-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=169878&contrassID=
2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
> The failure of the Arabs to communicate effectively with the
> international public opinion and to develop modern competent tools
> of dealing with the media left the scene open for Israel to spread
> its lies and manipulations about its occupation of the Palestinians
> and the usurpation of their rights. <<Jordan Times>>
> Funny how these types of articles never appear in Ha'aretz, A7 or the
> JTA.... <<TL>>
}}}>Begin
Wednesday, May 29, 2002 Sivan 18, 5762
Israel Time: 11:32 (GMT+3)
Living as hostages of hatred and racism
By Ada Ushpiz
Arabeh, 30 minutes' drive from Jenin. About 10 percent of the homes are not linked
to the sewage system and the roads are poor.
(Photo: Nir Kafri)
The recent arrest of the Jarbouni sisters of Arabeh on charges of contact with a
foreign agent and of aiding the enemy is not a popular topic in this Lower Galilee
village, plagued by unemployment, economic recession and a growing sense of
despair.
A Palestinian flag is flying at the village entrance. Two flags decorate a plaque
commemorating the martyr Allah Nasr, one of two village residents killed in the
October riots. Yet another, torn and ragged, is twisted around the power lines in one
of the deserted alleyways - mute testimony to the periodic outbursts of rage of the
young people of Arabeh, insistent on showing solidarity with their Palestinian brothers
in their struggle against the occupation, even on pain of being accused of disloyalty
to the state. "What's the big crime in waving a Palestinian flag?" says a defiant
teenager, his eyes darting, his cheeks inflamed.
At the office of the mayor, Yassin Yassin, they would rather not talk about the
Jarbouni affair. The girls' father, Ahmad Nasr Jarbouni, number four on Azmi Bishara
and Ahmed Tibi's Knesset list, competed against Yassin, the victorious Israeli
Communist party candidate, in the last elections. The two are related and echoes of
the backbiting election campaign that split up families are resounding again as the
village prepares for elections in a year from now.
"The matter is too sensitive," says Yassin, 57, born in Arabeh and a graduate of the
Kedouri Agricultural School, his Israeliness and Arabness closely intertwined. "We're
talking about girls, which is a touchy matter to begin with, and on top of that,
there's a
family feud," he says. "Still, I don't believe they did anything. Maybe someone set
them up or led them by the nose. We don't know the details. When it comes to state
security, we wouldn't dare interfere. It's too risky.
"You see what we've come to?" Yassin goes on. "Why should I have to feel like this?
Why am I always on the defensive? This is my country as much as yours, so why am
I so afraid of meddling?"
Arabeh, with a population of 20,000, is proud of its large percentage of academics
and professionals. More than many other villages, it veers between ambitiousness
and despair, wealth and poverty, education and neglect. There is no community
center, no playground, no soccer field. About 10 percent of the homes are not linked
to the sewage system, the roads are poor, and only 30 percent of the inhabitants pay
up when the local council collects taxes. Flagrant discrimination in development
budgets and constant marching in place have created a kind of immanent
backwardness. "Why should anyone risk their money on a place like this?" the
villagers ask.
Since the 1950s, Arabeh has run through the whole gamut of emotions in the battle
waged by Israeli Arabs to assert themselves as Israelis of Arab nationality. An uncle
of the Jarbouni sisters spent 14 years in jail on charges of spying for Syria in the
early 1960s. The girls' father was arrested for not turning his brother in when he
returned from Syria to visit the family.
Half an hour away from Jenin by car, the villagers of Arabeh walk a fine line between
their Israeli and Arab identities. As incitement against the Arabs grows, they are
pushed closer and closer to the wall. Several years ago, the village decided to put a
stop to the stream of laborers, peddlers and uninvited guests from Jenin who
thronged its streets every day. The villagers accused them of being disrespectful to
the village women and stealing cars. The fight that ensued left a bitter taste in the
mouths of many Arabeh residents.
The despair, the suffocation, the feeling that Israel's war against the Palestinians
has
turned Israeli Arabs into hostages of hatred and racism, reverberated in every
sentence and every bemused remark in the tent-cum- cafe set up on an Arabeh
street corner. The arrest of two girls from the village aroused no shock here. Just
resignation, introversion, a quiet suspiciousness. Arrests have become routine in
Arabeh. It hardly matters whether the charges are true or not. An Israeli Arab must
prove his loyalty a priori. The misdeeds of one individual are often seized upon to
blacken the entire Arab community.
"If it's true, what these girls are accused of, it's no good. Not for Israel and not
for us.
