Everything points to the Middle East conflict

Everything points to the Middle East conflict
By RAY HANANIA
08/04/2010 JERUSALEM POST

How a simple conversation turned into a

complicated discussion on the Israeli and Palestinian narratives.

It all started when I turned on the television set and started watching an old rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” a sitcom about an American-Italian family’s everyday humorous challenges.

(I’ve always wanted to produce my own TV show called “Everybody Loves Abdullah,” about an American-Arab family and their everyday humorous challenges, too.)

The topic of that particular episode was about Raymond who was asked by his wife to explain the whole issue of sex to their young daughter.

That’s when my wife turned to me and said, “Maybe you should have that talk with Aaron.”

“Are you asking me that because my name is Raymond?” I began facetiously.

“I’m being serious,” she said.

“You want me to have the ‘talk’ with Aaron?”

“Yes. I want you to talk to him about sex. He’s old enough to know.”

“Sex? Me? Why me?”

Alison gave me that look. You know, the way a border guard looks at an Arab entering Ben-Gurion airport.

“Fine,” I huffed. “I’ll do it.” I know better than to challenge my wife, or any woman, on any issue.

Not that Aaron – who I call Abdullah when my wife isn’t around – had asked about sex.

SO I sat Abdullah down and I asked him if he’s ever heard of sex. I winced as I anticipated the possible response, “Sure, dad, what do you want to know?” He just looked at me like was I annoying him and said: “Sex is that thing I’m not supposed to talk about.”

“Well, that’s right.”

“So why are we talking about it? Are you trying to get me in trouble?” he asked.

I just started yapping. Going into detail: “There are boys and there are girls, Abdullah. Boys and girls are different. In order to make babies, they have to come together and have, you know, sex. They get together. Then badda bing, badda boom. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Yaani [like, in Arabic] this and yaani that. Kol ma sheh ze lokeah [whatever it takes, in Hebrew]. Whatever. Everyone’s happy. And they have a baby. It’s simple. Any questions?”

“Why are boys and girls different,” he asked?

“That’s just the way it is.”

“You mean the birds and the bees?”

“Yes.”

“What do birds and bees have to do with sex?”

I knew this wasn’t going too well. “Well, ah, I don’t know. Maybe birds are boys and bees are girls. It doesn’t matter. It could be anything.”

THAT STARTED a whole series of difficult questions. “Do insects have sex?”

“Not all of them.”

“Do girls have stingers?”

“No, but they can cause you a lot of pain if you are married to them and you don’t listen to them; which is what’s going to happen to me if this conversation about sex doesn’t produce results.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because G-d made people that way.” Whenever I can’t explain something, I always blame it on G-d. “G-d made us all different.”

“Why? Is that why you are Arab and mommy and I are Jews? Why did G-d make us different? Why are they killing each other?”

“Arabs and Jews are basically the same. We’re both human beings. People. We just believe in different things.” I told him mommy and I have an armistice agreement, which was harder to explain than sex. “Mommy is the boss in our family, but I make all the decisions.”

“So, Arabs and Jews are fighting because they believe in different things?” he asked. “How about sharing? Mommy tells me to do that all the time. If you and mommy get along, why can’t Arabs and Jews get along?”

How did a simple conversation about sex turn into a complicated discussion about the Middle East conflict? That made me realize the problem we have in the Middle East. This is exactly what happens to Arabs and Jews. No matter what the topic, it always turns to the Middle East conflict. We can’t escape it.

Talk about sports turns in to a debate about why the Arabs opposed two states in 1947 when the UN proposed it and used violence to get it all back. Talk about technology turns in to how Israelis are slowly controlling and censoring social networking sites like Facebook and BlogTV. Farming? A debate on who owns what land.

Before I know it, I’m giving Abdullah the Palestinian narrative and then my version of the Israeli narrative, which are different, of course.


“There was this country, Palestine. The Jews lived there. Then the Arabs lived there. Then Jews came back. Then they started to fight over who owns the land. Both sides did bad things to each other and everyone just got madder. Sometimes, one side is tougher and stronger than the other, but the other won’t give up.

Then badda bing, badda boom. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Yaani this and yaani that. Kol ma sheh ze lokeah. Whatever. It’s simple. Any questions?”

Right about that time, mommy decided to poke her head into the room and ask, “How’s it going?”

“Great,” I said.

“Yeah mommy,” my son said. “Daddy says you’re the boss but he makes all the decisions.”

