- ?This is a human interest story. It could have happened
anywhere, but it happened in Jerusalem. Yes, we have Jews and Arabs here,
but this is a story about men and women. It would make a good subject
for a film, or for a novel, as it includes romantic love, beautiful young
lovers separated by prejudice, severe and unjust punishment meted out
in the name of law and order - and untimely death.
-
- A few days ago, a young Jerusalemite got aboard his Caterpillar
tractor, ran amok on the main street, hitting buses and cars and was
finally shot dead by a vigilante. Why did it happen? For the same reason
an American, Marvin Heemeyer, did his deed. When a man is pushed too far,
too hard, he snaps. One weeps, another one commits suicide, and yet another
one takes a gun and shoots everybody in sight or rolls his bulldozer
over cars and people.
-
- Marvin Heemeyer was a Colorado welder who, on June 4,
2004, drove his bulldozer through the town hall, the office of the hostile
local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a judge and
others. He was pushed too hard: the municipality had blocked his access
road, his livelihood had been ruined, his simple requests were being refused.
The young Jerusalemite, Hosam Dwayyat was pushed much harder.
-
- Hosam was born in Jerusalem after the Jewish takeover,
and grew up in a village on the outskirts of the city. Sur Bahr, his village
on the edge of the desert with its shepherds and sheep, is not a bad
place: it is walking distance from both the Old City of Jerusalem and
Bethlehem. Houses are nice, spacey and covered with white limestone, surrounded
by small gardens.
-
- Hosam, like all the youth of Sur Bahr lived in the twilight
zone between Jews and Palestinians. He spoke Hebrew and Arabic, had Israeli
and Palestinian friends, went to discos and concerts, could go to Tel
Aviv or West Jerusalem like an ordinary human being, like you and me.
However, on his way he would frequently be stopped, searched, ordered
to present his documents, detained, beaten and released: Israeli security
police, Border Guards, do this regularly in order to remind an Arab that
he is an Arab. For this reason, the dwellers of East Jerusalem hesitate
to venture westward, much like you'd hesitate to visit a violent South
Bronx.
-
- But Hosam was young, and youth does not surrender easily.
Some eight years ago, and he was 24, he had met a young Russian girl
Marina who was 19, and they fell in love. He was her first love, and she
did not hide her happiness.
-
- ?
- The Russians are a breed apart in the social mosaic of
Israel. Though nominally "Jewish", they have kept their Russian
identity, and their own ways. They were not infected with Jewish chauvinism
in the cradle. For Russians, Jewishness is a private thing, not a public
identity. In the internationalist Soviet Union and in its successor states,
boys and girls fall in love with or befriend a person without regard to
his or her ethnic and religious origin, and it does not cause a ripple,
let alone a storm. Upon arrival to Israel, these good-natured young people
are classified by rather arrogant Israelis as "Johnnys-come-lately".
They are snubbed and socially rejected. They have little contact with
youth of good social standing, while the children of poor Oriental Jewish
suburbs are too foreign for them. The Russians do not share the ideals
of other Israeli Jewish communities, i.e. military valour and the amassing
of wealth.
-
- The Palestinians, especially those brought up in the
bigger cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa-Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are closer
to the Russians than are members of other communities: they are smarter,
behave like gentlemen, and do not look down on Russians. They intermarry,
or have romantic connections with them, quite often. Among my immediate
friends, a young Russian girl married a boy from Batir, and now she lives
in that village near Jerusalem with her new family. Another one had a
Palestinian boyfriend for two years, before breaking up for personal reasons.
-
- Hosam and Marina went steady; they lived together for
a while in Tel Aviv. "Hosam liked Israelis", Marina told the
newspaper this week. But their love was crushed upon the rocks of apartheid.
