By EDWARD GROSSMANThe poster promoting the Israeli film, ‘Sand Storm,’ set in a Beduin village in southern Israel(photo credit: Courtesy)
SHE, OSAMA and Mohammed were flying economy. This wasn’t just because her generous Fulbright covers only basic needs.A Fulbright two-year Outreach Fellowship, that is, reserved for Israeli Arabs and for Israeli Jews of Ethiopian descent, affirmative action, if you will, covering tuition, fees, books, rent, health insurance, and support stateside, including networking and one round trip. No, even if Outreach fellows had their pick of classes they would’ve gone economy because in first and business in United’s Dreamliner on the non-stop Silicon Wadi-Silicon Valley route, there’s no means to hang a bassinet.And so here they were in economy some five miles up – Eman Abu Aiada, happy and excited more than she was worried, her husband, also more happy and excited than worried, and their offspring. Three seats abreast in the center of the Dreamliner paid for by the American taxpayer with the third seat holding baby paraphernalia. All three Beduin, some five miles above British Columbia, having been airborne some 13 hours and overflown Cyprus, Turkey, Europe, the North Atlantic, Greenland, Hudson Bay.What a good boy Mohammed was! Just five months old, he’d fussed and wailed a little but mainly slept, drank and taken in a new environment with its constant background whispering roar. A dark environment all the way owing to the fact that UA 955 leaves at a quarter to one in the morning, and as it zooms westward, it’s never quite caught up with by the sun. Westward, westward, invariably westward. The cute aircraft representation on the overhead screen might appear to be following a curved path, but though Eman has a humanities degree she knows as every ORT graduate knows that the earth is round and, therefore, on a two-dimensional map the shortest line between two such distant points as Tel Aviv and San Francisco will appear to curve. Fifteen hours in darkness until touchdown at six in the morning Pacific Standard Time.Good baby! When he’d wailed or fussed Eman had inspected his diaper and, if necessary, taken him to the lavatory for a change. To reach the lavatories she had to navigate the aisle past rows and rows of faces glowing in the light of built-in personal entertainment centers, or iPads, or MacBooks, or Kindles and past sleepers with mouths agape. Who were these other travelers in economy? She guessed dreamers hoping to succeed big in hi-tech like those in curtained-off business probably had already and those in first even bigger, for United’s daily Silicon Wadi-Silicon Valley and return connects the world’s two foremost start-up hotbeds. “Wadi,” a desert gully, is an expression adopted by the Jews from Eman’s mother tongue. You have to be vigilant in the winter in the Negev lest a flash flood in a wadi carry you off. It happens occasionally to hikers but rarely, if ever, to Beduin.She carried Mohammed past row upon row of Americans or Israelis, youngish if not downright young like herself and Osama, young Jews, young Christians, young atheists. The Jews all bareheaded, none among them faithful to the commandments of their religion, no surprise to her since takeoff had been on the Sabbath when commandment-keeping Jews won’t travel, unless to save their lives. Never mind. Though most were deep in entertainment or work or sleep, her baby and she triggered a friendly smile or two on the way to the lavatory.What a cramped place. But it was OK.And if the diaper wasn’t Mohammed’s problem? Well, a smiling flight attendant heated a bottle in the microwave. And if it was neither the diaper or hunger, and the pacifier was rejected, his father picked him up in his swaddling clothes and gave him a tour, rocking him, jiggling him, talking to him, showing him the dark view from the window in the galley, the plastic window cold to his father’s touch. Insufficient to say that Osama is happy with his son, his firstborn.Besotted is more like it.Osama in jeans and running shoes and Eman the only passenger in hijab and coatlike robe buttoned to the neck, just her face and hands exposed, and no makeup.Her name? “Faith” in Arabic. The same word in Hebrew? “Emunah.” Which isn’t surprising, the Arabs and the Jews being half-brothers, sharing a father, Abraham, the patriarch who was nagged and nagged and nagged by his first wife Sarah until he threw second wife Hagar and Ishmael his son by her, out of the tent and into the burning desert, the Negev around Beersheba where Eman, Osama