I really didn’t want to write a piece for First of the Month about Arabs and Jews. Every article I’ve read talks about the terrible discrimination – even hatred – and I am burnt out on hatred and stereotypes. I’d asked Hillel Shenker what he felt about the change in relations between Arabs and Jews and he listed the organizations working for cooperation, and how there’s less in some organizations and more in others. I kept mulling over what I knew and then went back and saw that I have no answers, and went out to do some chores. First, I went to see if I had mail at the university and I looked in on the lecture hall where I used to teach. The class was full – but from the back it appeared that they were mostly women, and half of them were wearing hijabs. So much for academic discrimination. Then, having found only dead flies in my mailbox, I decided I would forget about answering my email in my office and go out into the world where I could forget the whole subject.
The 2 places on my list today were the pharmacy and the supermarket. Yes, as I often note, the pharmacists speak Arabic and we are happy to let them take our health in their hands. Last month I met the pharmacist who had told me years ago when I was on my way to Egypt that I could get the prescriptions I needed there. I reminded him and told him that I had followed his advice, but after I bought them, decided not to take them. He laughed with me.
My next stop was the supermarket, where the cashiers were all women, all with hijabs. Do we worry about our food being poisoned on the counter, or examine the itemized receipts to see if there were mistakes? I didn’t notice anyone who did anything more than chat with the cashiers. One girl even suggested a way to cook all the things I had bought together in a simple recipe.
But yes, my Arab friends have stopped inviting me to their homes for holidays and dinner and the projects we had planned for tri-lingual poetry reading at the university seem to have lost their impetus. I continue to believe this is a matter of safety and discomfort rather than a lessening of understanding, since for many of us our day-to-day lives intertwine. I’m looking forward to reading some blessings for my friend’s wedding celebration at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where my son was first married. I’m still hoping to go back to learning Arabic properly when the hostages are returned and I can be more objective about the words I’m learning and not relate them to suffering. And I’m hoping to gather the Arab girls who live in our building together for a picnic in the near future.
This may well be a factor of my naivete, or my twisted interpretation of the facts, because some of the Jews who had been meeting patients at the border to take them to hospitals in Israel were the first to be killed, but I sense that even if my vision is partial, it might be a good idea to let people know that there are good things happening here as well.