Ouch!

The writer is an award winning columnist and Chicago radio talk show host. www.YallaPeace.com

Going to try (again) to organize an Arab-Israeli Comedy Festival in Jerusalem

You would think Arabs and Israelis hate each other. They must have some kind of issue or something between them. I know. if it were really a big story, the mainstream news media would be writing on it.

I'm going to try AGAIN to organize an Arab-Israeli comedy festival in Jerusalem. When I launched my comedy for peace drive in January 2002, the purpose wasn't to be a professional standup comedian. I'm not. It was to use comedy and humor to break through the animosity between Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis and get them to see each other as people.

The Comedy for Peace gig did not last long. We tried hard. I worked with a great TV producer and creative mind, David Lewis, who formalized the whole effort as "Comedy for Peace." We traveled to the West Bank and did a lot of interviews. David's mind never stopped working. genius and good guy. But the odds were so far against us. And everyone we encountered wanted to do it their way. By the end of 2006, we were on a difficult slope and it wasn't moving, unfortunately.

Then in November, 2006, I got an email from Charley Warady. Warady, who is Jewish, lived on Chicago's Southeast Side, where I lived. He was a few years younger than me and his friends were the younger brothers and sisters of my friends. He since moved to Israel and is doing standup comedy -- although there were no standup comedy clubs in Israel except one that didn't seem to have many shows in Tel Aviv (The Camel Comedy Club). Warady read an online book I wrote (Midnight Flight: The Story of White Flight from Chicago in the 1960s) which was about our old neighborhood in Chicago. He emailed me and he said he was a comedian. I asked him if he would be interested in doing comedy together and he was the first Israeli standup comedian to say yes.

We decided to bring in more comics. I reached out to Aaron Freeman and he reached out to Yisrael Campbell. I wanted to morph it all into Comedy for Peace but none of these guys new David and they all had their own ideas about how to do things. They ended up pushing to create a new comedy troupe called The Israeli-Palestinian Comedy Tour.

We didn't waste a lot of time planning and we set out to organize as many shows as we could in Israel, first, and then in Palestine. Our first show was in a place called the Syndrome in downtown West Jerusalem at the end of January 2007. We ended up doing a few shows at other locations too. In June, we came back and did more shows and included the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem where we did a sold out crowd of mostly Palestinians. We did even more shows and cities in Israel then too. And we came back in December (this time with comedian Sherif Hedayat replacing Aaron Freeman who could not make the tour) and we did two shows at the Ambassador East and several in Israel.

By then, a comedy club opened in West Jerusalem at the top of Ben Yehuda Street and Sherif and I did some guest shows there too. We went on to do shows around the world including in Dublin and also Toronto where we did our biggest show at Roy Thomson Hall for some 1,800 people in the audience. We did tours of college campuses through MASA and even did Limmud in Los Angeles in 2008. This year, 2009, we did more shows including two in Upstate New York and Long Island, and also recently for an audience in upstate Pennsylvania. Houston was our favorite, although a Palestinian activist in the audience hammered us because she didn't like my two-state solution is the best ideas and because I happen to criticize not only Israelis but Palestinians, too, which is a non-no in the extremist Palestinian circles which dominate American Palestinian activism.

2010, though, will be the year we formalize a series of shows in Jerusalem. Campbell is off preparing to launch his one-man show in New York this November, but Charley and I hope to galvanize a new drive in Jerusalem for all of us and for more comedians who have courage and vision and who believe that humor is the best medicine to help the people -- not the politics -- in the Middle East.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'll make it happen.

I mean, it's not like peace is going to break out any time soon and undermine the whole premise.

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com

humor column (Jerusalem post) Is Facebook and Israeli plot to take over the world?

Humor: Is Facebook an Israeli Plot to take over the world?
By Ray Hanania

Why would the Israelis want to control the world when they are having a hard enough time trying to control themselves? Still, it's a question worth pondering especially in the age of the Internet and the rise of the Zionist conspiracy called "Facebook." Let's "faceit," Facebook has a very strong Israeli face. Well, that's if you assume all Jews are Israelis and all Israelis are Jews. The evidence suggests a link.

The founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was born on May 14, 1984. Coincidence? (Hint, Israel's birthday!) And 1984 - the subject of George Orwell's book about the battle to control the world! Zuckerberg is from New York, or, little Israel as Osama bin Laden refers to it. He launched Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard, a scholarly institution controlled by, you know who. No! Not Jews. Presbyterians. (Jews think they control the media, the Arabs believe the Jews control the media and the Presbyterians do control the media. And Presbyterians are not sure who they dislike more, Jews or Arabs.)

Palestinians complain they have an extremely difficult time on Facebook. Do they join the Zionist entity and engage in "normalization" or do they go to the Arab alternative, Berqabook?

I HAVE my own tribulations with Facebook. I have been booted from the worldwide entity twice! Coincidence? The first time, I was writing criticism of the Israeli government. The second time, just this past week, I was writing criticism of the Israeli government. (Actually, I always write criticism of the Israeli government, but so what?) Immediately after and without notice, Facebook shut my account and my 1,363 "friends" vanished off my computer "facescreen" like "born again Christians" scooped up in the rapture. (That's where Evangelical Christian supporters of Israel turn on the Jewish state and read the fine print that if Jews don't convert to Christianity, they get punished like the Muslims.)

I am slowly working my way back from "Ground Zero" and no friends to recovery. I now have 124 "friends as of this writing." What I am learning is that I now have 1,363 people who were once "friends" and who are now angry at me, thinking that I "de-friended" them. Oops! (De-friending someone to a Facebook-nick is like anti-Semitism to a Jew.) About 911 of those former "friends" are Arabs, mostly relatives. (Yes, "Hanania is my last name" has a group on Facebook.) It includes the 15 Saudis whom I don't know but who asked to be my "friend" using a library computer at Guantanamo.

But de-friending 896 relatives and Arabs is the quintessential definition of Jeeeehad! I'll never make my "fourth wife" goal at this rate.

SO I HAVE to slowly re-friend people, one-by-one, cursing my Zionist entity nemesis, "Maaaark Zuuckerberg!" Worse in all this is the jolt to my ego. I went from 1,363 "friends" to zero friends, reminding me that no matter where I live, I am little more than a Palestinian refugee in a harsh and insensitive world of YouTube videos, Twitter and podcasting.

There is something nice about not having people to argue with, though. Yes. In making "friends" on Facebook, you are actually setting yourself up for conflict, which is the dark side of the Facebook experience. The worst thing to do on Facebook is to let your heart do the talking. I've gotten into so many mini-Suez Canal wars with Israelis, but into even more "Black September" battles with Arabs.

The Americans are like "duh!" They friend me, read that I am "Arab" and then say good-bye, explaining they thought I was Puerto Rican. Americans are the most educated people in the world but the least educated about the world. They can't tell the difference between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, an Indian and an Iranian. And a good president and a moron. Well, that was before President Obama, who I love! "Yalla habeeby Barack Hussein! Luuu luuuu luuuu luuuu luuuu!" Give me a gun and I can do that celebratory dance Vanessa Redgrave did so salaciously years ago.

Maybe, though, we should use Facebook as a new forum for negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. And make them post their views using Twitter, which forces each side to limit their disparaging comments about each side to only 140 characters, including spaces, which comes to about 35 words.

Do you know how hard it is for Arabs and Jews to insult each other in only 35 words? We can only hope. Hey Bibi. Do you want to be my friend?

(The writer is a Palestinian American comedian, columnist and Chicago radio talk show host. www.RadioChicagoland.com)

Israeli sitcom uses humor to shatter stereotypes of Arab citizens

Arab Labor: A humorous sitcom that turns tragedy into understanding

By Ray Hanania

The life of an Arab citizen is anything but funny. Just ask my relatives who live in several Israeli cities. Non-Jews in a Jewish world caught on the edge of the wall that separates Palestinians from Israelis.

Yet, that’s exactly the premise of a sitcom that was a hit last year and is in its second season on Israeli TV called “Arab Labor.”

The sitcom is the brainchild of Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua and produced by Israeli Danny Paran. Even in our everyday language, you might note, Arab citizens of Israeli are still spoken of as if they are not a part of the larger Israeli society.

A sizable 20 percent of Israel’s population, the Christian and Muslim Palestinians rarely get any real or substantive airtime on Israeli television, outside of the news reports which, like most Western media, portray them purely in a negative light.

“Arab Labor” is a mild translation of the sitcom’s Hebrew name, Avoda Aravit, which is slang for “sloppy workmanship,” a derisive stereotype of the Arabs of Israel.

