Day Three: 22/02/2012
"A woman of valour, who can find her? Her worth is above rubies." (Proverbs 31:10)
Amal's 8-year old Bedouin daughter asked her to tell her about the Nakba ('disaster', Palestinian term for the Israeli War of Independence). Amal was reluctant but her daughter insisted so she began to tell her the Palestinian narrative of exile and persecution. Her daughter cried and cried. Amal then told her daughter the Jewish narrative of creating a safe homeland and explained what had happened to the Jews in the Holocaust. Her daughter cried and cried. Then she stopped crying and said: "Me and Yaniv (her Jewish friend), we are going to stop all this pain."
Yesterday we heard both Israeli and Bedouin thinkers saying that the answers had to come from within the community. Today we were able to see a variety of ways in which members of the Bedouin community, predominantly women, are taking that challenge into their own hands, overcoming many barriers to get a decent education and becoming innovative, socially conscious and respected leaders of their community. These are young adults who are tired of dwelling on the problems and arguing about the conflicts with the government over land. They are not giving up on their struggle for civil rights and full recognition but they want to construct a better reality for themselves and their children in the meantime.
At the AHD High School for Science in Hura, visionary principle Jihad El Sana fundraises to build a school of excellence that can give a sound scientific education to gifted Bedouin teenagers and encourage them to study science and engineering at university. We sat and talked to the teenagers who have very clear ideas about what they would like to study, where they would like to study and the careers they would like to follow in the future. One girl of Sudanese Bedouin origin, wearing school uniform and a brightly patterned headscarf, told me that she wanted to go to the Technion in Haifa because it was the best place to study Computer Science and she wanted to work for Intel, Israel's leading IT company. Having passed their entrance exams, children arrive on busses to this school from across the Bedouin community and special funds are raised to enable those from unrecognised villages with limited means to attend.
Amal El Sana Alh'jool runs AJEEC, the Arab Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation, in partnership with American-Israeli Vivian Silver. Their aim is to bring the two communities together, not in coexistence but in partnership. This can only be done alongside projects that aim to empower the Arab/Bedouin community so that they can enter into partnership on equal terms. Unlike an aid organisation, AJEEC does not seek to change people's realities but rather to change their attitudes so that they can choose for themselves how to change their reality. We visited one of AJEEC's projects – the Volunteer Tent, a hub that trains, empower and supports over 700 volunteers, changing attitudes towards community, the 'other'.
Vivian has lived in the Negev for 20 years and is often struck by how easily the 30% Arab population can be unnoticed. She was once visiting an unrecognised Bedouin village when a huge convoy of tanks drove right by the school gates. Outraged by this intrusion of the peaceful running of the village school, she called her son who was the army at that time to ask how this would be allowed to happen. "These villages are not on the map, mom," he replied, "we don't even know they're there when we make our navigations." Vivian and Amal met and founded AJEEC during the second intifada, committing themselves to rise above the violence and stay focussed on their vision of volunteerism as a road to social change and civil society building. As the fifth girl in her family, Amal was released from domestic duties and allowed to accompany her father and brothers into the desert as a goatherd. Perhaps this early experience empowered her to challenge gender stereotypes in her community. She is eloquent, confident, strong-willed, beautiful and warm-hearted. There were few dry eyes among our group after we heard her speak.
Amal and Vivian accompanied us to see one of the projects that AJEEC supports – a social enterprise that gives employment to Bedouin single mothers; women who have been abandoned by their husbands when they have taken second wives. These otherwise isolated and ostracised women run a catering kitchen in that provides hot meals to 3,000 primary school children in the local area and plans, in consultation with an Israeli business advisor who volunteers his time, to expand its venture to 10,000 covers per day in the near future. Mothers to between three and eight children, the women were reluctant to talk about their histories but were more than happy to show off their very impressive catering kitchen and its produce, something that gives them a renewed sense of identity, purpose and independence. I have to say that even Jamie Oliver would have been impressed by the miniature fruit salads I saw being prepared!
Moving on to Lakiyah, another government planned town, we were very well hosted by the Lakiyah Weaving Project for a panel of incredibly eloquent Bedouin women who are all engaged in social action, enterprise and development projects in their community. One is the director of the Sidreh Institution for Women's Empowerment and Representation; one heads a newly established rape-crisis helpline for Arabic speaking women; and one is the entrepreneurial brains behind the Lakiyah Weaving and Embroidery projects that provide employment for local women and sell their merchandise to an international market. In their cosy visitors' tent, constantly refreshed with Bedouin coffee, cold water, sweet mint tea and sticky baklava, the rather lengthy presentations kept me engaged as one after another, the women amazed me with their intrepid commitment to overcoming disadvantage and bringing about change through success. They really are the proverbial 'Women of Valour' who rise at dawn to provide for their families materially, emotionally, financially and spiritually.
All the while there were words of warning ringing in my ears, made louder by the fact that, while the young women were being showcased as future leaders, the young men were serving us drinks. At Ben Gurion University yesterday, Dr Sarab Abu Rabia-Queder had told us that although Bedouin men had gone out to study much earlier, they had not made any changes. "When women went out to study, they started to make changes straight away. The men do not really want these changes because they want to maintain the status quo of the patriarchal hierarchy. It seems that there is a dangerous dynamic forming in which Bedouin women are taking huge steps forward to get an education and brings about social and economic change while their male counterparts are being left behind through an unwillingness to change or fewer opportunities for self-improvement as those traditionally expected to be the breadwinners. I put this concern to the panel and they only confirmed its validity, expressing their personal anxiety about finding suitably educated husbands but also assuring us that they had the wider communal matter in hand.
These last three days have been both emotionally exhausting and intellectually challenging. We have heard so many different perspectives on such a complex range of issues that it is hard to know where to begin processing the information, yet alone considering what our responsibilities as British Jews might be. Yet that has to be our next step; to think about where we go from here with the outcomes of this Study Trip. Somehow, by tomorrow morning, we will have to have assembled our thoughts well enough confront Minister Benny Begin who is responsible for the Prawer plan. We will need to be ready to apply Jewish thinking to these dilemmas when we meet with Meretz Member Rabbi Michael Melchior and we will have to be ready to consider our responsibilities on our return to the UK when we have lunch with British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould. "It is not up to you to complete the task but neither are you free to desist from it." (Pirkei Avot 2:15)
No comments:
Post a Comment