Tel Aviv — “Show me your identification,” the soldier, wearing a helmet and camouflage flak jacket, barks at unsuspecting theatergoers trying to reach their seats. Faces go pale. But nervous laughter follows once it becomes clear that the soldier is not really a soldier at all, just an actor in the play they are about to see — a production about the Palestinian-Israeli conflicted called “Plonter,” a Hebrew slang word for a mess. The idea of a checkpoint in the middle of a darkened theater may be absurd, but the absurdity of the conflict is what “Plonter” is all about. The play, which debuted at the respected Cameri Theatre last week, is the creation of its cast, a mix of Israeli Arab and Jewish actors who drew on real life scenes from the conflict, including some from their personal experiences. During the series of scenes and vignettes that make up the production, the nine actors switch back and forth between portraying Israeli and Palestinian characters, speaking in both Hebrew and Arabic. In one scene, Yousef Sweid, an Arab Israeli who grew up in Haifa, plays the role of a senior Israeli officer overseeing the cover-up of an army shooting of a Palestinian boy. In the next scene, he’s a Palestinian militant wearing a black-and-white checkered keffiyeh and firing an automatic rifle in the air, calling for vengeance. In another scene, Irit Kaplan, a Jewish Israeli actress, dons the black clothes and mourning scarf of a Palestinian woman, then returns to the character of a middle-aged Israeli mother fussing over her soldier son who accidentally shot a boy in the West Bank — the same child her Palestinian character is mourning. The interlinking story lines are part of the play’s message that all the players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are human beings; the tears of a Palestinian mother who lost her son from a soldier’s bullet, or a Jewish settler who lost her baby to a terrorist’s bullet, convey similar feelings of grief and loss. “The settler is really the opposite of who I am,” said Mira Awad, who plays the role of a Jewish settler in several scenes but who herself is Arab. She had trouble at first preparing for the part, she said, but then saw the humanity in her character. “A mother losing a child is universal, it’s the same disaster wherever you go,” she said. The cast spent seven months researching, writing and haggling over the script. They traveled to checkpoints, to Arab villages and throughout Israel, passing out questionnaires to citizens on their views of the conflict. At writing sessions and in rehearsals there were arguments and tension, but in the end they came together around the idea of depicting life on both sides of the conflict — the pain, the absurdity, even the humor. Director Yael Ronen said one goal of the production was to get the actors and the audience to see the conflict through the other side’s eyes. “We are not as blind as we were in the beginning of the process,” she said. The play opens with a replica of the concrete section of the West Bank security barrier the Israeli government has built to keep Palestinian attackers out of Israel. The actors, dressed in black, push back the pieces of the wall to reveal the world on both sides of it, and the play begins. The opening scene shows a Jewish couple hosting their first-ever Arab Israeli dinner guests. In the comic scene, the Jewish woman reveals her ignorance by repeatedly asking her guests how difficult it was to make it through the checkpoints to reach her home. They tell her over and over again that they are from Tyre, an Arab town inside Israel, so there were no checkpoints for them to pass. One of the most powerful scenes is drawn from the experiences of Yoav Levy, a Jewish actor who served in a combat unit in the West Bank. In the scene, Levy plays the role of an officer who chases down and beats a Palestinian boy who has thrown stones at him and his fellow soldiers. The officer blindfolds the boy and puts a gun to his head before returning him home to his father. The father takes in the son and then starts beating him for throwing stones. The officer, who just moments before was beating the same boy, asks the father how he can beat his own son. Enraged, the father forbids the officer from telling him what to do in his home, saying that the occupation ends at his doorstep. Levy drew the scene from an incident he was part of as a soldier in Nablus. It was at that moment in the Palestinian home, seeing the father beat the same boy whom Levy also had participated in beating, that he first saw “a red light that said ‘something here is not okay.’ ” Levy said several of his friends from the army came to see the play but disappeared after the curtain call. He found them outside, crying on the stairs. “For me the play is like psychological therapy,” Levy said, a time to see how being on the front lines of the conflict had affected him as a person. The strong images on stage evoked equally strong reactions. “I came here and did not know what I would see. I was crying and laughing and was embarrassed. When it finished I felt stunned,” said Devora Averbuch, a member of the audience speaking to the actors after the show. “I want to thank you for putting on stage what we all speak about in our homes … suddenly it is so real.” Read More...
By: Craig S. Smith
Date: 19/01/2006
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Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas
Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children's television show here on which he'll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip's newest television station, Al Aksa TV. But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam's third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term. "Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood," said Mr. Sharawi, sitting in the broadcast studio where he will produce his show. "I will show them our rights through the history," he said, "show them, 'This is Nablus, this is Gaza, this is Al Aksa mosque, which is with the Israelis and should be in our hands.' " The new station is part of the militant Palestinian group's strategy to broaden its role in Palestinian politics and society, much as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. The station began broadcasting terrestrially on Jan. 7, and Hamas is working on a satellite version that would give it an even wider reach, like Hezbollah's Al Manar TV, which is watched throughout the Arab world. "Their success encouraged us," said Fathi Hammad, Al Aksa TV's director. He said that Hamas had tried to find an existing broadcaster to accept its programming but that no one would take it. "The Arab satellite broadcasters Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya both turned us down," he said, sitting beneath the seal of Hamas, which depicts the Dome of the Rock (which stands alongside Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem) between crossed swords and an idealized map of Palestine. "Even Iraq and Saudi Arabia refused." In 2003, after the Palestinian Authority granted Hamas a broadcast license covering both radio and television, the group started the Voice of Al Aksa, which quickly became one of the most popular radio stations in the Gaza Strip. It took more than two years to assemble the expertise and equipment necessary to start the television station. The current 12 hours of daily television programming, which has the unfinished look of public-access cable television in the United States, consists primarily of readings from the Koran, religious discourse and discussions of women's issues, such as Islamic fashion, child-rearing tips and the right of women to work, which Hamas supports. It will eventually feature a sort of Islamic MTV, with Hamas-produced music videos using footage from the group's fights with Israeli troops. There will even be a talent search show, a distant echo of "American Idol." But its biggest star will be Mr. Sharawi, whose radio show for children was the Voice of Al Aksa's biggest hit. Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn. He said the head of Hamas's radio station spotted him leading children's games at his mosque and asked him to do a children's radio show two years ago. The show has become so popular, his appearances at occasional Hamas-sponsored festivals draw as many as 10,000 children at a time. Mr. Sharawi will not take visitors to see him do his radio broadcast because the studio's location is a heavily guarded secret. In 2004, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three rockets into the station's previous studio not long after Mr. Sharawi and his colleagues had fled. Everybody involved in the television station is worried about another attack, but Mr. Sharawi said he is ready to die if it comes. "The messengers don't care if they lose their lives for the sake of revealing the message," he said. As he describes it, his television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics - the disputed status of Jerusalem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the Palestinian refugees' demand for a right to return to the lands they lost to Israel in the 1948 war - without showing the violence that Hamas's pursuit of those goals entails. The show will alternate between Uncle Hazim and his animal characters in the studio taking live phone calls from children and video clips recorded outside. Mr. Sharawi said he would leaven the sober and pedantic material with fun and games, including such standards as egg-and-spoon races, eating apples on a string or "tug of war, which will show children that the more you cooperate with others, the more you win." Mr. Sharawi said he would dress up in different costumes to suit the show's locale: a sailor suit while taping on the beach, a track suit when in the park, even a Boy Scout uniform while hiking through the small patches of empty land that serve as Gaza's wilderness. "We will invite real Boy Scouts to come and talk to us about camping," Mr. Sharawi said, warming to his theme (the Palestinian Scout Association is a member of the World Organization of the Scout Movement). Through it all, Mr. Sharawi will be accompanied by animal-costumed sidekicks to provide comic relief. Hamas will rent the Egyptian-made plush costumes - a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken, already gray and matted from wear - from a production company run by a Hamas supporter who has just emerged from two years in Israeli jails. When asked if the animals will have names, Mr. Sharawi looked slightly nonplussed and said: "Bob. Bob the Fox, for example." He said he was inspired by a children's program on Saudi television in which a young veiled woman and a Mickey Mouse-like character take calls from kids. Fingering a string of bright green plastic prayer beads, a pale blue prayer rug lying on the chair beside him, he tries to reconcile Hamas's bloody attacks that kill innocent children with his role as mentor. "These are one of the means used by the Palestinians against Israel's F-16's and tanks," he said of the suicide attacks, giving a stock answer. "We're doing our best to avoid involving children in these issues, but I cannot turn the children's lives into a beautiful garden while outside it's the contrary." He gets up to fiddle with a magnesium light stand in the studio, which is furnished with five beige upholstered chairs and a dusty desk in front of a rattan screen decorated with plastic grape leaves. The show, which will be broadcast on Friday mornings, the beginning of the Muslim weekend, will be preceded by an hour of cartoons, including a serialized life of the Prophet Muhammad, and that universal send-up of deadly conflict, Tom & Jerry. By: Al Kamandjâti Association
Date: 16/01/2006
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Music for all in Palestine
Description of the association and objectives Al Kamandjâti is a French non-profit organization (set up under the French 1901 Association Act) created in October 2002 and recognized as a Palestinian organization since September 2004. Al Kamandjâti was founded by Ramzi Aburedwan, originate from Al Amari camp (Ramallah), he is a renowned musician and a former student of the Conservatory of Angers (France). The aim of the Al Kamandjâti Association is to set up music schools for Palestinian children – in particular the most vulnerable: those living in the refugee camps (Al Amari, Al Jalazoun, Qalandiah, Ayda, Balata, Askar, Shu’fat…). Children are the first victims of the occupation. The main purpose of Al Kamandjâti is to create an environment where education and games are children’s principal concerns. Ramzi’s trajectory should not remain an exception. Learning music could be an escape valve to those children, who live under very harsh conditions, and make them believe in a better future. The music schools will offer them the chance to both discover their cultural heritage and open themselves to the outside world. In addition, they will have a chance to explore their creative potential. In the current situation, working with the children is the best investment: the future of the region (and the possibility of peace and justice in Palestine) depends on them. Because today’s children are tomorrow’s adults. The musical activities we hope to provide will allow these children to have a better understanding of others as well as of their culture. Those activities contribute to creating bonds between peoples of different cultures, bonds that are a powerful vector for tolerance and openness to the world. Through cultural exchanges, peoples get to know each other. Undoubtedly, culture can be the foundation to a lasting peace. Music is a universal language. Through it, Palestinians can transmit their culture and promote their identity. Al Kamandjâti is now working at several refugee camps of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon. The Association has developed numerous partnerships with already-established cultural institutions. This project cannot be carried out without them; all the energies should be pooled to be more efficient. In order to be able to carry out its projects, Al Kamandjâti organizes solidarity concerts and fundraising campaigns (to obtain cash donations and subsidies from individuals and organisations) and collects musical instruments. Due to the support of many partners (Foundations A.M. Qattan Foundation, France Libertés, Palestine Avenir, delegation of the European Commission in Jerusalem, Riwaq Centre, Sida, Tamer institute, Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, Khalaf, Ghanem and Aburedwan families…), thanks to its members and donors, thanks to the children and their families, the association is currently handling several projects. “When you grab the hand of a child and introduce him to a musical instrument, you recognize the right of every child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to their age and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts,” says an Al Kamandjâti musician. To View the Full Report as PDF (290 KB)
By: Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen
Date: 12/12/2005
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The Condemned of Nablus
Like most good jokes, this one hides a tragic insight. If only Said and Khaled had caught her act! For these Palestinians, outrage has fed depression and turned it into righteous destructiveness the ultimate in therapy, posing as politics. Israeli occupiers prove daily to residents of the West Bank that they live in the opposite of Paradise; indeed, even a momentous distance from a contiguous and liberated Palestinian state. The beautiful future exists only in the fantasy of the two young male protagonists, and presumably those who have programmed them to take the violent route to Heaven. The "Resistance" leaders weave their religious-infused thread of struggle through the thin surface layers of daily maintenance and sustenance, work, family, food, smokes and play. In the dusty refugee camp in urban Nablus, the "Resistance" also selects best friends, Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Said (Kais Nashef), whose futures look bleak, to the honored role of martyrdom. Having established anger and pessimism in their lives, director Hany Abu-Assad ("Rana's Wedding") then takes the audience through a political and psychological discourse that goes beyond cinematic drama and gives "Paradise Now" an educative function for moviegoers of the world. Indeed, 90 minutes of pictures and sounds from a well-acted, character-driven film, prove more insightful than the millions of words analysts have exhausted on the volatile Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The protagonists live inside limits imposed by Israeli policies, the evolution of their lives caged by the history of occupation, that grinding process that erodes optimism and molds rancor into their psyches. