On August 17, 2014, shortly after Write Down, I am an Arab was released, twenty-six-year-old Mahmoud Mansour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, married twenty-three-year-old Morel Malka, a Jewish convert to Islam. Religious intermarriage is not recognized by the state of Israel; were Malka a Jewish Israeli and not a Muslim convert, her marriage to Mansour would have been invalid. Still, the union offended the right-wing Israeli organization LEHAVA, its name a Hebrew acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land.” In early August, LEHAVA published Mansour and Malka’s wedding invitation on its Facebook page, urging antiassimilation demonstrators to storm the banquet hall with banners and megaphones. Fearing for their safety, the couple sought a court order banning protestors from their wedding. They succeeded only in obtaining an order that barred demonstrators from coming within two hundred meters of the celebration. Hundreds of police were deployed to prevent violent confrontations between antiassimilation protestors and counterdemonstrators: hundreds of the former, dozens of the latter. Malka’s father refused to attend his daughter’s wedding, while LEHAVA’s chairman accused her of “marrying the enemy.”
It is on these grounds—that Jewish women who date Arab men are betraying the state—that LEHAVA created its infamous hotline in 2013. The telephone service, intended to “save the daughters of Israel,” allowed anonymous citizens to expose Jewish women suspected of dating Arab men. A recorded message offered callers three options: “If you are in contact with a goy and need assistance, press one. If you know a girl who is involved with a goy and you want to help her, press two. If you know of a goy who masquerades as a Jew or is harassing Jewish women, or of locations where there is an assimilation problem, press three.” While goy is a derogatory term for any non-Jewish man, LEHAVA makes clear that Arab men are the danger—a view commonly aired in conservative circles. A week after our night out, one of my companions in Ramallah sends me a link to a skit from a right-wing satirical program on Israel’s Channel 1. The two-minute video begins with an Israeli American woman introducing herself as Chloe and cheerfully describing Amir, the Arab man she’s just begun dating. The five ensuing sequences depict the stages of Chloe’s relationship, as the bubbly Israeli goes from wearing a minidress and holding a beer to: (1) wearing a long dress and drinking water; (2) wearing a headscarf and holding cooking pots; (3) wearing a full abaya and holding a baby; (4) wearing a niqab and holding several babies; (5) being absent. She has been killed. The iconography recalls the visual language of the antebellum South, where African American men were considered (and murdered for being) a threat to “pure” white women. In the Israeli antiassimilation narrative, it is not the Arab man’s body that threatens to annihilate, but his culture: oppressively patriarchal and inherently violent. Though the aforementioned hotline no longer exists, LEHAVA’s website still offers visitors the opportunity to “report cases of assimilation.” According to my hosts in Ramallah and Jerusalem, groups like LEHAVA intimidate mixed couples, defending, as they see it, the purity of the Jewish state.
The same sentiment exists in Palestine. Just as Morel Malka, the Jewish-Israeli bride, is said to have married the enemy, Ibtisam Mara’ana, the Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker, has been condemned by Palestinians for marrying a Jew. Notably, Mara’ana has said that she made the Darwish documentary not to expose the poet’s romance but to legitimize her own, a two-year relationship with a Jewish Israeli of Canadian origin. Four years before revealing Rita’s identity in Write Down, I am an Arab, Mara’ana released 77 Steps, a film about the challenges she and her boyfriend faced as a Palestinian-Jewish couple.
“One of my biggest fears was whether Arab society would accept the film,” she said. “To convince myself . . . I created a ‘safe answer’ to throw at anyone attacking me for exposing my relationship with a Jewish man. This ‘safe answer’ was that if Mahmoud Darwish could write love poems about his Jewish loved one, then it is perfectly fine to make a movie about my relationship with my Jewish boyfriend, a controversial act in both the Arab Israeli and Jewish Israeli societies.”
A controversial act indeed.
Surely the greatest feat of any apartheid government is convincing its population that to love, that most human of acts, is in fact to betray. In every oppressive society there is a demographic—the young, the students, the artists—that will reject the ideology of dehumanization on which protracted oppression and occupation rely. None of the Jewish activists and students whom I meet in Jerusalem, Jaffa, or Tel Aviv can be made to believe in the fundamental inferiority of the Palestinian people. No amount of Palestinian Authority propaganda will convince the intellectual clubbers in Ramallah that all Jewish Israelis wish them ill. And yet with precisely the same logistical maneuvering that has chipped away at Palestine’s borders, the occupying state has eroded the likelihood of interfaith relationships even among the most open-minded Muslims and Jews. There is nothing accidental about this outcome. It can be easy to dismiss organizations like LEHAVA as representing an extremist fringe, as reprehensible but as exceptional as, say, Germany’s anti-immigrant group PEGIDA. In reality, the antiassimilation project flourishes at all levels of Israeli society: from courtroom to bedroom to classroom and beyond.
