See video-interview with "Amaal",
the strong-mindeded, belligerent lawyer,
who fights stereotypes

That the series includes some simple lessons
in Arabic, based on the comic scenes,
pleases me,
despite the ugly reactions from some people

About director Ronni Ninio and script-writer Sayed Kashua

In a video-interview in Hebrew, Said Kashu' is asked
if he isn't afraid, that the Jewish stereotypes about Arabs
("they are not stereotypes, they are true..")
will be strengthened.
He says "No", but accustically I couldn't get his explanation.

On the Internet I found info about Sayed Kashua mainly German

Sayed Kashua
that he is an Arab author, born in Tira 1975, who writes in Hebrew
for "Ha'ir" and "Haaretz"
* 1975 in Tira, Israel) ist ein Schriftsteller,
his theme being the social and cultural tensions
in the society of Palestinians who are at the same time Israeli citizens.
He lives with his wife and daughter
in the Palestinian part of the village Beit Safafa near Jerusalem
His two fiction stories have become bestsellers in Israel,
and were translated into German by Mirjam Pressler

01. Tanzende Araber (2002) ~~~hebr.: 'Ar¯avîm rôqedîm ~~~
02. Da ward es Morgen (2005) ~~~~~hebr.: Way-yehî bôqer

2006 Kashua received the price of the Lessing-Akademie

I read the German interview with Kashua about this book
and found myself shocked and grieved.
The psychological situation of Israeli Arabs
is even worse than I knew or imagined,
"We are slaves, who are oppressed,
but prefer to stay slaves because we fear for our security..."

The info touched me also because of Kashua's two places:
He was born in Tira, - on Nov. 4 I've [see below] written about my
[See also: In memoriam Rushdi Fadila]
His house in Tira was also the place,
where we founded "Mushaaraka-Shutafut-Partnership",
the "Unity for creating the conditions of partnership between Arab and Jews."

And Sayid Kashua now lives in the Palestinian part of Beit Safafa .
It was in the Israeli part of this divided village, Beit Safafa,
where I lived with an Arab family for for 3 days in 1961 [see below]
when almost no Jewish Israeli was even aware
of the existence of Arab co-citizens,

On my wall still hangs the copper relief of two crane birds,
made by Buseima, the daughter of the Otman Family,
and given to me, when she - Accompanied by a male relative -
visited me at Ramat-Hadar, in January 1965,
a week after my daughter Ronnit was born,
8 months after I had finally immigrated to Israel.
Buseima was 16 and about to get married with someone in Kuweit.
I never heard of her again.

The producer Daniel Paran
is a religious man from Jerusalem,
who works with his wife and 7 children
as co-workers in his company...

Here are excerpts from an interview with him
about "Arab Work"

Muslim opens first Arab Holocaust museum in Nazareth
The museum's owner Khaleed Mahameed, a 43-year old lawyer, husband, and father of two, said that he learned about the holocaust during his time at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He spent about 20,000 shekels (US$4,500) of his own money in order to create the museum, despite the alienation of his own brother, the rejection of the Arab news media, and a public that is slow to accept his ideas.

Khaled's Holocaust institute
Arab-Israeli launches Holocaust research facility;
Khaled Mahamid says Arab world must understand horrors...
"I'm paying the price for this lack of knowledge," he says. "Israel's existence is premised on the memory of the Holocaust, while the Palestinians deny it."

If the Palestinians were made aware of the horrors that took place during the Holocaust, the conflict would end within a few days, he says.

20:37 [completed the next morning]

I've been working the entire day
to deepen the info above.
and to melt it into a sculpture.

As if the sculpture were lacking something,
at 17:00, I suddenly got a visitor:
Dina, one of my star-children,
whom I hadn't seen for many months.

She had chosen - for her army-service -
to "serve" as "a woman fighter",
and after months of hard training,
"served" in a guarding unit in the Arava,
on the border between Israel and Jordan
(two countries which are supposedly "at peace",
but "terrorists" or drug-dealers don't respect this)
I had waited for her to become disillusioned,
though I knew, that she needed her lessons.

Some 6 weeks ago she woke up,
and saw clearly, that
"the army in general and my unit in particular
are bad for human beings,
among the girls only four are not ill,
physically or otherwise,
and the boys too suffer."

