Heemeyer Rides Again
By Israel Shamir
This
is a human interest story. It could have happened anywhere, but it
happened in Jerusalem. Yes, we have Jews and Arabs here, but this is a
story about men and women. It would make a good subject for a film, or
for a novel, as it includes romantic love, beautiful young lovers
separated by prejudice, severe and unjust punishment meted out in the
name of law and order - and untimely death.
A few days ago, a young Jerusalemite got aboard his
Caterpillar tractor, ran amok on the main street, hitting buses and cars
and was finally shot dead by a vigilante. Why did it happen? For the
same reason an American,
Marvin Heemeyer, did his deed. When a man is pushed too far, too
hard, he snaps. One weeps, another one commits suicide, and yet another
one takes a gun and shoots everybody in sight – or rolls his bulldozer
over cars and people.
Marvin Heemeyer was a Colorado welder who, on June 4,
2004, drove his bulldozer through the town hall, the office of the
hostile local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a
judge and others. He was pushed too hard: the municipality had blocked
his access road, his livelihood had been ruined, his simple requests
were being refused. The young Jerusalemite, Hosam Dwayyat was pushed
much harder.
Hosam was born in Jerusalem after the Jewish
takeover, and grew up in a village on the outskirts of the city. Sur
Bahr, his village on the edge of the desert with its shepherds and
sheep, is not a bad place: it is walking distance from both the Old City
of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Houses are nice, spacey and covered with
white limestone, surrounded by small gardens.
Hosam, like all the youth of Sur Bahr lived in the
twilight zone between Jews and Palestinians. He spoke Hebrew and Arabic,
had Israeli and Palestinian friends, went to discos and concerts, could
go to Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem like an ordinary human being, like you
and me. However, on his way he would frequently be stopped, searched,
ordered to present his documents, detained, beaten and released: Israeli
security police, Border Guards, do this regularly in order to remind an
Arab that he is an Arab. For this reason, the dwellers of East Jerusalem
hesitate to venture westward, much like you’d hesitate to visit a
violent South Bronx.
But Hosam was young, and youth does not surrender
easily. Some eight years ago, and he was 24, he had met a young Russian
girl Marina who was 19, and they fell in love. He was her first love,
and she did not hide her happiness.
The
Russians are a breed apart in the social mosaic of Israel. Though
nominally “Jewish”, they have kept their Russian identity, and their own
ways. They were not infected with Jewish chauvinism in the cradle. For
Russians, Jewishness is a private thing, not a public identity. In the
internationalist Soviet Union and in its successor states, boys and
girls fall in love with or befriend a person without regard to his or
her ethnic and religious origin, and it does not cause a ripple, let
alone a storm. Upon arrival to Israel, these good-natured young people
are classified by rather arrogant Israelis as “Johnnys-come-lately”.
They are snubbed and socially rejected. They have little contact with
youth of good social standing, while the children of poor Oriental
Jewish suburbs are too foreign for them. The Russians do not share the
ideals of other Israeli Jewish communities, i.e. military valour and the
amassing of wealth.
The Palestinians, especially those brought up in the
bigger cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa-Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are
closer to the Russians than are members of other communities: they are
smarter, behave like gentlemen, and do not look down on Russians. They
intermarry, or have romantic connections with them, quite often. Among
my immediate friends, a young Russian girl married a boy from Batir, and
now she lives in that village near Jerusalem with her new family.
Another one had a Palestinian boyfriend for two years, before breaking
up for personal reasons.
Hosam and Marina went steady; they lived together for
a while in Tel Aviv. “Hosam liked Israelis”, Marina told the newspaper
this week. But their love was crushed upon the rocks of apartheid.
Liaisons between nominal “Jews” and goys cause much
alarm or outright hatred in official Israel. A few days ago, the largest
Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot,
informed its readers that “the Kiryat Gat municipality has decided
to act against … female teenagers falling in love with young Bedouins
and they … presented a 10-minute film titled Sleeping with the Enemy”.
