Common Ground on the Northern Border
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, 11 June 2000
No one, really, had thought about this in advance: the
thousands of Israeli Arabs who over several days flocked to the
new border fence with Lebanon to meet and talk with relatives
through the fences. They were an unexpected and moving sight.
It took but a few days for Israel to truncate this human drama as
it developed, on grounds of security considerations, but the
astonishing pictures had still been put before the Israelis, if only
for a moment. Hasty as they were, they exposed the Israelis,
perhaps for the first time, to the Palestinian tragedy in its full
dimensions, not only in distant pictures of a refugee camp in
Lebanon or in Gaza but in the shape of citizens of their own
country, residents of Haifa, Acre or Nazareth, crowding up to
the fence, trying to see and touch through the bars members of
their families whom they had not seen for 50 years or whom
they had never met before at all.The emotions of the Arab
citizens of Israel, repressed for dozens of years yet never
forgotten, suddenly burst into the consciousness of Israelis and
touched the nerve ends of the conflict. It is no wonder that
Israel hastened to shove this genie, which it sees as dangerous,
back into the bottle. It is a pity that it did so. It will burst out
again anyway. This was a spontaneous occurrence. Palestinian
refugees from the camps in southern Lebanon approached the
fence, to see their lost country.
Residents of the Bedouin village of Arab al Aramsheh saw
them from the other side of the border and the pictures were
broadcast on television. The rumor took wing and the children
of refugees from Israel began to flock to the new
wonder-border.
From both sides of the fence names were thrown across,
greetings transmitted rapidly and meetings set up for the
following day. Within a day, thousands of Palestinians were at
the fence on either side - young people who had never seen
their aunts and uncles and cousins and older people who had not
seen their brothers and sisters since they were children. Israelis
from Kawikat and Damun, Briwa and Abu Snaan, Safed and
Kabri came to see their relatives and neighbors who had been
less fortunate than they and had been expelled or had fled
northward across the border, and who have been living there
since then in the worst refugee situation in the region, in the
camps of Lebanon.
Some of them had not been heard from during all those years;
with others there had been occasional telephone contact or
meetings, once or twice, perhaps in Jordan. Babies were handed
across from side to side, only to be touched; images of
families were torn down and rebuilt - this one had died
and that one had been born, and excited calls rang back and
forth across the fence, which was good again. For a moment.
These were pictures that should have moved Jews greatly,
wherever they are. Anyone who still remembers the broadcasts
of the heartbreaking "Searching for Relatives" program on
Israel Radio during the 1950s and the 1960s - Holocaust
survivors looking for other lost survivors - should not have
remained indifferent to the sight of the similar Palestinian
experience. And those who lived cut off on either side of the
communist Iron Curtain could have remembered something.
But no.
These spectacles did not arouse any identification in Israel:
These were Arabs. Imagine what would have happened had
Jews been cut off and distanced this way from their families -
the Jewish world would have raised a ruckus, and rightly so. But
here it was a matter of Arabs and a matter of bringing the most
difficult problem of all to the forefront of consciousness. And
for this, most Israelis are still unprepared.
Therefore, perhaps, the Israel Defense Forces made such haste
to declare the area of the meetings a closed military zone. Its
spokesman explained on the weekend that there "was a
willingness" in the IDF to allow the meetings, but they were
impossible, as they must be arranged "with an appropriate
authority in Lebanon," and also that "the area was declared a
closed military zone because of the disturbances."
Could it be that behind the fog of these clumsy formulations
hides an intention to put an end to these meetings altogether?
Apparently. This, however, will be a mistake. From the moral
perspective, it is untenable that a state should forbid its citizens,
even if they are Arabs, this small thing. The divided families are
entitled to this basic human right after 50 years of separation. It
is also a mistake from the political perspective: MK Issam
Makhoul (Hadash), who followed the meetings, believes rightly
that if they are prohibited they will be transformed from
spontaneous family reunions, without any political dimension,
into an issue that is part of the national struggle of the Arabs of
Israel. From the security perspective, too, anything that turns
the border with Lebanon into a border of human encounters
and not of Katyusha rockets will only add to the quiet and
security in the North. And as for the threat of return, the
frightened Israelis can rest assured that the return of the
refugees will not begin with family meetings across the border
fence.
Thus, only good can come of these unexpected northern
pictures: along with the necessary humane gesture and the ill
that will come of forbidding these reunions, they also may be of
some help in convincing more Israelis that the Palestinian
refugee problem at long last demands a solution
