That brief conversation couldn't have too much meaning, I thought for a fleeting moment - we were already onto some serious matters after all. But I found this to be a lie immediately thereafter, to a great extent I couldn't care, I'm a European-educated guy, perhaps more provincial than cosmopolitan and not as failed as I would like to be, so that it couldn't matter to me any less 'in a way'. After all, I had had my own affairs with diplomats and Catholic clergy, as a leading socialite of the strange and invisible expat world of East Jerusalem to which I had belonged for sometime, despite endless warnings of friends in the Western side telling me "Watch out, you do look very Jewish after all". I had worked for a German Catholic organization, and knew the Christian community from head to toes and a great extent of the diplomatic one, at least from the European missions. I wasn't interested in influences or power, in fact my intentions were radically apolitical, I was just trying to satisfy my aesthetic sense with materials by far not available in the whole of Jewish Jerusalem. With all this in mind, what could be wrong with a nice Arab boy? Well that's something which needs a long answer. After the revelation nothing apparently changed, except the fact that paradoxically I could turn immediately to English and speak both languages simultaneously, being someone in English and someone else in Hebrew but playing both acts as good as I could. He felt ought to leave and tried to convince him otherwise, although I did want to leave that hole of filth where we had been crumped.
Thinking of it, it was highly typical of me to be with him in this rather fancy bar and then in those loopholes, because as sort of bohemian and declared enemy of the burgeoisie (to which I deliberately belong as though it were a fact of natural law) I could only find myself in places that are either of the very highest standards or of the very lowest, with nothing in the middle but the game of a broken middle whose lines I have refused to play since I became an adult. Finding it to be extremely boring and playful... And it is in those places, the best restaurants and cocktails just like in the filthiest bars and clubs, where Bohemians and Arabs meet. Then I convinced him to join me for half an hour to an even lousier place that I've grown too fond of, and encountered one of my painters on the portico, then followed by other people. At this point the conversation was quite intense and it reached the level of aesthetics I had sought and broke it asunder, aesthetics had become passion but in the most burning sense of the word. Being able to speak English made me a little free, not only grammatically, but in the sense that there was a shared sense of foreignness. Altogether, everything seemed extremely alright, which is always a very bad symptom, I always say. Eventually he decidedly had to go and I walked him over to his car, that is very very different from G. or J.'s, perhaps different by at least twenty-thousand dollars. So we kissed again perhaps in the best possible way - playing with both aesthetics and lust, and of course he had to be an educated Arab to understand that, a concept as foreign to Israelis as the idea of aristocracy. Then he brought me to my friends again and I left quite touched, unhindered and a little bit vexed.
I sat by myself and couldn't even drink, just played with my thoughts and remembered the one more painter sitting next to us, smiling with our conversation and drawing a man that danced in a chiaroscuro of green flashes. Then of course the curious friendly public couldn't wait to be furnished with all the information, and I replied basically by saying no more than "Well, some guy I happen to have dated a few times and who turned out to be an Arab". The first response is an absolute silence of ten minutes on the part of everybody, and then one young man interjects with a "Didn't you know it before?", to this I responded only with a nod. A very well-meaning friend just wanted to 'improve' the situation by saying "Oy Leo... there're some good Arabs you know!". This absolutely murdered the situation, but it would be only an appetitzer of what would come later. I had been a little bit jumpy because after all that date had been also the assassination of an old ghost, overall it had been a perfectly drawn night, and there my suspicion started that would be confirmed only ten minutes later.
My dear B., called me incessantly over the course of an hour, time during which in the middle of a tribunal made of ten young Israelis scorned my public shame, when I realized this a great deal of text messages had arrived already and I set myself to respond. In fact, my dear B. had been extremely "offended" by our meeting, which I had considered to be extremely normal and very successful, first of all because as an Israeli-born Arab, raised up in a villa in Ein Kerem, driving a car twice as expensive as anyone else's I know and studying medicine at the Hebrew University, he had to "accuse" me of "belonging" to what he termed the Ashkenazi Zionist burgeoisie, of course... me from all people! The most radical of all anti-burgeoisie that fights with his own burgeoise attitudes more than a little. But the judgment day didn't end there, it was also an attack set upon me and an statement of the impossibiliy of our "chemistry" because he's allegedly a Communist, who of course knows by heart the menus of all international restaurants to be found in this city! Finally it was significant enough to say that the root of the matter is that "I'm an Arab and you're a Jew". Proceeding onto adding that "When I told you I was a Christian it was only half the truth, in fact I'm half Muslim". "We believe in different things altogether". So that I was fairly enlightened by the content of this lesson: That love, ideology and chemistry are equally synonimous and interchangeable terms!
