February 8, 2012

A Lone Star-of-David Encounter

by William Miles

"You have a Jewish accent," said the El Paso Yellow Cab driver as he picked me up from my Holiday Inn in Texas one recent, pre-dawn morning.

"Oh, really?" I said, a bit quizzically. "Do Jews have a different accent from Christians?"

"Oh, for sure," my driver says with great authority. "American Jews, Israelis - they all have a Middle Eastern way of talking."

My taxi driver also had an accent, but it was not a southwestern drawl. His was Arabic-inflected. Turns out that I'd been picked up by a Palestinian, from Jerusalem but with roots in Hebron. He'd been in Texas for eighteen years already.

"It's different here than from where I come," commented Salah, on the contrast between El Paso and Jerusalem. "Is it different from where you come?" I assured him that for a New York-bred migrant to Massachusetts, Texas was also quite foreign.

"We are both Middle Eastern," Salameh continued, getting back to my supposed accent. "That's how we recognize each other. After all, we are cousins."

I'd been attending a cross-border conference on borders, jointly organized by the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of New Mexico, and el Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez.[1] It was my first time not only in Mexico but in Texas, too. I was looking forward to learning about what, to me, was still a New World – Tex-Mex Chicanos, Hispanics and Latinos. I had come to present my research on West Africa and Southeast Asia. But, as invariably happens at international conferences, the Semites regrouped.

It was not your usual brand of Hebraic eggheads, though. Among us was Daniel Seidelman, a Jewish lawyer with a rat-tail haircut who represents Palestinians in land disputes with the Israeli government, and David Eisenberg, a scholarly sheriff with the Chulavista, California police department. The Semitic contingent also included Saida Latmani, a Moroccan professor of law, and Nadia Abu-Zahra, a passionate Palestinian advocate from the University of Oxford. Both wore headscarves, as befit Islamic female modesty.

Nadia inveighed indignantly against the supposed injustice and suffering caused by the West Bank wall built to separate Israelis from Palestinians. That prompted a local member of the audience to make comparisons with indigenous peoples oppressed in the Americas, and to wonder aloud why "we don't hear about the Wall in the U.S." The audience was obviously sympathetic to both Nadia and the audience member, with nary a dissenting voice.

Now, whether as bad faith pretext for "land grab" or self-defense against suicide bombing, the wall/fence indisputably did go up in a context of random killing of civilians, including those the age of my adolescent children. And so, ambivalent about departing from my academic subject at hand, I stated my conflicted position – not as a professor, but as a parent.

"Yes, the Wall does contribute to Palestinian suffering. I too would want to see it come down some day – but not before my seventeen-year-old daughter gets back from Israel. Not before kids can go to pizza parlors without fear of being blown up."

"There are reasons why they do such things!" came a protest from the audience, as the otherwise sedate, academic session began to percolate.

The panel moderator, a meek lecturer from Japan, struggled to bring the session to a close…
* * *
As he dropped me off at the El Paso airport for my return to Boston, my taxi driver's parting words were, "We should only have peace."

Next year, perhaps we should convene a conference panel in Salameh's Yellow Cab in El Paso.

---

[1] The Lineae Terrarum conference was the brain child of Professor Tony Kruszewski, a Polish Catholic who participated in the anti-Nazi underground in Warsaw, and whose mother was murdered for sheltering a Jewish youth.

William F.S. Miles is a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston and the former Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies. His most recent book, ZION IN THE DESERT. AMERICAN JEWS IN ISRAEL'S REFORM KIBBUTZIM was designated finalist for a 2007 National Jewish Book Award.