Arab and Jew, but one family

By Andrew Metz

Newsday

HARDUF, Israel — When art class is over, the girls of the eighth grade rush outside, across a rocky yard to a place where the world runs by their rules.

They bunch together, all denim and skimpy T-shirts and chattering in Hebrew, under a plywood roof held up by blue oil barrels.

Here, boys who dare approach are summarily dismissed and Amelie Nassar is just another one of these rambunctious Israeli girls, 13 years old, with flowing black hair and flared jeans.

No one would say otherwise, except Amelie.

"I think differently than the other kids in my class," she said. "I feel like I’m stuck in the middle, like being torn, pulled apart."

She searches for words but they don’t come, so she makes as if she’s ripping a cloth with her hands.

"When I am with my family in the village, I say ‘we’ about the Palestinians, and when I am here, I say ‘we’ about the Jews. Sometimes, I stop and don’t know what to say — ‘we, they.’ "

In this land of blood-soaked birthrights, Amelie may be the conflict’s purest kind of conscience. She is Arab and Jew in a region where the two have long been cleaved by war.

Her mother is an Israeli Jew, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her father is an Arab Muslim, born in a village in Galilee.

The family — Pamela and Sadik Nassar, Amelie and her little sister Shirin — is a rickety bridge across an ethnic abyss. Their story is as much about the compromises of love as the uncertain future of a society rent by prejudice and violence.

Through a season of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military assaults, their allegiances have been tested, their positions challenged — Pamela Nassar’s support for a Jewish homeland and her pacifism; Sadik Nassar’s belief that suicide attacks within Palestinian territories can be a legitimate response to occupation.

"It is a big compromise by me to say that it is OK to have a Palestinian state just in the West Bank and Gaza," Sadik Nassar said on a recent evening, his family surrounding him: Shirin on his lap sucking her thumb, his wife and Amelie on the couch close by.

As this conflict has hardened, they have been touched by the suffering on both sides, but unwilling to abandon one for the other.

"The political issues can go on and on," Pamela Nassar sighed, sinking into the couch. "But I always like to take things back to our lives, to here and now."

In the schoolyard of Harduf, Daniel Strul, the eighth-grade teacher, said Amelie has developed into a bright, strong-willed teen-ager, popular and possessed of two distinct identities.

"She is completely Jew and completely Arab," he said. "The war, as she has said in class, is in herself."

For better or worse, it was destined to be this way.

Pamela Butter arrived in Israel in 1978, the driven 16-year-old daughter of University of Michigan professors who were not religious or Zionist. But, she said, "I lived under the shadow of the Holocaust. That is what made my house Jewish to me."

As a girl, she had a consuming interest in her mother’s survival of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Her other infatuation was Israel.

After visiting relatives here as a child, she vowed she would move to the Jewish state. She finished high school early, left the United States and became an Israeli.

Almost immediately, she met Sadik Nassar, son of traditional Muslim parents and one of 12 children. He was finishing law courses at Tel Aviv University, one of nine Arabs in a class of 120 Israeli Jews. He was committed to practicing civil rights law, and was passionate about the Palestinian cause.

Butter was taking pre-law courses and needed a tutor. A classmate recommended Nassar.

Sadik Nassar, now 44, remembers wavering about how to explain his identity to this blond American Jew he was falling for. Many times, he’d been taken for a Jew, with his perfect Hebrew, dark complexion and name that is used in both languages.

"I remember this tension, thinking if I should tell her right away that I am a Palestinian Arab," he recalled.

He didn’t, but there was no coverup, either. He introduced himself as Sadik and said he was from the Nazareth area. In a visit to his apartment, she saw the kaffiyeh — the traditional Arab headscarf — draped over a coffee table.

Pamela Butter wasn’t deterred. She’d never been one to stop at red lines — then or now at age 40.

"I wasn’t oblivious and I was well aware of the differences," she said. "But I thought I had the courage to manage."

There is no comprehensive tally of mixed families in Israel or the Palestinian territories, but few relationships span the divide and survive. By far the most common relationships are between Arab men who are citizens of Israel and Jewish women. There may be hundreds of such couples, the specialists say.

In Israel, only religious authorities can legally perform weddings, so either one partner must convert or the couple must have a civil ceremony abroad. The marriages can then be registered here under international law.

