[Peace-discuss] Sayad Kashua at UIUC

[David Green]

 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/an-exile-in-the-corn-belt
Excerpt: Within the Green Line that separates Israel proper from Gaza and the West Bank, Arab Israelis make up twenty per cent of the population. For liberal Israelis, and for Arabs who hope to be accepted as equals, Kashua embodied the country’s stated ideal of coexistence—of Arab Israelis’ full legal and civil integration. For a decade, he had lived with his wife, Najat, in Ramat Denya, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, and their children attended the city’s only bilingual school. In a country where columnists have a flair for grandiloquence, Kashua’s columns are conversational, confiding, anecdotal, centered on the rituals and trials of bourgeois life, like the “holiday tour” that includes stopping at sixteen relatives’ houses, or the visiting electrician who reprimands him for his children’s excessive television viewing. While his writing is rarely explicitly political, a sense of uprootedness lurks; when the electrician, also an Arab, overhears the kids speaking Hebrew, Kashua can’t stop apologizing.Coexistence of the kind that Kashua represents seems increasingly out of reach these days, when more than a third of Jewish Israelis openly say that Arab citizens shouldn’t be entitled to equal rights. Of 1.7 million Arabs in Israel, perhaps forty thousand lead middle-class lives in mixed cities. Ayman Odeh told me that his party’s goal is for Arab citizens “to take part in every institution in the country—except for security, foreign relations, and immigration absorption, because these institutions blur the lines of our national identity.” But even his more hopeful speeches don’t envision such inclusiveness for ten more years.
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