Yet under all this, Kashua may have achieved one of the most brilliant portrayals of the challenging life Arabs in Israel face every day. And using humor, he may have presented it in the only way most Israelis are willing to see it, one filled with racism, suspicion, distrust and stereotypes that must be brought out into the open if they are ever to be one-day healed. Because healing is something Arabs and Israelis need very badly.

Kashua’s remarkably captivating series focuses on the life of one Arab, Amjad Aliyan (Norman Issa), a journalist working for a Hebrew language Israeli magazine. Around him are his wife (Bushra played by Clara Khoury), daughter (Maya, played by Fatma Yihye), his parents, the rascal-like Ismael (Salim Dau) and cautious Umm Amjad (Salwa Nakra). Dau happens to be the head of the Arab Theater in Haifa.

What is really impressive is how the insignificant in life becomes the symbol of the very significance of the relationship between Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis.

Each episode of the sitcom focuses on one underlying challenge set in the broader theater of life. The first episode cuts right to the chase when Amjad is driving through the checkpoints – remember, he is a “citizen” of Israel – and he wonders how is it that the Israeli soldiers know how to single him out and pull him aside for constant inspection. He asks his daughter to please make sure not to speak Arabic and greet the soldiers in English. And of course, the daughter, in her best formal and religious Arabic, warmly and effusively greets the soldiers, who immediately check all their papers.

But his Israeli friend explains the reason for his daily harassment isn’t the way he looks, dresses or “smells,” but rather the car he drives.

Amjad drives a Subaru, his friends notes. And Subarus are only driven by the most extreme Israeli settlers who wear a yarmulke on their heads, or by Arabs.

So Amjad determines to buy a new car, through his father, who negotiates a purchase price and sale price and his double-sided commissions.

But in the process of lampooning something as subtle as the car you drive, other idiosyncrasies of Arab-Israeli life emerge. If you wear a seat belt in an Israeli licensed plated car through an Arab village in Israel, you must be an Israeli undercover agent with the Shin Bet.

Amjad engages in an argument about another subtle but serious topic. Why are there more accidents in the Arab communities in Israel than in the Jewish communities? Because of Arab culture of the fact that Arab villages and cities get so little funding their roads and infrastructure are dilapidated and eroded, causing more accidents.

Only a person who lives this life can see these details and expertly turn them into a humorous debate about everyday life.

In another episode, Amjad hears from his father about an Arab shepherd who has on goat who, when the Israeli soldiers pull him over for inspection, uses his snout to pull out the shepherd’s ID card from the shepherd’s pocket. When they try to recreate the scene for the magazine story and photograph, the goat is shy. So they stage it, of course. And once everyone is gone, the goat does precisely what he was acclaimed to do.

And in another episode, Amjad and his wife discuss placing their young but clever daughter in kindergarten, rather than leaving them to learn about life from the wily roguish grandfather.

So, they enroll her at an Arab school which happens to be religious. The daughter doesn’t want to go to the school but decides to go to excess in her religious transformation to shock her father into removing her. He then takes her to an Israeli school, called the Peace School.

That sounds innocent enough until they are told they have never had an Arab enroll at the Israeli school. And yes, while the name is “Peace” they never expected it to mean it might attract Arab children to mix with the Jewish children.

Unheard of, and shocking.

Episode after episode draws the viewer through the maze of conflicts that make of the reality of Arab-Jewish life in Israel.

The sitcom is broadcast in Hebrew with English sub-titles that are easy to read and understand. Words are often mistranslated to disguise the more obvious racism that sometimes exists in dialect and speech patterns and habits.

But the biggest tragedy is that most Arabs will not be able to see “Arab Labor,” because there are no cable or TV systems that are of any real reach that can present this sitcom to the public in the United States or the in the Arab World.

The first season features 10 hilarious episodes from start to finish. You can purchase the DVD online at www.AliveMind.net. 300 minutes on 2 disks, the DVD sells for an bargain price of only $34.98. Or, you can purchase it from its American distributor, “Cinema Purgatorio” atwww.CinemaPurgatorio.com.

I urge you to get it. Not to laugh at the foibles of human tragedy, but rather to understand through the only medium that permits understanding in the emotion-charged Arab-Israeli conflict, humor.

(An award winning Palestinian American columnist, standup comedian and Chicago radio talk show host, Ray Hanania is the 2009 Winner of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He can be reached at www.RadioChicagoland.com.)