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's annual report stated that the Palestinian economy "shrank 1% in 2004, one in three Palestinian workers was jobless at the end of last year and 61% of households had income below the poverty line of $350 per month" (Al Jazeera, August 25, 2005). Concurrently, "Between September 2000 and through September 2004, more than 24,000 Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have been made homeless by Israeli house demolitions," according to the 2004 Arab Human Development Report. Since 2000, over "12,000 homes have been either demolished or damaged in the West Bank" (pg. 31). Norman Finkelstein quotes an Israeli bulldozer operator, who told the Yediot Ahronot newspaper (May 31, 2002) after the IDF's 2002 incursion into the Jenin refugee camp: "I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the officersto let me knock it all down: from top to bottomFor three days, I just destroyed and destroyedI found joy with every house that came downIf I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down" (pg. 52, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, University of California Press, 2005) The Nablus refugee camp inhabitants understand the bulldozer operator. He could be the Israeli soldier staring death daggers at Palestinians at checkpoints, the fanatic settler randomly shooting a Palestinian. It makes Palestinians bitter, incensed or weak. Said's father grew weak and the "Resistance" executed him as a collaborator, a traumatic blow for a young child. He doesn't blame his father, he says. Instead, Said understands how living in Nablus, a human "prison," had eroded his father's strength. The media doesn't show Palestinians' living conditions, so the opening scenes of "Paradise Now" may shock US audiences. Israeli soldiers at check points aim guns at each Palestinian entering or leaving his territory. They treat them with disdain, suspicion and hatred. The film relies on that opening scene to evoke "oppression," since we don't see further images of the daily harassment and human rights violations imposed by the occupiers. Indeed, the director assumes that filmgoers already know about the humiliating body searches, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes as collective punishment, the Israeli soldiers shooting kids throwing rocks. He assumes the public will appreciate the symbolic and real meaning of the Israeli wall (452 miles long when completed) that cuts into Palestinian land. Indeed, in a July 9, 2004 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice called it "contrary to international law." Nonetheless, daily humiliation administered by Israeli occupiers does not explain suicide bombing. Palestinian fury does not have to mean martyrdom. Indeed, "Paradise Now" vibrates with the possibility of an alternative, one that negates suicide as viable politics. It suggests that this tactic poses as a crucial element in the political struggle, but really has no role in a larger strategy. Suha (Lubna Azabal), the film's third main character, a European-educated middle class daughter of a martyr, feels the passion in Said, the soulfulness in his sad eyes. But she cannot reason politically with a man whose psychic despair drives him to avenge his father's death, punish the Israelis and cleanse the family name and thus his own soul as well. Later in the film, however, she does persuade Khaled that suicide will not only deprive the resistance of a valuable actor, but that its violence against an enemy with far superior armament represents the ultimate in futility. In truth, suicide bombing-in the name of struggle-helps unify a potentially divided enemy. Suha also snaps Khaled out of his religious fervor, his parrot like repetition of the hereafter dogma fed to him by Jamal (Amer Hlehel), a member of an unnamed Palestinian group who guides the friends on their deadly mission. Two angels will transport them to Heaven and the "Resistance" will protect and look after their families, Jamal assures them. Yet, he doesn't explain how the fatal deed will help Said's mother recover from the loss of her son. We watch the elaborate purification ritual of the would be martyrs, culminating in their physical transformation from shaggy, rugged auto mechanics to clean cut human bombs sporting identical "belts" underneath their new black suits. Khaled, initially more spirited about their endeavor, experiences the first glimmers of cold reality when the video camera recording his impassioned pre-mortem statement malfunctions. Like an actor, he must do another take, in front of the crew more interested in devouring their pita sandwiches and ready to call it a wrap, than in the profundity of his final remarks. The video, we learn, will find its way to the shelves of a small West Bank version of Blockbuster Video. In that video shop that sells collaborators' taped confessions along with the last speeches of martyrs, the store owner claims people would pay more for the collaborators' tapes, a statement that underlines the callous foundations of Palestinian life produced both by the occupation and the hitherto frustrating results of resistance. The occupiers themselves, who we have seen only at checkpoints, take on greater dimension as the two erstwhile exploders take their last ride. For the first time they, alongside the film's audience, can compare Tel Aviv's prosperity and glistening sky-rise buildings overlooking the sparkling blue sea coast, to the reality of Nablus, the latter filmed in mostly grayish hues to evoke the stifling feel of the decaying city. The bomb-loaded young men, the only objects in distinctly black and white, stand as symbols of the oppressed in their death uniforms. Abu-Assad's astute direction doesn't allow the audience to assume that facile one-dimensional storyline by preaching good versus evil, right versus wrong. Rather, his account about suicide bombers dramatizes the complexity of human response to contemporary oppression. Instead of mounting spectacularly choreographed Hollywood fireworks, "Paradise Now" relies on subtle, ironic moments to explore an explosive subject. After the first aborted suicide mission, Said screams in pain when his handlers remove the adhesive tape that secured the bombing device to his body. Such a believable reaction from a man who moments before had committed himself to incineration raises questions about both characters and presents the immediate reality of human anatomy: it hurts to have the tape ripped off. It also raises the issue of whether Said really has the will to continue the mission. By the middle of the film, Suha's luminous presence, her growing affection and compassion for Said, should provide-at least ideally-a counter lure for his mission of death. Could she represent the means by which Said can transcend his desire to avenge his father's death and offer him a loving way out of his misery? In their last screen time together, the camera captures a sensitively acted exchange of longing looks and one light but very tender kiss: a statement of love or a sad goodbye? If nothing else, before potential suicide bombers commit to martyrdom, they should confront Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's lines: "We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the aroma of bread at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fear of memories We have on this earththe Lady of Earth, mother of all beginnings and ends She was called Palestine. Her name later became Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life." ("On This Earth," Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, University of California Press, 2003, pg. 6) Saul Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Farrah Hassen is a 2005 Seymour Melman Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. She can be reached at fhuisclos1944@aol.com. By the Same Author
Date: 03/09/2009
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From Arab to Palestinian Israeli: One Family's Changing Identity
