Overcome by a restless feeling that I needed to be doing more, I made my way one dismal afternoon to a retail outlet in Jerusalem that I enjoy going to.
Perhaps I was looking for some normalcy, some mind-numbing activity to perform in this acutely surreal-feeling historical moment. Then again, I may have been hoping to see the middle-aged Muslim saleswoman who worked in that shop for years, the one with the warm brown eyes and kind smile.
I know what it is like to be a Jewish woman living in Israel right now. But what was it like for an Arab one?
“Why do you want to know that?” an acquaintance interjected while eying me suspiciously when I brought this up. “If they could, they would kill us all. That’s all you need to know.”
I did not respond. Tensions are too high, emotions are too raw, and too many people are gone.
“You never know what to expect from people,” I recalled my grandfather saying as I found myself headed to the store anyway. “They may surprise you.”
“Mostly for the worse,” he would always quickly add.
“HELLO HABIBTI [Arabic for “my dear”] how are you?” the saleswoman Nur [not her real name] smiled, spotting me as I walked in.
Muslim woman's war experiences
Off-handedly answering that I was fine, I blurted out that I was interested in hearing how she was. Did she have any war-related experiences to share?
Taking a quick step back, worry crept into her eyes as she politely asked me what I meant, exactly?
I was interested in hearing what it was like for an Arab living in Israel in this current climate, I said.
“I see… What is it that you want to know, habibti?” she cautiously asked.
“Can you think of anything, anything at all about the war that you may want to discuss?”
The question asked was odd. Nevertheless, she understood it. She bit her bottom lip. Outside, night had fallen. Yes, there was something.
A FEW DAYS after what happened that October, she began, an elderly customer, a regular, walked into the store.
“Her eyes,” Nur said. “They weren’t right. They just weren’t right.”
So, Nur followed her around asking, “What’s wrong, habibti?”
The eyes, Nur repeated, “There was something not right with them. Have you ever seen eyes that have no light in them? That’s what her eyes looked like.”
Yes, I had seen eyes like that before, sometimes in the mirror – in others, such as was the case only very recently, on a screen where three men who were tortured, starved, and then shoved onto a stage where thousands of eyes gawked at them, gazed ahead with muted expressions.
At some point, the elderly client reached into her bag and pulled out her credit card, pushing it into Nur’s hand. “Buy things,” she said.
Nur considered calling an ambulance, fearing the woman was having a stroke.
“I kept asking: ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’” Nur said. “Eventually, she stopped and pulled out her phone, scrolling through pictures on it until she found the one that she was looking for and showed it to me.”
“I was looking at a picture of a boy, a boy like an angel; a beautiful young man in a uniform. He was a soldier, an IDF soldier,” Nur continued.
“That’s my grandson,” the elderly Jewish Israeli woman said. “He’s dead.”
“They killed him on October 7,” Nur’s voice became shaky. “Why? For what? His grandmother, they killed her, too. You could see it in her eyes, you could see it right away. Why? For what?”
“You mean Hamas?” I asked.
“I mean them,” Nur replied. “Did you succeed? Is Israel gone? Were you thinking of any of us when you made your move? Are you happy with the results? All this suffering, why?”
Hamas 'killed my aunt too'
WORDS STRUGGLED as they made their way out of Nur’s quivering mouth.
“They killed my aunt too,” she said.
“Who did, Hamas?” I asked again.
“The sirens went off and she dropped to the ground. They killed her. No one will say it. I will. They killed her.”
Nur’s aunt heard sirens and began running.
“My aunt was old. When she heard those sirens, she had a heart attack and died on the spot,” Nur said.
“You want me to say what it is like for me here?” she continued, “I am a Muslim woman who was born in Israel. I do not feel that I live under an oppressive, Zionist occupation.”
To her, living under Hamas’s rule was a frightening thought. She never chose it, nor did she believe it would ever give her the chance to.
“Gaza groans in agony. There’s so much pain and death. But I am not confused about who caused this devastation.”
She was no fool, she said. She had eyes and unlike some, she still knew how to use them.
And then: “Did you know that the going rate for a child is NIS 6,000?”
Her remark took me by surprise.
“I’m talking about our dire financial state. The borders are closed. Men can’t find work. There’s no income. Here’s one byproduct of the ‘mastermind’ invasion: People are selling their own to make ends meet. A family in Umm el-Fahm just sold their nine-year-old girl for NIS 6,000,” Nur said.
“I want to stress that I love my people. As Israeli Arabs, things are far from rosy for us. We experience racism. There are plenty of hate crimes perpetrated against us, from racist slurs to acts of violence. On all fronts, my world is a terrifying one.”
The difference, Nur said, between herself and Hamas, was that she understood that as a Jew, mine was also a terrifying world.
PERHAPS WE were just two naïve, foolish, brainwashed women – Nur for speaking her mind, for seeing complexity where others would urge her to think in binary terms of oppressor and oppressed – and myself for taking an interest in how an Arab was faring at a time when trust between our people has altogether eroded.
Having said this, perhaps we were not that at all.
“Why did you ask me what you did?” Nur inquired just as I set out to leave, promising to check in again soon.
Because people can still surprise you – for the better; because on the dreariest of winter nights, a Muslim wept for a fallen IDF soldier and watched as a Jew saw her as she was, without hearing the cries, smelling the blood and smoke, or visualizing men in green blowing up hope.
“Because no matter how hard they try, our humanity cannot be kidnapped,” I answered.
The writer holds a master of arts degree from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was the recipient of both the Theodore A. Harris Prize for Excellence in the Novel, and the International Dickens Prize for General Academic Excellence. She is currently a duty editor and journalist at The Jerusalem Post.