Arab in Israel: Working for Israeli Jews

Six­teenth in an ongo­ing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — “Why hire a non-Jew when you can hire a Jew?”

That was the response of a local bar owner when I asked him, out of curios­ity, whether he would hire an Israeli Arab as a bar­tender or wait­ress if the per­son were attrac­tive, friendly, and expe­ri­enced. Ear­lier that day, I had asked the owner of a local kiosk — some­thing like a con­ve­nience store — whom I know whether there were any local com­pa­nies that pro­vide clean­ing ser­vices. For the equiv­a­lent of $12 for two hours of work, I could have my small apart­ment cleaned as often as I like.

The kiosk owner, to my sur­prise, called out to another shop­per in the store and asked him in Hebrew whether he wanted a clean­ing job. Evi­dently, they were friends. I spoke to the other per­son — a guy who was my age — and he agreed to come over the next evening after we hag­gled over the price. As I left the kiosk, the owner told me in Eng­lish: “By the way, he is a very nice guy. A hard worker. But he is Arab.”

—
Arabs, Chris­tians, and Jews

Thirty per­cent of Israelis are not Jews. Most of the minor­ity are Arabs who are either Mus­lim or Chris­t­ian. The remain­ing peo­ple are immi­grants from the for­mer Soviet Union — Chris­tians and athe­ists — who fled the coun­try in the early 1990s and were able to emi­grate to Israel because they had at least one grand­par­ent who was a Jew even though they them­selves were not Jews. The lat­ter group has become very suc­cess­ful in Israel because they were highly edu­cated in fields like engi­neer­ing and the high-tech indus­try. But the Arab com­mu­nity has always had higher lev­els of poverty, crime, and poor edu­ca­tion. Nearly all of them work in blue-collar or ser­vice jobs — if they are
employed at all.

When the owner told me that they guy — a 30-year-old by the name of Faiez who works at a falafel stand dur­ing the day — was an Arab, I admit that I hes­i­tated for a split sec­ond. The Amer­i­can and Israeli sides of my brain were bat­tling each other. The Amer­i­can said not to be racist since the United States has usu­ally been an ide­al­is­tic, multi-ethnic soci­ety — at least in the­ory, if not always in prac­tice. The real­ist Israeli in me said to for­get about it. After all, I did not really know Faiez — although the kiosk owner said that he was a good guy, this might be a risky endeavor for all the obvi­ous reasons.

Finally, the Amer­i­can in me won. I told the kiosk owner in Hebrew: “What do I care? A good guy is a good guy.”

—
The Israeli Reaction

I was still a lit­tle unsure after I had hired Faiez, so I went to ask some Israeli friends at a bar that night for their thoughts. The owner of the place told me that he always prefers to hire Jews. After all, when you want to build a Jew­ish coun­try out of noth­ing but sand, it is impor­tant to make sure that all Jews are employed and able to sur­vive. (Although, the owner’s state­ment was not entirely accu­rate. Some of the wait­resses he had hired were non-Jews from the for­mer Soviet Union, so per­haps he had truly meant that he would not hire any Arabs.) Oth­ers offered thoughts that were meant as jokes but offered insights into the Israeli men­tal­ity as well. “Don’t leave an Arab guy alone in your apart­ment; he might try to steal some­thing.” “If any­thing hap­pens to you, we’ll know what.”

Imag­ine this con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring in the United States, and replace the word “Arab” with “black” or “His­panic.” For all of the good things about Israeli soci­ety, the sad truth is that this coun­try is incred­i­bly racist as well. A recent wave of immi­gra­tion brought black Jews from Ethiopia to Israel, but other Israeli Jews fre­quently refer to them with the Hebrew equiv­a­lent of the N-word. For peo­ple who were born and raised, for exam­ple, in the United States or Britain, these atti­tudes are always shock­ing because peo­ple in our native coun­tries are less racist, and any racism is at least not spo­ken bluntly and out­right in public.

