On Friday night, The New Israel Fund hosted a shabbat dinner with Israeli-Arab journalist and writer Sayed Kashua.
A few months ago I went to a screening of Kashua’s television show Avoda Aravit or ’Arab Labor’ in English. It was an event hosted by The Jewish Community Center in Manhattan for their ‘Other Israel’ series. Other Israel meaning the often forgotten Israeli-Arabs, Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship and live within the 1948 borders. Sayed Kashua is one of these citizens and an outspoken one at that.
Sayed is known for his weekly columns in Ha’Artez newspaper, the popular leftist newspaper in Israel. I must admit, I have only read a few since I do not read or speak Hebrew, the language in which they are written, and have only found a few of the English translations online. But, from what I understand, he is the voice of the Israel-Arab situation. A citizen of Israel yet as a Muslim, a minority in a Jewish state and as an Arab, an often persecuted minority.
When I saw ‘Arab Labor’ I found it clever and funny. There were many times when I laughed out loud but true to my education in Womens Studies, I couldn’t help analyzing the story and characters. The story of an Israeli-Arab deperately wanting to fit in with the Jewish majority, squelching his Arabness in the process, at first reminded me of black shows that came out in America during the 80’s. After some thought though, I realized the analogy was inaccurate. While speaking with the man who sat across from me at the dinner, a better comparison was made. Kashua, with his self-depreciating humor and sarcasm, is a Jewish comedian not unlike Woody Allen.
In the same way that Woody Allen makes fun of Jews to poke fun at non-Jews for their prejudices, Sayed Kashua makes fun of Arabs to poke fun at Israeli-Jews for their misconceptions. During the Q&A, Kashua put his humor into context. “It wasn’t necessarily ‘Jewish” humor’”, he said, but “minority humor.” What Sayed does in his articles, in his show, is an attempt to humanize the threatened minority, Israeli-Arabs, quite like how European and American Jews use humor to make themselves ’likeable’ to the Christian majorities of those nations.
As Israeli Independence Day, or to the Palestinian and wider Arab community The Nakba (catastrophe), wraps up there are many in the media who have left behind a wake of articles and interviews discussing the state of Arabs living within the 1948 borders of Israel. With the separation wall growing everyday, cutting off those in the West Bank from their neighbors in the pre-1967 land, it will be up to the Jewish and Arab Israelis to continue their work in trying to sort out the situation, to try and understand each others narratives. Those on the outside of those walls are out of reach and increasingly being pushed out of the conversation.
