By Rachel Reynolds
(First posted on the RACblog)
Rachel Reynolds is a graduate of Sweet Briar college and an intern at the RAC. All views expressed are her own.

Though rumors are still swirling that Bibi Netanyahu has yet to give up on a national unity government with either Labor or Kadima, this last week appears to herald the formation of a government that unites Likud with Yisrael Beitanu. This coalition will elevate Avigdor Lieberman to a position of power frightening to those of us who support the rights of Israeli Arabs.

When I lived in Tel Aviv, I resided in two worlds. The first was that of Tel Aviv. The locus of this world was my Jewish, Kiryat Shalom universe: the neighborhood pizza stand, the kids who attended the secular elementary school where I taught, and the dirty sidewalks on the main road, Kibbutz Galyot, that we had to cross to get to the bus station or our yeshiva.

It was the van that drove past our apartment with speakers blaring, "beytzim, beytzim!" (eggs, eggs!), and the kids volunteering in the Labor Zionist Youth movement with their blue shirts and Chuck Taylors. When I left Kiryat Shalom, my Tel Aviv was Shuk Hatikvah's copious supply of fresh, cheap produce, fish, and enormous sacks filled with spices. It was our Yeshiva, where we learned to better understand Jewish texts and philosophy alongside Israelis committed to establishing a progressive, religious voice in Israel. It was the small soldier's bar on Lillenblum where we went nearly every week to drink with the bartenders-cum-fireblowers (apt, for a bar named "Flame"), and where we learned to love Israeli pop music, and where I befriended an IDF officer who put a face on the news stories we read about the West Bank.

My second world was Jaffa, contained for me between the confines of Sderot Yerushalayim and the sea. The heart of my Jaffa was the Toulouse Garden across from the matnas, or community center, where I worked. My students played there and fought there. They gathered there with their parents for the annual Land Day protest that I too attended, sympathetic to their complaints over the ethnic gentrification in Jaffa that threatens to erase the Arab culture and life that has defined the city for thousands of years. My Jaffa is the beach just north of the clock tower, where I sat every Saturday at dusk to watch the Shabbat queen drift away into the horizon. My Jaffa was fresh mint tobacco in the shop on Yeffet St, and warm hummus at Abu Hassan's on Shvitai Yisrael, where the leather-faced men behind the counter bark at you when your order is ready, their brash tones belied by kind, amused eyes.

My Jaffa is Hebrew spoken through Arabic consonants and vowels, and Arabic spoken joyously, freely, and loudly by men in cafes and women with their children in the streets. I learned what I could from my students, and soon enough found myself on the corner in the garden, crying out "yallah tulab!" to call them in for a lesson. When I began to speak to them in pieces of their own language, they eyed me as though I had cracked a secret code. It was the first time I felt a sense of belonging in Jaffa. It was not to be the last. I took an exercise class in the basement of the matnas. For some reason, I was undaunted by the prospect of a Hebrew-speaking aerobics instructor and about twenty Arab-speaking women. Aerobics is a pretty fast-paced activity to engage in through two language barriers, but we did our best.

These concentric circles I inhabited may as well have been completely set apart. Many Israelis I knew could not understand why I volunteered with Arab children. When I asked an Israeli friend, a decade-long Tel Avivi, to meet me on Jaffa beach, I waited for him for half an hour on the boardwalk before calling him to discover he was twenty minutes north near the Dolphinarium. For him, Jaffa is a boundary, not a place in its own right.

Still, for all the time I spent in Jaffa, there were some questions I never had the courage to ask. I wanted to know--did they rank their identities, as I, an American and a Jew, felt somehow compelled to do? Did they consider themselves Israeli? If a Palestinian state were to be created, would they want to stay, or leave? These are the questions that Avigdor Lieberman would ask of my friends and students in Jaffa. Perhaps they are ultimately unavoidable, if there is to be an end to the current political and geographical impasse. But I fear for my friends in the wake of their answers. I hope that Lieberman will learn to see my Jaffa. I think that if he could, he would not be so eager to purge it, and the people who inhabit it, from the Israeli landscape and soul.

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