The other side

Israel is a paradise

It is Friday. Sama and I are going to visit a group of refugees who have just arrived from the Ivory Coast and are living in our bomb shelter. Yesterday Sama went to visit the refugees by herself when she heard that they were there and didn't have anything - food, clean clothes or a place to wash. When we arrive, most are outside, some playing football, others just sitting in the cold winter sun.

The shelter, two underground rooms with no heat or shower, has been home to 25 men since Monday. Some speak English, some Arabic, some French. We ask what they need - rice, sugar and soap - and get it from a local shop. I explain to the shopkeeper what the food is for. He says: 'There are Palestinian refugees who don't have anything - and no one helps them,' but he gives us extra rice for free.

Then I talk to Kourouma, who is 22. 'We left everything behind because of the war,' he says. 'We have lost all our families - some are dead, the rest have disappeared.

'We came through six countries to get here. It took us four years. First Guinea, then Mali, Niger, Algeria, Lybia and Egypt. In each place we were clandestine, working until we could move on to the next, until we got to Israel, when the army took us at the border and brought us here. This is the first country to accept us.

'Israel is a paradise. Nobody can do bad to us here.'

Please help the refugees. If you live locally and can offer food, clothing or any other assistance, please email me (link above).

My name is Vida. I am Jewish, I was born in Iran

'Hi, my name is Vida. I am Jewish, I was born in Iran, and I live in the States. I just came across your blog. Thank you for posting your writing and photography - I found it interesting and moving. I smiled when you wrote that you felt good being with the Iranian Jews in South Tel Aviv. I have not visited Israel since 1976, but I well remember the Iranians in the market near the Central Bus Station in the 1960s. Israel at that time was a very raw, new and poor but also old - very old and rich beyond measure. Visiting it from Iran was a revelation - it looked like home to me, dusty, dirty and hot, but I could not read the signs or talk to the people.

' We stayed in a dingy hotel across from the beach in Tel Aviv and visited our family members - struggling members of the underclass in Israel. In those years, the European Jews were busy building the Israel that we see today. My family did not participate in the country's intellectual and cultural debates - they did not have the education and habits of inquiry that Jews from Europe had brought with them - perhaps their children and grandchildren are now living fuller, more engaged lives.

'There is one thing that bothered me in reading your blog and this is something I come across in the writings of many Jews who were not born in Islamic countries. Their only contact with Muslims is post 1948 and for them the feelings of Palestinians and other Arabs towards Jews is a product of the birth of Israel. For me, and for a lot of Jews from Arab/Muslim countries, being despised, being a non-entity, being erased from books, discussions, radio, TV, having the very name of my group/religion be a synonym for coward/filthy, having to dissemble and in fact live outwardly as a Muslim and only take off the mask at home predates 1948 by about 1000 years.

' I want them to acknowledge that. I want to talk about my past - not in light of 1948 or 1967 or 1973 - but out of respect for the thousands of people who have come and gone and don't even have that marker in the desert that tells the world they were here. I hope that one day very soon, there will be a Palestine and a small measure of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. As for me, I will never forget.'

Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa

Jews of Iran

Where could all the Israelis go?

Meirav: born in Haifa, of Syrian descent

After watching Galoot, my friend and I descend the Barbican labyrinth to the Tube and talk about the film. I tell her that some of my Israeli friends really don’t want to be in Israel, they’d like to live somewhere else, that Ido once said: ‘We’d be happy to leave if some other country would agree to take us.’

Where could they go? we wonder. ‘Perhaps back to Europe to the countries their parents came from,’ suggests my friend.

But how easy would that be? I mean, you can’t just go and live somewhere and start a life, just like that.

Could my friend Meirav ‘go back’ to Syria, the country of her mother’s birth? In the 1940s, Jews there numbered some 30,000. After partition of Palestine was declared in 1947, mobs attacked the Jews, killing many, and destroying synagogues, homes and shops. Thousands fled – fewer than 100 Jews remain today. They are not allowed to participate in the political system and are the only minority with identity cards that note religion.

‘I’m not sure it would be simple,’ I say.

