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February 11, 2005
Kinship of Arab and Jew
The "parents of tomorrow" sing, talk on 10-day tour.
PAT JOHNSON
When Rivka Taylor and Sabrin Odeh were preparing to board their
flight from Ben-Gurion Airport to begin a 10-day North American
tour, the two friends had very different experiences.
"My family came with me to the airport and her family came
with her to the airport," Taylor said of the scene. "What
happened - what almost all the time happens to Arabs – they
took her to the other side of the airport to check all her bags.
I'm telling you they took out everything. I went straight through.
I went straight through and she took about an hour and a half. Our
parents were waiting for her to come out and they're witnessing
this situation together."
For Taylor's family - settlers in a West Bank town near Ramallah
– and Odeh's family - liberal Arab Christians from Nazareth
– the situation was a case study in how Jewish and Arab Israelis
are treated differently by their society.
The two young women – Taylor is 23, Odeh, 22 – are part
of an innovative program at Tel-Hai College in the Galil, in northern
Israel. Students at the college's Centre for Peace and Democracy
Education, Taylor and Odeh met last year, when they both took a
course in intercultural dialogue.
"I never expected to be in any kind of dialogue with Arabs,"
said Taylor, who recalls the terror of travelling as a child down
the road from her settlement to Israel proper, a pistol-packing
hired gun beside her and Arabs throwing rocks at their car. After
the intifada began in 2000, the rocks turned to bullets and when
Taylor finished her national service, she was afraid to go home
to the settlement. Her experience growing up predisposed her to
distrust Arabs, she said.
"My contact with Arabs was through the conflict. I knew Arabs
as bad," Taylor said. Her coming-around began at college, the
first time many Israeli Jews and Arabs meet each other. Even so,
both women said, it is easy for Arabs and Jews to remain isolated,
even in ostensibly integrated colleges.
"You could walk into a class and see clearly there is no communication
or relationship between Arabs and Jews," Taylor said.
But Tel-Hai offers an opportunity to bridge this chasm, she said,
with a dialogue course for which students gain academic credit.
For Taylor, meeting and talking with Arabs was eye-opening.
"I'm married and marriage is the same thing. You can't put
things aside, not talk about things. You have to be part of one
another's life. It doesn't mean just living next to each other.
It means having some culture of the other fellow or nation,"
she said.
For Odeh's part, the dialogue group was not as startling to her
worldview.
"I come from a very liberal family," said Odeh. "My
house was always open to political meetings, to Arabs and Jews meeting."
Still, there are areas where the two women disagree. It's difficult,
Taylor said, to know that your best friend believes you should be
evicted from your home. Some issues are left unaddressed for the
sake of friendship.
The thing that brought the two to Canada, as part of a tour that
includes Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, is their
singing. Taylor and Odeh meld their voices in a mellifluous repertoire
of Arabic, Hebrew and English folk and peace songs. In addition
to telling their story, they sang a few songs at a public meeting
in Vancouver last Saturday night.
Odeh and Taylor know their tiny effort of songs and dialogue is
not going to change the world immediately, though it is clearly
having a ripple effect in their families and their surrounding environments.
"We're the parents of tomorrow," said Odeh. "We have
to change the situation. We can't leave it the way it is. We have
to change the situation. We can't live like this – the Jews
apart and the Arabs apart."
Pat Johnson is a B.C. journalist and commentator.
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