An Israeli-Palestinian encounter

September 9, 2011 - 12:19 PM by David

The workers from the Palestinian town of Azariya who are remodeling our house bring their lunch with them every day. At around noon time, they wash up, bring their food out to our back yard table and spread it out for a communal lunch.

One day this week, I stayed home, tasked with the heavy chore of carrying our house contents outside so vacate the floor space in order to put in new tiles. I felt like one of the guys, sweating away, and felt that even more so when they asked me to join them for lunch.

I brought out some plates and soon fresh pita, tins of sardines, hummus with extra harif (spicy sauce) and chick peas were spread out on the table, along with a big bottle of Coke.

So there we were, Masri, Yusef, Ahmed, two other workers and myself sitting around the backyard table eating away. I had already gleaned over the week of small talk that most of them were married, with children, and often worked in my town of Ma’aleh Adumim. In general, Israelis don’t have much of a chance with face to face encounters with Palestinians, so I wasn’t about to pass this one up.

“So,” I said to Masri who seemed to speak Hebrew the most fluently of the bunch. “What do you think about what’s going on with the Palestinian Authority and the UN this month?”

Hiring Palestinians and eating lunch with them is one thing, but asking about politics, and about the issue that’s the crux of our century-long conflict is something else. I wasn’t sure if I had crossed a line of Jewish-Arab, employer-employee relationship, and if I’d had asked a question akin to “How’s your sex life anyway?”

But Masri looked at me and said, “look, we just want to work, feed our families and go home. We don’t care about politics.”

I asked him if he was an Israeli citizen and he said yes. I then asked him if he would prefer to be a citizen of a Palestinian state, and he also said yes.

We returned to eating in silence, and after a while, they started talking in Arabic to each other, and I started to clean up. The next time we spoke, Masri asked me about measurement for our new sink. That was much easier to talk about.

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