“I understand,” Ruchaleh said, after I apologized to her for my outburst, tears welling up in my eyes, “but I just can’t go on.”
She hugged me harder than usual and whispered in my ear, “You are going to have to decide.”
NUMBER 624
With a shaved head and a five o’clock shadow, wearing a long-sleeved Surfer Rosa T-shirt and green corduroy pants, the camera slung across my chest and round sunglasses on my face; with the old ID card, featuring a sixteen-year-old Yonatan, in my right pocket, and two new photos in my left — that is how I strode, back straight, mustering as much self-confidence as I could, toward the main branch of the Ministry of the Interior in downtown west Jerusalem.
I was in my fourth and final year at Bezalel, one of thirty photography majors. Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary. A classic Bezalel student, the kind the school was made for. I was Yonatan Forschmidt: Israeli, white, Ashkenazi, a consumer of Western culture. I was not Sephardic and I was not the token Arab.
Every class needed an Arab. In our freshman year we had the guy from Nazareth, but by our sophomore year he had been accepted at the architecture department and left. In the cafeteria we’d joke that we’d lost our Arab, and one kibbutznik from the Galilee said he’d heard that a class with no Arab was cursed and that we’d never succeed in the Israeli art world without one.
We were saved by the janitor from Silwan. According to the reports in the papers, the guy had been working at Bezalel for five years when the department head discovered him. It turned out that as soon as the guy was done washing the floor and scrubbing the toilets he would head straight for the darkroom, enlarging and developing the pictures he had taken with one of the department’s cameras. Apparently, he had made friends with the photography department’s storekeeper and had access to all the equipment he needed.
The discovery had occurred by accident: the head of the department had come back to the school late one evening and caught the Arab in the act, in his janitorial uniform, in the photo lab. At first the Arab had been terrified and had promised that he would never do it again, but the head of the department looked on in wonder at the drying photos that the Arab had taken in his village. The head of the department had offered him, right then and there, a spot in our class. The Arab said no, legend has it, because he had eight kids to support and couldn’t forgo his salary as a janitor. But the department head arranged it so that the Arab would get a full ride, would start as a sophomore, and would still receive his full salary in exchange for some minor cleanup work in the afternoon. Too bad I wasn’t born an Arab, the kibbutznik said, and everyone around the cafeteria table cracked up.
At Bezalel, I, a left-wing liberal like most of the students, learned that Arabs are horny, that they think with their dicks — mostly about pussy and mostly about preserving the honor of their sisters’ pussies. I learned that they can get angry fast and that there is no way to know what might set them off. They’re unpredictable and can be aggressive. Honor is desperately important to them; in fact, it’s all that matters to them — personal honor, national honor, religious honor, family honor. Show respect and avoid dishonoring them, and you’re on safe ground. Even the ones that seem the most enlightened are still, in some very basic ways, primitive. They think differently, have a different culture, a different logic. Arabs are more impulsive, more animalistic. The only thing they really understand is force, and when they sense weakness, they attack. Like hyenas. It does not mean that we should be occupying them, that is not what it means, but it’s such a shame that there’s no one you can talk to, such a shame that they don’t change, that they can’t really be trusted. Otherwise we could just sign a peace treaty, make a border, and make sure the two peoples stay friendly, each on their own side. If only they would just let up, let us live, be reasonable neighbors, get over their instinctive need for revenge, get over their obsession with honor, get over their mosque-fed fantasies of an Islamic empire. If only they could just admit that we were here first, that we are the natural owners of this land; if only they would just say thank you and finally understand how generous we have been.
Which is not to say that we don’t have our share of crazies. What about the nut-job settlers who are willing to risk the lives of their children in the name of some divine ideology. Or the ultra-Orthodox, and the Sephardim, who go on and on about ethnic discrimination. If they had any sense they’d come around and thank us for plucking them out of that dark and unenlightened place we found them in.
These things were said in the cafeteria or in the makeshift smoking corner, and they were said for white, cultured Israeli ears alone. The token Arab was always welcomed with open arms at Bezalel, with happiness even, and it never seemed artificial. Nor did the Arabs suffer. It seemed like our Arab enjoyed the whole thing. I think the Arabs felt very welcome at Bezalel and they were invited to virtually all of the events. A lot of girls threw themselves at them, and especially at our janitor, who, word was, could get any Jewish girl he wanted. In the cafeteria and the smoking corners, when we were alone, we, the founders, laughed at those girls and the way they used the Arab to get back at their parents. And we talked about the Arab phallus as art. I didn’t say much during those conversations but I laughed, got the joke. I was the quietest person in the class and no one knew that it was because I was afraid that my accent might emerge, even though I knew I sounded just like them, or very close to it. I knew that I had to stay focused at all times, making sure to maintain my crisp Ashkenazi Hebrew. Monk, is what the kibbutznik called me, also because I never talked about sex. I knew that there was talk in the department of me being gay or in the closet or, eventually, asexual. I picked up on those rumors while listening in on the Arabs’ conversations, who had no idea I understood everything they said. Loti means gay and adim achsas jinsi means asexual. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking for a social life at Bezalel, even though on account of my ethnicity I had one without trying. During breaks and free periods I always found myself sitting with the coffee drinkers and smoking with the smokers. Still, though, other than my Saturday morning visits to Noa’s apartment, I had no social life to speak of. I didn’t go to any of the parties, mostly because they were at night, when I was busy with Yonatan, and I didn’t go to pubs or over to other people’s houses for dinner or to work on group projects.
I loved taking pictures and that is all I wanted to do. My show at the end of sophomore year focused on the kids who work at the Mahane Yehuda market, carrying supplies and cleaning up around the stalls. After that my professor called me “the social photographer,” a nickname that I took as a compliment, but many of the other students said that I was stuck, that I wasn’t trying to break through the formulaic doctrines of field photography and that I was scared to reach for something that might be more “artistic.” But the truth was that I had no desire to do that. People were all that I was interested in. Our year-end show was viewed by members of the faculty and either an artist, a curator, or an art reviewer. My grades and appraisals were some of the best in the class. With a little PR, as Noa said, I could have been one of the protégés, but I steered clear of the faculty. I never went to office hours, never confided in them about my photography-related dilemmas. I insisted on doing things my way, shooting only in black and white, and even though some of the teachers thought my insistence was a sort of handicap, I knew that my work was in no way impaired and that each project I did was better than the one that preceded it.