[WCUSP] Fw: Guardian Unlimited: A Jew among 25,000 Muslims

[Joyce McLean]

Just sharing...... I didn't hear the speaker myself.........but two long 
time Santa Cruz WILPF women Marilyn Lucier and Sandy Silver did..........
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "marilyn lucier" <marilyn at ocugen.com>
To: "Sandy Silver" <silver at cruzio.com>; "Joyce McLean" <jmclean at jps.net>
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 8:35 AM
Subject: FW: Guardian Unlimited: A Jew among 25,000 Muslims


> Dear Sandy,
>
> A weird Monday, I guess. I'd sent this Guardian article to you last night
> with a note, but this morning I could find No record of it at all! I found
> the article again and am happy to repeat my note of thanks - which is by 
> way
> of thanking you so much for the good company and long opportunity to chat,
> as well as to share the experience of hearing Susan Nathan. I still feel 
> as
> I did last night - inspired to have heard such a principled, committed and
> well spoken woman and not yet into my despair at the state of life for the
> people of the region. Dinner certainly helped cap the experience - though 
> I
> apologize for all the coughing. Thanks for it all. I do feel energized and
> grateful.
>
> Love, Marilyn
>
> To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, 
> go
> to http://www.guardian.co.uk
>
> A Jew among 25,000 Muslims
> Even as a young girl in Wimbledon Susan Nathan knew she would one day move
> to Israel. But why did she choose to settle in the Arab town of Tamra? She
> explains to Jonathan Cook
> Jonathan Cook
> Wednesday August 27 2003
> The Guardian
>
>
> The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and
> Clarifications column, Thursday August 28 2003
>
>
>
> The following feature contained the statement, "Jews and Arabs are 
> forbidden
> to
>                                                  inter-marry in Israel".
> Some clarification is necessary to avoid a racist
>                                                  interpretation of this
> policy. It is, rather, an anti-secular piece of
>                                                  legislation: civil
> marriage is not permitted in Israel but those of
>                                                  the same faith may marry
> in front of their respective clergy, be
>                                                  they Jewish, Muslim, or
> Christian, etc. The only alternative is to
>                                                  marry abroad, as the 
> piece
> said, or live together without the
>                                                  legal benefits of a
> recognised marriage.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> She makes an incongruous figure, waiting in front of the central mosque in
> the northern Israeli town of Tamra. There is no danger I will miss her. 
> She
> has short blonde hair, in contrast to the rest of the women who cover 
> their
> dark hair with scarves, and is wearing a loose-fitting floral kaftan, 
> better
> suited to the streets of Wimbledon, her former home, than here in the 
> Middle
> East.
>
> The difference runs much deeper than mere looks: Susan Nathan is the only
> Jew among 25,000 Muslims in Tamra, one of the country's dozens of Arab
> communities whose council is run by Islamic fundamentalists. She is one of
> only two Israeli Jews known to have crossed the ethnic divide: the other 
> is
> the controversial academic Uri Davis, who lives in nearby Sakhnin.
>
> Nathan, a 54-year-old teacher and former Aids counsellor with the London
> Lighthouse Project, arrived in Israel four years ago, after the break-up 
> of
> her marriage. For the first few months she shared a tiny room in an
> absorption centre near Tel Aviv. "I was breastfed Zionism. My parents were
> prominent members of the liberal Jewish community in London and were firm
> friends of Abba Eban," she says, referring to the Israeli foreign minister
> during the epoch-changing period of the 1967 six-day war, when Israel
> captured the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt. "At the age of 10 
> or
> 11 I remember telling my parents that one day I would live in Israel."
>
> But since her move from Tel Aviv to work as an English teacher in deprived
> Tamra seven months ago, she has lost her Jewish friends. "At first they
> thought I was just being provocative," she says. "Then they thought I was
> suffering some sort of mental breakdown. Now they realise I am serious, 
> they
> have turned their backs. What I have done is far too threatening."
>
> Seated in her second-floor flat, surrounded by African cloth prints on the
> walls, classical music CDs and shelves filled with art and Jewish history
> books, it is not immediately clear what kind of threat Nathan represents.
> She is slight, still not fully recovered from surgery for a rare eye 
> cancer,
> and her thin voice is easily drowned out when the muezzin begins the 
