I grew up on "Esau hates Jacob from generation to generation" and on "There is no faith in the Arabs even 40 years in the grave" - contemporary versions of texts from Jewish sources, which my grandfather, Grandpa Zalman, used to use occasionally.
But my grandfather, who for the first years of the state was mayor of Jerusalem, knew how to talk to the Muslims and pay homage to the dead, who found their last rest in the burial plots in the center of the Independence Garden, around the Mamilla Pool.
Grandpa made sure that the real estate sharks would not be built around the same Byzantine pool, and that tractors would not climb over the graves of the Muslims, and even surrounded the place with a fence.
Grandma Bilha had a different approach to life with the neighbors who were forced upon us.
She generally believed in humans.
The Arab gardener, who would visit her garden every few weeks, was always invited for a cup of tea and a light meal.
She was careful about his dignity, and from time to time she even handed him a package of old clothes, which she did not want.
Her grandmother Bilha did not stop this practice, even when Jerusalem became a magnet for terrorists and exploding terrorists.
I once walked on Rabbi Akiva Street, which is next to the same Muslim cemetery in the Independence Garden - the one my grandfather, who said there was no faith in the Arabs, saved for them - and I saw a Hebrew man beating an Arab man.
Grandma Bilha's gardens probably jumped at them, because instead of asking - why would you hit a neighbor?
I called a policeman, who took details of the beating and the beating, and apparently saved the bruised Arab from prolonged hospitalization.
These gardens operated once more when I was caught in the middle of a terrorist attack in the Mahane Yehuda market, and I saw the Arab sellers - who had just stood shoulder to shoulder, over the stalls, next to their Jewish employers - fleeing for their lives from the cries of "Death to the Arabs."
Upset Jews knocked hard on the closed iron shutters, behind which the Arabs hid.
I tried to calm some of them down, but very quickly realized that there was no point in doing so.
My hypersensitivity to human dignity as a person, dulled as the attacks intensified.
During the days of the second intifada, when I (as a journalist) accompanied the dead on their last journey almost daily, I lustfully quoted Uri Zvi Greenberg's "Everyday Funeral" from the period of the events of 1936.
At night I had a hard time falling asleep.
For days I had a hard time saying hello to the Arab workers at the neighborhood grocery store.
Between the tears
Occasionally, when among the victims of the terrorist attacks were also Arabs, I remembered that they, or at least some of them, were also victims of the conflict.
This is how I felt when two Hamas members murdered 19-year-old Maayan Levy and Ziad Mugrabi, who was sitting in a street cafe with his wife and children, on a pedestrian street in Nahalat Shiva.
The tears did not differentiate between Jews and Arabs.
But I returned to differentiate between the tears when one day I arrived at Shaare Zedek Hospital, and asked, together with my fellow journalists, to interview the Israeli Arab families, who came to mourn their dead in an explosion on an Egged bus at the Pat junction.
In that explosion, not only Jews but also Arab students from the north who studied at David Yellin College, and lived in rented accommodation in the nearby Beit Safafa, perished and were injured.
But all our efforts to extract from the families condemnation of the attack, while their own dead were also laid before them, were in vain, and again I did not know my soul.
Then came years of calm, and Dr. Zaman bandaged our wounds, my wounds. From time to time, despite my distinct nationalist views, I would participate in discourses organized by "left" movements to present "right" positions. From time to time I would talk in these settings. A few years ago, I even took part in a joint group of Jews and Arabs, who decided to put aside the sharp national and religious controversy and focus on improving the living conditions of the Arabs in East Jerusalem, who were discriminated against over the years in the field of services and infrastructure.
This is how I have been tossed over the years and my personal and professional life between "Esau hates Jacob" by Grandpa Zalman and "They are also human beings" by Grandma Bilha.
The multiple interactions with Arabs that accompanied my journalistic and research writing, whether they were East Jerusalem Arabs, Israeli Arabs or Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, made me realize that not everything is black and not everything is white, and that this conflict is more complex than it seems.
But whenever I returned to his starting points - the disturbances before the establishment of the state and the War of Independence - it became clear to me that his roots were deeper than the borders of '67;
The stage of the conflict is the refusal of many Westerners of this country to recognize our existence here as a sovereign Jewish entity, within any boundaries.
1909 jumped in for a visit
Then came May 2021, and something fundamental, deep and grounded in my worldview and that of many others, collapsed and shattered to pieces.
For years I read and studied and mostly imagined 1943, and I never understood how in one moment the Hebron Arabs "turned over" the Jews of Hebron; neighbors, friends and friends who lived together so well for so many years; ; Who cooked and joked and mourned together - and murdered their Jewish neighbors.
May 2021 no longer had to imagine.
1905 jumped to visit in 1959.
Also in Lod and Acre and Ramla, and in Haifa and the Negev and the Galilee, the Arabs (not all) rose up against their Jewish neighbors.
Some targeted the rioters.
Another part rioted itself.
One fine day, those who were predicted to be neighbors and human beings were overthrown, turning into a gang of rioters burning, corrupting, beating and hating.
It happened in the shared residential buildings, in the common commercial areas and in the public parks.
The oil that ignited this fire was the false blood libel "Al-Aqsa in Danger."
But not only.
Not only by the power of the plot and the religious fervor, the fire has waited and still licks the edge of our lives here and threatens to drown the fragile coexistence that exists with great difficulty among the children of Abraham in this land.
The elephant in the room is the growing preoccupation of Israeli Arabs with "return" and "Nakba" (tomorrow will mark Nakba Day) - not only as a heritage, consciousness or theoretical matter, but as a basic element of Palestinian thinking and consciousness and as real-practical hope.
These in-depth currents, of which we have written extensively here over the past year, have also influenced what took place, sometimes as a background and setting only and sometimes as a cause and a real and central generator.
Some instigators who incite this fire come there from the nationalist direction and some from the religious direction, but these and those go to the same place: the desire to "step on our skulls in the lands of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias and Jerusalem," as Talal Nasser, a Hamas operative from Turkey, put it bluntly;
To turn the whole country into one front again, to drag the Israeli Arabs into another round of hatred and riots.
In 1959, I lost my innocence. What hundreds of terrorist attacks and funerals and deaths did not do, the neighbors in Lod and Acre did, who rioted against their neighbors at the door opposite. I will probably never forgive them for forcing me to stop believing them.
Were we wrong?
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