Some good news: a little bit of hope from Jerusalem

There is an old Jewish joke/line that I used to tell many years ago when I lectured about the peace process and was more optimistic than I am today: Even though I’m Jewish I have some good news for you today.

So, I have a good story to tell you today.

Last Friday, I had a little accident —I fell on the sidewalk in my neighborhood in Jerusalem and injured myself slightly (nothing serious). As I was lying there, slightly dazed, two men pulled over in their cars and came to my assistance. One was named Tzvika (Jewish) and the other was called Issa (Palestinian Arab). One got me a bottle of water. The other kept talking to me and wanted to call an ambulance, but it became clear that this was not necessary. After a few minutes, when I felt better ( I had been a little dizzy), they asked me if I needed help to stand up (by that time I had called my wife to come get me from our home two minutes away), and when I said “yes”, they both simultaneously reached under my arms and lifted me up! They then helped me walk a few steps to my car. Unfortunately, I was too discombobulated to get their full names and phone numbers in order to thank them properly, even though I had thanked them orally for their help.

On Sunday morning I went to see a nurse at my neighborhood health clinic to rebandage a small wound on my left arm, which another nurse had bandaged last Friday. She was very friendly and we talked a bit about this and that. At the end of our conversation, I told her about Tzvika and Issa and she smiled and said: “it would it be great if this was symbolic for our national condition!” And then she added: “there are many good people here in Jerusalem, who want to help one another.”

This nurse understood the message of my story right away. After all, she works in a health clinic where Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews work side by side every day for many years. The women who draw my blood for blood tests there are Palestinian. One of the medical secretaries who helps me all the time is a Palestinian from a nearby neighborhood. She is the most senior medical secretary there and always helps me with a friendly smile with whatever I need, with efficiency and empathy.

And when I left the health clinic to go around the corner to the pharmacy, I found that almost all the pharmacists are Palestinian and they are kind, courteous, professional and helpful. And when I go to a hotel or a restaurant or a garage (to have my car maintained) in Jerusalem, most of the staff are Palestinian. Not only that, it was reported in a major article in Haaretz last Shabbat that about 40% of the security guards in shopping malls, restaurants and parking lots in Jerusalem are Jerusalem Palestinians!

In short, we live with Palestinians in some strange form of “coexistence” or “shared society” in Jerusalem, where the city is effectively bi-national by now, where 60% of the citizens are Jewish and about 40% are Palestinian. But do we know each other well? Or do we each live in our own little bubble, with the only interaction between us taking place in the workplace?

The reality of “coexistence” between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem is actually quite complicated. In a fascinating article in Haaretz last Friday entitled “the Israelization of East Jerusalem”, Nir Hasson, a veteran journalist who has covered Jerusalem affairs for a long time, wrote:

Israelization doesn’t solve the four deep problems of Jerusalem Arabs: the fact that 95 percent of them don’t have Israeli, Palestinian or any other citizenship; the fact that Israel does not allow them to build homes under the law; the fact that a third of them live on the eastern side of the separation barrier; and the fact that the police continue to view them as an enemy and not as citizens who have the right to policing services.

But the Israelization process nevertheless holds out a little hope. Its importance lies in the fact that for the first time since 1967, a large number of Israelis and Palestinians are meeting at eye level, in the Hebrew phrase—not as contractor and worker, not as soldier at a checkpoint and resident, peace activist and victim. These are, instead, encounters of people in the same workplace, of lifeguards and children who can’t swim, security guard and mall visitor. (Haaretz, August 2, 2024)

Hope is hard to find these days in Israel. Living in Jerusalem gives me some hope, at least sometimes.

I was also inspired with a little additional hope about Jerusalem by my friend Eliezer Yaari, who gave a wonderful talk at a Conservative (Masorati) synagogue in the Arnona neighborhood of Jerusalem this past Shabbat about living with our neighbors in Jerusalem. In addition to reading a beautiful story by the Nobel Prize winning author Shay Agnon, whose house is now a small museum in our neighborhood, which was called “From enemy to lover”, Yaari talked about his research on the people of the neighboring Palestinian villages which led to the publication of his wonderful book Beyond the Mountains of Darkness,  which I read when it was published nine years ago. He interviewed 120 Palestinians in nearby villages and produced a fascinating book of photos and personal narratives of these people, with whom he has developed deep and lasting friendships during the last decade, another sign of what is possible in Jerusalem. His message to us was very clear: these are people who want to live with us in Jerusalem, and we should reach out to them, as he has done, and we too will discover new possibilities of living together in Jerusalem.

These are dark days on the national level in Israel, but in Jerusalem, if we look a little harder, we can still be inspired by small gestures of kindness and empathy, which remind us that there is always a flicker of hope for a better future here.