Word: arabized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hebron's settlers move among their four compounds heavily armed. Especially visible among the 450 Jewish residents are 150 students of the Shavei Hebron Yeshiva: in pairs or threes they patrol the roads connecting the settler enclaves, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. As they saunter through the streets, Arab merchants grow anxious. The yeshiva boys frequently overturn their stalls or bash their cars. "It's a daily business the trouble they make," says shopkeeper Mohamad Sharif. The settlers admit to these actions, but say they commit them only when provoked...
There's no mistaking the reference; Schami is flogging his heritage to American publishers. He capitalizes on the romantic nation of Arab story-telling, as thousands have before him. But Schami boasts an advantage that Nerval or Flaubert could never attain: he is an Arab. He understands what makes Damascenes tick, and embues his account with a wealth of genuine detail that French Orientalists could only dream of (when they weren't dreaming about those slave-girls they bought in Cairo). At the same time, he knows his surroundings well enough to misrepresent them subtly: Damascus appears slightly trated...
...heritage, re-seasoned for Western palates while still claiming authenticity, and passes his work off as a critical development in fiction. To quote the blurb on the back cover: "Slyly oblivious to the Western cartographies of narrative art and faithful only to the oral itineraries of the classic Arab story-tellers, Rafik Schami plays with the genre of the Western novel, and he explodes it from within." Well I guesses I'd better go throw out my novel collection...
...army doctor and in his work at the Kiryat Arba clinic, Goldstein was a paradox: a devoted physician, but not for Arabs. "He would say, 'He's an enemy of my people. I didn't come here to treat enemies,' " recalls Barbara Ginsberg, an American official of Kach who knew Goldstein. Says Michael Guzofsky, the associate director of Kahane Chai, a splinter of the Kach Party: "In his mind, there was no such thing as an innocent Arab." Among the Palestinians of Hebron, he developed a reputation as a fierce bully who harassed Muslim worshippers at the Tomb...
After Kahane was shot to death in 1990 by an Arab assassin in New York City, Goldstein's anger appeared to deepen. In remarks at the dedication of a new Torah scroll at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, he vowed that someday a Jew would rise up and kill many Arabs in revenge for Kahane's death. Last fall Goldstein quit the Kiryat Arba council. Some neighbors say it was because the council had rejected his demand to bar new immigrants to Israel, many of them from Russia, from moving to Kiryat Arba. He felt they were not sufficiently devout...