"Why then are you so beautiful today?
Is it love?"
She answered sadly:
"I don't think so.
The hard army "service" disturbs.
My boyfriend in the North -
everybody is just eating his prick,
as the slang goes."

I understood what she meant:
"I remember my two sons 22 years ago,
one in the airforce, one at sea.
They both said:
'Imma, you must understand,
that in the army it's impossible
to let yourself f eel.
You just have to shut down your heart.'
My younger son never really discovered .
Denial had and has the upper hand."

"Do you know,
why you created this period in your drama?"
"Oh yes!"
she said with enthusiasm.
"I've learnt so much, so incredibly much!"

From my diary, November 4th, 2007

[About "Bridge above the Wadi" and the accusation,
that Jews, even in an Jewish-Arab school,
don't learn Arabic]

I want to say all this also in English and put the story on my website. I decided – in 2001 – to create "Healingkiss" in English, so that neither Jews nor Arabs would feel discriminated....

It is not true, that Jews in Israel don't want to make the effort to learn Arabic. But whenever someone tells me with pride: "I've started to learn Arabic", I must fake enthusiasm, and my heart aches with pain and frustration. It is mustaheel – impossible – to learn Arabic! Except for the correspondent for Arab affairs – Oded Granot– I've never heard somebody who learnt Arabic as a second language, really master it.
I myself am truly a sad example for what I claim – and I do not yet understand, what this means for the dream of so-called co-existence...

I've learnt both, Hebrew and Arabic, first the Hebrew of the Bible, than spoken Hebrew. I see myself in the court of Tuebingen University before a Hebrew lesson. I cry: 'I shall never learn this language!'
And this, though I was the best student in years in Greek and Latin in the Humanistic Gymnasium for girls , the only one in the entire State of Baden Wuerttemberg. And after 10 months of living in Israel (1960-1961), when I – with my enormous discipline – reached a standard of fluency far above any of the other foreign students, though most of them were Jewish and should have had a higher motivation. Back in Germany I started to correspond with my future husband. But he asked me to write in German, while he would write in Hebrew: "It's no pleasure to read your Hebrew!"

When I immigrated to Israel in 1964, I dedicated an entire year to becoming better in Hebrew and then I started with Arabic. It was 1965 and I had not met even one Jew in Israel who even considered the necessity of learning Arabic. I availed myself of three different study books, in English and Hebrew , and learnt and learnt, with tears... "By the way", I also took care of 3 children, born between 1963 and 1966, and worked on an edition of the letters and diaries of Franz Rosenzweig, my father-in-law (died in 1929, 9 years before I was born).

Once I drove to a bookshop in Petach-Tikva, with my small motorbike and asked for "literature in Arabic". The shopkeeper looked at me, as if I had asked for literature in Chinese. But then he found some booklets with fairy tales. Suddenly he had an idea: "Approach this man over there!"

I thought the man was maybe an Iraqi Jew. But while we talked – in Hebrew , of course – he said that he was an Arab, yes a teacher in Arabic, in his home village Kalansawa. I asked him, if he could teach me spoken Arabic and proposed a technical way to do that: I would write down simple sentences about daily matters, and send these to him together with a tape. He then would translate my sentences and speak them on the tape and send this back to me, and I , then, would listen to these tapes over and over again, until I would get the language into my intestines! Or so I thought...

I don't know, how many tapes were exchanged. But after the 1967 war things became a bit easier. the consciousness of some people included the fact, that there were Arab citizens with an Israeli passport.

A very good study book for spoken Arabic was published by Prof. Moshe Piamenta. If my hope for conquering Arabic was raised, it was because of this book, and also this outstanding man, whom I visited once, much later, in order to thank him. Each lesson ended with a proverb, and some of them helped me to live my life, a life characterized by endless frustration concerning the fulfilling of my "vocation"...
-ma ahla min il-halawwa
– is-suhba ba'ad il-'adawwa –
what is sweeter than khalva (a sweet made of Sesam-oil and honey):
the friendship after the enmity.
whenever I quoted this proverb to Arabs, they didn't know it, but they said, they would adopt it.

Another one:
"a-shirsh il-tarri yeqassir is-sahr ik-yaabis "
– the fresh (living) root will break (destroy) the dry rock. "
this is a proverb people know, but don't apply, - some were grateful for being reminded of it.

A third one:
"id'a sahbak 'ask, ma tilhaqoush kullo"
"If your friend is honey, don't lick him up to the end",
meaning: " be careful not to ask to much from your friend – stay at a respectful distance."