It’s been almost three years since Shams Kalboni renamed herself. She grew up with the modern Hebrew name Revital, which means “quenched thirst.” It was given to her by her Arab parents in the hope it would pave her way to an easier life in Israeli society. And as Shams walks past blossoming purple bougainvillea plants, up the stairs and onto the veranda of her grandmother’s house in Jaffa, calls of “Revital” and “Revi” still greet her as she is embraced by aunts and cousins. But to the outside world she is Shams, Arabic for “sun.” Her new name is her way of announcing to the world, and particularly Jewish Israelis, that she is not one of them. Instead she is, as she says, a “Palestinian Israeli.” “When we define ourselves and say we are Palestinian Israelis they [Jewish Israelis] get freaked out,” says the 35-year-old Shams, pushing back her long reddish brown curls as she nestles into one of the white plastic chairs. “Arab Israeli is a definition I refuse to accept because an Arab can be Egyptian or Iraqi, also; it’s not part of a nation. The nation I am part of is Palestine,” says Shams. She is a member of a young generation, fluent in Hebrew, steeped in Israeli culture and bold about demanding its fair place in a country many feel has relegated them to a status of second-class citizens. Olive skinned with a pair of expressive large dark eyes, she wears snugly fitting dark shorts and a turquoise T-shirt, the same color as her long, dangling earrings. In her neighborhood in Tel Aviv, where she lives in a one-bedroom apartment just a block from the beach, her dress is not considered modern or provocative. In more conservative Arab Jaffa, it sometimes is. With a name like Revital, the looks of a young sabra and accent-less Hebrew, everyone always assumed she was Jewish. So one encounter with discrimination came as a shock. In 2006, she found a nice flat on a shady, central Tel Aviv street in a building owned by a progressive lawyer. When Shams faxed a copy of the lease to the landlady, she was asked if she had any additional income. Shams, still going by Revital, proudly replied that she had started working at an Arab-Jewish dialogue group. “I am the Arab facilitator,” she added. The phone line went silent. When the lawyer spoke again she told Shams she could not rent the apartment to her because other residents would complain that she had rented to an Arab. The words, she used were, “They will be upset that you are from another culture.” Shams recalls bursting into tears. “It felt like a knife,” says Shams, who has many Jewish friends and frequents the bars in Tel Aviv. “I felt so rejected. It made me feel like I did not belong here. Until that point, I felt very much Israeli. I had not yet started defining myself as Palestinian as well. But after this, I did not feel I was ‘Revital’ any more.” Shams is quick to add that she sees no contradiction between her Israeli citizenship and the assertion of her Palestinian peoplehood. “I want to make the future. I want to fight for it. I am not waiting for it. If you want your rights you have to demand them,” she says, her slightly raspy voice rising. And she sees American Jews as a model: “They want to be American and have a Jewish identity, which is also a national identity related to Israel. Well, that is also what I want. I want to remain Israeli and have the same equal opportunities but stay here while identifying with a Palestinian state.” She reflects a new dynamic among young members of Israel’s 1.3 million Arab minority in which there is a simultaneous process of two seemingly opposite trends, what are referred to as “Israelization” and “Palestinization.” Members of Shams’ generation are well-versed in the ways of Israeli society and more deeply integrated than most of their parents and grandparents. “We studied in Israeli universities and, despite discrimination, proved ourselves, and we’re more confident. We’ve been released from the fear of previous generations,” says Ali Khaider, co-executive director of Sikkuy—“chance” or “opportunity” in Hebrew—a nongovernmental organization that promotes equality between Arab and Jewish citizens on issues such as government budgets, hiring policy and land usage. “It is very clear this generation has high expectations of the state and takes its citizenship seriously,” he says. Especially since the outbreak of the second intifada, young Arabs in Israel have become more outspoken about their feelings of kinship with their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza, and increasingly alienated from a state that defines itself as Jewish—a definition they claim is incompatible with a democracy responsible for delivering equal treatment for all of its citizens. Shams’ views of herself and her relationship with the state of Israel are relatively new for the country’s Arab citizens. She is at once more Israeli and more Palestinian than her mother, Mariam Edris, 53, and her grandmother, Zeinab Edris, 85. The three generations of women in the family symbolize the changes in identity of Israel’s Arab citizens. Zeinab Edris lives on the first floor of what was once the home of a wealthy Jaffa family. It still has a grand air, with high ceilings, geometrically patterned tile floors and a wrought-iron gate with “1933,” the year it was built, intertwined in its design. She is sitting in one of the house’s sun-drenched bedrooms, light pouring through narrow high windows, her traditional galabia gathered around her and hair tucked neatly under a white headscarf. A Muslim, she is devoutly religious, unlike most of her children, rising at dawn every morning to pray. Widowed 20 years ago, she now basks in her role as the family matriarch overseeing a close brood of 10 children, 37 grandchildren and over 80 great-grandchildren, several of whose photos are tucked into a small glass display case. Zeinab was born in a farming village called Bassa in the western Galilee. Bassa is one of some 400 Palestinian towns and villages that disappeared after the Israeli War of Independence; its fields and orchards were destroyed, eventually becoming part of the village of Shlomi, established in 1963 for new Jewish immigrants and now home to about 4,000 people. “We had land, groves of olive trees,” recalls Zeinab, puffing on one of a chain of cigarettes, her voice trailing off. “The deed is still in the city of Acco.” Her most vivid memory, though, is of 1948, soon after David Ben-Gurion declared independence and fighting between Arab and Jewish militias turned the bustling port city of Haifa, where she had been living since the age of 10, into a battleground. At the time, she was a young mother of three small children, including a newborn. The Haganah defeat of Arab forces was quick. There were bursts of gunshot and mortar-fire, firebombs thrown into homes, and a haze of black smoke hanging in the streets. “Jewish fighters came at night and shot into houses, and 36 people in our neighborhood were killed, but we escaped. My daughter was one week old and I grabbed her. My husband took our six-year-old Fawzi, and our three-year-old son Ibrahim was already hiding with my mother’s family,” says Zeinab. Throwing her hands in the air, she says, in a voice that still recalls the mayhem six decades later, “It was a war. I was escaping. I was afraid, terrified actually.” She found refuge in a neighbor’s home farther away from the fighting. A few days later she and her husband returned to their house and loaded their belongings onto a truck her father-in-law had rented. “We took mattresses, blankets, only basic things. We thought we were going to come back. We thought we would only be away for about two weeks,” she says. “But we did not go back.” The family made its way east to Umm-el-Fahm, a town then untouched by the war, where Zeinab had relatives. At first they lived in a tent but soon rented a house and ended up staying for six years. On the eve of the 1948 war, Arabs made up about 67 percent of the population in the area that would become the state. By the time the fighting was over, 780,000 had either fled or been driven out of their homes by Jewish militias. Approximately 150,000 remained in the country, among them Zeinab and her family, who, like many others, had become internally displaced. The Edris family settled in Jaffa in 1955. Before the war Jaffa had been a cosmopolitan hub of Palestinian urban intellectual life alongside Haifa and Jerusalem, but now only 3,000 out of 100,000 remained. The family was part of a war-weary and disoriented Palestinian population that tried to make sense of its situation in a newly born state in which it was suddenly a minority. The bulk of its upper and middle classes, including its leaders and intellectuals, had fled, leaving behind a largely poor and agrarian population that needed time to regroup. Although Arabs were guaranteed equal rights under Israel’s Declaration of Independence, their lives were separate and far from equal. Based on 1945 emergency regulations set by the British, military restrictions were put in place largely to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes and land, says Shira Robinson, a professor of Middle Eastern history at George Washington University. Until military rule was repealed in 1966, Arab citizens were subject to curfews and needed