Of course a whole providence of self-defense of someone who's never been attacked. Perhaps my friend does want to be an Arab in his heart, but in his whole attitude and language he's entirely one of us... although, almost none of my friends would agree. He's by no means a Palestinian, but an Israeli Arab that could certainly pass easier for an Israeli than myself that at best am able to pretend being a third-rate European in exile. Something makes me think that these experiences are not the mainstream (or at least I want to believe it so) and that among less 'cultured' segments of both our Jewish and Arab societies, these encounters are not so abnormal and that happen in everyday situations, something that we 'intellectuals' aren't too fond of because it's difficult to quote that way. It is interesting to give oneself such political legitimacy, but not at the price of love in whichever form it comes, but matters aren't so easily resolved.
Conversation
"Oy... what a drama! But how real? The guy leaves although he's so interested, because I'm a burgeoise, a Jew and because I seemly am in love with another guy".
"I think you still have your other one in the heart, but you could never have such wonderful evenings with him"
"He also thinks that I can't love him at all because my other one is a Jew and that he's an Arab. I can't believe the world to be divided between Jews and Arabs. I don't accept it!"
"But he's right, isn't he? Yet he doesn't understand the meaning of the evening you spent together...The horror of it is that the politics and the ressentment and divisions fill all parts of the most private feelings, there's no corner left free, not even love."
"The night was so mad! The "Arab" came to my house this morning, he explained once again that he's a Communist and I'm an elitist burgeoise, then we stopped and had a pretty good time, it all seemed OK. Then he left and called me again to say it can't work out... because of the Jew-Arab thing!"
"My dear Leo, it is a dilemma when one's own life is so mad and crazy, the artist's imagination is so useless, because there's no distancing, no need of evoking anything or inventing figures, stories or drama. How to survive, how to create, but seeing the everyday life as a parable... but how? When everything is at the highest risk, everything is extreme, devotion?"
"That's a serious problem, so that living and therefore dying is the only possible art, the kind of savoir-vivre. Everything is fragmentary representation, broken pieces... no distancing, just creation and therefore destruction".
"To call this a serious problem is already a step to help not getting mad. It's a good joke as well, because IT IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM! I start writing you a letter, we have to talk about love and politics, I'll call you tonight".
Nothing could have seem more normal than such encounter, taking into account our age, and well his, slightly less than three years under my already weighty twenty-three summers. But looking back, and it is important to notice how different the perspective is now, I can clearly see why B. would be so offended about this apparently unnatural meeting, not one of a bad context even as most of those encounters between our peoples that one hears about. It's not a matter of being too much of anything, or too little.. I simply feel that in my unrelenting trust that he was in fact an Israeli, I can't imagine how many millions of things I might have said whereof he might not have heard in his whole life... the revelation came to me as a shock and I refused to give it much importance, although I did feel that at the very moment he said he was an Arab, something did change in me and what had been the most natural feeling of 'tolerance' turned by now into hatred indeed, from both sides. It's a sad but strong anger you can't really describe, and especially that it is felt among two groups as unconventional in their ways as Jewish and Arab homosexuals... it's even perplexing, but somehow I guess as I said before, this is a sin of intelligent people, just safeguarding my sanity in the hope that the masses might think and most definitively act differently. I think now that I could have lied, and just say that it doesn't matter to me at all whether I have a Jewish partner or not, but I didn't so it's irrelevant, what is of importance is that, had I lied, perhaps I could be enjoying myself in a very neatly packed lie of love and deceive, although some of those are necessary sometimes, brutal reality is simply unbearable. It is a problem for our secular world, it can't manage to deal with itself, the abyss is too close and the ends-of-the-end drawing nearer and nearer in our age, either toward Enlightenment in the Kantian sense or plain destruction.
