Child’s Play

Revisiting my own brief experience of Israel/Palestine

I don’t remember her name, yet still I see her haunting face, hear her voice.

It’s 1996 and I am running a kid’s club in a hotel in Limassol, Cyprus.

She has a honey blonde bob, is lithe limbed and light eyed. She is about nine years old and wears the same sort of loose T-shirt and shorts they all do. All the kids that come daily to my playroom. To play, make friends.

Tears are streaming down her tanned cheeks.

She is being eyed suspiciously by a huddle of dark eyed girls a similar age.

“They won’t play with me! They don’t want to be my friend!”

She says, voice wobbly as a lamb.

“Why not?”

I enquire.

After all, this child is a true sweetheart.  She is sociable, kind, shares what she has. It can surely be smoothed over.

The words I hear next, stay with me forever.

“It’s because I’m Jewish. I’m from Israel.”

She says.

“Their parents have told them they aren’t allowed to talk to me.”

I am in my early 20’s.

I get it, yet I don’t get it.

I know about the conflict in that part of the world. The Middle East.

But these are kids, right?

I preach love.  Twentysomething me is a ‘Whistle While You Work’ Snow White, wishing bluebirds to fly in through this window of hope I naively open to help rid the air of the foul stench that has entered the room.

The stench of hate.

They do not arrive.

I talk to their parents but my hopeful English patter lies idle as oil on water. How I shake the bottle, vigorously, desperately! But no matter what I do, like a frustrated science student, I just cannot get two to become one.

Later that year, I visit Israel. I feel like Noah on his ark as I enter the port of Haifa on my cruise ship, greeted by the most mesmerising rainbow. I take in fascinating street markets, bejewelled with mounds of spices that stack as red hills and gold mountains, pungent with promise and mystery.

Palm trees jut from arid as withered wrists and fingers evoking the watercolour pictures from the Bible I had as a child.

It feels like the oldest land I have ever met. Yes ‘met’. Some countries shake your hand like an elderly guide. They breathe their dust bowl history upon you, each crumbling wall a trembling lip.

But accompanying this absorbing tableau, lies that same undercurrent of tension. The same foul stench of hate I had tasted months earlier.

“I will take you near the muslim area so you can see the difference.”

Says the Jewish coach driver on my tour, as he leads us away from affluence into more uncomfortable territory.

His commentary starts off fairly innocuously but rapidly descends into the same hate I witnessed in that playroom.

As we are encouraged to look down from our windows, we are also invited to look down upon our fellow human beings. To pity and sneer.

“They do not have the same standards we have. Look at how they live. Their filth and chaos. Their houses are dirty, they do not take care of what they have.”

As he drives around the outskirts of this neighbourhood, his vehicle a barge pole, I wonder how he cannot see what I see -  families, footballs being kicked around, giggling children.

He sees instead aliens, parasites, scum.

I feel sick inside.

Hatred sits on my tongue, a heavy treacle medicine. I cannot rid it with a spoonful of my homemade Disney sugar. It stubbornly refuses to budge.

I listen further as he insults Palestinian people. their ‘squalor’. Compares them to animals.

All from the comfort of his air conditioned coach full of big tipping Americans.

The coach I am also on.

That summer, I learn more about hate than I have since learned in the sum of the rest of my life.

I learn that just as fairytales are passed down from generation to generations, so it is with prejudice.

Hate becomes tradition.

Past wounds are bestowed as heavy necklaces which weigh upon our children as shackling armour.

And if one is dressed in such psychic armour, laden with the anchors of his ancestry, it follows he is half way to battle.

I do not know how we pick apart intricate knots that make faceless nubs of our neighbours.

But I’d hazard a guess, it starts with child’s play.