Muslim Triangle

The events of Women of the Wall early in the morning this past Monday were eye opening enough for one day, but following that was another challenge. The Hartman program on Monday arranged for a day of tiyulim, tours in different facets of Israeli society. So directly after the Rosh Hodesh service with Women of the Wall, I boarded a bus to visit the Muslim Triangle, or HaMeshullash, an area of Israeli Arab towns and villages adjacent to the Green Line to learn about Muslim identity within the Jewish state. It was a day that posed new challenges to our views and ways of thinking, and left more questions than answers. We began with an introduction at the Hartman Institute with Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Israel Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel. Rabbi Kronish explained that “Israeli Muslims have a four-part identity: they are Muslims by religion, Arab by language and culture,
Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship, and that “Each person balances these four components of his or her identity in different ways, and adds to it issues of gender and geography. In short, one can say with certainty that Israeli Muslims are a variegated and multi-faceted group.”

We began our tour in the Israeli Arab city of Baka El Gharbiyah, at the Al Qasemi college. The Al Qasemi college is mainly a teachers college, where young women (and a few men) come to learn to become educators. Founded in 1989 to teach Islamic law and religion, it is the leading Islamic educational institution in Israel and hopes to become the first Israeli Arab university in the state of Israel.Al Qasemi also seeks to foster dialogue and understanding between cultures and religions.

We also visited the village of Kfar Kassem and talked with the municipal leaders, about their community and the challenges and opportunities for Arab Israelis. We had also planned to meet with an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsour, but he was called away for an important vote that day. It was fascinating to hear their stories and to consider the statements that were made, in regards to both positive and negative feelings about being Israeli citizens - the Arab Israelis we talked with said that while they definitely face discrimination in Israel, their status as minority citizens is much better than other places in the Arab world so they also value their Israeli citizenship and do not want to leave Israel to live in Palestine; and the negative aspects of living with the current Israeli government - the towns struggle with denial of building permits and lack of building materials (yes, even within Israeli Arab towns).

Our tour at K’far Kassem ended with a visit to a museum dedicated to the massacre of 1956. This was a very difficult place to visit, first to see the pain that still lingers in the community, and second, to hear of the conflicting views that continue until today over what happened on that day and the aftermath (Those leading us through the Museum repeatedly told us that the Israeli government had never apologized; our group of rabbis was profoundly disturbed by this and on the bus ride home, one of us looked up the event on Wikipedia and found that this case established a famous legal principle concerning the fact that security personnel must disobey illegal orders and that the Israeli government had made an official apology and declared that Israeli school children must learn about the massacre.)

I came away from the museum visit and our day in the Muslim triangle with an even greater understanding of how complicated the situation in Israel is, reminding me just how far things are from black and white, and how many very different shades of gray there are. Most of all, I think that this day impressed upon all of us that pain is pain, for the parents and children of both Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews; and that there is a lot of very difficult work that has to be done in order for both sides to be able to really hear the pain of the other.