In June, the Israeli army
removed an Israeli girl named Melissa, 23, who married a local man
named Muhammad Hamameh, 25, from the village of Husan. There is a
vigilante organisation called Yad Leakhim that fights
intermarriages and conversions to Christianity or Islam, and they are
busy interfering with interracial happiness.
Marina’s parents received hints and odd looks from
neighbours. It was explained to them that “it is not done”, that it is
“sleeping with enemy”. They conveyed this pressure to their daughter,
but strong-willed Marina moved to live with her boyfriend and his
family. He wanted to marry her, but Russian girls rarely marry so young,
and – like other Western girls – they do not necessarily want to marry
their first boyfriend. They still want to flirt with others, while
seriously minded sincere young men may well disapprove of it. You do not
have to be a Russian and/or Arab to know about this. Moreover, you do
not have to be a Moor to be aware that jealousy may cause you to slap
the flighty partner, and slap he did. In a moment of anger, Marina
complained to the police, and they took away her lover. Marina tried to
take her complaint back; at that time she was pregnant and lived with
Hosam’s parents. “He slapped me when he had reason to feel jealous”, she
said last week. But even her intervention in favour of Hosam in the
court did not help – he was sentenced to 20 months of jail.
Jerusalem judges are notoriously anti-Arab; they'd
have to be, as they approve of so many unjust acts towards Arabs. Here
they saw a chance to break a forbidden liaison of a nominally Jewish
girl with a goy, of teaching the Russians and the Palestinians a lesson.
But there was another reason, and it was equally relevant. In
post-feminist Israel, as in many other Western countries, a woman may
not withdraw her complaint against a man. The state provides for the
ham-fisted over-protection to women. It is ready to do violence to real
women for the sake of “Women’s Rights.” In an unrelated case, Israeli
minister Hayim Ramon kissed a soldier girl. She complained, but later
withdrew her complaint. Police pursued her all the way to Latin America
and forced her to complain, threatening her with charges of making a
false accusation. The feminists witch-hunted Ramon all the way to court,
and they still refer to him as a “rapist”. So Hosam and Marina could
suffer their same fate in any feminist-ridden European country.
Last week Marina, 27, still pretty, slim and blond,
bewept Hosam and told a reporter that she was and still is in love with
him, her first love and the father of her child she was now bringing up
alone. She was angry at the vigilante, a
far-right activist who kept shooting at unarmed Hosam. She shed
tears for the man Israeli authorities and media had already judged to be
an “evil terrorist”. For years, Marina hoped he’d forgive her momentary
lapse and come back to her after his release. But he did not return. His
family arranged for his marriage, and he tried to reshape his life in
the Palestinian milieu after his failure in the Israeli one.
This second try was even worse. Once his family had
had much land, but it was confiscated to build nearby Jewish
neighbourhood. The remainder of their land was confiscated to build the
Wall, a fourteen-feet-tall monster that cut them off from Bethlehem and
the desert. On what was left, he built a house for his new family, for
his wife and two children.
But a Palestinian may not build a house in Jerusalem,
even on his own land, and he can’t ever get a permit. Hosam had been met
by Israeli “justice” a second time, with equally disastrous
consequences. They ordered him to demolish the house and fined him
$50,000. After that, he snapped, took his front-loader tractor and ran
amok in the centre of Jerusalem, ramming cars and buses. He was quickly
shot dead.
There are some local specifics, and bulldozers as
well as killing of an attacker are permanent fixture of the Arab-Israeli
conflict: a Jewish bulldozer driver drove his armoured machine over the
American peace activist Rachel Corrie who defended a Palestinian home
from demolition and was never prosecuted. Another Jewish bulldozer
driver
shared with the world his experience of razing Jenin: “I had
no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have
demolished plenty. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The
whole area. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade
of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you
knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. I had lots of
satisfaction in Jenin”. While the Jewish vigilante who killed Hosam was
called “hero”, Arabs who killed Jewish murderers in Hebron or in
Shafa Amr were prosecuted for murder.
