Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine
February 2005
Arafat and my hot flashes - an Israeli response to Suad Amiry's Sharon and my Mother-in-Law.
After reading Suad Amiry’s novel Sharon and my mother in law I was extremely moved … as an Israeli, living in Tel-Aviv at ta time when all around me people were “bursting at the Seams” or merely committing suicide at their leisure while taking other people’s lives, limbs, children and women with them, I could identify myself with her agony at not being able to move freely…
It was Saturday eve; I always felt weird on Saturday eve, uneasy. On a verge of a panic attack. Maybe it was to do with the gloom I experienced at home, as a child on Sat. eve (My mother was a BA –graduate of Auschwitz).
It was exactly 2 years ago, me and my not-such-a-great-hero, husband, who was an extremely gifted and intelligent man but the biggest coward if there’s ever was one, were having a row, after a long week … I wanted to venture out.
Out of doors…out of our building; living in Tel Aviv had become
a Russian roulette … the streets were very quiet and empty … not a dog in sight, the stray cats had totally disappeared, everyone was waiting for the next one, and we didn’t know where it would come from. I wanted to go to the movies.
“Are you out of your mind?!!!” Gideon screamed.
I couldn’t sit at home anymore I had to go out. To a coffee place,
“A coffee place?!!! Now?!!”
Only yesterday one of the most popular coffee places in Tel Aviv blew up.
“Ok then, the bar around the corner is always empty! Why would a suicide bomber come there, to kill us and the barman?”.
I thought that was reasonable enough.
“I don’t know why?” argued Gideon back “he might just get fed up
half way to the Hilton, did you think about that?“.
I tried the movies, again.
“Crowded places?!!! Hello? Anybody home?”, pointing at my head.
“but we never had a suicider at the cinema!!”, I tried to reason.
“Exactly!!!”, exclaimed Gideon with a big smile, winning the argument.
I felt a hot flash coming on. It was August and I just had to have some air. “I don’t care!!!”, I screamed, “I am going out!!! Now!”
All of a sudden a siren was heard, and another one and another one, a string of sirens always meant a suicide bomber, and the ambulances were rushing to the scene. We looked at each other with terror and turned on the TV. There was a suicide bomber at Michael's Pub, a few minutes away from us. It was my son’s favorite hang out; thank God he had been living in Holland for the last few years. He didn’t even come home for a visit; I wouldn’t let him, my only son…
Gideon, quickly rushed to the phone to ring his three children (from his 2 ex wives) they were all in their twenties … that was his usual routine, every time a bomber hit the town. Then he would take his clooney (Cloonex – a tranquilizer) I was always angry when he took it, being a practitioner of Chinese medicine, it was totally against my principals. But he couldn’t care less. He was slowly becoming addicted to clooney.
We stayed at home glued to the TV watching the horrible scenes of children, women, blood, screaming, etc etc. Gideon began his usual snores beside me, the clooney had knocked him out!
The next day we heard on the news that Palestinians were under curfew ….
There are always three sides to every divorce: the wife, the husband and the truth…
We are having a terrible, endless bloody row: it’s time to stop talking about the past. I would expect an educated person like Suad not to live in the past, but to accept our existence in Israel and to start talking from that point. We have no where else to go, and the experience of living as a Jew outside Israel has not been very successful … I could attach a picture of my mother’s green number tattooed on her arm, she is only 74, she was 12 when they took her to the camps, one of the last survivors in the world … Tell me Suad, the truth: this is not about the occupied territories. Barak begged Arafat to take it back. This is about Jaffa…according to your book. Do you expect my mother to go back to Czechoslovakia? And look for her confiscated home? And what about me? I was born here, am I to take a dive in the sea?
Yours sincerely,
Yael Stern O’Dwyer
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Comments
I enjoyed reading this book but was chilled at the author's inclusion of "1929" as a year of Palestinian "pride" without mention of the atrocities of the Hebron pogroms. "Text without context is pretext" as the PLO's old friend Jesse Jackson used to remind us. Tom Segev's One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (which alot of Amazon reviewers think has an anti-Zionist bias) would be a good corrective for the reader new to these issues.
Amiry is not a fanatic or a fundamentalist and this is her P.O.V. and her life. Can she address the moral failures of the Palestinian leadership, beginning with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ending in Hamas? Maybe, but this is not that book.
I have never lived a life anything like Suad or yourself, Yael,but after reading this book and reading your comments I have such great pity for you both.
Yael, for all your sorrows, you can visit your son, and your son can visit you, if he chose to etc etc. but I understand your fears. What I don't understand is your lack of compassion for another mother, just because you fears another jewish holacaust, when the other mother is also in fear of a holocaust, this time knocking on her door.
My father is 84, he takes my dog, Bunty, out each day in the local park, whatever the weather. His hearing is awful, even with his digital hearing aids, but generally his health is good for his age. It would break my heart to have to watch him plant olive trees over and over again, but he would do it, because he's a man of principles but it would be his death as well, and no old man or woman should live as the Palestinians have to. Because it is inhumane, and quite simply wrong.