Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 2000, pages 102-104
Book Review
Caught in Between: The Extraordinary Story of an Arab Palestinian Christian Israeli
By Bishop Riah Abu el-Assal, SPCK, 1999, 174 pp. List: $13.99; AET: $10.50.
Reviewed by Mary C. Cook
Caught in Between is an apt title for this glimpse that Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem Riah Abu el-Assal gives us into the lives of Palestinians inside Israel and the worlds they must straddle. In the author’s case, it is a struggle to maintain his four identities: Arab, Palestinian, Christian, and Israeli.
Few are aware that Arabs live in Israel. After all, this 52-year-old country was created as “a homeland for the Jews.” Yet 17 percent of Israel’s population is Arab and, more specifically, Palestinian Arab.
How did they get there? some might ask. We have always been there, might be the author’s reply. Our roots can be found with the Philistines.
Still scratching their heads, the same individuals might ask what those Palestinians are still doing in “the Jewish homeland.” We have been the inhabitants of this land for more than 2,000 years, the bishop might reply. We refused to leave when the Zionist army overran our villages and threatened us with the loss of our lives and properties.
In fact, many of the 75,000 Palestinians who refused to flee to neighboring Arab countries escaped to other parts of Palestine. They settled in villages, often down the road from their original ones, which by that time had been razed or taken over by Jewish settlers, making them the “present absentees”: absent from their land, yet still present in the country.
The questioners, thinking they now are on solid ground, will probably assume, but still ask, just to be sure, “So those Palestinians, they are Muslim, right?” And with patience the author might explain that some are Muslim but many are Christian, and of many different faiths: Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist or even Anglican, like he.
If they don’t throw up their hands at this point, despairing of ever understanding, those same individuals will pepper the bishop with more questions, straining to piece the puzzle together.
Through a simple recounting of the facts, the author lays the groundwork for this initial foray into the morass of confusion which surrounds the Palestinians inside Israel, known in Arabic and Hebrew as the Israeli Arabs. In attempting to humanize this new information, Bishop Abu el-Assal puts a face on a complex situation with personal accounts of his own family members’ conflict as they come to grips with the loss of life as they knew it.
With the creation of Israel in 1948, the family, deeply rooted in Nazareth, loaded their black Dodge with mattresses, food and 14 people to escape to Lebanon. Once there, they became “the refugees,” a term used with derision by many Lebanese.
In 1949, only a year after their departure, the author and his sister, ages 12 and 13 respectively, made the return journey on foot. In stages, his mother and siblings returned to live in the family home, not as the owners but rather as renters, as their property was now in the hands of the Custodian for Absentee Property. The bishop’s father did not return for five years, by which time the children were nearly grown and looking to their older brother Riah for direction.
His father, who suffered from the loss of his parenting role, never lost his belief that the Zionist regime would pass, like those of the Ottomans and the British. Unlike life under the previous occupiers, however, it became clear that the family would have to contend with a new language and a new way of life. Angry and defeated, the older Abu el-Assal told his family he wished he had stayed in Beirut: “There I could accept that I was a refugee, but here I am treated like a refugee in my own country.”
In many ways Bishop Abu el-Assal was fortunate that he was so young when Palestine once again was occupied. As a teenager growing up in the new state, he could observe its formation while attempting to learn the new language foisted upon him. Many older Palestinians have never accepted Hebrew, making it nearly impossible for them to communicate with government administrators, employers or their Jewish neighbors.
Following the author’s return from India, where he prepared for his ministry with the Anglican Church, he became enmeshed in state politics. He provides the reader with a brief description of the political parties in which many of the Palestinians in Israel participate. The bishop himself became active in the Democratic Front, a coalition of parties, and later the Progressive Movement, whose missions are to defend the rights of Arab citizens, albeit each party with its own agendas.
In response to his activism, the Israeli government imposed a four-year travel ban on the bishop, preventing him from traveling abroad. Despite his treatment, the author still believes that the Palestinians of Israel are strong enough to change Zionist attitudes and influence their “Jewish colleagues to look on Israel as the state of all its citizens.”
The last three chapters of Caught In Between, however, may be the most touching and compelling. In these pages, Bishop Abu el-Assal points out that although he describes himself first as a Palestinian, since this aspect of his identity is under threat, nowadays he hesitates to do so, because his identity as a Christian seems equally threatened. In Israel, as Christian Palestinians are marginalized by their Muslim brothers as well as Jewish Israelis, more and more Christian families are leaving for the West.
With that in mind, the bishop wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II in which, describing the increasing isolation of the Christian community in the Holy Land, he cried out to fellow Christians for their support.TheChristian presence is diminishing for many reasons, he wrote, among which are the lack of land, their status as second-class citizens, and the scarcity of educational opportunities. Yet Arab Palestinian Christian Israelis have an important role to play, the bishop argued, for they can act as a bridge in the search for peace and justice for the region in ways that others cannot.
To capture the flavor of his life in its many facets, Bishop Abu el-Assal highlights his straightforward story with anecdotes and explanations.Although it may be too complex for readers without some background in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Caught in Between is an enjoyable and enlightening read.
