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What do you tell a child that comes home from school and says this to you? When Israeli children call Palestinians “Aravi meluchlach,” dirty Arab, and your child asks you, “why do they say I’m dirty, I take showers?” A few days ago Samira, a Palestinian friend, a citizen of Israel, who sends her children to school with Jewish children, told me how her son would come home and say this. She be noticed that I was stunned, so she looked right at me. “What are you shocked about, this happens to us all the time.”

I wasn’t shocked I was stunned. I was speechless; or maybe I was shocked though I wasn’t surprised, if that makes sense.

“What can we do? We tell our children that not all the Jews are racists, there are good Jews too.” Tough sell when you are an Arab in Israel.

Samira’s kids speak Hebrew, as do so many Palestinian kids who have Israeli ID, with no accent. They look no different than any Jewish kid, and there is no reason for another kid to think they are different. Unless someone at home said this first.

Aboudi is ten years old, the son of another friend who is also a Palestinian citizen of Israel. He and I sat next to each other before dinner and talked about all kinds of things. He explained to me in great detail the difference between African elephants and Asian elephants. I have photos on my phone of an African elephant that I saw while on safari in South Africa – a scary sight when he comes up close. After a while Aboudi leans over real close and says to me, “I have a question.”

“Go ahead and ask.”

“What religion are you?”

“Jewish”

“I have a question,” Aboudi repeated

“Ask” I replied again

“Are you Christian or Muslim?”

“ I am Jewish.”

Aboudi repeated himself a couple of more times. Finally he leaned over closer to me and said,

“Look, you are Arab so you are either Christian or Muslim.”

I took it as a great compliment. He thought I was a Palestinian Arab, and I was hoping it was because my Arabic was good enough to pass for an Arab – but that wasn’t it.

His mother was listening to the conversation. “He’s never seen a Jew here among us – sitting comfortably like this, chatting in Arabic. All he sees of Jews is what we usually encounter: racism, discrimination, police, and all that.”

Aboudi is a Palestinian boy with Israeli citizenship; his entire family are Israeli citizens, what Israelis like to call “the Arabs of Israel.” This is the Palestinian experience within Israel. This is the experience of Arabs that Israel claims are citizens who live “together” with Jews, they call this “co-existence.” Who in their right mind would want to co-exist under these conditions? Aboudi’s uncle, another friend of mine works in Tel-Aviv, which is about an hour drive south on the highway. The problem is that he drives to and from work during rush hour. The Palestinian town where he lives is next to many upper middle class Jewish towns all of which were built for Jews on lands taken from Palestinians, making space in the Palestinian towns scarce. So while the drive on the highway is swift and smooth, the drive to and from the highway is on a single lane road that has not been maintained for decades. That part of the drive takes Aboudi’s uncle an additional hour to an hour and a half in each direction due to congestion. But that is not the case in the nearby Jewish towns, where wide, well-lit, well-kept roads allow for a swift and speedy drive to the highway. So even though these are not designated as “Jewish-only” roads like in the West Bank, the roads that are used by Palestinians are never maintained. “They’ve taken so much land from us for the Jewish towns and Jewish roads; can’t they take a bit and make our roads better too?”

Recently another face of the racism within Israeli society became public, and although most people knew about it, everyone feigns shock: The separation in Israeli hospital maternity wards of Jewish and non-Jewish mothers. A storm erupted in response to a report that revealed that all major hospitals in Israel maintain separate rooms for Jewish and non-Jewish mothers. The code word, according to one report is “Arabic speaker.” If the woman is an Arabic speaker then she is given a less desirable room. Desirable rooms are kept for the Jewish mothers. “There were two kinds of rooms, crowded ones with six women and one bathroom, or more spacious ones for two or three women. Clearly the Arab women got the less comfortable ones.”

The racism is one thing but the patronizing can be even harder to take. The assumption is always that the Palestinians would want to be in a room with Jews and that the Jews are the ones that are being inconvenienced by the presence of the Palestinians. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe the reverse is true? That a Palestinian woman would be horrified to share a hospital room with a Jewish woman? After all, every soldier in the Israeli army was raised by a Jewish mother, and to spend a night next to a mother who raises children capable of such hatred and cruelty can be terrifying.

Hanan Ashrawi is famously known for saying that Palestinians are the only occupied people on earth that are asked to guarantee the security of their occupiers. But that is only part of the picture. Jews in Israel demand to be recognized, wanted, loved and respected by Palestinians and at the same time feel entitled to kill, steal and torture Palestinians. Palestinians are forbidden to express their desire to fight to have country back, to demand to see their relatives return from exile or, God forbid, express their disdain for the people who took their country.

Palestinian are also the only occupied and oppressed people on earth who are constantly told they need to differentiate between the good among those who occupy and kill them and the bad. If they say “Jews” are the problem then they are promoting another holocaust. If they say they don’t want to have the Jews in Palestine, then they are asking that Jews go back to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Palestinians are supposed to say Zionists, not Jews even though Israel, which is the essence and the reason that there is a Palestinian problem calls itself the Jewish state. Meanwhile, little Arab Palestinian boys and Arab Palestinian girls, their faces scrubbed and hair combed, proudly march to school each morning.