Roots in the Holy Land Judea Pearl recounts his family’s emigration from Poland to Palestine in 1924 to rebuild an ancient city. George E. Bisharat tells of his Palestinian grandfather’s hospitality before his West Jerusalem home was expropriated by Israel in 1948. Los Angeles Times. May 16, 2008 Judea Pearl: What Israel means to me I was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 and, quite naturally, my feelings toward Israel are suffused with the love, pride, memories, music and aromas that nourish and sustain all natives of any country. As the years pass, I discover that these same feelings toward Israel are echoed by people everywhere, including many who have never set foot in that country. My family's love affair with Israel began in 1924, when my grandfather, a textile merchant and devout Hasidic Jew from the town of Ostrowietz, Poland, decided to realize his life dream and emigrate to the land of the Bible. Family lore has it that my grandfather was assaulted one day by a Polish peasant wielding an iron bar and shouting, "Dirty Jew!" My grandfather crawled home, wiped his blood and announced to his wife and four children, "Start packing; we are going home!" In the weeks that followed, he sold all his possessions and, along with 25 other families, bought a piece of sandy land about four miles northeast of Jaffa. That land was near an Arab village called Ibn Abrak, which was described by the newspaper Haaretz in July 1924 as "a few mud-walled huts surrounded by a few scattered trees." The Arab real estate broker in Jaffa probably had no idea why a group of seemingly educated Jews, some with business experience, would pay so dearly for a piece of arid land situated far from any water source, which even the hardy residents of Ibn Abrak found to be uninhabitable. But the 26 Hasidic families knew exactly what they were buying. Ibn Abrak was the site of the ancient city of Bnai Brak, well known in the biblical and rabbinic days, the town where the Mishnaic scholar Rabbi Akiva made his home and established his great school. It is said that it was to Bnai Brak that Rabbi Akiva applied the famous verse, "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue." The vision of reviving the spirit of that ancient site of learning was well worth the exorbitant price the broker demanded, the dusty winds, the merciless sun, the lack of water and all the daily hardships that pioneering agricultural life entailed. My father was 14 years old when his family arrived at Bnai Brak in 1924, and whenever he reminisced about that early period of hardship, he always referred to it as the "rebuilding of Bnai Brak," as if he and my grandfather had been there before, with Poland and the whole saga of the Jewish exile merely an unpleasant nightmare. We, the children who grew up in Bnai Brak, had not the slightest doubt that we had been there before. Every Passover, when our family's reading of the Haggadah reached the story of the five rabbis who w ...

1. Roots in the Holy Land
Judea Pearl recounts his family’s emigration from Poland to
Palestine in 1924 to
rebuild an ancient city. George E. Bisharat tells of his
Palestinian grandfather’s
hospitality before his West Jerusalem home was expropriated by
Israel in 1948.
Los Angeles Times. May 16, 2008
Judea Pearl: What Israel means to me
I was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 and, quite naturally, my feelings
toward Israel are
suffused with the love, pride, memories, music and aromas that
nourish and sustain all
natives of any country. As the years pass, I discover that these
same feelings toward
Israel are echoed by people everywhere, including many who
have never set foot in that
country. My family's love affair with Israel began in 1924,
when my grandfather, a textile
merchant and devout Hasidic Jew from the town of Ostrowietz,
Poland, decided to realize
his life dream and emigrate to the land of the Bible.
Family lore has it that my grandfather was assaulted one day by
a Polish peasant wielding
an iron bar and shouting, "Dirty Jew!" My grandfather crawled
home, wiped his blood
and announced to his wife and four children, "Start packing; we
are going home!" In the

2. weeks that followed, he sold all his possessions and, along with
25 other families, bought
a piece of sandy land about four miles northeast of Jaffa. That
land was near an Arab
village called Ibn Abrak, which was described by the newspaper
Haaretz in July 1924 as
"a few mud-walled huts surrounded by a few scattered trees."
The Arab real estate broker in Jaffa probably had no idea why a
group of seemingly
educated Jews, some with business experience, would pay so
dearly for a piece of arid
land situated far from any water source, which even the hardy
residents of Ibn Abrak
found to be uninhabitable. But the 26 Hasidic families knew
exactly what they were
buying. Ibn Abrak was the site of the ancient city of Bnai Brak,
well known in the
biblical and rabbinic days, the town where the Mishnaic scholar
Rabbi Akiva made his
home and established his great school. It is said that it was to
Bnai Brak that Rabbi Akiva
applied the famous verse, "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue."
The vision of reviving the spirit of that ancient site of learning
was well worth the
exorbitant price the broker demanded, the dusty winds, the
merciless sun, the lack of
water and all the daily hardships that pioneering agricultural
life entailed.
My father was 14 years old when his family arrived at Bnai
Brak in 1924, and whenever
he reminisced about that early period of hardship, he always
referred to it as the
"rebuilding of Bnai Brak," as if he and my grandfather had been

