A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum

Author:Dion Nissenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Five

The Collaborator

Ameel.

The slur followed him everywhere he went.

Friends would whisper it behind his back with a hiss.

Ameeeeel.

Assailants would shout it from the street as they tossed Molotov cocktails at his house. Guys would spray-paint the warning, the implied threat, on the stone walls outside his home on Assael Street:

Collaborator.

Beware of the collaborator: Abu Fadi.*

To call someone a collaborator in Jerusalem is to make them a marked man. Abu Fadi wore it as a badge of honor. He wielded it as a weapon. He used the fear his neighbors on Assael Street had of collaborators to intimidate. He was not cowed. He was proud.

Sitting in his dimly lit living room smoking cigarettes and playing backgammon with a friend one afternoon in 2007, Abu Fadi said he didn’t care what his Arab neighbors thought of him. As far as he was concerned, they could move to some other Middle East nation and live under one Arab tyrant or another.

“Israel is the best country in the world,” he said between rolls of the dice. “Period.”

If someone asked Abu Fadi whether he preferred to be called an Arab-Israeli, a Palestinian-Israeli or a Palestinian, he would choke on the question.

“I’m Israeli,” he said, again and again. “One hundred percent Israeli.”

With the thick living room curtains drawn, Abu Fadi sat on the edge of his couch in dress pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt that showed off a heart-shaped tattoo on his shoulder. His den felt claustrophobic, and the smoke choked the room. It seemed like Abu Fadi had embraced his reputation as a small-time thug. He silently sized up strangers while sitting on his chocolate-colored fabric couch set with fake gold frames.

Abu Fadi pointed to a wood carving hanging on the living room wall.

“See that?” he asked.

It was the shank-shaped map of Palestine as it existed under British rule until 1948, the land meant at that time to be split so two new countries—Israel and Palestine—could live side by side. The image is ubiquitous in Palestinian iconography. It serves as a reminder that there was once, not so long ago, a place called Palestine. Uncompromising Palestinian nationalists hold up the old lines as borders they hope to reclaim someday by eliminating Israel from the map. Abu Fadi looked at the image and saw something else.

“That,” he said, “is Israel.”

Not Palestine. Not Israel and Palestine. Just Israel.

It’s a view not even Israeli moderates imagine when they look at the image. It’s the view of the most uncompromising of Israelis who see the land—all of the land—as the G-d-given property of the Jewish people. It’s the kind of thing you hear from armed Israeli settlers living in illegal West Bank trailer park compounds where they have defied their own government to seize more land.

Abu Fadi didn’t care that Jews didn’t consider him one of G-d’s Chosen People. He was Israeli. A full Israeli citizen, unlike most of his neighbors on the eastern side of Assael Street. That gave him a right most of them didn’t have: to vote in Israel’s national elections.

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