Now, I am not excus­ing the racism; I merely intend to explain it. As most peo­ple know, Israel has been attacked by the sur­round­ing Arab coun­tries since its incep­tion. Waves of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ism and sui­cide bomb­ings swept through the coun­try in the late 1980s and 1990s. In this small coun­try — roughly the size of New Jer­sey — nearly every­one knows some­one who died in a war or ter­ror­ist attack. For obvi­ous rea­sons, this affects peo­ple men­tally. Israelis my age were pre­teens and teenagers dur­ing the worst of the intifadas. The effects are two-fold: 1.) Many Israeli men have some level of
Post-Traumatic Stress Dis­or­der (PTSD) as a result of mil­i­tary ser­vice; and 2.) Israelis have a myopic view that the sur­round­ing peo­ples — Jor­da­ni­ans, Lebanese, Egyp­tians, and Syr­i­ans — are not indi­vid­ual peo­ples but sim­ply “Arabs” who want to push the Jews into the sea. The racism in Israeli soci­ety recently extended to the city of Petah Tikva, which wants to mon­i­tor and “help” Jew­ish, teenage girls who date older, Arab men. (Although, as I noted, there is also crime, poverty, and edu­ca­tion involved in addi­tion to racism.)

In just one exam­ple: One friend of mine was fired upon while fight­ing in Lebanon; a few of his friends died. A few years later, he saw a few other friends die when a Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist took con­trol of a bus and plowed them down in the street. You can imag­ine what he thought when I told him that I had hired an Israeli Arab to clean my apartment.

—
Me and Faiez

So, Faiez came over. He was very friendly, and he did a won­der­ful job clean­ing. I gave him the wage plus a good tip. While he cleaned, we would watch soc­cer and bas­ket­ball on tele­vi­sion, talk about girls, and he would ask me about my Amer­i­can DVD col­lec­tion. (For exam­ple, how do you explain “Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer” in basic Hebrew? I said, “A girl in high school kills…” and then held up two fin­gers to my mouth to imi­tate fangs. He under­stood and laughed.)

I do not speak Ara­bic, and he does not know Eng­lish, so we com­pro­mised on Hebrew. But we started to teach each other a few phrases in our native lan­guages. Faiez would see my neigh­bors — cute, Israeli girls in their twen­ties — walk by and then make the usual com­ments to me in typ­i­cal guy-fashion. He asked one if she needed some­one to clean her apart­ment; she declined curtly and walked away. That same night, he asked if my girl­friend — an Israeli Jew who was born and raised in Jerusalem — was Mus­lim. I responded, per­haps sheep­ishly because I did not want to risk offend­ing him, that she was not.

Later, Faiez told me this past week that it is hard for him to meet girls. I was not sur­prised. Most Israeli Arabs live in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and in a few towns in the north­ern and south­ern parts of the coun­try — not here in the cen­tral region. I said that there are some dat­ing web­sites for Mus­lims — prob­a­bly even for Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip — and that I would find one for him. But then Faiez said some­thing that made me pause men­tally for a moment: “I do not have a lot of friends either. Can I come just to hang out some­times? You seem like a good guy.”

—
A New Friendship?

My mind did not know what to think. But out of my Amer­i­can polite­ness (as opposed to Israeli blunt­ness), I said: “Of course! You are a good guy too.”

After Faiez left, I went to talk to my friends again. First, I called my girl­friend. “Jews and Arabs just don’t become friends here; it just doesn’t hap­pen,” she said. “You should screen his calls, and hire some­one else.” Another friend who owns a bar in the city: “You know what I think. If you become friends, do NOT bring him here.” (“Not a prob­lem,” I replied. “He is a Mus­lim and does not drink alco­hol.”) But three other peo­ple responded: “A per­son is a per­son. Who cares what his reli­gion is? If some­one said these things about Jews, we would be angry!” The responses to my sit­u­a­tion per­fectly reflected the polar­iza­tion in Israeli soci­ety and pol­i­tics — there is hardly any­thing between the far left and the hard right.

Since I had orig­i­nally hired Faiez to clean my apart­ment and he seemed like a nice guy, I no longer had any con­cerns about the fact that he was a Mus­lim Arab. I was more con­cerned about my per­sonal moti­va­tions. Did I hire him and pos­si­bly want to become friends with him because he was a poor Arab who needed the money? That would be con­de­scend­ing. Was I con­sid­er­ing becom­ing friends with him out of a desire, to help pro­mote peace in some small way, to build a peace­ful, Jewish-Arab con­nec­tion between two peo­ple? That would reduce him to being sim­ply “an Arab” and not a per­son in his own right. If I would become friends with Faiez, it would only have to be for the fact that he was a nice guy whom I liked.

So, after reflect­ing on this sit­u­a­tion and writ­ing this essay, that is what I decided to do. Now I’m just think­ing about what I will tell my girlfriend.

Prior Let­ter: The Bright Side of Life. Next let­ter: A Tale of Two Child­hoods.