3. there before, with Poland
and the whole saga of the Jewish exile merely an unpleasant
nightmare.
We, the children who grew up in Bnai Brak, had not the
slightest doubt that we had been
there before. Every Passover, when our family's reading of the
Haggadah reached the
story of the five rabbis who were sitting in Bnai Brak reciting
the story of the Exodus, my
grandfather would stop the reading, look everyone in the eye,
issue one of his rare
mysterious smiles and continue with emphasis, "Who were
sitting in Bnai Brak."
The message was clear: We never really left home.
A short distance from our school, there were two steep hills that
almost touched each
other. The older boys told us that the two hills were once a
single one that got separated
when Bar Kochva -- the heroic figure who led a futile Jewish
rebellion against Rome in
the 2nd century -- rode through it on his lion, creating the gully
between. We had no
doubt that we would eventually find Bar Kochva's burial place;
we needed only to dig
deep enough into these hills -- which we did enthusiastically for
hours. It was only a
matter of time, we thought, before the Earth would unravel the
mysteries of our historic
infancy. It was this cultural incubator that shaped my childhood
-- an intoxicating

4. enthusiasm of homecoming and nation-rebuilding.
Those who say that this sort of culture no longer inspires youth
are mistaken. Seventy-
eight years after my grandfather first set foot in Bnai Brak, in a
shed in Karachi, Pakistan,
his great-grandson Daniel Pearl stood before his eventual
murderers and said, "My father
is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." Then, looking
straight at the eye of evil, he
added one last sentence: "Back in the town of Bnai Brak, there
is a street named after my
great-grandfather, Chayim Pearl, who was one of the founders
of the town."
Was a page of history ever chanted with greater pride? Was a
more gentle love song ever
sung to a homeward-bound founder of a new town?
My mother's story was different, yet still driven by the same
forces of history. A resident
of Kielz, Poland, she applied to British authorities for
immigration to Palestine in 1935,
when anti-Semitic intimidation reached unbearable proportions.
Adolf Hitler came to
power two years earlier. His threats were broadcast all over
Europe; the writing was on
the wall, and masses of Polish Jews applied for emigration to
their biblical homeland:
Palestine. Ironically, the British government, which then
controlled the region, was
bending to Arab pressure to stop Jewish immigration, and my
mother's hopes of leaving
Poland before the storm fell at the mercy of a political
controversy that has not been
settled to this very day.

5. I recently read the argument the Arabs used in that debate, as
published at the time in the
Arabic newspaper Carmel: "We know that Jewish immigration
can proceed without
dispossessing a single Arab from his land. This is obvious. And
this is precisely what we
object to. We simply do not want to peacefully turn into a
minority, and European Jews
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gename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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should understand why." The counter-argument by the Jewish
leadership was equally
compelling. Zev Jabotinsky said in 1937: "This sort of morality
is morality of
cannibalism, not one of the civilized world, for it dictates that
the homeless must forever
remain homeless; we beg merely for a small fraction of this vast
piece of land." But the
British sided with the stronger, allowing a trickle of only
15,000 immigration certificates
a year.
My mother could not wait and paid a huge sum to a cousin who
had an immigration
certificate to arrange a fictitious marriage that would later be
annulled. Fortunately, her
father intervened, and she found a better prospect -- my father,
a suntanned young
"Palestinian" who was searching the towns of Poland for a

6. refined European bride. My
mother's parents, brother and sister were not so lucky. Stranded
by the British-Arab
blockade, they perished in the holocaust with 6 million other
victims of cannibalism and
selfishness.
I once asked my mother how she felt when she arrived. "I came
to Israel in the eve of
Hanukkah, 1935," she said. "The first day after my arrival, I
went up to the roof, and I
could not believe my eyes -- how deeply blue the sky was,
compared with the gray sky
that I left behind in Poland. I was breathless!
"Then I met a neighbor, a teacher who invited me to visit her
kindergarten. There I
experienced one of the happiest days in my life. Scores of
children were standing there
loudly singing Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, as if this was the
most natural thing to do, as
if they had been singing those songs for hundreds of years."
"Why the wonder?" I asked. "Didn't your family celebrate
Hanukkah in Poland?"
"Not exactly," she said. "Yes, we lit the candles, but it was in a
dark corner, with my
father whispering the blessing and mumbling the songs quietly.
You see, the neighbors
were Gentiles, and he did not feel comfortable advertising that
we celebrated a Jewish
holiday. And here I come and suddenly find these toddlers
singing 'Maccabee, My Hero!'
in full volume, and in the open courtyard."

