Eating baklava with a Palestinian

This is going to be really hard to summarize in a blog, but I’m going to give it a go.

Tonight, I had baklava with a Palestinian.

On an evening stroll in Yafo, I stopped by the Abouelafia bakery.  It’s a renowned Middle Eastern bakery that attracts people of all faiths and backgrounds.  As I like to do, I started speaking Arabic with a middle-aged gentleman working there named Adnan.

Since we’re in the Middle East, instead of exchanging pleasantries and saying “nice to meet you”, I invited him to sat down with me and we talked for about two hours.  Also important to add that this conversation was fueled by lots of baklava and knafeh.  And it was delicious.

First things first- Adnan is a cool guy.  He helped me hand-pick the best baklava (there were easily two dozen kinds).  He put on Nancy Ajram for me.  He told me I spoke great Arabic.  He’s even letting me come back and pay him tomorrow since I didn’t realize they were cash only.  Because that’s how we do here.

We talked about everything.  Bibi (we both don’t like him).  Abu Mazen (we both don’t like him).  Hamas (we both don’t like them).  And politicians in general (we both don’t really like them).

We also talked about the shared history of Arabs and Jews, as carriers of two of the world’s oldest civilizations.  Our shared linguistic heritage (Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages).  Our love of learning.

I told him how half of the students in my college Arabic class were Jewish and that many spoke Hebrew, so when the Moroccan professor started speaking on the first day, many Jews were laughing and nodding along with him.  And the non-Jewish students were totally confused.  Because Jews and Arabs have a shared cultural heritage.

Then we delved deeper into politics.  First, he said that he has no problem with Jews.  Jews and Arabs are regular people who just want to eat, sleep, drink, educate their children, and live a happy life.  He said his family’s neighbors back in 1948 (before Israel’s independence) were Jewish.  His family is from East Jerusalem.

East Jerusalem.  We could unpack that phrase for literally eons and still be talking.  So let’s sum it up- in 1948, Israel’s Arab neighbors invaded the nascent country.  Israel won its independence and the parts of the U.N. mandate that were supposed to be a new Arab country were annexed by Egypt (the Gaza Strip) and Jordan (the West Bank).  Jerusalem was divided, with the western part in Israeli hands and eastern part in Jordanian hands.  In 1967, when Israel’s neighbors again tried to invade, they were rebuffed, and Israel won Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, home to many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian holy sites.

While Israel never formally annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it did so with East Jerusalem.  The political reasons are complex, but part of the rationale was that Jerusalem was Israel’s (now unified) capital and home to the holiest site in Judaism- the Temple Mount.  Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were neglected or destroyed and Israelis weren’t allowed to visit them.

The point of this isn’t to rehash history or to debate politics.  It’s to say that since Adnan is from East Jerusalem, he is different from other Arab citizens of Israel.  Arab-Israelis who live in pre-1967 Israel are full voting citizens and variously identify as Arab-Israelis, Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, or Palestinian-Israelis.  More often than not in public discourse, they are referred to as Arab-Israelis, though people’s personal identifications may vary.

Folks from East Jerusalem, however, are largely permanent residents, which entitles them to many government services including healthcare.  They are eligible to apply for citizenship if they renounce foreign citizenships, which is a complicated issue involving national identity and bureaucratic red tape.

Going back to the story, Adnan tells me that even though he had Israeli citizenship, since he spent seven years abroad working in Romania (which, incidentally, is where some of my family lived before immigrating to America), when he tried to return to Israel, they told him he had lost his citizenship.  Even though he was born in Jerusalem and his family has lived there for who knows how many generations.

Eventually he got Romanian citizenship, came back, and then through a process of waiting for three years in Israel without being able to travel abroad, he became a citizen again.

I’ve tried to avoid writing about the Israeli-Arab conflict on this blog because I’m sick and tired of people thinking that’s the only thing that’s going on in this region.  There’s a lot of life and beauty here and I can’t think of a single friend who visited China showing concern over the plight of Tibetans (which they should- they’re being violently oppressed by the Chinese government).  The point is I want my journey to be about so much more than that- and I’m tired of the media turning both Israelis and Palestinians into monkeys for the world to watch while other countries deteriorate without notice.

And the conflict is here.  You can’t totally avoid it, no matter what you do.  It landed on my lap because I talked to a guy at a bakery for goodness sakes.

I’ve spoken to many Arab-Israelis in Yafo and had a great time.  Things aren’t always great for them either, but they’re pretty good.  I spent 30 minutes the other day in a McDonald’s talking to an Arab-Israeli girl who’s going to an Anime convention in Ramat Gan and speaks perfect Arabic, Hebrew, and English (in addition to the Japanese she’s learning).  If she lives abroad in Japan, she won’t lose her citizenship, thank God.

But Adnan is not an Arab-Israeli.  He’s a Palestinian (in his own words).  He’s a Palestinian with Israeli residency, caught between a right-wing Israeli government and the absolute insanity that is Palestinian politics.  He lives in a place claimed by two peoples and on some level, isn’t allowed to really fully be a part of either.

I am proud to have made aliyah.  Aliyah in Hebrew means “rising up”.  It is not just immigration.  It is a process by which a Jew returns to the Holy Land to live with his or her people.  It is an adventure and a blessing.  I am grateful to the Israeli people and the Israeli government for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime.

Adnan’s a great guy and also has some problematic and contradictory thinking.  He doesn’t like Zionists and likes Jews (a whole lot of us are Zionists especially here).  He said that Arabs have always treated Jews well historically and that hasn’t always been true.  When he went to get his citizenship back, he ridiculed the Ethiopian-Israeli at the embassy saying she didn’t look like she was from Israel.

The point is not to make Adnan out to be some idealized perfect person or some terrible anti-Semitic monster.  He’s a complicated person with a good heart.  The point of aliyah is to rise up.  I have a right to be here.  Jews have a right to be here and to protect ourselves from harm.  And Arabs – Palestinians – have a right to be here too.

I will use my aliyah to lift myself and my people up.  And I will use it to lift up Palestinians like Adnan who lose their citizenship when moving abroad while I gain mine for moving here.

If my government can support me in building a new life here, surely it can let Adnan keep his dignity.  Those are my Jewish values.