I also found a study book for spoken Arabic, which was published already in the thirties, before there was a State of Israel. And then the radio started to provide lessons. Of course, I recorded each lesson on tape – for listening to a lesson only once would not have availed me of any benefit.
Still, when meeting with Arab people, my talking was poor, and what was worse – for when talking I can talk myself around until I find the words I do know – my understanding was poor.

When I had finished my Ph.D. thesis, (5 hours per day on the average between 1967 and 1972) and another book within the edition about Franz Rosenzweig's work, and my youngest son had started school, I had an idea. Though I was now dedicating all my free time to preparing for what I thought was my vocation, I felt, I needed to do more for "Peace", and the least I could do, was to improve my Arabic.

So with my motor-bike a drove to Tira, to the department of education, asking, if I could sit in in a class for Arabic and thus learn. I was sent to a teacher of fifth grade, Rushdi Fadila! It was clear, that Rushdi was considered the best teacher in Tira. So once a week I came to his class, and soon enough to his house and family. I don't remember, how much patience Rushdi had to talk with me in Arabic.

When we founded "Partnership-Mushaaraka" in March 1977, after two and a half years of my individual work for "Creating conditions of Partnership between Arabs and Jews" , we did this in his house. Of course, then and always - the Arab participants suited themselves to the Jewish participants, and everybody talked Hebrew.

The same was true, when we organized the one-week camp with 90 young Arabs and Jews (including my children) at Neve-Shalom (from which the Arab-Jewish village, envisioned by the founder of Neve-Shalom, Bruno Husar finally grew wings). Whenever we sang the "Partnership-hymn" , the Arabs could sing the song in both languages, while few of the Jews could sing the Arab version. This was not because of lack of effort!

Of course, it is helpful to learn a language, when one lives in the community, where this language is spoken. But in Israel of the sixties, there were many Jews, whose Hebrew was so bad, that I couldn't speak Hebrew with them. On the other hand –I created many opportunities to live among Arabs at least for several days, the first time already in 1961, a few months after I had come to Israel for a scholarship year at the Hebrew university. My fiancé in Germany had organized a meeting between me and an Arab co-student in Frankfurt: "If you want this people to reach peace", Martin Fincke said to me, "you have to get to know the people who are now considered the enemies of the Jews."

So I was hosted for 3 days at Beit-Safafa, a village near Jerusalem, then divided between Israel and Jordan. Relatives could talk to each other only through the fence. The 3 days were uncredibly difficult for me, not only because then it was , as one says today, "a cultural shock " for me , for instance to eat on the floor (and i came back with Amoebae, which will stay in my intestines forever, and attack me every once and then) , but because of the frustration of communication. One of the sons of the family knew Hebrew well. But I didn't know Hebrew well. The only togetherness which I enjoyed, was, when they took me to another family, where we danced.When dancing, one is free from needing to talk..

When in January 1965 the daughter Buseima, now grown-up and about to marry somebody in Kuweit, came to see me (together with a male relative, of course), while I was sick in bed after having given birth to my daughter, we talked Hebrew... She brought me a gift, which i still cherish: two cranes engraved in copper.

From among the many painful experiences with communicating in Arabic, I want to mention only one more: when my husband and I visited Old Jerusalem for the first time , quite soon after the war, we greeted a man who was standing above one of the staircases. He invited us to his house, and though it was difficult at first – in the recent war the eldest of ten children had stuck his head out from the upper wall of that kind of Old Jerusalem "house" and got killed – I could make myself be accepted, even loved, and we could help the family to bring the woman, always sick, to a hospital. Still, the communication, now in the Jerusalem dialect, was so difficult, that after a year or so I did not foster the relationship any longer.

6 years of "Partnership" work (Nov. 1974-Dec.1980),
3 years of teaching "Arabic Literature" in a teachers' college (1981-1984) – nothing really helped. I was unable to master this language.

When I started with "Succah in the Desert", I again had great need of communicating in Arabic. There was a mutual dependency between the "Succah" and the Bedouin greater family of Jum'aa, his two wifes, especially the older one, who often came to drink tea in the main succah and even drove her herds of sheep and goats through the area of the "Succayah".