We' re against terror. Those who commit such acts should be severely punished. But
in this case, I'm sure they're making a mountain out of a molehill. These are good
girls: well brought up, polite, non-political. In my opinion, they haven't done a
thing,"
says one of the village elders, Abu Lutuf, 70, a former history teacher, with a thick
mustache and a traditional kaffiyah on his head. Abu Lutuf has voted Likud since the
political upheaval in 1977.
Lena Jarbouni, 29, and her brother, Said, were arrested on April 18 at 2 A.M. Their
mother, 62, a short, stocky woman, her face heavily-lined, opened the door for the
police. There were 10 of them in uniform, she says, and a bunch of men in civilian
clothes and ski masks. They burst into the house, woke up Lena and Said, and
arrested them in their pajamas. "They searched for an hour. They left a big mess. In
one minute they ruined my life," she mumbles, not anxious to be drawn into
conversation.
Ten days ago, they arrested her other daughter, Lamis, 28, disabled and blind in one
eye. Said was released in the meantime, but he told her nothing. The family lawyer,
Attorney Nasr Hassan, has not spoken to her either, so as not to worry her. She
doesn't know what her girls are accused of, and she doesn't want to know. All she
wants, she says, is for them to be released.
Subjected to heavy psychological pressure and unable to see her lawyer for 10 days,
Lena, the chief suspect, revealed the secret life of two unmarried Arab women
walking a fine line between what is permissible and what is not in Arab society. Lena,
who works at a sewing factory near Segev, lives with her brother and sister in her
mother's home. The father doesn't live with them. In 1999, she met Waal Jaradat, a
peddler from Jenin, married with two children, who came to the village to sell
merchandise to a neighbor who runs a grocery store and a clothing shop. In those
days, Lena told the police, she didn't have problems yet with her fiance.
One day, the neighbor asked if she and Jaradat could go over their accounts
together at Lena's house, worried that people would gossip if she met him alone in
her house. After that, Jaradat would visit the sisters from time to time, bringing
along
friends from Jenin. The brother Said wasn't happy about it. He never liked the folks in
Jenin, he claims.
After some time had passed, Jaradat asked Lena to buy him a cell phone using her
name, promising to pay her back for the calls. They purchased the phone in
Nazareth. Within a year, Jaradat ran up a bill of NIS 8,000 which he couldn't pay.
That, says Lena, is when the trouble started.
Little by little, Lena developed a relationship with Jaradat's friend, Samr Silawi. She
complained to him about Jaradat and asked him to help her get her money back. He
suggested that she go to the police, but she refused. Silawi said he had a friend who
could help her. From their very first meeting, Silawi admitted he was a member of the
Islamic Jihad. Later, he introduced her to Thabet Mardawi, known by his code name
Abu al-Abd, a top Islamic Jihad activist who was on Israel's wanted list. No one told
her exactly what his role was in the organization. She knew nothing about his
involvement in a long list of suicide bombings. "I told them that if they carried out
acts
like that, so would the Israelis. They'll kill our people just like we kill theirs,"
Lena
said. Abu al-Abd replied that there was no other way to fight the Israeli occupation.
Captured during Operation Defensive Shield, he promptly informed on her.
Lena says she spent a lot of time talking to these men on her cell phone. When her
phone cards were used up, she would borrow her brother's. Sometimes they met her
in Umm al-Fahm, but she always went with her sister - not alone, God forbid.
Sometimes she would go to Jenin to confront Jaradat and demand that he pay up.
Silawi and Abu al-Abd would accompany her. Once her mother went along. When
the battle was raging in Jenin, and horrifying scenes were being broadcast on
television, she heard her brother say: "Abu al-Abd will show them."
"Samr and I were in love," Lena told her interrogators."I don't remember when it was,
but once I asked Samr why he was involved in these things. I knew him as a person
who loved life. Samr said he had a friend named Iyad who was killed by the Israelis,
and Israel was looking for all Iyad's friends. He says he had no choice. One day, he
just found himself in Islamic Jihad."
As their love grew, Lena says Samr asked her to photocopy some Israeli identity
cards for him so he could live in Israel and quit the organization. Abu al-Abd told her
the Palestinian Authority was after him, and he wanted to hide in Israel under a false
identity. She agreed to help. Approaching her brother and his friends, she said she
needed photocopies of their I.D. cards because she wanted to send in several
entries to a contest sponsored by one of the Arab newspapers, and needed to attach
a different I.D. number to each entry. She passed the photocopies on to Silawi and
Abu al-Abd.
Lena also agreed to rent a house and a car for them in her name, but the plan never
materialized . The whole business began to worry her. Her sister noticed she was in
a bad mood and asked her what she had done. Lamis was horrified.
When Abu al-Abd asked her to help someone from the territories sneak into Israel,
she balked. "You drive ahead and check the road for roadblocks," he told her. "He'll
be in the car behind you. If you see a roadblock, you tell us."
