? I think you're intifadeh, boy!"

It sometimes seems to a Palestinian in Israel as if he and his family had been killed in an accident and now live on as ghosts in the same house. Another family, Jewish, has moved in. The ghosts observe the new tenants with sardonic commentary. The new tenants watch the furniture move and objects fly through the air. The Arabs have become poltergeists at their old address.