To tell just one story: one winter morning, probably in early 1991, I was alone, without co-workers, without guests: I saw Juma'a approaching the Succah and went out to meet him: "Rachel, can you come with your jeep to my compound and help me get my tractor started? The battery has run out and the water too, I need water for my animals".
So we went to my jeep on the "parking-lot" , and what do we see? the jeep has a puncture! What would I have done without Jum'aa? I had no "jack", and in any case, I had never been able to learn to exchange a tyre myself.
Jum'aa, a Bedouin, always knows what to do. He asked me for a hoe and dug around the wheel, until it was free in the air and he could exchange it by the reserve wheel. When the wheel was fixed, we drove to his compound , connected a cable between the battery of my jeep and the battery of his tractor, and he could drive and get his three tons of water....

Of course, I could always "manage" with the language in such cases. But just managing doesn't give pleasure, leave alone full-fill-ment.

To skip a long, long story of forever frustrating experiences – I 'll end with the last experience:

In October 2007 Yahia came to my home in Arad. "Had'ra is sure you are dead!" he said seriously and asked me to come with him to his family in the Zealots' Valley....

Since I hadn't seen 'my' family for 15 months, and since I now live in solitude, even avoid hitchhiking, which means – no opportunities to practice and train my Arabic – my Arabic had become "rusted". .
I could communicate only with Yahia – who has always insisted to speak his poor Hebrew – and Samira, who was born and raised in Bethlehem, i.e. she speaks a dialect, which is closer to the dialect I know, not the Bedouin dialect , or one of them (since the dialects vary between tribe and tribe) , and since she is such a wise woman, this mother of 8 children at the age of 32, who was allowed to visit school only for 4 years, she is able to make an effort to talk clearly, so that I can understand , and what is more, she is ready to make an effort to understand, what I, Maryam, try to say. But with the children it was hopeless.

I don't know, why this time I even couldn't understand Had'ra anymore. Maybe , because young people in all languages "try" to speak in a way, that "ordinary" people have a hard time grasping, be it English, German, Hebrew or Arabic . In any case, - together with other frustrations – I finally decided to give up. I already gave away half of my books, and the other half, about 15, I'll only keep, because they fit well in my present shelf. And I'm not making any more effort to learn Arabic, as I've done from 1965 till 2005 – forty years.

(In fact , I wanted to start learning it already before immigrating to Israel in 1964. At Tuebingen University I was appointed a student teacher from Egypt. But when after the first lesson he asked me about the purpose of wanting to learn Arabic, and heard, that I was going to immigrate to Israel, the lessons stopped. The Union of Arab students" forbode him to teach me: "She may want to learn it to become a spy."

Again: I am fed up with suffering, suffering because of my superhuman motivation and superhuman discipline .

What this facit means for the much less gifted, much less disciplined, leave alone motivated Jews in Israel I do not know, isn't difficult to guess. If I am an example of an aim that is "mustaheel" (a word which exists only in Arabic, all other language put the syllable "un, im, non" before the word "possible: "im-possible", "un-moeglich", ee-aefshar") , then the difference in difficulty between Arabic and Hebrew is truly a 'tragic' non-condition for co-existence....

But at least – if this difficulty would be acknowledged and admitted – there would be avoided a little bit of self-hatred on the parts of the willing Jews, and a little bit of resentment on the part of the Arabs.

Moreover, the Arabs would be even prouder of their language, which has evolved over centuries of almost modern thinking – fertilized by the Greek and Roman philosophers and their language, which was, as well known, translated first by Arabs, and via their translations influenced the Europeans- while Hebrew lay dormant, hibernated, so to speak, not from the time of the general exile after Bar Kochba and finally after the Christianazation of Palestine, but even at the time of Jesus, Jews in the Land of Israel spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew!

I have not studied the origin of the semitic languages, but the richness of the Arabic grammar and vocabulary has always enticed me, and when I was still hopeful, that in time – with constant practicing and training – I would master the language ( I even acquired an Arabic type-writer and learnt the method of writing "blindly" with ten fingers) – I used to say: "If my time will be ripe for becoming a writer, I want to write in Arabic."

I repeat:
Why do even the simpliest Arabs learn Hebrew so fast?
Because for somebody whose mother tongue is Arabic
– not for someone whose mother-tongue is
English, or French or German! –
learning Hebrew is child's game,
and even for me
– comparing the learning of both languages,
to learn Hebrew was child's game !