"I said: Okay. But then I realized from what they were saying that the man I was
trying to sneak in was a terrorist. I went home. I said to myself: Today you've got
money trouble. Tomorrow you're in worse trouble. I decided to break off the
relationship." Lena told Abu al-Abd she had no car. He promised to get her one. So
she said her mother wouldn't let her leave the house, and that was the end of that.
"Why didn't you tell the police?" asked the interrogator. "What am I supposed to do?
Let them call me a collaborator?" she replied. "What I've told you is the whole truth.
I
come from a good family, religious and all. My father is respected man. If everything I
said here gets back to them, things will be very hard for me and them."
The police and the state say Lena Jarbouni is guilty of providing Thabet Mardawi with
photocopies of Israeli I.D. cards "in the knowledge that they would be used by him
and Islamic Jihad to enter Israel illegally, endanger state security and carry out
terrorist attacks on Israeli soil." The prosecution claims Mardawi considered Lena
reliable and planned to give her a bomb to set off inside Israel, but Silawi had called
and told him to hold off for a while. Lena is being charged with aiding and abetting an
enemy, conspiring to murder, supporting a terrorist organization and endangering
state security.
At Arabeh's makeshift cafe, the men continue to sip bitter coffee, smoke nargillas
and joke about current events. Old Abu Lutuf rattles off an account of the history of
the village since the days of the Romans and the First and Second Temples, full of
passion and irony. Since the days of Ariel Sharon have they been out of work. The
Al-Aqsa Intifada brought everything to a halt and dried up the steady stream of Israeli
and foreign tourists.
Arabeh's Ohel Shalom (Tent of Peace), a restaurant-guest house with an unusual
sculpted stone facade, has closed down. "Why doesn't Sharon want a Palestinian
state beside Israel? Because he is not a real man. He loves drinking blood more than
making peace," proclaims Abu Lutuf, raising his voice as the young people who have
gathered around him laugh bitterly. "I am proud to be an Arab in Israel. What's good
for the state is good for me, and what's bad for it is bad for me. I am an inseparable
part of this state, and I was here before Sharon. I'd rather live in a tent in Arabeh
than
in a palace in Syria.
"This is my land," says Abu Lutuf, as the conversation moves to transfer, a topic that
has become an obsession in the Arab street. "I was born here. Ask any of these old
folks if they are prepared to budge from here. No. You see? We will die here. Every
clod of earth is ours."
"So why did you sell it?" interjects a young man. "It's the rich people - not us,"
replies
Abu Lutuf. "They sold their land and ran off to Lebanon and Syria with their heads
filled with fantasies. As far as I'm concerned, they can stay there. I'm against
allowing
the refugees to come back. Why on earth should they?"
As the old Likudnik fondly recalls the days of Menachem Begin, he is interrupted by a
young gangly fellow in need of a shave, one of the village "vigilantes." The police
often search them for drugs and firearms, giving chase as they zip through the alleys
on their motorbikes.
"All you care about is a full refrigerator and sleeping easy," counters the young man.
"We want rights and equality. We Arabs were born to pay taxes or make trouble. We
pay 40 percent income tax and get nothing in return. Why? Because we don't serve
in the army. So let us be pilots and we'll join the army. But forget it. It's all make-
believe. This is still their country, and we don't belong. Since Sharon came to power,
we've only gone backwards.
"You know what?" he adds suddenly, his face reddening. "Sometimes I wish I could
burn this whole country down."
"What we're seeing today is a political mutiny against the Arab sector," says Mayor
Yassin. "The leadership of this country treats the Arab minority like a hostile entity.
They take one case and apply it to everyone. This country has a problem. I go to the
office of a certain minister to discuss development plans for the village. I sit down
and he says: `Hey, look who's here: Arabeh. Intifada. Nice going. What do you want?'
And I have to smile at this guy and act friendly, because I need him. Why do I have
to be pushed into that kind of corner?"
Yassin says he saw with his own eyes how the police intensified the rioting in his
village in October by bringing in masked thugs from outside the village to throw
stones. He testified on this matter before the Or Commission. "There may be some
infractions against state security, but these are exceptional cases - not the rule," he
protests. "The trouble is that the government, which is as much ours as yours, is
killing and oppressing our Palestinians brothers - and this is not just rhetoric. I'm
talking about actual relatives, sisters and brothers - while we sit and do nothing. If
that's not loyalty to the state, I don't know what is.
"But expressing solidarity with our Palestinian brothers or opposing the government
is not allowed. What every Jewish leftist is entitled to, we are not. We're treated
like
criminal suspects even before we open our mouths."
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