It was my duty to tell the truth, and even being an hypocrite I could say that lying didn't even seem possible then because I had the absolute security of being among 'my own'; and the things I said, oh God! Only he knows how bad it sounds when put into context. There's a conversation going on between human beings, there's a connection... but at a certain moment one turns around and sees the reality, and our realities aren't the same so that there's no possible conciliation, only vengeance in the short time and oblivion in the longer one. We both saw that reality in the moment when that discussion took place, and now it seems as though it happened a million years ago but it didn't. That look of reality was a frightening declaration of alterity that escapes all definitions, and it is indeed only the second chapter of the story with the children, it is an open declaration of what my friend said, the total politics of the space, even the most private feelings are invaded and filled with emptiness, the political is everything and therefore, nothing at all. This isn't without ground, to be an homosexual in Arab society (in Israel or anywhere else) is not just a dialectic of accept or reject as in Israel, where unfortunately some people are indeed thrown out of the house for coming out of the closet, but the tendency has changed significantly. It is a narrative of family life that the modern acceptance of the awareness of homosexuality has seriously threatened, and for an example we have a very nice story shared by our former policewoman: A certain guy is found out to be gay by the neighbours and soon thereafter is found dead, a police investigation in course: An Arab family, everybody is questioned... the end result: The father confessed to have ordered the older sons to murder the homosexual brother, and the youngest brother confesses to have seen how they soaked a piece of cloth in chemicals used for floor-cleaning and asfixiated that certain brother with it. They told the police that he was in the shower, had fallen upon the cloth with the chemicals unconscious already and inhaled it to death; quite a difficult story to believe matter-of-factly. This is the wonderful end!: The father expresses how much he loved his son, but as well how unable he was to live with the fact that his son is an homosexual!. Maybe his father could have loved him a little bit less and respected his sacred humanity a little bit more? Am I sounding too heartless? This is already what Postmodernity would define as a political murder, and no less.
My dear B. can't help his liking of me, it's all too clear.. but as long as I remain a Jew in this country it all seems impossible, no matter how contradictory his position is and mine too. How many times I spent long nights in the white Vienna with Egyptians and Lebanese, discussing Israeli politics? Or how many times I visited Sonia's father, that old guy from Tulkarem in Amsterdam? How often did I scorn Israel? Well, in Europe it was just too easy, and too irresponsible too. I might have developed already some un-love for my dear friend, who somewhere in the dark that has posed its wings upon one generation more, remains questioning the nature of the world at large and whether we need politics so much. I hear horrible stories about relationships with Arabs, most of them quite true, from all different kinds of people. It was clear to me that whatever he is, he undeniably belongs into the intelligentsia of this country... we can never have a double-state and we can never end this conflict, at least in this generation while enmities are just this fresh. Perhaps one could do like my dear Ursula Rosenzweig, to try and build a new intelligentsia in which Arabs and Jews will work together in building a country, but somehow I know this is bound to fail, because it is my country and not theirs, and I'm not even a Semite, I'm a stranger, a foreigner, imported from the West but I just know how much this country is mine.
This exercise has taught me that my intuition is right, the connection between love and politics in our age is beyond repair and it must be examined, I feel grateful that I've examined it in reality and no less, but at times the price of it seems an all-times-high one. Maybe I'll see him again in one of those expensive restaurants where we used to meet, just to remember that he's a Communist and I'm a pathethic burgeoise, no? And perhaps even beyond that, because our similarities are so striking that we might never be able to accept each other... but this love turned into politics and politics turned into love can only be negatively portrayed by a dictum of Augustine, "Love is as strong as death", and this, the father of a young man murdered by his brothers, could easily sing to himself in the tranquility of his heart. This love is murderous indeed, and perhaps we might find a way in which we could be a little bit more free by using less politics in between people and less love in between nations as the only viable alternatives of coexistence. That this exercise was taught me, in the course of such a wonderful night of a gift of grace, but only because this is so, the lesson is extraordinarily rude and noisy. A few years ago even, I felt so comfortable in the foreignness of East Jerusalem, but things have changed, the Levant has replaced Europe in many of my ways, but by no means all so that perhaps I have some space for reflection, the worst of all curses one might have in days when despair creeps in so easily and action is limited to the definition of whom we hate or love, if only on the principle of difference. I remain aloof in the madness of this dead city, and trying to come to terms with myself from the storm of political loves, I send a whole bunch of lies to an old friend, telling him how much I've spent the last two days resting from my books and my madness.... how untrue could it be? And then he replies callously telling me how he's been working in the garden. How much I envied him then. But yet not. We're all made of different material, and apparently so, of different politics and policies.
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