Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

Travels with Mohammed - Part 1 of 2
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Travels with Mohammed - 

(Part 1 of 2)

A trip with lawyer Mohammed Dahla to his childhood stomping grounds in Galilee takes us to the two major shapers of his identity - Sheikh Raad Salah and MK Azmi Bishara - and raises some serious questions about the common future of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. His message is clear: The Jews have already lost their battle for control of this land

As dusk approaches, Mohammed's brown eyes will look straight into my eyes and he'll say: You have to understand that it's not going to work. Your Jewish mind came up with this Jewish-democratic invention, but the invention won't work. So instead of talking and talking the whole day long, through this whole long trip, what we should have done was to sit down together quietly and try to formulate some sort of new, joint constitution. Because you have no other ally: I am your only ally. And instead of going to the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews), you should have come to me. And instead of trying to scrape up half-Jews and quarter-Jews and eighth-Jews from every corner of the world, you should talk to me. Because I am here, in your backyard. I am here and I am not going anywhere.

So talk to me, attorney Mohammed Dahla will say to me. Talk to me, give me your hand, make me a partner. Because, like it or not, you are a minority in the Middle East. And even if your country takes part in the Eurovision song contest and plays basketball in Europe, if you open an atlas and look at the map for a minute, this is what you will see: 300 million Arabs all around, a billion-and-a-half Muslims. So do you really think that you can go on hiding in this crooked structure of a Jewish state? Do you really think you can protect yourself by means of this internal contradiction of a Jewish democracy?

To live by the Jewish character of the State of Israel is to live by the point of the sword, attorney Mohammed Dahla will say, and over time, you will not be able to live by the point of the sword. The world will change, the balance of forces will change, demography will change. In fact, demography is already changing. Your only guarantee is me; your only way to survive in the Arab-Muslim world is to strike an alliance with me. Because if you don't do it, tomorrow will be too late. When you become a minority, you will look for me, but you won't be able to find me.

In the meantime, though, it's morning. In the meantime, it's metropolitan Tel Aviv. Gedera to Hadera. And Mohammed Dahla, my friend and my rival, says to me: Look at this architecture - it's so foreign, so alien to the place. It's as though some kind of invasion force emerged from the sea and landed on the beach. Without any sensitivity, without any connection to the land. As though the immigrants who arrived don't feel the land and its past. And you build with dizzying speed. You build arrogantly and high, and glued - absolutely glued - to the earth.

Look at the road signs, Dahla says. Most of them are in Hebrew and English, without Arabic. Because what you want, after all, is for a tourist from the moon to be able to come and wander around the country and believe that it really is a Jewish country. That there really is a Jewish state here. But I'm in your way. I and a million other Arabs are in your way. That's why it's so complicated for you with us. And in order to be able to continue with this adorable fiction of a Jewish-European state, you are trying to hide our existence. To erase our geography, our history, our identity. Now you are even trying to erase our parliamentary representation.

Does the idea of a Jewish state truly lack all justification? Don't the Jews have the right to self-determination within the boundaries of June 4, 1967? Mohammed says that the Jewish public now living in the country has the right to self-determination. But one can understand why the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. And one must understand that there is no balance of rights here. There is no balance of our right v. your right. And that is because at the point of departure, the young lawyer Dahla says, the Jews had neither legal right, nor historical right, nor religious right. The only right they had was the right of distress. But the right of distress cannot justify 78 percent [of Mandatory Palestine becoming Israel]. It cannot justify the fact that the guests became the masters.

At the end of the day, it is the natives, not the immigrants, who have a supreme right to the country. Those who have lived here for hundreds of years have become part of the land, just as the land has become part of them. We are not like you. We are not strangers and we are not wanderers and we are not migrants. For hundreds of years, we lived on this land and we multiplied on it. Therefore, no one can uproot us from it. No one can separate it from us. Not even you.

Existential distress

Dahla was born in 1968, in the village of Turan. He studied and worked hard and made his way by himself. His achievements opened the gates of the Faculty of Law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he also excelled. In 1989 he became the first Arab law clerk in the Supreme Court. In 1991 he became the first Arab lawyer of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). In 1993 he and attorney Mazen Kufti opened a flourishing law firm on the "seam line" in Jerusalem. In 1995 he became one of the founders of Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. From 1998 to 2000 he was the legal adviser of Palestinian Authority Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo in his secret meetings with Yossi Beilin. Two-and-a-half years ago he married Suhad, a lawyer and television presenter. His first-born son, Omar, is now seven months old.

