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October 31, 1986 - Image 19

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1986-10-31

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

/—

would cover copper dishes
with new tin, and twice a year
they would walk through the
streets and shout, in Yiddish,
`Weissen kessalah! Whiten
the kettles!' "
Those Jews who were not
confined within the parochial
circles of the Hasidic yeshiva
world, who mingled with
Arabs and played in Arab
streets, found in themselves
a more fluid approach to
Arab society. Some even
came to feel that the reflexes
of Arab culture ran deeply
within them, a sense that has
persisted into adulthood,
despite the religious antagon-
isms and anti-Jewish riots
that burst out most dramat-
ically in 1929 and 1936, and
through the succeeding
decades of warfare and
terrorism.
These are not qualities that
are easy to define or measure.
"My wife claims that I am a
complete Arab," said Rafi
Horowitz, but he offered a
less categorical appraisal of
himself. He was one of those
who had grown up among
Arabs in Jerusalem, a toughly
built, balding man in his mid-
dle fifties now working in
Israel's Government Press
Office after a long military
career. Journalists know him
casually as an Israeli hard-
liner, and that was true on a
purely political plane. But it
was only part of a more pro-
found, less visible complexity
that surged beneath the sur-
face. "I'm antagonistic to
Arab nationalism and very,
very friendly to Arabs as
human beings," he-said. "I'm
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to
some extent." And then he
explained.
His mother's family had
lived in Palestine for eleven
generations, and his father
had come from Germany in
1921. "My mother was a doc-
tor and had a clinic in the Old
City, and I was born in the
middle of the riots in 1929. I
lived in Jerusalem. We lived
in different places, but most-
ly either next to Arabs or
among Arabs. Arabic was the
language that was spoken at
home. My mother spoke
Arabic fluently. I learned
Arabic from playing with
kids. I went to school with
Arabs. And I almost cannot
get away from my embrace or
entanglement with the other
residents of this big condo-
minium.
"I grew up in a very strict
home with a German educa-
tion," Rafi continued. "But
just on the other side of the
door there was a world one
hundred and eighty degrees
away from my home with
black furniture, a piano,
education, and so on. I
couldn't play with the kids
outside if I had shoes on, so
I used to hide my shoes, play
with the kids, and when I
came back I would put my

shoes on very quickly. This
was another world. I am
somehow exactly in the mid-
dle. I have a split person-
ality."
The entanglement he feels
with Arab culture, the affin-
ity for the rhythms of Arab
life, are so much a part of him
that he cannot quite tell
where his Arab impulses end
and his Jewish ones begin.
This is not a blurred identity
but an affirmation of his
legitimacy as an Israeli Jew,
a Zionist son of the Middle
East. Born amid Arab riots,
toughened and softened by
both war with Arabs and
friendship with Arabs, Rafi
has gained a hardness with-
out hatred.
When he was eighteen, he
and his Jewish classmates
joined the Haganah. The
Arab Legion besieged his
unit in the celebrated Etzion
Bloc, a cluster of settlements '
between Hebron and Jeru-
salem. "The atmosphere was
that we were doomed," he
recalled, "I remember a night
when the commander gath-
ered us and we walked to a
stony spot. We were only
eighteen, most of us. And he
said, "We can't run away
from our Jewish history, and
this is going to be Masada.'
And I didn't want to die."
Then the Arab troops over-
ran the Jewish unit. "In less
than twenty-four hours most
of my friends—school-
mates—disappeared," he said.
"My company was composed
of a class from my school. So
I lost more than eighteen
members of same class I went
to high school with in less
than twenty-four hours."
Rafi was badly wounded, and
lay bleeding. "I saw the
others being cut to pieces,
castrated, the eyes cut out.
Some of my friends were
raped next to my eyes."
Later he was in a Jordanian
prison camp. "We had groups
coming in the middle of the
night, captured, and most of
them suffered the trauma of
being raped, not by one or
two but by companies. It's a
way of disgracing your
enemy." He was taken to a
desert camp in Jordan near
the Iraqi border, where he
spent eleven months as a
prisoner of war. He mini-
mizes the hardship. I asked
how he was treated.
"Objectively, not so bad,"
he said. "I was wounded, and
we were treated very badly as
wounded, but as one lives ac-
cording to criteria of the time
and space and doesn't com-
pare that to anything else, I
think, looking back on it, it
wasn't that terrible. Yearh,
we suffered very bad—how
would you call it?—resi-
dential conditions in the mid-
dle of the desert. Tents, of
course. Terribly hot days and
terribly cold nights, which

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19

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