and Mohammed were born and had lived so far.She’s unusual, Eman is, and knows it.Lucky and highly unusual in numerous ways – a Beduin woman with a degree, a Beduin woman fluent in three languages, a Beduin woman anointed by the Fulbright people, a Beduin woman whose marriage wasn’t arranged and whose Beduin spouse helps care for their kid. She assumed that in Corvallis she’d have to explain to at least some of her teachers and classmates and neighbors what and who the Beduin are, in general, and the Negev Beduin, in particular.There’d be questions.Do they live in tents like Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness in “Lawrence of Arabia”? Very few these days, and certainly neither her or Osama’s family. Are there vendettas? Honor killings? Some. Is there polygamy? Some, well, actually more than just some, a lot. Do all Beduin women have as many children as Eman’s mother? Not all – some have fewer, some more. And will Mohammed be an only kid? God-willing, no. Eman doesn’t intend stopping with him – she’s not Jewish, you know. As the Beduin say, “The Jews have one child and one dog.” But, nor, God-willing, is he going to be the first of ten either. That’s a different mentality, the old, the traditional.Are the Beduin Moslems? Yes, although few heed all the commandments of Islam.For example, while drinking Coke in preference to United’s complimentary beer or complimentary wine, she and Osama hadn’t ordered halal. Neither the pan-roasted chicken breast with herbs and porcini cream, Carolina grits and spinach, served with artisan whole-grain ciabatta roll and cranberry pumpkin quinoa salad, which she’d enjoyed and given Osama a taste of, nor the home-style turkey meat loaf in spicy barbecue sauce, served with sweet potato mash, mixed vegetables, artisan roll and amaranth mango salad, which Osama had had and given her a taste of, were prepared in accordance with Moslem law. Flavorful meals, although not so delicious as the honeymoon Turkish Airlines snack of chicken breast, cheese, tomato, cucumber, olives, roll, marmalade, cake and Coke they’d had some 14 months previous. Everything on Turkish is halal.Are the Beduin Arabs? What a question – the original and maybe the sole genuine Arabs. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been eligible for this Fulbright. Are those in the Negev and the Galilee Israelis? Well, that’s complicated, but more yes than no – again, otherwise she wouldn’t have been eligible.Palestinians? Also complicated, but more no than yes. On the other hand, she imagined there might be some at Oregon State University in Corvallis who know the Beduin are the original Moslems and Arabs, the nomads on the move with their camels throughout history from oasis to oasis who today are encouraged, if not forced, to settle down across North Africa and the Middle East by governments intent on control and on quashing the smuggling of drugs, women, guns.Who knows? There might be somebody who’s heard or read of the unauthorized Beduin villages the Israeli government keeps demolishing, sometimes in the face of violent resistance, and of the UN condemning a plan to move all the Beduin of the Negev into legal villages with electricity, sewerage, clinics, running water, paved streets, etcetera, as neocolonialist, a racist land grab. What’s that about? Have any Beduin gone in for terrorism? Do she and Osama reside in an unauthorized or a legal settlement? Is it true her people, her indigenous people, the numerous young especially, suffer from illiteracy, unemployment, alienation, drug addiction, like the Native Americans on the reservations into which those not exterminated by the WASPs got herded? By chance does Osama’s father have more than one wife? Does hers, progressive as he may be? What if Osama in 20 years decides to take a second and a younger wife? Eman was confident she’d be able to handle such questions.She wouldn’t deny that few of her people graduate high school and next to none, university.In fact, her mother was the first Israeli Beduin woman to go to college. She’d enrolled at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, the nursing program, but dropped out – the commute too long. She’d married, had children, ten to be exact, two daughters, eight sons. Yet she’d urged Eman to go to college and finish. More important, so had Eman’s father, the first in the hamula, the clan, to have studied beyond high school.The father in Beduin society decides everything for his wife or wives, his sons and daughters. Already in high school Eman knew