-
- Liaisons between nominal "Jews" and goys cause
much alarm or outright hatred in official Israel. A few days ago, the
largest Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, informed its readers that "the
Kiryat Gat municipality has decided to act against female teenagers
falling in love with young Bedouins and they presented a 10-minute film
titled Sleeping with the Enemy". In June, the Israeli army removed
an Israeli girl named Melissa, 23, who married a local man named Muhammad
Hamameh, 25, from the village of Husan. There is a vigilante organisation
called Yad Leakhim that fights intermarriages and conversions to Christianity
or Islam, and they are busy interfering with interracial happiness.
-
- Marina's parents received hints and odd looks from neighbours.
It was explained to them that "it is not done", that it is "sleeping
with enemy". They conveyed this pressure to their daughter, but
strong-willed Marina moved to live with her boyfriend and his family.
He wanted to marry her, but Russian girls rarely marry so young, and
like other Western girls they do not necessarily want to marry their
first boyfriend. They still want to flirt with others, while seriously
minded sincere young men may well disapprove of it. You do not have to
be a Russian and/or Arab to know about this. Moreover, you do not have
to be a Moor to be aware that jealousy may cause you to slap the flighty
partner, and slap he did. In a moment of anger, Marina complained to the
police, and they took away her lover. Marina tried to take her complaint
back; at that time she was pregnant and lived with Hosam's parents. "He
slapped me when he had reason to feel jealous", she said last week.
But even her intervention in favour of Hosam in the court did not help
he was sentenced to 20 months of jail.
-
- Jerusalem judges are notoriously anti-Arab; they'd have
to be, as they approve of so many unjust acts towards Arabs. Here they
saw a chance to break a forbidden liaison of a nominally Jewish girl with
a goy, of teaching the Russians and the Palestinians a lesson. But there
was another reason, and it was equally relevant. In post- feminist Israel,
as in many other Western countries, a woman may not withdraw her complaint
against a man. The state provides for the ham-fisted over-protection to
women. It is ready to do violence to real women for the sake of "Women's
Rights." In an unrelated case, Israeli minister Hayim Ramon kissed
a soldier girl. She complained, but later withdrew her complaint. Police
pursued her all the way to Latin America and forced her to complain,
threatening her with charges of making a false accusation. The feminists
witch-hunted Ramon all the way to court, and they still refer to him as
a "rapist". So Hosam and Marina could suffer their same fate
in any feminist-ridden European country.
-
- Last week Marina, 27, still pretty, slim and blond, bewept
Hosam and told a reporter that she was and still is in love with him,
her first love and the father of her child she was now bringing up alone.
She was angry at the vigilante, a far-right activist who kept shooting
at unarmed Hosam. She shed tears for the man Israeli authorities and media
had already judged to be an "evil terrorist". For years, Marina
hoped he'd forgive her momentary lapse and come back to her after his
release. But he did not return. His family arranged for his marriage,
and he tried to reshape his life in the Palestinian milieu after his failure
in the Israeli one.
-
- This second try was even worse. Once his family had had
much land, but it was confiscated to build nearby Jewish neighbourhood.
The remainder of their land was confiscated to build the Wall, a fourteen-feet-tall
monster that cut them off from Bethlehem and the desert. On what was left,
he built a house for his new family, for his wife and two children.
-
- But a Palestinian may not build a house in Jerusalem,
even on his own land, and he can't ever get a permit. Hosam had been met
by Israeli "justice" a second time, with equally disastrous
consequences. They ordered him to demolish the house and fined him $50,000.
After that, he snapped, took his front-loader tractor and ran amok in
the centre of Jerusalem, ramming cars and buses. He was quickly shot dead.
-
- There are some local specifics, and bulldozers as well
as killing of an attacker are permanent fixture of the Arab-Israeli conflict:
a Jewish bulldozer driver drove his armoured machine over the American
peace activist Rachel Corrie who defended a Palestinian home from demolition
and was never prosecuted. Another Jewish bulldozer driver shared with
the world his experience of razing Jenin: "I had no mercy for anybody.
I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. For three
days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I didn't see, with
my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were
any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40
or 50 people. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin". While the Jewish
vigilante who killed Hosam was called "hero", Arabs who killed
Jewish murderers in Hebron or in Shafa Amr were prosecuted for murder.
