12. The Israeli Arab and the Arab in General
The Arabs are Jewish Israel’s ‘others.’
This was not what the early Zionists envisaged. They tended
to ignore this part of the population, relegating them
to a colorful but insignificant place in the background
of the Israeli landscape in which extraordinary events
were taking place. Those who, like Herzl, did think about
the Arabs in the early days of the movement were convinced
that the advantages of civilization that Zionism would
offer this ‘backward’ region – as many
Jews already perceived them to be – would be embraced
gratefully by the local inhabitants. The Arabs would then
happily march forwards, hand-in-hand with the Jews, into
a Zionist sunset.
Some certainly had a different vision. Ahad Ha‘am
recognized the difficulties ahead and criticized the optimism
of his opponents in the Zionist world, but he could be
dismissed as a permanent pessimist. In a later generation,
Ze’ev Jabotinsky refused to bow to the prevailing
vision of a happy ending; he too was dismissed by many
because of his militaristic opinions – so out of
touch with the majority opinion – and his admiration
for certain aspects of Italian fascism. Zionists continued
to think optimistically, confident that – in time
– they would overcome opposition and peace would
unite the struggling sides.
There is an interesting scene in the 1960 film There
Were Ten that is relevant to this discussion.
Tracing the fortunes of a group of Halutzim in the late
19th century, the film dwells on the problems that the
new settlers experience with the local Arabs. In buying
the land, they have also acquired the legal right to use
the water of a local well that is situated in an Arab
village nearby. The Arabs do not want the settlers there
and make it impossible for them to obtain the water. The
Jews have to resort to drawing it by night. Finally, after
a confrontation with local shepherds who are driving their
flocks deliberately over the settlers’ newly-ploughed
land, an argument breaks out among the Jews regarding
the correct policy to pursue. Some believe in appeasement
and are content, for the meantime, to continue to draw
their water at night. Others argue that the only response
is to use force against the Arabs. The argument they use
is: “They only understand force.” The dispute
leads to a discussion of the need to create a new sort
of Jew in Eretz Yisrael: one who is not afraid of his
own shadow and who is prepared to fight back, not because
he likes fighting but because he is not afraid to stand
up for his rights.
This is a very telling scene because it raises, in a microcosm,
the argument that had already existed for decades before
the film was made. Today, more than forty years after
its release, the scene is a fascinating entry point into
an argument that has become perhaps the main issue in
contemporary Israeli society: what to do about the Arabs.
Israel today is a far less optimistic place than when
the film was made; it also is incomparably less naive
than the period in which its plot was set. Viewing the
film today is an extraordinary experience because it brings
into the focus the interaction between these three different
periods, each with their own view of the issue, and each
less optimistic than the one before.
Far from fading into the background, the Arabs are an ever-present
reality in modern Israel. It is important to stress that,
despite this discussion about Israel as a Zionist State,
some 20% of the country’s population are Israeli
Arabs. (This does not include the Palestinians in the
territories captured in the 1967 war).
The Arabs are Israel’s ‘others’ not only
in demographic terms; they are also a significant factor
in that they have become the country’s ever-present
obsession, a source of simultaneous fear and fascination.
One of the first to notice this and explore it in his
work was the young Amos Oz . Arabs took a central
place in the fantasies of his Israeli protagonists, in
his first book of stories published in Israel in the 1960s
(and later translated as When the Jackals Howl).
The story Nomad and Viper, for example,
portrays the Arab imagined as dangerous, threatening and
yet seductively attractive. His early novel My Michael
explores the same theme: here the heroine, trapped in
a mediocre marriage, longs for depth and excitement that
only the Arabs of her fantasies can provide. A more recent
story, the wonderful, much anthologized Room on
the Roof by Savyon Liebrecht, delivers
a similar message in a language alert to the slightest
nuances of the problematic interaction between Jew and
Arab in Israel.