7. About three years ago, as I was preparing for a Muslim-Jewish
dialogue, I read that many
Palestinians have decided to view themselves as descendants of
the Canaanite tribes
conquered by Joshua. I couldn't help but imagine how lonely it
must be for a Palestinian
boy not to be able to sing "Canaan, My Hero!" in the language
of his ancestors, not to
have Canaanite role models after which to name songs, towns
and holidays and, more
lonely yet, to be taught by teachers who had never heard of his
Canaanite ancestors. At
that point, I understood the root cause of the Palestinian
tragedy: underestimating how
sincerely indigenous those children were in Bnai Brak, singing
"Maccabee, My Hero!"
Throughout my childhood, we had wonderful symbiotic
relations with the Arabs in the
village of Jamusin, about half a mile from Bnai Brak. Jamusin
supplied labor and farm
products, and Bnai Brak produced commerce and technology.
We often played with Arab
children our age, riding donkeys in the citrus groves and
playing soccer in vast empty
lots, though language was a barrier. I do not recall a single
religious or ethnic skirmish.
The day that Israel was proclaimed -- May 14, 1948 -- I spent in
a bomb shelter,
traumatized by the sound of Egyptian war planes that were
attacking Tel Aviv and its
suburbs. The next day, Arab peddlers did not show up with their

8. merchandise, Arab
children were not seen in the orange groves, and the village of
Jamusin, we found out
later, was totally abandoned; even donkeys, goats and chickens
were not to be found.
I was too young to join the Israeli army then, but all my friends
who were 16 and older
volunteered, many of whom came back in black coffins. Israel
lost 1% of its population
in that war. Whenever I listen to speeches by pacifists and other
anti-violence activists,
my mind sees those young kids from around the block and the
number of lives they
helped save with their instinctive sacrifice.
Today, Israel is a land of contrasts. My hometown of Bnai Brak,
a bustling replica of an
extremely orthodox, Eastern European town, is situated among
totally secular
neighborhoods, in which International Workers Day on May 1 is
celebrated every year
with school ceremonies and marching bands. At the same time,
it is not uncommon to
find youth groups in Marxist-leaning kibbutzim engaging in a
nightlong trance of Hasidic
melodies interspersed with Arabic Debka dances. This
marvelous blend of an intense
reverence of the past with an innovative, indeed revolutionary
and optimistic outlook to
the future is the essence of what Israel means to me.
The optimists among us say that the world will never abandon
Israel because civilization
cannot afford to dispose of such an innovative project, one in
which the noblest

9. aspirations of mankind have been brought together to develop.
Pessimists tell us that the
fate of Israel is the fate of civilization itself, and the latter does
not look very promising.
As a member of a stubborn tribe of survivors, I take the
optimistic side. True, the world
may not fully appreciate the importance of such noble projects.
But I am nevertheless
convinced that, beneath the criticism and the rhetoric, it is the
heroic example of Israel's
struggle and progress that currently fuels the will of civilization
to survive.
Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is a
frequent commentator on the
Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the president and co-founder of the
Daniel Pearl Foundation
-- named after his son -- a nonprofit organization dedicated to
dialogue and cross-
cultural understanding.
George E. Bisharat: The hope of a victimized people
I am the son of a Palestinian father. Through countless stories
about his family, I
absorbed the ethic that the strong must help the less fortunate.
My grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat -- "Papa" to us -- was
fluent in Arabic, English,
French, German and Turkish and had studied agriculture in
Switzerland before World
War I. He began introducing mechanized farming to Palestine

10. and dreamed of
establishing his own agriculture school. During World War I,
our family harbored
Australian and New Zealander soldiers who, while fighting the
Turks in Palestine, were
caught behind enemy lines. They offered refuge to a Syrian
sheik who was fleeing
powerful enemies. During the riots in Palestine in 1929, Papa
sheltered Jewish friends in
his stately home in the Talbiyeh quarter of West Jerusalem.
Little did he expect that this
home would be expropriated in 1948 and serve as the home of
Golda Meir -- she of the
famous quip that the Palestinian people "did not exist."
Christian soldiers, a Muslim sheik, Jewish neighbors -- they
were all human beings in
need, and we were blessed to be able to help them.
My Palestinian family, in its tradition of compassion and
hospitality, is not exceptional.
During my last trip to the West Bank, I met a man whose
parents had been driven out of
what became Israel in 1948 and had settled in the Balata refugee
camp outside Nablus.
The Friday before, as he was taking his son to prayer, an Israeli
tank suddenly wheeled
into their empty street, spewing heavy machine-gun fire. The
man saw his son stumble,
then plunge face first into the stairs ahead of him. When the
father reached him, the boy
had swallowed his teeth and blood blossomed across his shirt.
Within minutes he turned
blue, his internal organs destroyed. Amid Abu Sayr, age 7, died
before reaching the
hospital. No protests nor disturbances had preceded this