difficult-to-obtain passes to travel between cities, including for work. Political organizing was restricted and newspapers censored. It was also a period of large-scale land confiscation. The majority who had made their living as farmers now had to take low-paying service jobs. “The late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of tremendous uncertainty for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike,” writes Robinson in her study of Israel’s military rule in the Negev Desert, the Galilee and the “Triangle” area in central Israel on the border with the West Bank. “The establishment of the state had been announced, but what that state would look like, how it would function, and the meanings people would make of it, and in it, were still open questions.” Jaffa was only briefly under military rule, but Zeinab, like most other Arabs, had little time for politics. She was focused on making a living and creating a stable environment for her growing family. “We have had a good life,” she says. “The economy did well, there was peace at first, people started to work but then the wars began,” she said, referring to the Six-Day War in 1967. “The Jews wanted to expand, and war destroys everything.” Still, Zeinab bears no grudge, saying she feels blessed with her 10 children and the fact that Israel’s monthly social security payments ensure that she is provided for. She remembers the Jewish militias telling Haifa’s Arabs that if they did not rise up and fight, the war would pass peacefully for them. “We were not angry about the Jews. My grandfather used to say this state will be like America. We will benefit from it. He thought it sounded as if it would become a good, modern place,” she says. “Overall I believe my grandfather was right.” The smell of strong, cardamom-roasted coffee wafts through Zeinab’s living room. With its stuffed maroon velveteen couches and walls hung with Koranic verses, the room is a favorite gathering place for her children and grandchildren. I join Shams on the veranda, where she tells me more about her life. She grew up in Jaffa, amid its run-down streets, gangs of drug dealers and overcrowded schools, and felt privileged to attend a private Christian school run by French nuns. Most of the students, like her, were Muslim, but there were also Christians and even a few Jews. An avid reader, nicknamed “the professor,” Shams excelled in school and wanted to go on to higher education. But she came from a family where almost no one had been to university before and felt compelled to support her family financially, so she took a job at a local jewelry factory. In her five years there she earned a nice living and advanced to the position of manager. But she felt something was missing and applied to study at Tel Aviv University for a degree in Middle Eastern studies and Islam. She started classes in 1999, a year before the second intifada erupted. “There was still hope after Oslo,” she says, referring to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. “We were in a state of euphoria. I thought I would study to become a bridge between Palestinians and Israelis.” As the only Arab citizen in the department, she attracted a lot of attention. “There was not a moment that I ever sat alone in the cafeteria. I was a curiosity. I helped others with their Arabic translation assignments and because I had started to become politically active on campus, I could give them a different perspective from what we were reading in our books.” It was in university that she took the first steps of her journey. “Everything was new to me,” she says. She joined the small Arab student association on campus. It also became increasingly clear that her degree would not lead where she had hoped. She realized that most people who graduate in Middle Eastern studies join either the Mossad or the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. She was contacted four times by Israel’s defense ministry, which hoped to hire her. For the newly politicized Shams, working covertly for the state would be akin to being recruited as a “collaborator.” The term, laced with connotations of betrayal of one’s own people, is perhaps the darkest in the Palestinian lexicon. “Being approached like this only caused me to feel separated from what until then was a very Israeli identity,” she says. “I felt like I was being told that the only way you can work in your field and be a welcome citizen is to collaborate. I had felt so proud of myself with my degree and was anxious to see what my worth would be in the market. Then the bubble burst in my face and I did not know what to do,” says Shams. Deflated, she decided to return to the world of jewelry. The worst job interview experience of her life began well enough, with smiles and handshakes: She impressed the managers of a firm in Tel Aviv’s diamond district, known as the “Bursa.” But when one of her interviewers ran into her at a beauty salon and learned that Shams was not a Jew but an Arab, the woman’s face instantly dropped. “She looked shocked,” says Shams. She returned for a previously scheduled second interview only to be informed the job was not a suitable fit. When she inquired as to whether she had been turned down because she was an Arab, she was curtly told that the results of her handwriting analysis—an arcane practice that has survived in Israel as a common tool of potential employers to screen job candidates—had come back. “‘The analysis said that you are sensitive and if there was a suicide bombing or attack, people might talk about Arabs in a harsh way and you could get hurt,”’ the woman executive, a Russian-speaking immigrant, told her. “I was devastated,” Shams says. She gave up on the jewelry business and drifted through several waitressing jobs at Tel Aviv restaurants and bars, ultimately landing a position as an assistant at a left-wing law firm where the partners were aware that she was Arab and welcomed her. Difficulty finding a job that matched her qualifications was not unique to Shams: According to 2008 Central Bureau of Statistics figures, 12.5 percent of Arab college graduates are unemployed, compared to 3.5 percent of Jewish graduates. As the Jewish world turned its back on Shams, she began to look in a new direction. “I started pulling away from my Jewish circle of friends,” she recalls. “I wanted distance. I wanted to get to know Palestinian friends and with them, I found out I was not alone in undergoing an identity crisis.” She began to hang out in Jaffa, where she met Palestinian students from all over Israel. “I felt empowered,” she says. “But after a while I felt less connected to them as well.” Unlike Shams’ apolitical tight-knit working-class family, these young Palestinian men and women came from highly politicized families from the Arab Galilee, many of them long-time activists in the Hadash—the Communist party—or Arab parties. And their Arabic was more literate. Having grown up in Jaffa, so close to Tel Aviv, hers is jumbled with Hebrew phrases and words, and her written Hebrew is better than her written Arabic. “I could connect to them but I did not feel a sense of 100 percent belonging,” she says. As she grew more politically aware, she started feeling isolated from her family. Finally, she found a job at a nonprofit organization called Windows that promotes interaction between Jewish and Arab youth. Shams, the administrative director, works with director Rutie Atsmon, a Jewish woman, and helps oversee the magazine her young charges produce in both Hebrew and Arabic. The 12- to 16-year-olds tackle thorny issues that they must write about together, such as the shared anniversary of Independence Day and the Nakba [“catastrophe” in Arabic] and the recent war in Gaza. With time, and through her work at Windows, she has gained a clearer sense of who she is: “I am a mixture of everything and that’s okay. It’s a result of how history evolved—I have a new identity and that’s okay,” she says. Shams has inherited her mother’s deep olive skin and ropey curls and the glints of hazel in her brown eyes, but not her even temperament. Mariam Edris moves languidly from room to room. A smoker like most of the family, her low voice has a raspy huskiness. Born and raised in Jaffa, Mariam grew up largely unaware of military rule and its restrictions, although her father, Khaled, must have worked hard to convince the authorities to grant him permits to move from Umm-el-Fahm to Jaffa. She remembers an idyllic childhood growing up in the streets of Jaffa, where Arab children—both Muslim and Christian—mixed