the exile within

It was my first lesson in spoken Arabic at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Arabic is similar to Hebrew in many ways, though it’s still hard to master if only for the fact that spoken Arabic is phonetically different to the written word. Even simple words like ‘you’ have a completely different pronunciation, not to mention the various dialects and vernaculars.

The lesson is pleasant and much of what I learnt in school between the ages of 14 and 16 is coming back to me. In those days in the late 90s, Jewish schoolchildren would start learning English as a second language at the age of 9 or 10. Literary Arabic (the kind that lends no help whatsoever to striking a conversation with Arabic speakers) was offered as an optional module at 14, as well as French. I had a very severe but approachable Arabic teacher that kept insisting we “think laterally” when constructing our sentences. The textbooks we used were full of instructive comic strips, with scenarios that would usually include a boy looking for his lost camel or a mother shopping for groceries in the local souk… Things have changed quite a bit since then but, tragically, Arabic is still a token subject in most Jewish schools, far from being studied thoroughly and usefully like an official national language should be.

The atmosphere in my class is subtly colonial: there’s around 10 Jewish students sitting in a circle with our teacher N, a Sociology student from an Arab town inside Israel. Our texts use Hebrew letters, to make the learning easier and quicker. When N asks everyone to introduce themselves and tell why they chose to study Arabic, one girl says without a hint of self-consciousness: “is the Arabic we’re going to learn spoken within Eretz Israel then?”. Eretz Israel?! As in, the loosely-defined piece of land promised to Abraham and inherited to the Jewish people? Aren’t we being a bit biblical here? Would it not be more accurate to say ‘Palestine’, which at least refers to the political entity that existed here under a British mandate much more recently and to the national identity of most Arabic speakers that she is referring to? But, like the relatively mild example of the muddled conflation of religious and secular-nationalistic language that this is, no one but me even stirs.

Before the lesson begins, I get myself a tea and a pizza flavoured bourekas at the cafeteria. Last rays of orange sunshine streaming through a fire exit tempt me to step outside, despite the chill. As I take my first step unto the roof of the building, I halt at the incredible scene around me. A full view of the old city and Temple Mount, and beyond, West Jerusalem. On the other side of the building you can see the Judea desert, the blocks of illegal Jewish settlements, the Jordanian mountains in the distance. The sun is setting rapidly, and the voices of the muezzins of Jerusalem are emerging from loudspeakers in every mosque, creating a multi-layered blanket of masculine wailing over the city. But what’s this? Singing in Hebrew? I turn my gaze to the left and see a group of Israeli soldiers in grey uniform, standing in rows on the roof, singing the national anthem. “To be a free people in our country, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” It’s as if I stepped into the final act of some kind of perfectly orchestrated cosmic opera. This sensory overload is so reverently symbolic it leaves me in a state of overwhelm and detached amusement. “What? What is this?” I ask myself.

Finally, the muezzins stop singing and the soldiers come nearer to where I stand, sit down on the floor and listen to their commanding officer. They don’t seem to mind my presence only 10 meters away. I learn that these are fresh recruits on the Talpiyot programme, an exclusive and intense training for top-mark Jewish high-school students to be employed in intelligence units. The officer waxes poetical about “influence”, “pride”, “responsibility”, stirring emotions and egos. Remarkably, nothing of what he says refers in any way to the actual purpose of these soldiers’ service. Pride in doing what? Responsibility over whom? Influence over what things? I have no way of knowing what passes through the heads of those soldiers, sitting as they were on Mount Scopus. My experience tells me that very few of them, if any, cared to entertain such questions. The same questions that, at 18, ejected me out of the same route that they are now taking.

As dark and cold descend over Jerusalem, I step back inside.