The early writers who wrote about the Arabs tended to romanticize
them. They perceived them, and the Bedouin in particular,
as exotic models for the new Jew to which Zionism aspired.
Writers such as Moshe Smilansky and Yitzhak Shemi wrote
modern fantasies about the Arab inhabitants of the region
that were influenced by The Arabian Nights. They often
portrayed them as people of honor, at home in nature,
with none of the faults with which city life corrupts
its dwellers. These stories in Hebrew sometimes contain
not a single Jewish character; nonetheless, but it is
not difficult to discern beneath the surface the Jews
about whom they were so concerned.
In order to understand this, one only has to look at pictures
of the early guards of the Shomer movement, the first
Zionist self-defense organization in the country. Sitting
on horseback, or standing, the really interesting element
in these pictures is the clothes they have chosen: a mixture
of the Cossack and the Bedouin. They look so proud and,
in retrospect, so naive. The exoticism of the Arab, at
home on the land and at one with nature – a person
who has never been spoiled by ‘civilization’
– was a deeply attractive image for those who supported
the idea of the new Jew. This was a central image in the
writings of Zionist writers in the early 20th century.
Time and conflict would soon overlay that image with different
significance, however. The image of the Arab as a cruel,
unscrupulous enemy developed in the late 1920s and 30s
as the Yishuv came into contact with Arab terrorism for
the first time. The image of the Arab as a victim to be
pitied was developed in the ground-breaking work of S.Yizhar,
e.g. in the 1949 story, The Prisoner, mentioned
above, but only really became accepted by a wider public
in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The image of the Arab as a harsh,
ruthless potential murderer is more recent. The brilliance
of Savyon Liebricht’s story, Room on the Roof,
is that she manages to combine all of these layers in
a subtle parable of the extremely complex relationship
between Jew and Arab.
The theme of the Arab as victim has dominated Israeli cinema
since the 1980s, as presented by the mainly left-leaning
film industry. Hamsin (1982) shows the tension
that develops between Galilean Arabs and Jews when the
army decides to requisition Arab land. Nadia (1986) portrays
the struggle of a young Arab girl from a village in the
Galilee, who attends a Jewish boarding school in an attempt
to obtain a better education. Several of the Israeli figures
in the film are depicted as callous; even the better ones
are insensitive and unaware of the plight of Arabs in
Israel. Behind the Walls (1986) is a prize-winning
political film that portrays Israelis and Palestinian
Arabs as victims of a manipulative establishment that
prefers to perpetuate the difficult situation through
a policy of ‘divide and rule’. Smile
of the Lamb (1986), an adaptation of David Grossman’s
novel, evinces great sympathy for the native Palestinian
position and calls into question the whole idea of enlightened
Israeli rule in the territories captured in 1967.
Fictitious Marriage (1988) is a rather implausible
film about an Israeli business-man who decides to step
away from his life and, through a series of coincidences,
adopts a new identity as a deaf-and-dumb Palestinian construction
worker. In its heavy-handed way, it portrays the Arab
as a victim of Israeli suspicions and stereotypes, on
the one hand, and the Jew as a victim of an impossible
situation, on the other. Another interesting, prize winning
film, Avanti Popolo (1986) uses these images
very cleverly. When Shylock’s famous speech “
I am a Jew: Hath not a Jew eyes…” is put into
the mouth of an Egyptian soldier who is a Shakespearean
actor in his native Cairo, the film becomes a parable:
the Arab has now replaced the Jew as victim.
In recent years, as a result of the confusion wrought by
the murderous terrorism unleashed by Palestinian fundamentalism
and the legacy of the two Intifadas, Israeli cinema has
tended to step away from Arab-Jewish tensions and politics
in general.
A further element that must not be overlooked is the significant
input of Arab artists in creative expression in Israel.
