«We Must Give them Memories»

A street in downtown Jerusalem

I met Gil one day when my regular hairdresser was on vacation and the haircut could not wait. Jerusalem is wonderful in that sense; for every fifty meters, you will find a grocery store, a synagogue, and a hairdresser – and that’s just a mild exaggeration. I chose Gil’s tiny and rather undistinctive shop.

Hairdressers usually belong to one of two categories; those who use their profession as a cover for practicing their speaking faculties and those who reluctantly communicate with customers, but do so out of professional duty. Hairdressers are of course nice people so they also try to be sensitive to the wishes of the customers. Gil is a talker, and a very interesting person at the same time.

The topic soon entered politics, and I told Gil that I met Sai’id, a Palestinian Arab, the day before, just outside Bethlehem. Sai’id made some rather unusual statements, talking openly about the corruption in the Palestinian Authority and numbered a lot of other shortcomings in the Palestinian Arab society. He did not spare criticism of Israel either, but the honest self-criticism is unusual when Palestinian Arabs speak to outsiders. Normally, Israel is blamed for every ill.    

Sai’id said he longed back to the period before the Oslo Agreement (signed in 1993). At that time, there were hardly any road blocks, no security barrier, and Arabs worked in Israel while Israelis often did their shopping in Bethlehem and other Arab towns.

Gil was not surprised. “This is how a person older than forty years speak”, he said, whether it is an Israeli or an Arab. “We remember how it was before Oslo, before the so-called peace negotiations – and we were much better off.” Gil told me that as a child he had often slept over in the Arab town of Yatta, south of Hebron. His father employed Arab workers in his company, and sometimes Gil would stay overnight in their homes, playing with their children. “When I tell my children this story nowadays, they think I am lying.” Yatta is today known among Israelis as a stronghold for Hamas and the town from where numerous terror attacks originated.

“We have to give our children other memories,” Gil said. A generation has grown up that only know Arabs as terrorists, but “it did not use to be like this.”

Gil had not lost hope. He knows that the reality of Jerusalem in 2018 does not have to be the standard for the future. He knew Arabs as friends - he also learned their language. True, even back then, there were terrorism, but support for it among the general population was far from what it is today. The contact between the two communities made it impossible to demonize “the other.” Both sides had experienced that the other side was also human.

A Brazilian graffiti artist visiting Bethlehem working on the security barrier. Israel had to put up the barrier to prevent terrorism that intensified following the Oslo Agreement of 1993 and the establishment of the PA.

The lack of contact between the communities the last twenty-five years serves as a fertile ground for those who want to demonize the other side. And unfortunately, an entire system has been built to do so; the educational system, the media, and the religious institutions of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA has educated an entire generation in the belief that Israel is the reason for all their miseries, that Jews are the evil of the world, and that murdering them is honorable. And these obvious lies can no longer be disproved by personal contact – as they were for Sa’id and Gil. Tellingly, most Palestinian Arab terrorists are under 25 years old – they have no memories that things used to be different.

This does not mean that terrorism would cease if there was contact between the communities. There are many other motivations, especially religious, that motivates the terrorists to perform their perverse acts. But memories of the sort described above, create an effective barrier against attacks. Sa’id and Gil are living proof of this.
The PA must not be allowed to educate yet another generation in hatred. The children must be given memories - good memories.