In 2015, for example, a novel called Borderlife was added to Israel’s literature curriculum. Written by Dorit Rabinyan, “one of the country’s most respected authors,” Borderlife tells the love story of a Palestinian painter and an Israeli translator. Including this kind of narrative in a high school curriculum does much to naturalize interfaith dating in the minds of youth. For precisely this reason the Israeli Ministry of Education banned the novel from schools, arguing that Israeli young people could be encouraged to pursue relationships with Arabs by the book. Though two members of the curriculum panel quit in objection, and though the ban was widely criticized, it has held. Witness: the enforcement of personal prejudice at the level of the state.
Religious intermarriage is not recognized in Israel, much as interracial marriage was once criminalized in the United States. One cannot make a direct comparison between the two; the marriage of a mixed faith couple wed outside Israeli borders is, for example, recognized within them. But though such a union is legalized in theory, it is not legitimized in practice—and it is in the context of the manufacture of social illegitimacy that comparison proves instructive. The US legalized interracial marriage in 1967, when the Lovings (that fabulously named couple) appealed to the Supreme Court to declare antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. Richard Loving was white, Mildred Loving black; theirs was the country’s first legal interracial marriage. What I’ve always found most interesting about the Loving case is the history of the laws that it overturned. Before there were antimiscegenation laws, miscegenation itself had to be invented. According to etymologists, the word was coined in 1863 in response to the abolition debate. The fabricated word combined the Latin miscere (“to mix”) and genus (“kind”), where the reference to genus was intended to underscore the allegedly biological differences between nonwhites and whites. The irony, of course, is that all human beings belong to the same genus (Homo) and the same species (Homo sapiens). By definition, there can be no such thing as miscegenation among people. Religion is a less slippery concept than race if only in that the former can be said, per force, to exist. But in the Palestinian-Israeli context the two often blur together. To invalidate inter-religious marriage (and, more important, to illegitimate interfaith romance) is to problematize interethnic love—that is, to invite one to forget that the Other, enemy or lover, is a human being.
Through a combination of formal policy, cultural production, and violent intimidation, the state has succeeded in racializing love—the most egregious act of dehumanization possible. Invariably, a single image comes to mind when I think of the dehumanization of the Palestinian people: men packed together like caged animals at the border crossing in Qalandiya, grimly preparing for the checkpoint rush. It is impossible to see photos like this without confronting the extent to which the
architects of the occupation have ceased to view Palestinians as human beings. Though there are many Israelis who do uphold the humanity of their Arab neighbors, the danger associated with loving them succeeds in obscuring the singularity of humanity itself.
What Palestine’s national poet knew is that, as soon as one sees the other as human, not only love but nuance becomes possible. Concluding his 1973 musings on Rita, Darwish writes: “The following year the [1967] war erupted and I was put in prison again. I thought of her: ‘What is she doing now?’ She may be in Nablus, or another city, carrying a light rifle as one of the conquerors, and perhaps at this moment giving orders to some men to raise their arms or kneel on the ground. Or perhaps she is in charge of the interrogation and torture of an Arab girl her age, and as beautiful as she used to be.” What Esther knows, what Mahmoud Mansour and Morel Malka know, what Tamar Ben Ami knows, is that fear is as instrumental to hate as nuance is detrimental. In discovering Darwish’s Israeli lover, I rather childishly wish to have found some ray of hope, some proof that love might somehow triumph over all the hate I’ve witnessed. I do not wish to imagine Darwish’s lover as a conqueror, a torturer. And yet Darwish did because he had to. Still he saw her beauty. In speaking with Jews and Arabs about the thorny subject of interfaith love, I learn that my thinking lacks nuance. With Darwish I am obliged to see the matter for all its ugliness and its beauty, resisting the urge to simplify while retaining the right to grieve. I have asked a question and received an answer, not the one for which I hoped, but a harsher truth born of a haunted, hardened landscape. Love between Jews and Arabs does exist, but must fight violence and bigotry for its survival. Or, said more hopefully, violence and bigotry do exist, but love between Jews and Arabs does, too.
Imagining Jericho
Colm Tóibín
In June 1992, on the night Yitzhak Rabin was reelected in Israel, I was in Jerusalem. When darkness fell, I went alone to the Western Wall. I walked through the security barriers and down the steps. The Wall was floodlit and people in black clothes were praying up close to it. The sound of the prayers was intense and mesmerizing. Some of the men with black hats and hair curled down the sides of their faces were almost in a trance. Some were reading, some reciting. The atmosphere was laden with reverence and emotion.
After a while, I went and sat on my own close by. The strength and force of what was going on at the wall was intense, filled with fervor.
Over the previous two years, as Eastern Europe opened up, I had spent time in the countries that had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In cities such as Bucharest, Budapest, Prague, Kraków, and Warsaw in 1990 and 1991, the fate of the Jewish population was not memorialized. The Jewish population, which had once been an essential thread of the fabric of these cities, was simply a palpable absence, surrounded by a desolate silence. My efforts to find where the Warsaw ghetto began and ended, for example, were met with bafflement. No one I asked seemed to know.
