- Frank Viviano Writes
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- Elusive Peace
Hope glimmers amid bitter reality
ISRAEL: Two peoples, one dream
- Tel Aviv -- As the terrible year of 2001 wanes, conventional
politics offers little hope for peace in the Middle East. But
conventional political wisdom is fallible. It failed to predict
the Islamic revolution in Iran or the collapse of the Berlin
Wall -- monumental events that were forged in collective dreams,
rather than government decisions.
- It is in the dream life of the Middle East that a reporter
still finds room for hope, amid the incessant bloodshed.
- After a monthlong assignment there, the harsh official pronouncements
from both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict recede into a chilling
drone. Far more resonant are the echoes of personal conversations
with people like Walid, 45, and Reuven, 53 -- two men who are
technically enemies, yet who speak in their unguarded moments
more like brothers.
- Both are fathers of two and professional interpreters, trilingual
in Hebrew,
- English and Arabic, a capability that is remarkably widespread
among Arabs and Jews alike in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
- But because they allowed their unguarded words to be recorded,
they didn't want their full names used, nor their pictures taken.
- Walid lives in East Jerusalem, which is a curse for his political
self- esteem but a blessing for his standard of living.
- Because the status of Jerusalem is the most emotional issue
blocking a peace settlement, the 280,000 Arabs who populate the
city's east side hang in civil limbo. They are regarded as neither
Arab-Israeli, with the rights and privileges of formal citizenship,
nor as West Bank Palestinians, who, even in the statements of
hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, will one day have
a state of their own.
- "We float between two worlds," Walid says.
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- FREEDOM TO WORK AND TRAVEL
Yet Walid's dilemma also means that, as a legal resident in what
Israel considers its own capital city, he can work and travel
freely across the country, earning an income that is roughly
four times the average in neighboring Jordan.
- On the drive from East Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, his words and
thoughts are framed by the passing scene. A few miles south of
the city limits, an abandoned, ruined village clings to the slope
of a deep gully. "There," he says, nodding toward the
village, "that was where my parents lived before 1948. "
- Walid says no more than that. In his glance at the village,
in his allusion to 1948 -- to Israel's war of foundation and
the subsequent diaspora of 750, 000 Palestinians -- the entire
story is told.
- A few days later, the reporter asks Reuven about his family's
history. "What survived of my family came to Israel in 1946
from Romania," he says, softly. "From the Holocaust."
- Like Walid, he says no more.
- Route One, the freeway that traverses the 35 miles to Tel
Aviv, twists through a series of dry hills and canyons, then
descends into a verdant coastal plain. Skyscrapers rise against
the horizon, soaring above an immense stretch of neatly landscaped
subdivisions.
- Greater Jerusalem is the Third World, even in the expensive
enclaves that remind one of the wealthy suburbs of Cairo or Amman,
walled off from the surrounding chaos of poverty and displacement.
But Tel Aviv is unequivocally urban First World, Mediterranean-style,
a beach-blanket-and-cafe city, where forests of moored sailing
yachts sway in the breeze.
- Walid, who has driven to the coast four or five times per
week for 20 years,
- knows the city as well as its natives. "Just look at
it," he says, his voice cracking with bitterness. "Look
at the way they are able to live."
- Then, suddenly, he drifts into the dream. "This is what
I want to build for my children," he says. "They've
created a miracle in Tel Aviv. Why won't they allow us to do
the same?"
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- A LONGING FOR THE SECULAR LIFE
His bitterness is the region's angry norm, steeped in the politics
of resentment. But the subtext is that Walid wants to be part
of a Palestine that resembles Israel, and specifically, the secular,
free-wheeling Israel of Tel Aviv.
- This is Israel's most potent weapon, even if Israelis seldom
appear to recognize it: the image of affluent, modern democracy.
It is the largely unacknowledged counterweight to the rising
power of Muslim extremism among younger Palestinians, which is
taught in scores of Koranic schools established by the fundamentalist
groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
- "What they learn in those places is a form of brainwashing,"
Walid says. "For some time, I thought we should move to
America, get away from all of this. "
- Instead, like many moderate Palestinian Muslims, Walid enrolled
his children in Catholic schools. Their teachers, it is widely
understood, are committed to education, rather than proselytizing.
- Reuven shows no surprise when he hears of Walid's decision
against emigrating. "Arabs have a saying," he explains:
"A man is nothing more than a product of the place where
he is raised."
- Walid's refusal to budge from East Jerusalem is not so different
from the determination that keeps Jews in Israel, Reuven allows,
despite the ceaseless violence and uncertainty.
- Asked by the reporter for an introduction to his own city,
Haifa, Reuven parks his car and sets out on what proves to be
a five-hour stroll.
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- PROFOUND NATIONAL INSECURITY
"This is the way an Arab would show you around," he
says, "close to the ground, in the markets and shops. This
is the only way to engage a Middle Eastern city."
- The observation touches a remarkably consistent strain in
the private conversation of Israeli Jews. The profound national
insecurity -- the sense that their precarious hold on this land
depends on unflinching discipline, high-tech weaponry and the
distant support of Washington -- yields, in the Israeli dream
life, to something very different from conquest and occupation
of their neighbors.
- "We will survive if we too become Arabs. Everyone who
lives in the Middle East must eventually become an Arab,"
Reuven says.
- "I'm speaking of a certain mentality, a certain relationship
to this place, a certain way that it molds thinking and acting
-- and not of religion," he is quick to add. "Religion,
theirs and ours, doesn't hold the answers."
- Like most Israelis of European origin, Reuven worries about
the role that Orthodox sects and extremist political parties
have come to exercise in the nation's political life, a role
that seems to grow in direct proportion to the accelerating tensions
and violence between Jews and Palestinians.
- His concern, the reporter points out, is a precise echo of
Walid's wariness of Koranic schools.
- "We are like Siamese twins," Reuven finally says,
after a long pause. "We find it very hard to live together,
but we cannot live apart."
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