This essentially occurs in three spheres. A number of
Israeli Arabs have contributed individually within Israeli
Jewish frameworks in the context of the wider cultural
scene. This is particularly evident with regard to actors
in both theater and film. For example, Salim Dau, Muhammed
Bakri, Salma Nakara and Makram Khouri are serious actors
who are well known to the wider Israeli public. Interestingly,
they are not confined to Arab roles. This works in both
directions: Israeli Jewish actors have effectively played
roles as Israeli Arabs. For example, Khouri portrays an
Israeli military governor in the film Smile of the
Lamb, while Hannah Azoulai-Hasfari played the
title role in Nadia.
Arab actors have a difficult time within Israeli cinema
and – most particularly – in the theater.
An Arab theater actor who must appear nightly before Israeli
– predominantly Jewish – audiences can sometimes
feel contradictions, given the problematic relations between
the Arab community and the larger unit of the Zionist
State. Dau recently confessed that, in the middle of the
second Intifada it was becoming increasingly difficult
for him to do his job; Bakri has intimated the same.
Many Arab artists have also participated in some form of
cultural dialogue and common expression with Israeli Jewish
artists. One example is the recent adornment of the Wadi
Nisnas area of Haifa. Paintings and murals of Mediterranean
scenes and sculptures of stone and iron were prepared
through the co-operation of some 100 Jewish and Arab artists.
Some Israeli Arabs have introduced the Arab perspective
into their work, working as individuals within Israeli
culture to express their points of view. Particularly
important in this connection are the writers Anton Shammas
and the late Emil Habibi. Their works in Hebrew express
the experience of the Arabs of Israel yet have been widely
read by the Israeli Jewish public. Such writers have created
their own artistic expression while using the tools of
Israeli culture. Their contribution thus differs from
the Arab actors mentioned earlier who are involved in
cultural projects created by Jews. There are exceptional
cases, however, in which Arab actors have created their
own one-person shows in order to express their individual
viewpoint.
An interesting phenomenon has developed in recent decades
in Israeli music. With internal ethnic realignments between
Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews (see
Section 10), local musicians have stopped relying
almost exclusively on Western models. As a result, Middle
Eastern (i.e. Arabic) motifs are increasingly heard in
the local popular music. These musical influences first
penetrated the Israeli music scene through the filter
of the early Mizrahi singers. Wishing to be accepted by
the Israeli mainstream, they sang in Hebrew and included
some Western and Mediterranean popular styles.
In the early to mid-1990s, however, some musicians began
to shift into Arabic musical styles as the Arabic language
became increasingly acceptable. Some Israeli musicians
began to work within the classical Arab tradition itself,
a key example being Zehava Ben. After considerable success
with her Turkish-influenced Hebrew-language popular music,
she proceeded to present a series of critically-acclaimed
concerts in Arabic, singing the work of the great Egyptian
singer Um Kulthoum. Interestingly enough, this was very
well received by the Arab population of the region. In
a parallel trend, a number of popular Mizrahi singers
released disks of dance music in Arabic.
A totally different manifestation of this trend in music
began to develop in the mid-1990s. Buoyed by the new optimistic
atmosphere of co-existence in the years immediately following
the Oslo agreements, a number of groups formed that included
both Jewish and Israeli-Arab musicians. They started to
play a completely new kind of Israeli music, a fusion
of Western and Arabic musical influences. When the atmosphere
of optimism began to fade, most of the groups fell apart.
However one group survived that has garnered considerable
critical acclaim – both in Israel and in Europe.
Bustan Avraham (Abraham’s Garden) has produced
some intriguing instrumental music, introducing sectors
of the Israeli public to the potential in Arabic music.
Jewish Israel’s problematic relationship with the
Arabs in general – and with the Arab Israeli population
in particular – will continue in the future. Whether
the subject of the Arabs appears at the forefront of Israeli
creative culture will depend, among other things, on the
degrees of optimism and/or pessimism that it arouses in
Israeli society. The directions that creative expression
takes will largely depend on the directions that the general
relationship takes.