So, if Arabs would know and understand
the utter disproportion in difficulty between Arabic and Hebrew , they would be proud of their language,
and they would be compassionate with the Jews
who simply haven't got a chance to be their equals in this respect. And of course , since "language is petrofied philosophy",
a term I read 40 years ago,
not being able to understand Arabic,
the Jews also forgo the wisdom embedded in the Arabic language. but then, they have other advantages,
and becoming equal,
means to fertilize each other by the uniqueness,
each of us is gifted with.
Sing with me the wonderful song, Tomer sent me on Nov. 19:

You are white, I am black
I am dark, you are in the light
which warms like a mother,
which cares for you.
You are small I am big (or tall)
I want to, you are able to
dance and march forward,
to be whole among people,

And perhaps a day will come and we'll become equal,
you will be a river for me, and I'll be oceans for you
and we'll flow together to infinity
a second before the line of the shore arrives.

I cry, you scream,
I am wrong, you are right,
this is our drama,
and there is no audience and no stage,
Perhaps we should sit and rest
you are you, and I am I,
let's dance , march forward
let's be equal among people.

And perhaps a day will come and we'll become equal,
you will be a river for me, and I'll be oceans for you
and we'll flow together to infinity
a second before the line of the shore arrives.

Hagar talks with the Angel - a painting by an Indian painter from a Christian calendar

See my sculpture about Hagar, the Mother of Yishmael,

A Jewish-Arab school in Beesheva is supposed to be called "Hagar"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_in_Hand_%E2%80%93_Bridge_over_the_Wadi
http://www.handinhandk12.org/
in Hebrew: http://www.handinhand.org.il/?lang=he
in Arabic: (see there)
http://www.handinhand.org.il/?id=210&pid=28&nid=33

I want to say all this also in English (see left frame)

Continuation of my diary on November 4, 2007

It's also not by chance, that on this date, Nov. 4, I worked so hard
on the Page of Natan Jonathan's song: Ha-raita, though I inserted it on Nov. 2.

The public speech of the writer David Grossmann
in memory of the murdered Yitzchak Rabin
a year ago is not less relevant this year
David Grossmann's son was killed 2 months earlier in the Israel-Lebanon War.

Dalia Rabin, Yitzchak Rabins' daughter, said at the mass gathering:

Nov. 28, 2006 - Diary Entry:

Please help me to transform doomsday babble
into info that will help us, as a nation, to love ourselves!
And I shall never agaom mention that "fire" synchronicity of Nov. 4-5
(Grossman-Eliahu the prophet-Nakhal Khaemla...)

To All Nations Cafe
[mailto:allnationscafe@gmail.com]
Nov. 6, 2006
from Christa-Rachel Bat-Adam

Dear People -

Let me thank you for the small,
but truely significant things you do amidst our hopeless mess.
I, age 68. was German and Christian,
who became Jewish and Israeli,
and have worked for 48 years
on converting the negative dependency between Jews and Palestinians
into a positive dependency , i. e. a Partnership,
based - as any partnership - on the three conditions
- Common Interest, Mutual Trust, Equality in Self-respect.
I am glad especially about the info in your Newsletter which I highlighted.

May you love yourselves and cause others to love themselves,
for without learning to move the pain and anger and self-hatred,
which prevents total Self-Acceptance
and therefore total Self-Determination
nothing can change in the exterior world.

Nov. 12 Dear Christa-Rachel,

Thank you for your positive input and Amen to all you have said!
You are most welcome to come over to visit us in Jerusalem.
All the very best to you,
Dhyan

Come, Come Whoever You Are

You are most welcome to join in on this Tuesday or on the following weeks, anytime between 2 and 8 pm. Please bring food or drinks, musical or other instruments and anything else you would like to share with the group.

Driving instructions: Ein-Haniya is located on the road going from the Malha railway station in Jerusalem towards Bethlehem and Gush-Etzion (known as Walaja road), about 2.5 kilometers after you cross the railway line, and about 700 meters after the checkpoint you will see an old stone house on the left-hand side of the road - that is the place.
Coming from the West Bank, we are located on the road from Beit-Jala (DCO) to Jerusalem via Malha, about 4 kilometers after Walaja, before the checkpoint, on the right-hand side of the road.

We will be using a stone house and the outdoor space around it. In case of severe weather conditions you should better call us to make sure we are still having the gathering at 054-5832495 (Dhyan).