seamlessly with Jewish children whose parents were recent immigrants from countries like Bulgaria, Syria and Morocco. “There was no discrimination. There was naïveté. There was fun. We played together—jump rope, hopscotch,” she tells me, smiling at the memories as she dishes out generous portions of her mother’s maklube chicken (a traditional Palestinian dish that includes rice and pine-nuts) from an industrial-sized metal cooking pot. Mariam’s teachers were almost entirely Jewish immigrants from Iraq who could teach in Arabic, since most native Arab teachers had left in 1948. “What helped me be so open to the world is that I grew up in such a mixed setting,” she says. As for the trauma of war her parents had experienced less than a decade before her birth, she says they didn’t speak about it much. “They did not say it, but we knew where we had come from and why we were now here,” she says. “But who really suffered? Not us, but the refugees who left the country and were left without money, without homes. I would sometimes think that it could have been me who ended up in Lebanon.” Having grown up in a traditional home, she was taken out of school when she reached puberty at age 12. “My parents were scared someone would look at me the wrong way and do something bad,” she says. Mariam was relieved when her father refused a marriage offer for her when she was 13, the age her mother married. But at 18, when the handsome and fun-loving Ahmed Kalboni, a local restaurant owner, asked for her hand, she was ready to marry, seeing it as her ticket into the world. After 14 years of marriage and four children, they divorced, a fairly uncommon occurrence in Arab homes, even more modern ones like theirs. Since then she’s been employed as a nanny for Jewish families and is especially close to the couple for whom she has worked more than 11 years, helping raise their twins. She jokes that her left-wing employers are more political than she is. “It’s not that I don’t see what goes on here, and sometimes it does outrage me, but I don’t want to leave the country,” she says. “I don’t want to feel foreign somewhere else. My life is good here. But yes, I see the discrimination. I see it in education, that my neighbors don’t always have a place to live, that in the workplace there are places that prefer Jewish Israelis. But when I come for a job interview I always identify myself as an Arab. I’m proud of it, it is who I am.” Mariam has seen discrimination firsthand—lengthy questioning at the airport and suitcases searched and returned days later, nasty glances for speaking Arabic, stinging anti-Arab comments during times of unrest and war. During a recent visit to a mall with her niece, a security guard asked to see their identity cards before letting them enter. Her niece, she says, “put up a fuss.” “But it’s all about how you handle things,” she says. “I don’t feel downtrodden.” Mariam is proud of Shams, her only child with a university degree, although she wishes she had not chosen to work for a non-profit, and especially for a Palestinian-Israeli co-existence organization. She thinks “they,” meaning the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, will not thank her for her efforts. Mariam is also concerned about the Israeli government. “The security services here know everything and now she has all these connections with people from the West Bank,” she says. She finds it difficult to understand why her eldest child has felt it necessary to take these risks. “I tell her not to get herself into complicated situations,” Mariam says. “She had a good life and has now gone and made it difficult.” Mariam was too young and sheltered to be deeply influenced by Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War, a pivotal moment in the Arab-Jewish relationship. After the war, the Arabs in Israel became more politically aware. The government hired them at high salaries to build up the new territories, spurring the growth of the Arab middle class. “Suddenly the Palestinians started having money in their pockets in what was an ironic but important stage in their development,” says Mahmoud Yazbak, a professor of Middle East history at Haifa University and chairman of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, a prominent Arab nongovernmental organization. They used this money first and foremost for education. By the early 1970s, Yazbak says, the number of Arab citizens going to university soared from no more than 50 new students a year to the thousands. The newly educated bolstered the ranks of Palestinian intellectuals and ushered in an era of activism. At the same time, Israel’s control of the territories put its Arab citizens into direct contact with their brethren from the West Bank and Gaza for the first time in almost 20 years. It would take nearly a decade, however, for what is considered their political coming of age. On March 30, 1976, a general strike was called to protest government plans to confiscate hundreds of acres of Arab-owned land, and some Jewish land, to make room for Jewish towns and villages, part of a policy to “Judaize” the predominantly Arab Galilee. Six Israeli Arabs were killed by police fire and hundreds were arrested during the unrest that followed. Marches each March 30—now known as Land Day—commemorate the turning point of what is called the “Stand Tall Generation.” “It was the first alarm bell marking a new era for the Israeli establishment and society,” says historian Elie Rekhess, the head of Tel Aviv University’s Adenauer Program on Jewish-Arab Cooperation and the Crown Visiting Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University. “It was a sign of national awakening and of the changes that would mark the transition from the 1950s-1960s to the 1970s-1980s.” Headline-grabbing protests were not the only ways in which this new political consciousness was manifested. Civic organizations all over Israel have formed over the last 30 years to raise concerns from economic equality to Palestinian statehood. Nabila Espanioli, 54, is founder of one such group, Women in Black, a feminist peace group and director of the Al-Tufulah Center for Childhood and Women’s Empowerment. “We have learned,” she says. “We are more sophisticated. We know now if you want to really change democratic systems, you have to use all the means available to you.” While her mother and grandmother prefer to keep their views to themselves, Shams is part of this evolving political shift. In addition to her job, she established a committee two years ago to prevent further house demolitions in Jaffa. She created it as a local voice of protest against gentrification efforts that are displacing some Arab families in the city. We walk to a nearby plot of land that has been sold to a group of religious Jews who want to build an apartment building. Shams fears they want to “settle” Jaffa as their peers have settled the West Bank and other mixed cities within Israel like Lod, Ramle and Acco. Their ideological motives are unclear, but Shams believes their goal is to displace local Arabs, and she is defiant: “The first stone that is put here will be removed.” There’s yet another project that she is pursuing with zeal. Shams is researching the vanished village of Bassa, where her grandmother was born, gathering information to piece together what it looked like and who lived there. She is arranging a trip to bring her grandmother and her large extended clan—dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins—to the Jewish town, Shlomi. While there, she plans to shoot a video of her grandmother in front of the rest of the family and interview her about her childhood. “I feel like our family’s children know nothing about our history,” Shams says. Zeinab would like to make the trip; she is curious to see if anything of her childhood remains. But she’d prefer that her granddaughter spend her time finding a lucrative job more worthy of her university degree. Shams brushes off her suggestion. It hasn’t been easy, but she finally feels secure in who she is and that she has found her calling. Like the majority of Arab citizens in Israel, the woman once known as Revital would choose to remain in the country of her birth if a Palestinian state were ever established. Israel is where her roots are, where her life is. Meanwhile she’s going to fight for her democratic rights. If she ever meets Benjamin Netanyahu, she knows just what she will say to her prime minister: “I’ll ask him to commit himself to protect our equality and rights as citizens. All this is good for Israel.”
