by joe eskenazi
staff writer
Mohammad Darawshe’s family has lived in the vicinity of Nazareth for more than 800 years, and no fewer than 6,500 of his neighbors are in some way related to him.
So the longtime advocate for coexistence knows the drill. His ancestors have long been coexisting with Israelis, Brits, Ottomans, Mamelukes and even the odd Crusader or two.
“If you look at the history of the Jewish people, I do accept the notion that they did come home” to Israel, notes Darawshe, the director of external relations for the New York- and Israel-based Abraham Fund (www.abrahamfund.org).
“But I need [the Jews] to understand that it is also my home.”
Darawshe spoke to j. during a brief respite from a cross-country speaking tour that carried him across time zones nine different times. He was in the Bay Area for meetings Nov. 9 in Oakland and San Francisco with Abraham Fund CEO Ami Nahshon, the former longtime director of the East Bay federation.
The two conversed a bit in Hebrew and Arabic, which both hope will be commonplace for tomorrow’s Israeli youth. The Abraham Fund has started a pilot program for Arabic language classes in Israeli fourth and fifth grades that has spread to 120 schools in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Beersheva, and to every elementary school in Haifa.
“I expected to see picket lines and parents banging down the doors of schools saying ‘I don’t want my child participating in this program,’” Nahshon said.
“But the reality is there’s been very little criticism of this program from parents. In fact, parents and teachers are banging on the door demanding [their students] also learn Arabic.”
The Arabic teachers are usually Arabs as well, “which in itself is a revelation,” Darawshe says. “They’re not talking about the Arabs and the Jews — there they are, and you deal with them and have firsthand experience with them and their culture. I hope we’ll be able to encourage Jewish teachers to go teach Hebrew in Arab schools.”
It’s all part of Nahshon’s vision to change Arabic from “the language of the enemy” to “the language of the neighbor.” Too many times he’s asked his Israeli friends if they speak Arabic to receive an answer such as “I can say ‘stop,’ or ‘come over here’ or ‘show me your hands.’”
If those sound like commands an officer might bark, that’s no coincidence. Ever since the Israeli police force’s aggressive response to protests and riots left 13 Israeli Arabs dead in 2000, the Abraham Fund has been working to ensure that sort of bloodshed doesn’t happen again.
Israeli police revamped protocols and procedures. They range from recruiting more Arabs into the force to avoiding cultural faux pas such as using dogs to search an Arab bedroom (this would be the equivalent, Darawshe notes, of loosing a pig in a Jewish home).
While many Jews in Israel and here view the drive to eradicate anti-Arab prejudice in Israeli society as an egalitarian measure, Darawshe doesn’t. His take: Don’t do it for him. Do it for you.
“The mainstream Jewish community should [equalize Israeli Arabs and Jews] out of enlightened self-interest, because Israeli Arabs are not going away. And if we fail in our efforts to make a cohesive society, other forces might fill the gap. Other forces still try to pull the carpet out from beneath the Jews and Arab Israelis and derail this. If we fail, everyone will be sorry,” he said.
Nahshon adds that the Israeli government has been “chronically unwilling or unable” to foster coexistence, but he feels the tide may be turning.
“The government should take over the work of all the 170 organizations working on Jewish-Arab relations. The government should buy us out — and we’ll be happy to sell for a cent,” adds Darawshe.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California