Not to be outdone by the previous night, the next day was spent in Lod, the slum city of Israel. In the early hours of the morning, 17 weary/hungover students and 3 adult/chaperon figures boarded a bus for a suburb city of Tel Aviv near the airport. The girls had all been told to wear appropriate clothing, as it was a mainly Arab city. Appropriate clothing in this case included skirts below our knees, and covering our shoulders as well as some form of shawl to cover our hair, or elbows should the need arise. I find it ironic that this is the appropriate dress in Jerusalem as well or you are in danger of being stoned.
About 20 minutes after leaving the white silhouette of Tel Aviv we were in Lod. Lod can best be described as a slum. Something within you identifies these tall, uniformly ugly buildings as projects, and the air of furtive desolation adds a grimy slime to the morning. Yet Lod is an ancient city with building and a history that returns to the Bible and beyond.
As we disembarked the bus discomfort was a haze in the air around our group. We stood warily off to the side of the road behind our guide (whom we had just recently picked up off the side of the highway in a slightly shady meeting) and the program directors.
The feeling of wrongness only got worse as we walked through the graffitied and pitted building of Lod to a residential area where we meeting our first speaker, an Arab man who had been in Lod as a child when the Israeli soldiers took possession of it.
His house was a pleasant surprise after the heat and desolation of the streets. From the outside it appeared a bleakly walled compound indistinguishable from his neighbors, but inside we were greeted with a pleasantly cool courtyard to shelter us for the 90 degree heat present even at 10 in the morning.
It was shaded by small fruit trees and an overhanging attached to the house. The floors, a cool white marble, radiated a pleasing chill and the outside world seemed to fade away. He and his daughter had set up a circle of chairs around a small table and a lemon tree. On the table they had placed juices and cookies and as we sat our translator/guide explained that he wanted to express his apologies at not serving us, his guests, better food but it was Ramadan and unfortunately he could not.
I was surprised to see that he had laid out anything, seeing as in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan it is illegal to eat, or drink or even have restaurants open during the day in the month of Ramadan. But we all tucked into the cookies (those who were hung over with slightly more relish behind their sunglasses) and settled in to listen to his story.
The Story of Lod:
Before Israel achieved independence in 1948 Lod was a primarily Arab town on the ancient pilgrimage path from the port of Jaffa to Jerusalem.
During the fight for independence Lod became an important strategic city as well as a place that the Arabs forced out of Jaffa and its surroundings fled too. Within a few days the population of Lod tripled swelled with refugees. When the Israeli troops took it they forced all of the Arab inhabitant out of their homes and set them walking on the roads towards Arab countries or Arab towns in what is now the West Bank.
It is known that the Israelis purposefully used the Arab refugees to clog the roads and hopefully block the armies coming from Jordan and the other Arab countries with a wall of living deterrents. But as this Arab man told the story of what he lived through as a young boy fleeing his city with no possessions on his back I could not help but see the similarities between his plight and that of the Jews just a few years before in Europe.
He told of slaughter in the Mosque where men had fled for safety, and of men women and children pushed out of their houses onto the road with no belongings or supplies, dying without water or food. And when they were finally allowed to return only a fraction of their lands were returned and only some of their citizenship's granted trapping parts of the family in refugee camps in other countries, and granting some Israeli citizenship, or the version of it that is granted to Arabs.
By the time he had finished telling his story and relating all the work he has done to try to integrate Lod and Arab Israeli citizens with larger Israel I could not help but feel that the centuries of built up grievances here were so misunderstood by the international community that there was little hope for peaceful resolution.
Our next stop was to speak with an Ethiopian Israeli who immigrated in the 80s. Lod is comprised mostly of Arab Israelis and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants both of which are poorer communities in Israel.
The story this woman told was heart rending in its sincerity and horrors. As a young girl she lived in Ethiopia with her family. When she was 15 there was a lot of talk about trouble in their community. Ethiopia at the time treated Jews similarly to the way Jews were treated in the Jewish Pale in Russia with Ghettos and frequent riots/abuses. She decided the solution was to walk from Ethiopia to Sudan where there was supposed to be a way into Israel, but her family wouldn't go with her so at school one day she and her best friend never came home and started walking towards the border of Sudan and Ethiopia.
The hardships she endured traveling through war torn Ethiopia and Sudan are too numerous to be told but along her journey she amassed a following of more than 30 people and as a 15 year old led them to Israel enduring starvation, deprivation, detention, capture and harrowing escapes.
It was crushing to listen to her translated tale and think that she did all of this at 15 years of age, but more than that, that she did all of this in the 1980s, a short time before I was born, tragedy too close to the present brought too us not through books or newspapers, stories or history, but through a woman who lived this life. A woman standing before us telling horrors in a pretty white dress and wedge sandals.
And when she finally reached Israel through all this pain and suffering, a miracle occurred, and the man who interviewed her and the other Ethiopian refugees turned out to be a distant relative who was heading to a family brisk that night and took her as a present to the family embracing her into their midst.
Her journey to this point had taken over a year and a half walking. Mine from America to Tel Aviv, took less than 12 hours.
In the places I would go in the next few weeks people would speak of Lod as the drug capital of Israel, a dangerous place where hubcaps where stolen, people were shot and riots and stoning between the Ethiopian Jews and the Arab Israeli population were common, but for me Lod will always be a place of duality. Where an Arab Muslim man will welcome us too his house, but where we are refused entrance to the Mosque courtyard because the women have not covered their hair; where ancient buildings lie fallow next to crumbling modern conveniences; where two communities live in hatred of each other and are hated by the outside world; and where I can see clearly the scared and cruel beauty this country possesses.
Next installment, please
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