One of my daughters is getting married and I am writing invitations. We have very few relatives so I am phoning and asking for addresses of faraway relatives. We used to be in contact with Zsupa (pronunced something like Djuppah) a nice old couple in a kibbutz. They came to the mandatorial Palestine as young Communist Zionist pioneers, and were living in an old derelict wooden shack in a semi-flooded corner of the kibbutz, with old standard furniture of kibbutzim seventy years ago. They had big blond daughters with doctorates who lived elsewhere. One of the daughters was married to a man who worked in the police or something like that. Later I saw his pic in the paper in some stupid scandal and learned that he had been the top security person in this country. They invited us to lunch some times and the man never said a word. It was rather strange but excentric people are our specialty.
I am coming to the point. I asked for Zsupa's real name and postal address. Zsupa's real name was Mahmood Jabbar Bin Djaldjuliyyah Al-Arabi (that is not the real name, but something very similar, so you get the idea). Doubting my ears asked again and then wondered how come this small Hungarian Jew calling himself Mahmood Jabbar Al Arabi ("Big Mohammed The Arab")? Well, it appears that Third Aliyah pioneers affected Arab folk dress and extra Arabic Arab names, in some kind of declaration of communist universal love among the peoples (see pic. Those ferocious looking Arabs are from the HaShomer Zionist Organization in the early twenties). Like me, he had only daughters, so he will be the sole Al Arabi on my genealogical tree.
10 comments:
Mazel tov on your daughter's wedding. This is the cycle of life - you mother has passed on, soon (not TOO soon I hope) there will be a little girl who will have her name and maybe, just maybe, if you look at her right, you will see a little glimmer of your mother's features from old photographs - a certain curl of the lip, perhaps the arch of the eyebrows.
Again, mazel tov.
K
Yes, congratulations.
Thank you.
BTW, speaking of your relative "the Arab", nowadays, we generally have a poor opinion of Arabs, but at one time they had a great image in popular culture and a lot of Westerners tried to affect their style. Think of Rudolph Valentino, Laurence of Arabia, etc. Arabs were these dashing figures, the cowboys of the desert - men of action on horseback, banditos with bandaliers (and able to make women swoon as a bonus). For the pioneers, they were role modes in how to live in the Middle East, how the Jews would have been had they never left and allowed their vigor to become bleached out in goles.
Now, like any pop cultural image, neither that Arab nor the Arab who is a suicide bomber with a vest full of dynamite and nails is an accurate depiction (nor is the Jew as crooked businessman or hunched over Yeshiva bocher) but they all contain some grain of truth, like all stereotypes. If I propose a stereotype that say the Germans are lazy and like to lie about in the sun and drink wine all day, it does not resonate at all because there is hardly a single German that we know that it applies to. Every stereotype has to have at least some relationship to reality. So how did the Arabs lose the PR war and come from a positive stereotype to a negative one (except among State Department Arabists and Leftists (an overlapping group)? I would say by their own actions, but I'm not sure it could have turned out differently - just like the scorpion, they can't help themselves, it's their nature.
K
The early Zionist settlers tried to copy and learn from the local Arabs, and many thought that the oppressed Fallah (peasant) and the Jewish worker had the same class interest. Many Jewish political organizations (they were all Communists) tried to include Arab workers and peasants, but it did not work out. Marxism, workers of the world unite! you have nothing to lose etc. failed in the Middle East.
It is one of the unfortunate coincidences of history that socialism peaked right around the time that decolonization did, so many newly liberated countries ended up socialist. In some cases (India, Israel) the countries got over their socialism and the "only" result, though bad enough, were a couple of lost decades of economic growth. But in the Arab world the failed experiment of socialism led them to distrust modernity at precisely the time they should have been embracing it, and regressing to a feudal religious society instead. Look at Egypt - in the name of Arab Socialism, Nasser sweeps out Egypt's 3000 year history as a cosmopolitan crossroads of cultures. Now sophisticated Cairo girls wear rags on their heads that their grandmothers, even the Moslems, would have laughed at. Jews may no longer want to dress like Gulf Arabs, but Egyptians do now, and their culture once had no more connection to the sands of Arabia than the Jews. Black Nigerians who were once Arab slaves now volunteer to be martyrs for the Arab Allah. Perhaps the Arabs massive PR failure in the West can be viewed as a success from inside the umma?
K
Unfortunately, socialism is not dead but thriving in places like Venezuela, ECuador, Bolivia, and to some extent, in the US. Arab failure is not because of socialism but the general weakness of the state. Arabs seem to be unable to organize themselves. During the weekend we toured the Arab village of Kalansuwah and the vehicle traffic was chaotic and deadly. Arab villages have triple and more road accidents than Jewish places. I am glad escaped with the car intact from Kalansuwah, we had several near accidents in less than half an hour. Apparently Arabs cannot negotiate precedence on the road.
I can only imagine since Israeli drivers themselves have a horrid reputation (and statistics to match) - if Kalansuwah was bad for you it must be truly insane by Western standards. I've heard that a lot of Israeli misbehavior in traffic has to do with the fear of becoming a "freier". If you let that car into the intersection ahead of you, you're the freier and no one wants to be the freier so no one is willing to give an inch. Do you think the same dynamic (with even more macho Arabs) is going on in Kalansuwah?
BTW, even though freier is supposedly a Yiddish word, it is pretty much unknown in America outside the Israeli context. Americans (and American Jews) are no obsessed with not being a freier. If you are nice to somebody, if you allow them to go ahead of you on the road, this is regarded as a positive thing and not some kind of defeat.
K
Palestinian ARabs are first generation drivers, they have no road culture and they play macho honor games on the road.
I'd like to hear your take on the "freier" thing - how it relates to Israeli driving habits and Israeli culture in general? From an American perspective, Israelis seem to be more "Middle Eastern" than "Northern European" in regard to their own driving habits and their attitudes in general. I think the kaffiyehs of the Arabs were not the only thing that the early Zionists emulated (plus the whole socialist thing where being polite was some kind of bourgeois vice to be avoided), but perhaps coming from a Latin culture which has its own macho thing going you might not have been as shocked.
K
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