However, putting aside le couleur locale, such
a story could happen almost anywhere, in the US or in Europe. Some
prejudices are common: A young girl could get cold feet right before
marriage. A jealous youngster could slap his flirty girlfriend. Feminist
judges could separate a young couple. She could remain alone loving him
and bearing his child. City hall could demolish anybody’s house for
being built without a permit or in order to build a bypass. A man could
become incensed and mete his vengeance on whoever came his way
Death Wish style. And here in Israel, as in your country, we are
first of all human -- men and women. This is an optimistic tragedy:
normalcy creeps in through the holes in apartheid.
It is not necessary to view every event through the
binary, Jew-Goy, or Jew-Arab perception. This perspective is dearest
with people for whom their Jewishness is more important than their
humanity. For
them, denial of the “tractor terrorist murder of Jews” is “another
blood libel against Jewish people”. They force their binary view onto
others. Thus, Prime Minister Olmert and the Labour leader Barak
immediately sent their police forces to disturb the mourning family,
and, equally devoted to the Jewish paradigm, President Bush, UN chief
Ban Ki-moon and sundry others condemned the “bloody terrorist”. Even
good guy Seth Freedman
wrote that “Israelis should be under no illusions as to why we're
being targeted by terrorist killers such as Hosan Dwayyat”. Their
counterparts in Hamas, Hezbollah and the mythic Galilee Liberation also
claimed responsibility, or “understood” Hosam’s actions as those of
resistance. The yellow press of Israel and of Jewish communities abroad
invented his criminal past (“the convicted rapist, burglar and drug
dealer”), his terrorist call to God and his hatred of Jews.
But this miasma of obsessive hate can’t transform the
human tragedy: that of an unhappy man pushed too far, whose broken body
was washed by the tears of a Russian Israeli girl named Marina.
PS. Only Gilad Atzmon, Israeli saxophonist and writer
of note,
wondered “why the Israelis are entirely sure that it was an act of
terror. It may as well be that the man was slightly mad, he might have
had a phone row with his wife or alternatively a soaring dispute with
his Israeli boss that made him flip. I would assume that in order to
declare an incident to be an act of terror, a terrorist motivation or a
scenario must be established first. Without establishing such a
motivation we are doomed to admit that we are dealing here with a
criminal case that must be investigated. We should as well refrain from
jumping to conclusions.”
He was right here, though, in a moment of despair, he
came to the wrong conclusion continuing “However, the Israelis seem to
be pretty convinced here. The Israelis are indeed united, and it is good
that they are so united because it allows us to see what the Jewish
state is all about. Sadly, there is no partner for peace in the Israeli
society… Unfortunately, and this is indeed a tragedy, the Palestinians
are at the forefront of the most crucial battle for a better world. The
Palestinians have been captured in a grave encounter with a psychotic,
phantasmic, bloodthirsty self-centric Jewish national identity that
knows no mercy.”
Not only native Palestinians, but Israelis too,
including nominal Jews, are at odds with this Jewish paradigm, or
identity. Just as normal women suffer from their feminist defenders,
ordinary Israelis officially classified as “Jews” do not need defence
from the binary perception priests. While abroad, every man can choose
whether to accept Jewish identity -- in Israel we have it forced upon
us. Israeli unity is a phantasm as seem from afar; up close, you see men
and women with their own preoccupations, and “professional Jews” are
even rarer in Israel than elsewhere.
Like Gilad, I doubt that ‘Jews’, i.e. the people who
uphold this identity, will agree by their own good will to any fair
arrangement with native Palestinians. But unlike Gilad, I consider
Israelis, including nominal Jews, to be capable of such an arrangement.
For we do not fight Jews, we fight the Jewish identity, and we can win.
If the Russians succeeded in making Jewishness a private thing, not an
identity, so can we.
As long as there are Israeli girls like Marina and
Israeli men like Gilad, there is a chance for peace. Better than a
chance -- a certainty!