Date: 19/05/2009
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On Fiery Birth of Israel, Memories of 2 Sides Speak
In a high-rise apartment with a Mediterranean Sea view, the cameraman checks his frame and the interviewer makes sure the slight, silver-haired man is relaxed enough to tell his story. Then Peleg Tamir, 81, starts recounting his days as a teenage recruit for an underground militia fighting for the Jewish state. Arrested by the ruling British authorities in 1947, he smuggled himself out of a detention center in a suitcase. “Everyone was shocked when I climbed out,” he said. Tufaha Natur, 74, lived a very different part of this story. The women from her small Arab village in the Galilee fled when Jewish militias arrived. “A woman who carried her two or three children also carried clothing and food; how could she organize herself?” she said. “There was a woman who forgot her son in the bed, leaving him and taking a pillow instead.” As Israel celebrated its Independence Day last month — an event that Palestinians call the nakba, the catastrophe — the videotaped accounts of Mrs. Natur and Mr. Tamir are part of efforts to preserve the narratives of both sides of the war that led to Israel’s tumultuous birth in 1948. While historians debate the reliability of first-person accounts given decades after the event, advocates argue that they give voice to ordinary people’s experiences of historic times. In November 1947, the United Nations approved partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Infuriated, neighboring Arab states invaded, supported by local militias. Zionist forces fought back. Some Palestinians fled, hoping to return once the fighting ended; others were evacuated or saw their villages destroyed by the Israeli forces. The different sides tell vastly different stories, and the act of preserving them is itself a political statement in a land locked in arguments over narrative. No battle over the regional historic record is perhaps more contested than the one over the story of Israel’s establishment. The unresolved questions of that history will continue Monday, as President Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington. Their expected discussion of Palestinian statehood is directly rooted in the events of 1947-48. On the Jewish Israeli side, an ambitious new project called Toldot Yisrael is trying to reconnect with the Zionist story, which many Israelis feel is overshadowed by the narrative of Palestinian displacement. Modeled on Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which interviewed about 52,000 Holocaust survivors, the project is collecting firsthand accounts of the arrival of the Zionists and their struggle to create a Jewish state. One account was that of Harold Katz, a Harvard Law student and World War II Navy veteran, now 85, who volunteered to help illegally smuggle Holocaust survivors by ship to pre-state Palestine. “We couldn’t just sit in law school while history was being made,” he said. “We had to do something.” In testimonies collected on the Arab side, witnesses tell of smoldering remains of villages destroyed in the fighting, and confusion as families fled and became separated. In an interview with Zochrot, an Israeli organization that promotes awareness of the Palestinian perspective on 1948, Dia Faour, 93, tells how men and women in her village, Sabalan, near the Lebanese border, were divided by Jewish militiamen and told they had an hour to leave the village or be shot. “I started running in fear,” she said. “My children and I went in one direction, my husband in a different direction. I fled to Lebanon and nighttime fell. It was very cold outside and the children were hungry.” It took her two attempts, dodging military checkpoints with four young children in tow, but eventually she returned and found her husband. The historian Michael Oren, who was recently appointed the Israeli ambassador to the United States, said videotaped testimony collected by these groups and others would inevitably become part of not only the historical record, but also the political debate. “I have no doubt it will become a weapon on both sides,” he said. “Maybe those documenting don’t have political agendas, but they will be asking different types of questions.” The Jewish interviews focus “on the struggle for statehood, heroism and sacrifice,” he said, whereas the Palestinian ones are “about pain and uprootedness.” For Diana Allan, founder and director of the Nakba Archive, which has recorded interviews with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the testimonies are inherently political. The question of who is responsible for Palestinian refugees bears directly on the contentious issue of whether they should be allowed to return to within Israel’s borders. “Our aim has been to but record this critical period of Palestinian history through the voices and personal experiences of those who lived through it in a way that moves beyond the statistical, mythical and anecdotal,” she said. Eric Halivni, 37, who founded Toldot Yisrael last year, said he was motivated by intense curiosity about the period. “I don’t see this as a political issue but as our history and heritage, so let’s preserve it,” he said. For the Palestinians, much of whose documentation and libraries were destroyed or confiscated during the fighting between 1947 and 1949, personal testimonies have special value, said Sharif Kanaana, an anthropologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, a pioneer in recording Palestinian testimonies. “There are some who would say the value of oral history is to establish the facts of what happened in 1948 and the conflict,” he said. “To me, the value is in people, the Palestinian people, refugees in particular, knowing their background, their past and the communities they lived in.” Today, the larger-scale Palestinian oral history video projects are being conducted inside Israel, collected by Arabs who are descendants of those who lived through the events, as well as among refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. Sometimes, stories intersect, showing the human paradox at the heart of any complex story. “An old man sat with his back to the village — he could not bear to watch it burn,” said Yisrael Cohen, a Jewish militia officer, recalling the conquest of an Arab village. “From a burning courtyard a young boy came running to me laughing; he wanted to play. He came up and I took him into my arms and he hugged me. What will I do with him, I thought. It was such a contradiction to what was going on around us.”
