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Who Is My Neighbor?
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16758 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
4,886 Words |
| Author
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Philip Nicolaides
Philip Nicolaides is director of the Foundation for Africa's
Future. |
MY ENEMY, MYSELF
Yorum Binur
New York: Doubleday, 1989
215 pp., $19.95
The idea is not new. Assume a disguise and pretend to be a member of a group to find out what they really think and feel. Enemy spies do it, and in many an ancient tale, princes posed as peasants to discover their grievances. Gregory Peck did it in the movies, playing a Gentile who assumed a Jewish identity to experience first-hand the sting of anti-Semitism, and in Black Like Me, a white author lived as a black to learn what racial discrimination feels like.
One year before the Palestinian Intifada drew the world's attention to the human powder keg in Gaza and the West Bank, an enterprising young Israeli journalist, Yorum Binur, disguised himself as an Arab laborer and, using his fluency in Arabic and knowledge of Arab mannerisms and customs, spent six months living in his native country as a Palestinian. His book is a unique eyewitness account of a tragedy unfolding.
About the uprising, Binur writes in his preface: "If there is anything extraordinary about [the Intifada], it is only that it [didn't happen] sooner."
Down And Out In Israel
Generally, Binur reports, he sought to involve himself in typical Palestinian situations. Fooling other Jews into believing he was an Arab was not very difficult.
Nobody is interested in posing as someone inferior, and in
Israel an Arab's status is inferior to that of a Jew.
There might be a case where an Arab worker living in Israel
would pose as a Jew in order to make life a bit easier for
himself, but no one of sound mind will suspect that an Arab
employee who is performing hard physical labor for very
low wages is not actually in Arab.
Palestinians working in Israel typically perform hard physical labor for very low wages. The wages offered are so low, Binur reports, that they are inadequate to
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