| Darkness at the End of the Tunnel |
|
| Ha’aretz |
| Friday, September 10, 2004 |
|
|
|
Under a wall separating their neighborhoods in Ramle, Arab and Jewish children dug a passageway that enabled them to play together. Then the municipality came along and blocked it
|
A while ago
, Nawal Abu Amar, the principal of the Juwarish School in
Ramle,a mixed Arab and Jewish town inside the Green Line, told the following story: Along part of the fence that separates the Arab Juwarish neighborhood from the Jewish Ganei Dan neighborhood there is a small playground on the Jewish side. Entrance to it is possible only from the direction of the Jewish neighborhood; the wall blocks it off from the Arab neighborhood. From time to time older Arab children leap over the wall. The little ones found a different solution. The voices of the Jewish children playing on the seesaw and the carousel on other side of the wall attracted them. With the inventiveness of children, perhaps on the basis of knowledge that was acquired from similar adult scenes on television, they set out on their mission: Quietly and patiently, they dug small tunnels in the ground under the wall.
The Jewish children, who identified the opportunity for a new game, joined them happily. Thus Jewish children on the one side and Arab children on the other crawled on the ground and dug three small tunnels through which a child of four or five could wriggle. After they completed the subversive action, they would happily crawl from side to side, playing with each other. Abu Amar's family itself lives in a pretty house in the "build-your-own-home" neighborhood of Ramle, but her youngest son, Wissam, would sometimes crawl through the tunnel for a visit to his grandmother and grandfather in Juwarish.
When she told this story, there was a twinkle in Abu Amar's eye. She saw in this functional bit of naughtiness some good news about the victory of life over the artificial borders. Alongside her professional activity for which she has won many awards and official citations, Abu Amar is active in a group of Arab and Jewish families that hold friendly meetings to advance peace. None of them are fervent political activists; they are mostly yuppies who seek a normal life, who are apparently the biggest chance of bringing about a change. However, the struggle against borders is not only a matter of political outlook for her, but rather mainly a matter of character.
She began this challenge, which has become a way of life for her before she became the principal of the Juwarish school six years ago and the first female principal in the Bedouin sector. She revolted in a big way back when she was a very young woman and chose to marry Dr. Hamed Abu Amar, a family doctor at a local health clinic. When they met and fell in love, Nawal was a rookie teacher at the Juwarish School and Abu Amar had just returned from medical studies in Italy. However, despite his M.D., the groom was not considered a suitable catch. A doctor is nice, but Abu Amar comes from a tribe that is far inferior to the respected Wahdi tribe that Nawal comes from. One of her uncles explained to her, holding out his two hands like the two pans of a scale: "A doctor doesn't tip the scales," in a paraphrase of an Arabic proverb.
But the story did not end with sayings and proverbs. In fact, it ballooned into a real war between the tribes and murder threats to Nawal from within the family.
When the story came to the attention of the commander of the Ramle police at the time, he entered the fray, not only for the sake of public order, but also because he was taken by the young woman's stubborn stance in the face of her tribe and the threats. He provided her with physical protection and intervened in the dispute until he brought about a sulha (traditional reconciliation) and enabled the wedding to be held. Since then, Nawal has kept in close touch with him - and also with the cousins who threatened her life.
"They are just like the soldiers who don't agree with what is happening, but go to serve in Gaza because they don't want to refuse to obey an order," she says. "The tribe is like an army, and this was a war in which they obeyed orders. But I always knew that I would win."
Loathing of borders
The desire to win is impressed deeply in the soul of Nawal Abu Amar, who since then has borne six children, completed a degree in education at the Hebrew University and is now planning a master's degree. She is also responsible for an important contribution to an astounding change in the Juwarish neighborhood. The neighborhood had a terrible reputation for the bloody wars between two large clans: the Juwarish and the Karaji. There were fatalities and casualties on both sides and an endless cycle of revenge and response. The Juwarish School was right on the front line of fire in this war. Every few days, when the fighting broke out, the children would be sent home and the school would close. There are still holes gaping from that period where bullets hit the old building.
Since then the Juwarish neighborhood has experienced a real revolution. The Karaji have been relocated away from Ramle, there has been intelligent investment by the mayor, Colonel (res.) Yoel Lavie of the Likud, in the Arab population of his city as a whole and in the Juwarish in particular and there has been a firm decision by the Juwarish to take their fate in hand. All these have changed the neighborhood beyond recognition
The ruins of the Karajis' houses that were demolished stand as a warning; the 4,000 inhabitants of the neighborhood have improved their lives and they even live in complete accord with the "minorities," as the Bedouin inhabitants who came here from the south at a later stage are called. To each his own minorities.
Perhaps for this reason, the wall that separates them from the Jews looks to the Juwarish more insulting and hurtful than ever. From the window of the new library at the school, librarian Rivka Abu Ashba, a traditional Bedouin woman who was educated at this school in the bad old days, looks out over the modern tennis court that has been opened adjacent to it. Only afterward did her gaze wander to the long wall that separates Jews from Arabs, and she sighed: "I've learned to live with these borders - both of tradition and of the wall."
Abu Amar refuses to come to terms with borders. If she were Jewish, she would no doubt have been an Israel Defense Forces officer with much to her credit. In a conversation in her office at the school, the walls of which are adorned with all kinds of certificates of honor for her educational activities, she in fact agrees with this hypothetical assumption. From this loathing of borders, physical and abstract, she went out this week to show me, delightedly, the tunnels that have achieved a symbolic dimension in her mind. Like a tracker stalking tunnel openings she strode back and forth along the separation wall, not believing her eyes: In recent weeks, before the beginning of the school year, someone had planted thorny sabras (prickly pear cactuses) over the openings of the tunnels, as a kind of aesthetic horticultural solution to prevent the infiltration of the young children. "Just like in Rafah," muttered Hamed Abu Amar with a bitter smile.
A swift clarification revealed that it was the municipality that had planted the sabras. Ramle municipality spokeswoman Nurit Levy, who sung the praises of the profound change in the Juwarish neighborhood, said the blocking of the tunnels was in response to complaints by neighbors in Ganei Dan. Of what had the neighbors complained? "That they were hurting little children."
This explanation, it must be said, is very strange. The new situation is like this: Teenagers and adults from Juwarish can easily vault over the wall and the separation wall had already been shown in the past to be incapable of stopping missiles in flight. A rocket that was fired from the direction of the mosque during the bad days of the clan wars hit a Jewish home in Ganei Dan. That is to say, blocking the tunnels with prickly and painful cactuses was intended to stop the infiltration of potential culprits aged four. Is this the hostile organization that the Jews of Ramle saw as an existential threat? It would appear that those who urged this prickly separation wanted to contain the phenomenon of rapprochement while it was still small. "It is hard to see an opening for hope closed before your very eyes," said Nawal Abu Amar, gazing sadly at the sabras that had been planted where there used to be an opening that joined the two sides.
|
|