'Well they’d have to start by studying,’ suggests my friend. ‘And build up from there. I mean they can’t expect to be given a house and a job. No one just gets given whatever they want, do they?’ And then, as an afterthought, she adds: ‘But some of them might not want to go back – to somewhere like Germany, I suppose.’

Ripped apart and forgotten about

I am working with refugee children in London, making a book of their short stories, to be published under the title Visible. The project is organised by Westminster Befriend a Family, a charity supporting refugee and asylum-seeking families in the capital.

Yesterday, we had our final workshop – Endings – designed to help the children finish the stories they’ve been working on since last October. It was an eye-opening experience. Check this out – from Stella, 12, whose family is from Nigeria: ‘There’s drama happening in my life, so writing makes me feel better’. Or Jannetal, 13, whose family came from Bangladesh ‘to seek happiness’ – she likes writing because ‘I go into another world.’

Hadia, in England only three years, ‘uses lots of colours in her stories. She also likes to draw in her stories because she wants everyone to know what the text means and what it is saying.’ Hadia writes of a soft school haven: ‘The Cushion Corner reminded me of my old home in Afghanistan, where the rooms had silk embroidered cushions. Each cushion was different. Some had golden threaded braids and fringes, some were very old and worn.’

Imagine living in two rooms with your parents and three brothers and sisters, your parents fighting and friendless, bemused because they can’t read the language, or even understand what to do to get the benefits they need to buy food. Or going to school and sitting in a corner with another immigrant child whose language you can’t speak – because she’s the only one who will sit next to you. And then imagine what it means to have someone let you tell your story, to build your own future as a writer with something to say.

Back to the workshop. All the children are having difficulty finishing their stories. Starting’s the easy part but finishing makes you a writer.

‘Look,’ I tell them, ‘if you’re going to be professional writers, you’ve got to learn to work to a deadline and with a brief. Your work won’t be published if it’s not ready in time.’ We’re going to produce a finished piece to a brief – here and now. The exercise, courtesy of friend and mentor Karen McCarthy is ‘my writer’s biography.’ I hope this will inspire them – they all want to grow up to be writers. So we do it – me included – 10 minutes, finished work. Read aloud.

They all produce brilliant, beautiful work. They all think it’s rubbish. I tell them, listen: you are good enough. They’re barely teenagers, but they need to know about the critical voice, the inner one, that will stop them in their tracks. ‘You’ve just got to get the writing down,’ I say. ‘Don’t listen to that voice. Be the editor afterwards, but in your writing time, write, don’t think.’ As Nathalie Goldberg says, ‘you have to think on the page.’

They seem to be listening but they're so quiet it's hard to tell. Then I remember that they’re only 12, 13. You’re not exactly assertive or shouting at that age. Specially not if you came from somewhere else, and you’re used to being ignored.

Working on The Cushion Corner with Hadia, I understand how she misses Afghanistan. She left when she was 9, travelling to the UK via Iran. Phrases in the text that need clarification open doors to her world: ‘games we played’ – which games? The Cushion Corner tells of two girls, one Polish, one Afghan, who find each other at school. Both are lonely but the Cushion Corner is their refuge – to Hadia, it feels familiar, like Afghanistan. Why is that? Because it is soft and calm, not full of rush. So what was it like in Kabul? I ask her. Let’s think about what it was like there, what you remember, and try to get that into the writing. Conjuring can comfort. This is what she wants to tell.

Jannetal’s story – Velasco – is about facing a monster. It is set on a far away island where Velasco, the young girl narrator, landed after running away from home. A Goliath figure named Sergio holds captive a young boy, Oceanne. Velasco kills Sergio but as she tries to escape with the boy, a huge sea-storm overwhelms them and they die: ‘It was too late. The sand engulfed us. There was darkness. No escape.’

Jannetal, reed-slim dainty, tells me about the storm – we’re trying to get the ending just right. ‘The storm is because I’m angry,’ she says. ‘When I get really angry with Sergio, the sea erupts into a huge storm.’

Why is she angry?

‘All I can think of is Sergio. How he treated Oceanne, like he was worthless, a piece of rubbish, ripped apart and forgotten about.’