For two intense years in the mid-1990s, we were partners in leading the board of ACRI. So, as we travel north in his blue Mercedes, Mohammed and I conduct a conversation that focuses on a shared conceptual universe: human rights, minority rights, liberal democracy. However, in contrast to the past, each of us brings to the conversation his national history and his national perspective. His existential distress. And, in contrast to the past, Mohammed explicates a full world view. Why he no longer believes in the partition of the country; why he has jettisoned the solution of two states for two peoples.

During his years in the village, identity took the form of local revolt. The identity of a village son. It was only during his period at the university that he acquired a Palestinian consciousness. When the students' union debated the two-state solution proposed by Hadash, an Arab-Jewish party, versus the solution of one secular state proposed by the militant Sons of the Village, he leaned toward the latter. He found the idea advanced by Hadash artificial and insufficient. The two-state solution did not solve the problem of the 1948 Arabs or resolve the question of the historic justice of 1948. However, when the Oslo accords were signed, in September 1993, Dahla was persuaded that the only viable solution was that of two states. And for a few years, he even saw Shimon Peres' New Middle East taking on flesh in his office.

A few months before the Camp David summit of July 2000, Dahla already understood that there was no hope for the Oslo process. That what was called the "peace process" was actually the submission of the Palestinian people, a sophisticated stratagem to "launder" the occupation. But after Camp David, he was totally convinced: The Israeli nation is not ripe for a historic conciliation. The Israelis are not yet ready to give the Palestinians minimal historic justice. Consequently, he reached the conclusion that there is no avoiding a struggle; that there is no choice but to shake up the Israeli society. To make them understand that in the end, the solution will take a binational form - one state, democratic, between the river and the sea. A state in which the Jewish Law of Return will be complemented by a Palestinian right of return. A state in which the settlers in Hebron will be able to stay in their homes just as it will allow the refugees of the devastated villages to return to the ruins of their homes.

Silence and mute fear

The two of us also drove north on the first Friday after the events of October 2000 [when police shot dead 13 Arab citizens of Israel in the course of quelling unrest]. We visited the Jewish community of Katzir, in connection with which each of us had a certain part in the High Court of Justice case about whether an Arab could purchase a home there (at the time, Mohammed entered one of the houses in the community and conducted fake negotiations to purchase it, taking pleasure in watching the owner squirm in a web of contradictions involving the sale of her house at an exorbitant price to a Muslim).

We also visited the city of Umm al-Fahm, charred in the wake of the flames. We visited Sheikh Raad Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement (he received us with eyes beaming and talked about the abandoned mosques in the ruined villages throughout the country and about the danger looming to the Al-Aqsa mosque, and about how the Jews had no right to Al-Aqsa. You know, he said, even according to the Israeli historians, even according to Ha'aretz Magazine, the Jews have no right to Al-Aqsa: The whole story of the Temple Mount never happened).

We visited the mourning tent of a shaheed - a martyr for the cause - in Kafr Kana (the bereaved father related with shining eyes that every day, when his 17-year-old son returned from the demonstrations, he told his father he was sorry he had come back alive). And we visited the empty streets and deserted restaurants of Nazareth. Everywhere we went, what struck us most forcefully was the silence, a mute fear. It was as though both the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian citizens of Israel were appalled by what they had just done. As though both sides had taken refuge within themselves in a kind of voluntary curfew, frightened and waiting to see what the future portended.

Now, though, two-and-a-quarter years later, there were crowds everywhere: Jews and Palestinians. Despite two years of terrorist attacks, Wadi Ara was again filled with Jewish visitors. There was not a seat to be had in the restaurants of Nazareth: Hebrew-speakers and Arabic-speakers were shoveling in the hummus side by side, and ordering grilled meat in loud Hebrew and in loud Arabic. It's as though the internal peace has been restored and as though the bleeding wounds of October have healed. It's as though October 2000 never happened.

So when Mohammed and I again enter the modest office of Sheikh Salah, a surprise awaits us: His eyes are no longer beaming and his face is tormented, furrowed with wrinkles. In fluent Hebrew, he tells me that the attempt to expel the Arabs from their land is imminent; that the problem of the Arab sector is not one of rejection, but of existence. That the proposal put forward by the left to make Umm al-Fahm part of the Palestinian state is a proposal to carry out an elegant "transfer." And that the various proposals by the government to block the Islamic Movement and to disqualify Arab parties running for the Knesset are also part of the attempt to effect an elegant transfer. On the West Bank, near Nablus, an entire village has already been expelled, but no one says anything. Therefore, the feeling in the villages is that 1948 is looming again, that things are repeating themselves.