she wasn’t only expected but wanted very much to go to BGU and win a degree.IT WAS the ORT high school in Umm Batin, one of the Negev villages the Israeli government has built and, shall we say, encouraged Beduin to move into. ORT being an international network of Jewish vocational and technical schools begun in St.Petersburg, Russia, in the time of the czars.There she learned to speak Hebrew like a Jew, and learned English, and learned the earth is round, and it was at BGU that Eman took the literature courses permitting her to fall in love with English novels of the 19th century. Her all-time favorite? “Wuthering Heights.”Everything the Brontë sisters produced is worth reading, thinking about, understanding but “Wuthering Heights” especially.Plus she thinks highly of Dickens, although in Prof. Gelber’s course on literary antisemitism she learned that Fagin belongs in an English tradition of Jewish villains. Prof.Mark Gelber, a wonderful teacher, head of BGU’s foreign languages and linguistics department, American-born, Americaneducated.She’d enrolled at BGU intending to teach later because teachers have a set routine, a set and orderly existence allowing work, marriage and children. It was at BGU that she met the Beduin who’d become her husband and Mohammed’s father. Osama had been studying toward a degree in social work he now has. A member of a bigger, stronger hamula. They of course hadn’t had a relationship, an affair of the kind Jews may have on campus, but only spoken, and when Osama and she went to her enlightened father to ask for his permission to marry he wouldn’t give it. Small as her hamula may be she’d be the first woman to marry outside. Too much for him to accept immediately.Besides, whatever the hamula, small or large, powerful or not-so-powerful, virtually all Beduin marriages are arranged.What a job getting him to relent! But eventually he did, and for the honeymoon they’d flown to Istanbul, two hours airborne, the bride’s first trip out of Israel but not Osama’s who’d visited Italy and Germany. This kid in the bassinet was conceived in Turkey.Yes, quite a beautiful kid. Eman is lucky and she knows it. She was happy, like Osama, so happy and excited to be on the way to America that she couldn’t sleep, despite knowing that the incoming president of the United States had spoken during his campaign about people like her, Osama and their child. He’d said, a year ago exactly, when a U.S.-born Moslem had carried out a massacre in San Bernardino, California, and he and his Pakistani/Saudi wife had died in a shoot-out with police, that when he became president he’d stop Moslems entering the country until, as he put it, “we can figure out what the hell is going on.”Eman had seen photos on the Internet of the makeup-free wife in hijab and coat-like robe buttoned to the neck. She’d read that the neighbors had no idea, none whatsoever. The couple left a six-month-old daughter.And so Donald Trump had promised to stop Moslems, any and all Moslems, coming in, be they would-be immigrants, exchange students, tourists, the well-off seeking treatment at the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, what have you, and later said, no, not all Moslems, just those from countries with a history of terrorism, not from, say, England where the mayor of London is a Moslem, or Scotland where Trump owns a golf course. The president-elect hadn’t mentioned Israel.But now that he’d been elected, there was no telling what he’d do. Lucky she, Osama and Mohammed had gotten their visas and were landing in San Francisco before his inauguration. Of course, no president of the US can be a dictator. She knew there was a Constitution, and there were courts, and so was less worried about Trump and more about how his supporters might treat her and her family. How would it be in Oregon? She understood it’s green and wet and wooded, not too hot, not too cold, unlike the Negev with its sandstorms, where in the summer there’s no unirrigated green thing and on winter nights frost. But the people? Were they for Trump? By nature she’s optimistic, therefore she hoped for the best, intending to show that Moslems can respect and love people of all kinds, and be respected and loved. Anyway, it was her Outreach duty to be a cultural ambassador, make that ambassadress, fostering sympathetic understanding of Israel, the Beduin, Arabs, Moslems, of each and all. How did the fact sheet put it? “Fellows serve as cultural ambassadors and should be prepared to speak about their countries, cultures and research to academic