-
- However, putting aside le couleur locale, such a story
could happen almost anywhere, in the US or in Europe. Some prejudices
are common: A young girl could get cold feet right before marriage. A
jealous youngster could slap his flirty girlfriend. Feminist judges could
separate a young couple. She could remain alone loving him and bearing
his child. City hall could demolish anybody's house for being built without
a permit or in order to build a bypass. A man could become incensed and
mete his vengeance on whoever came his way Death Wish style. And here
in Israel, as in your country, we are first of all human -- men and women.
This is an optimistic tragedy: normalcy creeps in through the holes in
apartheid.
-
- It is not necessary to view every event through the binary,
Jew- Goy, or Jew-Arab perception. This perspective is dearest with people
for whom their Jewishness is more important than their humanity. For them,
denial of the "tractor terrorist murder of Jews" is "another
blood libel against Jewish people". They force their binary view
onto others. Thus, Prime Minister Olmert and the Labour leader Barak immediately
sent their police forces to disturb the mourning family, and, equally
devoted to the Jewish paradigm, President Bush, UN chief Ban Ki-moon and
sundry others condemned the "bloody terrorist". Even good guy
Seth Freedman wrote that "Israelis should be under no illusions as
to why we're being targeted by terrorist killers such as Hosan Dwayyat".
Their counterparts in Hamas, Hezbollah and the mythic Galilee Liberation
also claimed responsibility, or "understood" Hosam's actions
as those of resistance. The yellow press of Israel and of Jewish communities
abroad invented his criminal past ("the convicted rapist, burglar
and drug dealer"), his terrorist call to God and his hatred of Jews.
-
- But this miasma of obsessive hate can't transform the
human tragedy: that of an unhappy man pushed too far, whose broken body
was washed by the tears of a Russian Israeli girl named Marina.
-
- PS. Only Gilad Atzmon, Israeli saxophonist and writer
of note, wondered "why the Israelis are entirely sure that it was
an act of terror. It may as well be that the man was slightly mad, he
might have had a phone row with his wife or alternatively a soaring dispute
with his Israeli boss that made him flip. I would assume that in order
to declare an incident to be an act of terror, a terrorist motivation
or a scenario must be established first. Without establishing such a motivation
we are doomed to admit that we are dealing here with a criminal case that
must be investigated. We should as well refrain from jumping to conclusions."
-
- He was right here, though, in a moment of despair, he
came to the wrong conclusion continuing "However, the Israelis seem
to be pretty convinced here. The Israelis are indeed united, and it is
good that they are so united because it allows us to see what the Jewish
state is all about. Sadly, there is no partner for peace in the Israeli
society Unfortunately, and this is indeed a tragedy, the Palestinians
are at the forefront of the most crucial battle for a better world. The
Palestinians have been captured in a grave encounter with a psychotic,
phantasmic, bloodthirsty self-centric Jewish national identity that knows
no mercy."
-
- Not only native Palestinians, but Israelis too, including
nominal Jews, are at odds with this Jewish paradigm, or identity. Just
as normal women suffer from their feminist defenders, ordinary Israelis
officially classified as "Jews" do not need defence from the
binary perception priests. While abroad, every man can choose whether
to accept Jewish identity -- in Israel we have it forced upon us. Israeli
unity is a phantasm as seem from afar; up close, you see men and women
with their own preoccupations, and "professional Jews" are even
rarer in Israel than elsewhere.
-
- Like Gilad, I doubt that 'Jews', i.e. the people who
uphold this identity, will agree by their own good will to any fair arrangement
with native Palestinians. But unlike Gilad, I consider Israelis, including
nominal Jews, to be capable of such an arrangement. For we do not fight
Jews, we fight the Jewish identity, and we can win. If the Russians succeeded
in making Jewishness a private thing, not an identity, so can we.
-
- As long as there are Israeli girls like Marina and Israeli
men like Gilad, there is a chance for peace. Better than a chance -- a
certainty!
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