Enemy of the status quo
By Khaled Diab
At a
time when the only Arabs and Israelis who met were soldiers and spies, an
intrepid Egyptian woman crossed enemy lines.
July 2008
Everyone recalls, whether approvingly or
critically, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s audacious and groundbreaking trip to
Jerusalem to talk peace at the Israeli Knesset.
But history should find a page in its annals
for, in my opinion, an even more courageous Egyptian. More than three years
before Sadat’s famous foray into the unknown, at a
time when the only Arabs and Israelis who met were soldiers or spies, Sana Hasan, a PhD student in her
mid-20s, went to Israel as the Arab world’s first, albeit unofficial and
ostracised, peace envoy and probably its most unusual.
Her six-week trip turned into a three-year
sojourn, from 1974 to 1977, in which she seems to have met just about everyone
in Israel! Her memoirs of her odyssey, entitled Enemy in the Promised Land,
provide fascinating insights into the dynamics and diversity of Israeli society
– replacing the faceless “enemy” with a dizzying parade of characters and
individuals. Hasan’s irrepressible and probing
personality, sense of adventure, humour and human insight leap out of the page and
draw the reader into the web of this unusual and improbable journey.
She rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty,
from Shimon
Peres to Menachem
Begin and Ariel
Sharon, made friends with progressive intellectuals and right-wing
expansionists alike, and became intimate with Israel’s most marginalised.
She strained her back on various left-wing kibbutzim,
‘adopted’ a young prostitute, posed as a lapsed Jew while living with an
Orthodox missionary family, visited the earliest right-wing settlements in the
West Bank, entered an army camp in Gaza, and even worked in the grim and grimy
kitchens of the prestigious King David Hotel.
Hasan’s stay came at a time when Egypt and
Israel were literally at war. Although the 1973
war was officially over, the two armies still nervously faced each other
across the ceasefire lines. This meant that Hasan
faced the very real possibility of being stripped of her nationality or being
arrested as a spy in Israel. As it turns out, after five years of exile, she
received red-carpet treatment on her return to Egypt after the Camp David peace
accords.
Not surprisingly, upon arriving in Israel she
felt fear and trepidation. Although my trip carried none of the risks Hasan’s did, I, too, was overcome with conflicting
emotions and sentiments, and felt weighed down by decades of collective
political baggage.
Hasan was not naïve and entertained no illusions
about what her personal peace mission could achieve. “In the face of Phantom
jets and the interests of superpowers, individual action was pathetic. But I
was determined not to give in to circumstances that seemed increasingly
dangerous,” she wrote. She was also driven by personal curiosity: “I often
daydreamed about crossing the Egyptian border.”
One thing that immediately struck Hasan, as it
did me more than three decades later, is how strangely familiar Israel
seemed. She had expected Israel’s official capital to be “a grand metropolis,
the gleaming jewel of Israeli dominion and efficiency… Instead, Tel Aviv
resembled a Middle Eastern bazaar.”
“We’ve [Arabs] been saying all along that
Israel must integrate itself into the Middle East if it wants to be accepted,
but Israel is the Middle East,” she quips. But for political expediency and
psychological reasons, both sides turn a blind eye to Israel’s Middle Eastern
face. “Israel’s desire to perceive herself as part of Europe was a way of
gaining the acceptance historically denied to the Jews.”
She discovered plenty in common between her own
compatriots and Israelis. “Israelis seemed to have the same healthy, if
somewhat exaggerated, scepticism of authority and… to
believe that the law applied to everyone except themselves.”
Another area of common ground I uncovered was
the absolute importance of family to Israelis and Arabs alike, although
Israelis tend to value individuality more.
As for Israel’s legendary efficiency, something
Arabs both admire and fear, the intrepid Egyptian was soon disabused of any
notions that it actually existed in most spheres of daily life. An Egyptian
Jewish bank clerk told her that Israeli bureaucrats worked 8-0-4 hours per day:
arrive at eight, do zero work, and leave at four. In Egypt, it is a common
belief that the average civil servant does 24 minutes of actual work daily.
One area where Egyptians and Israelis part
company is in the realm of social niceties and refinements – something which,
with her upper-class upbringing and rebellious nature, was both intriguing and
grating.
Other differences are often as much aspirational as they are actual. One such area is the
status of women. In fact, Hasan, a hardcore feminist,
was dismayed by the role of women on supposedly progressive kibbutzim. “It took
me a while to realise that the glamorous image of women pioneers ploughing
fields and carting manure… was largely mythical.”
Determined to live her principles, rebel
against her aristocratic background and prove to the Israelis that she was not
some soft-touch Egyptian woman, she insisted on doing all the heavy-duty jobs
reserved for the men, fuelled by willpower alone. “How I hated the Israelis for
their disgusting good health,” she admitted in exhaustion. “And for all those
yoghurt-and-cucumber-salad breakfasts they had been fed since childhood.”