and community groups” so as to “promote a more peaceful and prosperous world.”Research? She hoped to write her MA dissertation on aspects of the Gothic novel.It would be OK. She hoped and trusted as a final snack of warm croissants with preserves and yoghurt was served that it would be OK, even though English isn’t her mother tongue and even if finding an apartment, a job for Osama – holders of J-2s may work – and daycare might be a challenge.Maybe it wouldn’t, maybe the kind and flexible OSU people would help. After all, they’d agreed to let her begin her studies in January, rather than September, in order not to have to travel with Mohammed when he was only a couple of months of age. Would the University of Buffalo or Indiana University have done as much? She’d never know, because her applications there weren’t successful.Anyway, more than likely the OSU people would help as the Fulbright people had helped obtain a J-1 visa for herself and J-2 visas for Osama and Mohammed.Sure, there’d been paperwork, medical exams, fingerprinting, an interview at the consular division of the fortress-like US Embassy in Tel Aviv. But things had gone quickly and without hitches. Run, as Outreach is, by the State Department, paid for by Congress, once a young Israeli gets chosen she or he jumps to the head of the line. Which doesn’t mean he or she can stay in America forever, of course. Eman and Osama know that after two years they and Mohammed will have to leave and return to their country. Only after two years back home will they be eligible, if they so wish, to apply to immigrate. Will they? Much too long in the future to think about.And now Mohammed was fussing in the crib hanging on the bulkhead. Diaper time again. She carried him to the lavatory past the rows of jam-packed bodies and glowing faces, the built-in seat-back personal entertainment centers, the iPads, MacBooks and Kindles, past the sleepers and past a woman who smiled at her, past an unsmiling black man – a basketball player? – who drew his legs and enormous feet out of the way. Mohammed – good boy! – laughed as Eman saw to him atop the closed toilet seat. Then back up the aisle where the flight attendants were passing out customs and Homeland Security forms.Having transferred him to his father’s arms she juggled pen, visas, her and Osama’s passports and United boarding passes, while following instructions to use “ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.” Just one customs declaration per family regarding possession of food, disease agents, soil or money over $10,000 US or foreign equivalent. Was baby formula considered food? To be on the safe side Eman declared it. Likewise dealing with the question about having recently been on a farm/ranch/pasture or in close proximity of livestock – neither Osama’s family nor hers keep animals, but some more traditional women hamula members, who’d wished her Godspeed and kissed her, do. As for the Homeland Security arrival records, there were three to be completed, one for her, one for Osama, one for Mohammed.She was scrupulously filling these out as the pitch of the engines changed and the Dreamliner lost altitude.Outside it was still night.A chime. Fasten your seat belts, came the announcement over the loudspeaker, first in English, then Hebrew. Exciting! A flight attendant requested Mohammed be placed on somebody’s lap and Osama complied.Exciting! A new country, and not just any country but the United States of America.Would there be a hitch on the ground, at non-citizen passport control, what with the baby formula, the livestock, the hijab, Osama’s name, Mohammed’s name? Eman hoped and trusted not.Slowing, slowing, the Dreamliner losing more altitude, nearing earth. The baby was fussing. His ears? They were going to have three and a half hours to kill in San Francisco International Airport before the one-hour-and-forty-minute-long Virgin America flight to Portland.A curious name, Virgin America. There in Portland somebody would meet and drive them an hour or so to OSU. Grindingly the undercarriage engaged. How many sleepless hours total will it have been from leaving the Negev to reaching Corvallis? Well over 24, right? Never mind. In no time she, Osama and Mohammed would be landing in the Promised Land.Edward Grossman’s reportage has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, Les Temps Modernes (Paris), Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm) and Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo)
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