> midday
> call to prayer. Although she refuses to speak Hebrew in Tamra, she still
> wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.
>
> Paradoxically, her stance has also earned her the enmity of the Israeli
> peace movement. "The Jewish left is totally in thrall to the idea of two
> states for two people. What I am doing by showing that Jews and Arabs can
> live together in peace undermines their argument."
>
> Although there is little in the law to prevent Arabs and Jews from living
> together, in practice it almost never happens. Israeli Jews are educated 
> to
> see their Arab neighbours as either primitive or dangerous, says Nathan.
> Jews and Arabs are forbidden to inter-marry in Israel: the tiny number who
> do must leave the country and marry abroad, usually in nearby Cyprus. The
> handful who do live together do so incognito, usually in Tel Aviv or in 
> one
> of what are misleadingly termed "mixed cities" such as Lod, Acre or Haifa.
> But in reality these are little more than Jewish cities with poor, 
> separate
> Arab neighbourhoods.
>
> Israeli Arabs face their own obstacles to joining Jewish communities. Some
> 93% of land is owned by the state; and those who try to lease it are 
> vetted
> by committees that weed out undesirables, including Arabs. Against this
> background, and the eruption of the intifada, Nathan started to question 
> her
> own Zionism and the direction the Jewish state had taken since its 
> founding.
>
> She was surprised at how quickly she was accepted in Tamra. "Once they
> realised I was coming with an open mind and was trying to help they were
> very welcoming," she says. Seven months of living in a Muslim town have 
> made
> her rail even more angrily against what she sees as the intolerance and
> racism of Israeli Jews. "When I left for Tamra, my friends said they were
> very afraid for me. So I asked them if they had any Arab friends on which 
> to
> base this judgment. None of them did: they only met Arabs if they were 
> being
> served humous or having their car fixed. When I asked them what I should 
> be
> afraid of they could not articulate it. It's all emotion."
>
> The parallels that Nathan draws between Israel and the old South Africa 
> are
> based on long periods of her youth spent there with relatives, although 
> she
> acknowledges that Israel does not enforce the same brutal apartheid. In
> fact, she even points out that her first real meetings with Palestinians
> occurred in the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, where her cancer was being
> treated. In the days before the intifada, Jews and Arabs lay in beds
> alongside each other.
>
> "Of course, Jews and Arabs travel on buses together and watch films in the
> same cinemas. The apartheid in Israel is not formalised and legalised like
> it was in South Africa; it is sophisticated, hidden and emotional. It is
> based on a culture of fear of the Other, which is fed by the Zionist
> propaganda machine."
>
> The real problem, she says, lies in the different nature of citizenship 
> for
> Jews and Arabs. It starts with the founding principles of the state such 
> as
> the law of return, which allows Jews anywhere in the world - such as 
> Nathan
> herself - to claim a right to migrate to Israel; but at the same time it
> denies millions of Palestinians the right to claim the homes they and 
> their
> parents were dispossessed of 55 years ago.
>
> And it continues in the discrimination in employment, local council 
> budgets,
> access to the media and control of the government. "Where are the Arab 
> heads
> of banks, the civil service, the rectors of universities?"
>
> But most of all, she says, apartheid is shaped by the battle for 
> territory.
> "It is revealed in the fact that the state can confiscate hundreds of
> thousands of acres of Arab-owned land and then refuse even to lease it 
> back
> to the original owners; that the state has refused to build a single new
> Arab community in its 55 years, even though the population has grown
> eightfold."
>
> Dotted around Tamra are land-hungry farm collectives (the kibbutz) and
> luxury communities reserved exclusively for Jews. "Where are the people of
> Tamra supposed to live? They are being choked. By making life unbearable
> here is the state not trying to bring about a quiet form of transfer, of
> ethnic cleansing? People who have the money or connections to move abroad 
> do
> so."
>
> She is working on projects to expose the similarities between Israeli and
> former South African apartheid, including regularly travelling to South
> Africa to work with the Tutu Foundation. But she remains pessimistic about
> the future. "You can't run a country without offering the people a future, 
> a
> path forward. Here, the way is blocked in all directions and sooner or 
> later
> it will catch up with them - just as it did in South Africa."
>
> Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited
>
>