Date: 07/03/2009
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British Embassy in Israel Cancels Move Over Jewish Settlement Concerns
Embassy officials had intended to move to Kirya Tower in Tel Aviv, partly owned by real-estate company Africa-Israel Investments Ltd but has reversed its decision while it seeks clarifications from the company. A subsidiary of Africa-Israel, Danya Cebus, has built homes in at least one West Bank settlement, Maale Adumim, but it is not clear what the scope of the company's activities are. Africa-Israel, which is owned by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, said in response that the British embassy's perception of Danya-Cebus' operations in the West Bank is "fundamentally wrong," but refused to provide any additional details. It said pro-Palestinian organisations in Britain have long been trying to promote a "biased, one-sided political agenda" against Israeli business corporations, business people, academics and researchers. "No leases were signed, and part of the reason was we looked into the issue of Africa-Israel and settlements and settlement holdings and we asked for clarification on those issues," a spokesman for the British Embassy said. The embassy's decision reflected growing UK and US pressure on Israel to abide by its international pledges to freeze settlement building in the West Bank and dismantle unauthorised outposts. Mrs Clinton, the US Secretary of State, criticised Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem yesterday, saying it was of "deep concern". "Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road map'," she said, referring to peace efforts between the sides. Mrs Clinton, on her first foray into Middle Eastern diplomacy since taking her new post, spoke in the West Bank town of Ramallah following a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. She added that she would be raising the issue of the planned demolitions of some 80 homes Palestinian neighbourhood in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem with the Israeli government. Before the houses were even built about fifteen years ago Israel had plans to turn the land, just beyond the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, into an archeological garden for tourists. Recently the Jerusalem Municipality decided to follow through on those plans. Jerusalem municipal officials say the homes were built illegally without permits but Palestinians counter that in general it is extremely difficult to receive permits to build in the city and so families have no choice but to build without them. The future of Jerusalem is one of the key disputes between the sides. The Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as their future capital but Israeli leaders have said the city must remain united as its capital. Mrs Clinton reiterated the message she sounded in talks with Israeli leaders on Tuesday that a Palestinian state should be established as a way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The US is committed to a two-state solution," she said during a stop at a Ramallah school. "We will work immediately to help solve these problems and I'm very committed to that." The Palestinian leadership also wants the US to put pressure on Israel to open border crossings into the Gaza Strip which have been only sporadically opened since Hamas militants seized control of the territory over a year ago. It is also seeking commitments, Palestinian officials said, that Israel halt all construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Date: 01/11/2008
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Israelis and Palestinians Launch Web Start-Up
Nibbling doughnuts and wrestling with computer code, the workers at G.ho.st, an Internet start-up here, are holding their weekly staff meeting — with colleagues on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. They trade ideas through a video hookup that connects the West Bank office with one in Israel in the first joint technology venture of its kind between Israelis and Palestinians. “Start with the optimistic parts, Mustafa,” Gilad Parann-Nissany, an Israeli who is vice president for research and development, jokes with a Palestinian colleague who is giving a progress report. Both conference rooms break into laughter. The goal of G.ho.st is not as lofty as peace, although its founders and employees do hope to encourage it. Instead G.ho.st wants to give users a free, Web-based virtual computer that lets them access their desktop and files from any computer with an Internet connection. G.ho.st, pronounced “ghost,” is short for Global Hosted Operating System. “Ghosts go through walls,” said Zvi Schreiber, the company’s British-born Israeli chief executive, by way of explanation. A test version of the service is available now, and an official introduction is scheduled for Halloween. The Palestinian office in Ramallah, with about 35 software developers, is responsible for most of the research and programming. A smaller Israeli team works about 13 miles away in the central Israeli town of Modiin. The stretch of road separating the offices is broken up by checkpoints, watch towers and a barrier made of chain-link fence and, in some areas, soaring concrete walls, built by Israel with the stated goal of preventing the entry of Palestinian suicide bombers. Palestinian employees need permits from the Israeli army to enter Israel and attend meetings in Modiin, and Israelis are forbidden by their own government from entering Palestinian cities. When permits cannot be arranged but meetings in person are necessary, colleagues gather at a rundown coffee shop on a desert road frequented by camels and Bedouin shepherds near Jericho, an area legally open to both sides. Dr. Schreiber, an entrepreneur who has already built and sold two other start-ups, said he wanted to create G.ho.st after seeing the power of software running on the Web. He said he thought it was time to merge his technological and commercial ambitions with his social ones and create a business with Palestinians. “I felt the ultimate goal was to offer every human being a computing environment which is free, and which is not tied to any physical hardware but exists on the Web,” he said. The idea, he said, was to create a home for all of a user’s online files and storage in the form of a virtual PC. Instead of creating its own Web-based software, the company taps into existing services like Google Docs, Zoho and Flickr and integrates them into a single online computing system. G.ho.st also has a philanthropic component: a foundation that aims to establish community computer centers in Ramallah and in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel. The foundation is headed by Noa Rothman, the granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister slain in 1995. “It’s the first time I met Palestinians of my generation face to face,” said Ms. Rothman, 31, of her work with G.ho.st. She said she was moved by how easily everyone got along. “It shows how on the people-to-people level you can really get things done.” Investors have put $2.5 million into the company so far, a modest amount. Employing Palestinians means the money goes farther; salaries for Palestinian programmers are about a third of what they are in Israel. But Dr. Schreiber, who initially teamed up with Tareq Maayah, a Palestinian businessman, to start the Ramallah office, insists this is not just another example of outsourcing. “We are one team, employed by the same company, and everyone has shares in the company,” he said. At G.ho.st’s offices in Ramallah, in a stone-faced building with black reflective glass perched on a hill in the city’s business district, employees say they feel part of an intensive group effort to create something groundbreaking. Among them are top young Palestinian programmers and engineers, recruited in some cases directly from universities. The chance to gain experience in creating a product for the international market — a first for the small Palestinian technology community — means politics take a backseat to business, said Yusef Ghandour, a project manager. “It’s good we are learning from the Israeli side now,” Mr. Ghandour said. The Israelis, he said, “are open to the external world, and there is lots of venture capital investment in Israel, and now we are bringing that to Palestine.” The departure of educated young people mostly to neighboring Jordan and the Persian Gulf states is a major problem for the Palestinian economy and has been especially damaging to its technology industry. Since the Oslo peace process broke down in 2000, a wave of Israeli-Palestinian business ties have crumbled as well. Political tensions make it somewhat unpopular for Palestinians to do business with Israelis, said Ala Alaeddin, chairman of the Palestinian Information Technology Association. He said the concept of a technology joint venture across the divide was unheard-of until G.ho.st opened its doors. A handful of Palestinian tech companies handle outsourced work for Israeli companies, but most focus on the local or Middle Eastern market. “It’s much easier to have outsourcing than a partnership,” Mr. Alaeddin said. “A joint venture is a long-term commitment, and you need both sides to be really confident that this kind of agreement will work.” Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with offices in Israel, invested $2 million in G.ho.st. Michael Eisenberg, a general partner at the firm, said Benchmark was “in the business of risky investments,” but that G.ho.st presented entirely new territory. Recalling his discussions with Dr. Schreiber, Mr. Eisenberg said: “Frankly, when he first told me about it I thought it was ambitious, maybe overly ambitious. But Zvi is a remarkable entrepreneur, and I started to feel he could actually pull this off.” The video hookup runs continuously between the offices. Chatting in the Ramallah conference room, two Palestinian programmers wave hello to Israeli colleagues conferring over a laptop in the Modiin office. “We are doing something across cultures and across two sides of a tough conflict,” Dr. Schreiber said. “I was prepared for the possibility that it might be difficult, but it hasn’t been.”
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