Hasan also discovered that the notion of sexual
liberation was often skin-deep, even among progressives. “Though popular lore
often pictured the pioneers as bohemians who… indulged in unrestrained sexual
pleasure, nothing could be further from the truth,” she observed. “Their
contempt for the institution of marriage and for the cult of virginity did not
include an ideology of free love.”
Romantically, Hasan,
vulnerable and alone, found herself to be entering uncharted territory,
especially after her estranged husband divorced her. Although she’d had
boyfriends before and had a liberal attitude towards sex, she was drawn into an
affair with a man who was not only married but was an officer in the Israeli
army. To boot, he did business with the apartheid regime in South Africa. But
he was gentle, sensitive, an intellectual and lacked “the typically
Mediterranean machismo that was so much a part of Israeli culture”.
Hasan also experimented with lesbianism when she had
a fling with a beautiful young woman on an ultra-radical kibbutz, partly
because Michelle possessed the warmth and openness Hasan
felt other young Israelis suppressed: “I had had the greatest difficulty making
friends my age, because in reaction to the emotionality of the European-born
generation, the young people were very cold.”
Michelle also shared a similar conscience to Hasan. She was torn between her love for the egalitarian
ideals of the kibbutz movement and the ugly underbelly of Israeli hegemony. “I
find the mystification and worship of the army that goes on in this country
revolting,” she confided just before her decision to leave for France. “May be
a genuine pacifist can’t live in Israel at all.”
In addition to the better aspects of Israeli
society, Hasan got plenty of opportunity to explore
all the warts. One was the discrimination endured by Oriental Jews. “We lived
side by side with [Muslims] with no problems, and believe me the goyim
were kinder to us than Israeli Jews are here,” complained one Georgian Jew,
lamenting her loss of status in Israel.
Despite their poverty and lowly status, the
Georgian Jews – who lived in the poor Jerusalem district of Nachalot
where “as in the cramped, poor districts of Cairo, everything took place on the
staircase” – were the most generous people Hasan came
across in Israel. This doesn’t surprise me, given the over-the-top notions of
hospitality I personally experienced in Georgia.
On the next rung down from Mizrahi
Jews stood the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Despite their declared equality
under the law, the reality Hasan found was very
different. She was shocked at the casual disdain and even racism expressed by
Israeli Jews towards Palestinians, the de facto segregation,
discrimination in education and the job market, and how emergency security
measures and some questionable laws had been exploited to deprive them of their
land.
Although I found the situation to have improved
in the intervening years, the status of the Palestinian citizens of Israel is
still fairly
precarious.
In fact, Hasan
experienced the same
unease I felt when I could move freely around the West Bank while my
Palestinian hosts needed permits to go anywhere. “They probably wondered why
such a fuss was made over an Egyptian while hundreds of thousands of ‘Arab
Israelis’ were subjected to daily indignity and cruel indifference.”
One young Palestinian she met, Eissa, posed as a Jew in order to rent a room. Others
complained of the constant security checks and suspicion.
To be able to take part in society, some
Palestinians tried to assimilate fully into Israeli culture. Wahib, one student from an upper middle class family,
boasted that he spoke better Hebrew than Arabic. “I don’t feel torn,” he
insisted. “I’m a Palestinian first, then a Christian, then an Israeli.”
However, he later admitted that: “A Palestinian
can’t afford to be too sensitive if he wants to live in this country.” His
father, who said he had raised his children to keep their heads down, said:
“Politics can be very hard on us. We are strangers in our own land.”
On the Israeli side, many of the seeds of the
current crisis could already be discerned by Hasan
more than three decades ago. On visiting Kiryat
Arba, which paved the way for the religious
settler movement in the West Bank, she feared that the territories captured in
1967 would soon go the way of those taken in 1948, which would shatter
prospects for peace.
The intransigence of the mainstream politicians
also filled her with foreboding. On the right, Menachem
Begin told her that: “Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] are our homeland and we
intend to keep them.” On the left, Golda Meir, said:
“Jerusalem must remain united and under our control. We can’t give up the Golan
Heights… we must keep Sharm el-Sheikh… And Gaza we
must keep, of course.”
What Hasan learnt
during her time in Israel helped her humanise the society in all its diversity
and develop an appreciation and even love for the people and the place. But it
also filled her with despair. “I shed my optimistic faith in the infinite power
of rational discourse to bring about concord between Jews and Arabs,” she
admits.
I have not yet reached that point and hope that
dialogue and empathy can move us along the slow path to peace.
A shorter version of this column appeared in The
Guardian Unlimited’s
Comment is Free section on 6
July 2008. Read the related
discussion.
ã2008 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the
copyright of Khaled Diab.