Right of Return scares me | Ora Reuven
I live in an Arab house whose inhabitants have left, fled or were expelled - arguing about it - and I was just a baby, and I do not know what was really. In the Arab house I grew up in were very long flowered curtains that covered the space used as closet. I hid with my brother behind the curtain and we were nibbling a biscuit large tin box. And was fragrant jasmine tree in the courtyard and a water pump next to him, with a huge iron handle, I would hug and rocking her while water is pumped to it, and guava and lemon trees and olive and pomegranate and huge grape, all Seven Species. All this left the people who lived in this house and fled for their lives against the Jews.
Jews is my dad. Dad was a soldier in the General Staff in Tel Aviv. When the Arabs fled from Jaffa, or when driving them, Father came along with his friends from the army, and each took home. Father's friend took the apartment above us, with the roof, and my dad caught the apartment with courtyard Yasmin planted her, and lemon.
Mom and I were not in Tel Aviv. We lived in Nahalal, Valley, and Dad was in the army. But Dad was not always the Army. He is not from the Palmach and Haganah. Is the Holocaust. Dad was a refugee, a brand plucked from fire.
Dad ran his tiny town two days before the Nazis burned it.
The fire burned the first wife of my father and his daughter, aged eight. Even his parents and five brothers and sisters, all of them were burned together with the house and all the other houses in the town, while hiding from the Germans in the basement under the beds and mattresses, and only father and a few young men who had fled earlier, because they thought there in the Polish town that soldiers do not touch against children and women, and they thought that they were flee to the forest, and the German army continued to roll and they come home. But everything was burned and not even a picture.
Father, the orphan, widowed, bereaved - had embarked on forests, trains, snow and hunger, and joined the Russian army out of the seas and continents. When the Russian army came to Iraq, father defected and continued his journey to Israel. He came to Israel Jezreel Valley was a dream, and wanted to be a farmer and start a new family and new life. Mom was a young girl crept Youth Aliyah and sat in detention as an illegal immigrant Atlit, where the British held infiltrators and illegal immigrants. Dad met Mom at Nahalal, boarding school for girls. Together they produced me and started a new life...
War of Independence broke out and Dad was drafted to save the new life and came to the General Staff in Tel Aviv.
Arabs fled or were expelled, and Jaffa was empty of people. The Israeli army entered Jaffa and my father, whose house was burned and his family had cremated, took now the home of an Arab family expelled. And here in this house sat my mother and me to live the new life.
Now the Arabs want to return the Jews took their homes in Jaffa, which was our neighborhood, and associate Munis, there is now Tel Aviv University, and a host of communities.
At the elementary school I went to, Jaffa, rose a tower. Nice round tower and next to low dome-shaped structure. The huge dome wrapped fig. Classroom window I was looking at the beautiful tower hours. Bialik's fairy tale book Dad gave me, was a story about a princcess who was imprisoned in a small room at the top of a tower, waiting and waiting ... I eventually learned that this tower is the mosque. No muezzin called for prayer in those days in Jaffa.
After the Six Day War, pre-intifadas glory days, days of open bridges, two women came and knocked on my door in Jaffa.
One said: I live in Jaffa, and she points to the other wearing a black djellaba, she added, and this is my sister, from Amman, and it was her house. Can we visit the house?
I took the women inside my home, and the woman from Amman said: Jasmine was here and here the lemon tree. Did the lemon give fruit? She asked. The two women wandered around the house, watching. The house was new and lived there only a year, said the woman from Amman. The women wandered dumbly at some more and then left.
My father did not want to leave the country anywhere in the world, not even for a short trip. This is my home and I have nothing to look elsewhere, he told me.
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