It was hard, then, and indeed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in 1992, not to keep in mind how little Ireland, my country, had done in response to the plight of the Jews of Europe. In December 1942 Eamon de Valera, who was both the Irish prime minister and foreign minister, received a telegram from Chief Rabbi Herzog of Palestine, whom he had known when Herzog was chief rabbi in Ireland between 1921 and 1936. It read: revered friend pray leave no stone unturned to save tormented remnant of israel doomed alas to utter annihilation in nazi europe greetings zions blessings. Herzog followed this in January 1943 with a long telegram that referred to “five million threatened with extermination.”
The Irish authorities dithered and made enquiries, but in general they did nothing, as even more alarming telegrams came to de Valera from Herzog.
During the war years the number of Jews allowed into Ireland “may have been as few as sixty,” according to Dermot Keogh in his book Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland.
It was hard not to think of this as I watched the figures praying at the Western Wall. It was hard also, in reading about the early years of Israel, not to be reminded of the revolutionary generation in Ireland in the years leading up to the 1916 rebellion—their idealism, their belief in culture, their sense that they were making a better life for Irish people in the future.
And it was difficult too in thinking about the fate of the Palestinians who suffered in the creation of Israel not to remember the history of dispossession in Ireland, of Irish Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries being removed from their land. This was a history whose legacy was still poisoning life in Ireland even as late as 1992.
But in Ireland things in 1992 were changing. John Hume, the leader of constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland, had developed a mantra. Everywhere he went, he said: “There is no such thing as territory. There are only people.” And: “You do not make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies.”
Slowly, tentatively, the parties in Northern Ireland had begun to move towards ending the conflict. What was striking about John Major and Tony Blair, who oversaw this process from London with considerable energy and care, and indeed their Irish counterparts, was that no matter what atrocity was committed by any of the terrorist armies, it did not stop them in their efforts to negotiate and talk, even with those close to the perpetrators. Each spate of killings almost seemed to spur them on to find a solution so that there would be no more killing.
In the week before the 1992 elections in Israel, as a guest of the Israeli government, I had spoken to politicians of every hue and had spent days and nights listening to arguments about the internal complexities of Israeli politics, some of which had close connections to Ireland. It seemed to me, however, that the fierce arguments and the many differing opinions on factions and personalities in Israel served almost as a means of distraction from the threat from the Arab world, and, more important, as a way of keeping the burning question of how to make peace with the Palestinians at bay.
Many people I met in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv wanted to talk about anything except how they were going to make a settlement with their immediate neighbors in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Many secular Israelis seemed more concerned with the demands coming from religious Jews than they did with the plight of the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, during the week I had met candidates from the left wing parties who did want to discuss the Palestinians; some of them, had run a campaign based on their readiness to form a pact with the Palestinians. Among those I saw also was Yossi Beilin, whom I remember as the most open and intelligent politician, passionately engaged in attempting to find a reasonable solution, to take the desires and needs of the other side into account. On the other hand, I had also met people who wanted Israel to be a religious society, and wanted no dialogue at all with anyone, least of all the Palestinians.
As I walked away from the Western Wall on election night, I bumped into a man with whom I had had dinner a few evenings earlier. He had been born in England, but had come to Israel with his family; he had not, he said, voted for Rabin or any of the left-wing parties and now he was on his way to his local police station to get his equipment to do vigilante duty in the city center for the evening. I walked around with him for a while. Some of his children had become very religious, he said, and he seemed happy about this. I noticed a hardness in this man’s views, a determination, a sense that he would do anything to hold on to what Israel had achieved.
I wondered what someone like him would do or feel if negotiations with the Palestinians began, negotiations which would have to conclude with the Israelis ceding rights and land, and losing a sense that they fully controlled what happened within the borders of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, the borders which had been created in 1967.
That same night in Jerusalem, as the results came in, my friends who supported the left-wing parties were jubilant. Rabin had won, and would hold power, they hoped, with the help of Meretz, the most dovelike of all the Jewish parties. They raised their glasses to the possi
bility of peace that night in Jerusalem, and it felt good until I began to move among these people and ask them specific questions. Did this mean that they would demolish the settlements in the West Bank? Did this mean that they would allow Gaza to be part of an autonomous Palestinian state with the West Bank? A real state? With an army? A police force? What about Jerusalem?
These were liberal Israelis on the night of an election victory, and each time a specific concession to the Palestinians came up, they were doubtful, and when Jerusalem itself came up, they were sure, they would not give up Jerusalem.
The next day I went to the West Bank with an Israeli military expert. I had imagined the settlements to be in the wilderness, in the middle of nowhere. But Israel is a tiny country, and if you drive for just fifteen minutes out of Jerusalem, you are quickly in the disputed territory, and another half an hour and you are in the place that the Palestinians want as their state. As we passed through Arab villages, the military expert scoffed at the notion that at some point in the future Palestinians would have the right to stop him and his driver.
As we stood on a hill overlooking the Jordan Valley, we saw herds of goats being tended by a solitary Palestinian sitting on an opposite hill, the man working in the same way as people have for thousands of years. I pointed out the herdsman to the Israeli expert, but he was too busy explaining potential strategies in the event of an invasion. He explained how quickly an Arab force could overrun the West Bank, how vulnerable Jerusalem and its Jewish citizens were, and how vigilant they would have to be at all times in the future.