You shall not wrong a stranger

I am in the cinemateque, Tel Aviv, listening to refugees from Darfur, Sudan, talk about their escape from genocide. Escape from genocide to the jails of Israel, that is, where, over the last two years, more than 200 Sudanese who gave themselves up to the authorities after crossing the Egyptian border have been held.

A government-backed militia in Sudan has, to date, murdered an estimated 400,000 African Muslims. A civil war, which began in 1983 and continues today, has resulted in the deaths of two million people and the displacement of millions more from the region.

‘Yassim’ (we are asked not to report any names) says: ‘I made it to Egypt from Sudan. I was living in Cairo but it was not safe there – many people were deported back to Sudan. I wanted to come to Israel.

‘I knew about Israel from TV – that there was a conflict between Israel and the Arabs – so I thought they would understand our problem. But it’s not easy to get to Israel. You have to ask the Bedouin to help you cross the desert. They want money – and when you give them money, they ask you for more. But I could not return to Sudan. I chose danger because I had no choice. Behind me was hell; in front, my destiny was blank.

‘When I came to Israel I was jailed for a year and a half. The Israeli people treated us well – better than before. I told them that I had escaped from genocide in Darfur in Sudan.

‘In my village, a group of men came on horseback and started burning everything. My sister and I started to run away, but she didn’t run fast enough, and they shot her in the head. My sister lay dying in front of me but I had to leave her. I ran into the mountains to my uncle’s village. Then they came to my uncle and shot him and another family member in front of me. There is no life without family so I moved to a city nearby.

‘I had no money, no friend, no shelter. I lived in the city alone, but it was not safe there. They were arresting people from Darfur. Eventually I made it through to the desert in Egypt.’

Yonatan, a lawyer for the Sudanese, tells us that so far, only 50 have been released from prison. Israel claims that they are a threat to national security because Sudan is a terrorist-sponsoring state. An Israeli law allows the detention without judicial review of anyone who ‘infiltrates’ Israel, and Israel is using this to detain migrant workers. Lawyers for the Sudanese filed a petition on their behalf, challenging their detention under this law. The State continued to say that no one should be released, producing a report by Shabak, the Israeli secret service, claiming that any person from Sudan is a threat to national security.

But the tribunal rejected the State’s claim. Before the Sudanese could be released, CARD (committee for the advancement of the refugees from Darfur, a group of human rights organisations) had to find kibbutzim willing to take them, which is why, so far, only 50 are free.

But, even after their release, the Sudanese do not have refugee status. Israel hopes that another country will take them. No other country is willing to take them. In refusing refugee status on the basis that the Sudanese are nationals of an enemy state, Israel is in breach of the Geneva Refugee Convention. When the convention was agreed, in 1951, Israel argued for the inclusion of a provision that no one could be refused refugee status on the basis that s/he was the national of an enemy state – because of the German Jews refused asylum during the Second World War on this basis.

On his release of four Sudanese men, Judge Elad Azar said: ‘I believe that the situation of these four refugees is not qualitatively different from the fate of tens of thousands of German Jews who felt their very souls were threatened when they fled from the Nazi regime and arrived in England seeking refuge. These refugees were first treated as enemies and were put in custody, but the British authorities realised pretty soon the absurd and the moral injustice and changed their attitude in favour of the refugees of the Nazi regime.’

Sudanese women and children are not jailed upon arrival in Israel – only the men. Many of the women live in a shelter, Kanfei Shahar, run by Rita.

Affaf, one of the women living in the shelter, gets up to thank Rita for her work: ‘I can’t speak English, only Arabic,’ she says via a translator. ‘I want to thank this beautiful mother, Rita. You can’t imagine how she takes care of us and our husbands in jail. No one of the government of Sudan will do what this lady did for us. Over there they kill children and pregnant women. We thank her from the bottom of our heart and every Sudanese should thank her.’

Affaf throws her arms around Rita, who blushes deeply and says: ‘Arab and Jewish and Christian women all work together in the shelter. We must not turn our back on anyone who needs what we can give them in Israel.’

Or, as Israel's hotline for migrant workers puts it: You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22:20)