Pamela Butter and Sadik Nassar’s solution was a civil marriage in Michigan in 1982. Both sets of parents were ultimately supportive. The society Pamela and Sadik Nassar chose to inhabit wasn’t.

"It’s so intense here," said Pamela Nassar, who works at an organization that promotes women leaders and teaches English at the girls’ school. "Everywhere you go it is Jew, Arab, Arab, Jew. You can’t just be."

There have been so many double takes, criticisms and insults — too many to count. Pamela and Sadik Nassar haven’t cataloged the abrasions, but when pressed, they are raw.

Once, practicing law in the rabbinical court, Pamela Nassar was told she should consider working elsewhere.

An Arab grocery store clerk who realized Sadik Nassar was an Arab married to a Jew asked sarcastically, "Are there no Arab girls left in the country?"

A few weeks ago in the Jewish community where the family lives, a man came to the door and told Amelie: "You don’t have to be afraid. I’m not a stinking Arab who will do something bad to you."

"I wanted to scream at him," recalled Amelie, "but I didn’t."

The family has worked to straddle the distance between Jewish and Muslim cultures, to exist in the open. Until recently, they lived in Haifa, a city with both Arabs and Jews, where Sadik Nassar has a law office.

The girls attend the Jewish school in Harduf, which is far better endowed than those in Arab communities. Last year, they left Haifa and rented a house in a Jewish community called Adi, which is closer to the school and to Turan, Sadik Nassar’s home village.

They have not put down roots in Adi and hope to move to Harduf, a kibbutz, or collective farm, where people have seemed open to their arrangement.

Symbols and sounds and smells of coexistence permeate their home. Their dining room armoire displays a leather-bound Koran next to a menorah, the Jewish candelabra used on Hanukkah. The family celebrates Jewish holidays alongside Muslim ones.

The girls have Islamic first names. Amelie means "my hope" in Arabic; Shirin means "sweetness" in Persian.

The two girls speak to each other in Hebrew, but conversations in the house can be a jumble of languages. Sadik Nassar most often addresses his daughters in Arabic. Pamela Nassar speaks to them in English. Their responses are usually in Hebrew.

The girls move readily between their cultures. Before dinner, Amelie and her father went to Turan, where most of Sadik Nassar’s family lives and where he keeps an office at his mother’s house.

Sadik Nassar tries to spend at least one day a week in the village, and is ambivalent about not living there.

"I am confused. I love the place," he said, sipping a small cup of sweet black coffee his mother set out on a tray. "But you don’t have the privacy that I am now used to."

Amina Nassar, 66, wearing a dark green robe and white head scarf, sat on a plastic chair next to her son and her granddaughter. Yes, she had reservations about his marriage, she whispered to Sadik Nassar.

"I thought then that if you married a Muslim woman, you’d be happier," she said to her son. After all, she continued, Muslim women are known to be better at serving their husbands.

Sadik Nassar smiled kindly at his mother and laughed. But Amelie cringed.

"Abba!" she scolded her father, using the Hebrew word for dad, then refuted her grandmother in Arabic, "No. No. That’s not right."

The debate soon retreated to the kitchen, Amelie, a woman in the making, and her grandmother, patiently listening.

"If there is anything that our relationship might reflect on how our two people can get along, it is compromise," Sadik Nassar said. "It’s the magic word."

There are disputes, of course. But Sadik and Pamela Nassar say their politics are closely aligned and the fights are like those in any marriage: The TV is too loud; the garbage hasn’t been taken out.

"It is possible for this to work," Pamela Nassar said. "A committed couple can survive."

What that means for this divided land is unclear.

At Harduf, the girls say Amelie has challenged them to think differently about the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

"Having her in our class shows us that even in this complicated country people can live together," said Ilyll Sneor, 14, holding Amelie’s hand. "Just like her small family."

There have been clashes. In her early school years, Amelie remembers, a classmate or two called her a "stinking Arab." Once, she shot back at her tormenter, "Well, you’re a stinking Jew," not totally satisfied with her response.

More challenges will come. While she’s willing to perform some kind of national service, Amelie can’t imagine joining the army, a rite of passage that her friends eagerly anticipate.

For now, the girls don’t dwell on divisions. They prefer to shoo boys from their hangout, to keep command of this hilltop and not think about how the story will end.

"I feel like if they don’t get along, these two sides, then maybe I won’t stay here," Amelie said. "But it is my dream."

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