11. incident, and no one could
explain the tank gunner's zeal.
As the father related this to me and my companions, he saw my
eyes film with tears.
Then this humble man -- a mechanic, as I recall -- embraced me
and patted my back. Two
days after the most searing experience of his life, he offered
comfort to me. "Just tell the
world how they stole my heart," he whispered gently. I was
reminded, yet again, of the
deep courage, resilience and magnanimity of the Palestinian
people.
I am also the son of an American mother, who is from an early
settler family. Our
ancestor, Samuel Johnson, participated in this country's
constitutional convention. From
my mother's side I took the ethic of civic responsibility -- the
conviction that in a
democratic society, we are the government and that when we
fail to exercise true popular
sovereignty (by educating ourselves, voting, challenging
political leaders and speaking
out) we lose the right to call ourselves a free people.
Both of these family traditions meld in my concern over Middle
East peace.
I have already suggested that the United States should
respectfully counsel Israel to
abandon ethnic separatism and embrace equality. Not the
equality and pluralism among

12. Jews from different origins that Judea described the other day,
but equality between Jews
and Palestinians and among all human beings, regardless of
religion, race or ethnicity.
I understand why some Jews turned to the vision of ethnic
separatism that Zionism
offered, particularly after World War II; the reasons are
obvious. But Zionism has been a
tragic deviation from Jewish universalist ethics, a never-ending
nightmare for
Palestinians and a source of tension and instability in the
Middle East and the broader
world. A growing number of Jews and even some prominent
Israelis -- like Avram Burg,
Meron Benvenisti and Daniel Gavron -- concur in this
assessment.
What does it say that the most prosperous and secure Jewish
community in the world is
here in the multicultural United States, flourishing under a
regime of equal rights, while
the Jews of Israel, armed to the teeth, live in chronic insecurity
and are fortifying an
apartheid wall?
Those who have dominated others always resist losing their
monopoly of power and fear
vengeance from those they have oppressed. White South
Africans defended apartheid on
just those grounds. But as South Africa has shown, a blood bath
need not ensue,
especially when the movement for political change is firmly
committed, as was the
African National Congress, to equality and reconciliation. If
Israelis could muster the

13. courage to admit moral responsibility for the injustices they
have inflicted on the
Palestinians, they could not find a more forgiving and generous
people.
Israelis have comforted themselves over time with a series of
myths, among them: that
Palestine was a "land without people for a people without a
land;" that the indigenous
Arabs they encountered upon arriving in Palestine were little
but a scattering of
individuals with no sense of collective identity (as Judea put it
a few days ago, peasants
who had never heard the word "sovereignty"); that the settlers'
European outlook and
culture made them superior custodians of the country; that
Jewish settlers knew the
country's landscape even better than the Palestinians who had
cultivated it for centuries;
and that Palestinians loved their fields, orchards, villages and
towns less than Zionist
colonizers, and thus, fled in 1948 not in response to the
massacres, rapes and systematic
campaign of terror mounted by Jewish militias, but simply
walked away from them to
mysteriously disappear. The first step toward genuine equality
between Israeli Jews and
Palestinian Arabs involves liberation from this colonialist mind-
set.
I am impelled in equal parts by foreboding and hope. Far from
modeling equality for
Israel, the United States instead is following the Israeli model

14. of a permanent "war on
terror." Now, like Israel, we have our military occupation of an
Arab country. Israeli
jurists counsel our State Department on the legal justifications
for targeted assassinations.
Israeli colonels train our Iraq-bound Marines in urban warfare
tactics developed in the
Jenin refugee camp. Israeli security contractors teach American
police chiefs and airport
personnel how to racially profile Arab and Muslim travelers.
Israeli policymakers -- who
strongly supported the Iraq invasion -- now egg our leaders on
to a new confrontation
with Iran.
There is only pain ahead for everyone on this path of
confrontation and violence. We
must find a way back from the brink and guide Israel back with
us. Nothing could
enhance the security of the United States more than a just and
therefore durable peace in
Israel and Palestine.
I am hopeful. In the West's shame over the Nazi Holocaust, we
relaxed our normal
skepticism and, deferring to Zionism's demands, accepted
principles we would have
denied anywhere else. But more people are recognizing that a
Jewish state built on
expulsion, repression and ethnic privilege will never know rest.
Justice, equality and
mutual respect are the salvation of both Israeli Jews and
Palestinian Arabs. Ahead,
perhaps distantly, a bright future awaits them.