JERUSALEM, Dec 26: Some Palestinians and Israelis are making love, not war. But Ahmed, a Palestinian Muslim, and Ayelet, an Israeli Jew, say their romance will soon make them exiles from a land torn by more than 11 weeks of Palestinian-Israeli bloodshed.‘‘I cried the first day of the clashes,’’ Ayelet said, sitting in the apartment she shares with Ahmed. ‘‘We had just started to build a dream and I thought, ‘They’re stealing my dreams and I will have to leave my home’’.
At least 330 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. For Ahmed, Ayelet’s boyfriend of two years, the toll of the violence has hit home. Some of his childhood friends and a family member are among the dead.
It also changed their lives. After the fighting erupted and Arabs were attacked in the central Israeli city where they live, Ahmed did not leave the home of Ayelet’s parents for three days. It was the only place he felt safe.
Now the two 25-year-olds, who did not want their last names or the city they live in revealed because they are afraid of retaliation, are thinking of moving to Europe.
‘‘It’s no good for us here. With every attack, I hear people talking about Arabs in the bus and it’s breaking me up inside. I hear it and I see his family in front of my eyes. I want to go to a place where people see us as equals,’’ Ayelet said.
They say they can no longer envision a life in Israel where Ahmed is a second-class citizen and Ayelet is the talk of the town. Nor can they see themselves in the West Bank village of Zaim, where Ayelet is not welcome in Ahmed’s family’s home. In either place, one of them risks being branded a collaborator.
Israel captured east Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and annexed it in a move not recognised internationally.
Encounters between Israelis and Palestinians from beyond the 1967 border are rare, although Arabs supply much of Israel’s manual labour. ‘‘I didn’t know any (Arabs) and I didn’t know anything about Arabs, except what I saw on television,’’ Ayelet said. Then she took a job as a waitress at a restaurant where Ahmed was working his way up to head cook and spending nights on a cot in the back.
And though he had never had a girlfriend and his contact with his sisters in a devout family of 10 siblings had been formal, he was drawn to the auburn-haired Jewish feminist in wire-rimmed spectacles from ‘‘a family of semi-Communist ideas’’.
‘‘I felt from the start that I had known her forever.’’ Ahmed and his family suffered under the occupation, which he says oppresses his people. After the first Intifada (uprising) began in 1987, he left school to throw rocks at Israelis.
‘‘The Intifada influenced me a lot, because the Israeli Army would close the school or the Arabs would call a general strike,’’ he said.
Ahmed says he only threw stones and one petrol bomb in 1990-1991. But late one night in 1995, Israeli soldiers caught him outside his home, hooded him, and took him away. ‘‘I Left the house to see who was at the door and I didn’t come back for 20 months,’’ he said. Ahmed tells the same story of other political prisoners held by Israel. He said he was held in a police station ‘‘dungeon’’ for weeks where he was tortured, coerced to confess, and denied legal aid until trial. Then Palestinian prisoners sold him out.
‘‘I came out angry at everybody at both sides. I have no place here. I can’t live in peace here or in the territories. And I want neither,’’ he says.
He met Ayelet less than a year later. His mother asked him: ‘‘You were arrested by them, humiliated by them, what are you doing living with a Jewess?’’To love, there had to be an opening of hearts and minds. ‘‘I had lived with the same illusions that every Isreli has. I was stunned to hear (Ahmed’s stories). And ashamed. I am still ashamed. Now when ‘’
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
