Interview with Asma Agbarieh

Portrait of a Community Leader

By Roni Ben Efrat

Asma, what is the Baqa center?
Baqa is an alternative community center which was established by Hanitzotz Publishing House and members of the ODA in 1995. The center is located in the heart of the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa. It is involved in the problems faced by Arab Jaffans and works to organize the population toward finding solutions. All Arab locations in Israel suffer from acute difficulties, but in Jaffa they are especially severe. In addition to serious obstacles in housing and education, Jaffans have to tackle special problems that relate to identity. The 20,000 members of the Arab community in Jaffa are located five minuets from Israel's metropolis– Tel Aviv. This creates confusion and unbearable contradictions. Let’s take for example the problem of housing: the municipality together with private real estate companies is taking over the Arab neighborhoods and turning Jaffa from an Arab city to a high-class financial, residential and tourism center-- an exotic, oriental appendage of Tel Aviv. The vastly poor Arab population has no place in this scheme. The idea is to gradually push them out of their own city. The plan has national significance because, as Arabs, we don't have anywhere to go. The bottom line is that the people have no tools with which to deal with this predatory real-estate attack.

So what is the center’s answer to this?
One might say that we entered an already desperate situation. The local leadership, which once stood against such plans, had changed its mind. Believing that you can't swim upstream, they started planting illusions in people's minds that perhaps the Arabs could benefit from this building frenzy. It didn't tell them that only a very thin layer of Jaffa's bourgeoisie will profit while 98 percent of the people will lose their city. Our center-- whose name means "holding on"-- fights the problem at two levels. The first is the individual level- counseling and intervening in specific cases. For example, many single mothers lose their rights to their house as a result of divorce or unlawful agreements, and we intervene in such cases and mediate a solution with the municipality. There is also the public sphere of raising consciousness, explaining the plans, warning people not to sell their rights. Our paper Al-Sabar writes extensively about these cases. People read and come to see us as an address they can turn to.
You could say that our main goal is empowerment: we train people to be aware of their problems and deal with them. A particularly good example of this is our Mothers' School. Jaffa falls very near the bottom of the education ladder of the Arab sector in Israel. There is a 50% dropout level after age 14, and the percentage of pupils who matriculate is tiny. We decided to tackle the problem via mothers and developed a concrete program to teach them how to tutor their children. Most of the mothers themselves dropped out of school an early age, so they are keen to discover new learning methods. We don't wait for them to come to us but go to their homes and convince them to join. Most of all, the women want to believe that change is possible. In the long run, we want them to be confident enough to enter the local schools and monitor what is happening there. This is a unique program that we have developed, first in our twin Baqa center in Majd al-Krum and now here.
We are paying a high price for the lack of a good educational system in Jaffa. Many parents, out of despair, send their children to Jewish schools. This in turn leads to a complete loss of linguistic and historical identity. Arab children learn to despise both themselves and their community. Yet as much as they try to enter Jewish society, they'll always be rejected. I'm always shocked to see that half of our Arab youth cannot read Arabic. This has to change if we want to build a healthy society, aware of its national roots and culture.

You are the youngest of the ODA's candidates, yet the first two candidates, Samya Nasser and Wehbe Badarneh are also young. Is there a special meaning behind the age of the ODA list?
I'd like to point out that most of the members of our party are young. This reflects the fact that our program offers a solution to youngsters who are disappointed with the Arab parties’ idleness and lack of resolve. In the past the Communist party had this role, but today the ODA is the only party that educates young people like me and trains us to work in the community. We were chosen to lead the list because we take on crucial public struggles on behalf of the party-- Samya on questions of education and land, Wehbe as a labor organizer and myself in education and housing. We do this work with no special eye toward the elections, but I certainly believe that we give our young Arab generation a message: If we want things to change we have to take leadership into our own hands.

In your adolescence, when you were tackling questions of identity and your future, what was the message society gave you?
When I was growing up, my society refrained from educating its youth about our national values or Arabic identity. There was a complete avoidance of the Palestinian question in every area, including the schools. I must say regretfully that I grew up at a time of decline for the national movement of Arabs in Israel. Therefore, as a person searching for greater purpose in life, the only available message was religion. This fulfilled me for a while and answered some moral and philosophical questions. But alongside Islam, and without my seeing any contradiction, society encouraged me to concentrate on a career and to look out for myself. I was told that only the strong survive and that for me the way to do so was by getting an education, which would ensure me a successful husband, a house and a car. After some years, around the time of my graduation from university, I realized that this set of aspirations, including religion, was too narrow and impeded my development.

At that point you joined the ODA?
Yes. Through the party I realized what reality is made of, in contrast to the bubble I was living in. I realized that one cannot run away from her place in society, and I began to reclaim my identity as a Palestinian living in Israel. I began to ask questions about my connection to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and the rest of the Arab world and to live up to my responsibilities to my society.

In the past two years you have led two crucial housing struggles in Jaffa. The first erupted in the summer of 1997 when the municipality of Tel Aviv handed the whole neighborhood of Karem al-Dalak eviction orders. The second has been going on for some years but exploded when the Sawaf family was thrown into the street . What have you learned in the course of these struggles?
In the case of Karem al-Dalak, the neighborhood took matters into its own hands and established a committee. This was a phenomenon which Jaffa had not seen for years. The pattern had been that people would approach the local leadership, which would bury the case until it was too late. So this struggle revealed a mistrust of the local institutions (who were, by the way, represented in the municipality's coalition). The Baqa center entered the mix as a supporting body. Indeed it was my first experience in a public struggle. Watching the conduct of the local institutions, I learned how they serve the municipality by marketing its plans to our community instead of serving our needs. I realized that we need a strong opposition body that will stand with the people against the municipality’s plans. It was the first time I took it upon myself to speak on behalf of Jaffa to the press and to supporters from outside circles. We organized a mass solidarity event with some 500 people and an outdoor exhibition with the participation of 60 artists.
At that time, the municipality told 32 families to vacate their homes within 60 days. The plan was presented as a fait accompli, and the municipality didn't even bother to present an alternative. Did they think we would evaporate? Yet they got more resistance than they had bargained for, and up to this point almost two years later no one has been evicted. I think the whole affair was important for Jaffans to see: it showed that you can fight and win without bowing your head.
The Sawaf family’s case is more complicated because here we have to fight two battles at once. The first is to defend a socially weak Arab family that found itself on the street because no one defended it against real estate powers (full story in Challenge #53). On the other hand, while we are using legal and public means to try to force the violating party to offer the family a fair solution, the municipality has brutally evicted the family three times from its tent. We erected a new tent each time. The bitter lesson Jaffa is learning from this is that the forces of real estate have no mercy and are serious about ousting the Arabs. The municipality is standing with them. We need strong forces of our own, a strong community, in order to fight back. We have also learned that the question has a class aspect, for there are small but influential Arab elements in Jaffa who would like to join in the game of real estate roulette. The struggle is still going on, but already it has turned Jaffa upside down. It has brought us to every home and forced people to form a position. Here is a family on the street. The question is simple: are you supporting the family or are you turning your head and saying it won't happen to you? From the beginning we took the problem to the people. After all, they are our source of power at least as much as we are theirs.

Did the fact that you are a woman in any way impede your ability to carry out these struggles?
At first my family members tried to prevent me from being active at all, but this was more because they were afraid of my involvement in the political opposition, not so much because I was a woman. When working among the people, I don't see my gender as a limitation. On the contrary, it allows me to enter houses which might be a problem for a man. In addition, Jaffa is a socially weak society, and you find that in many cases it is the woman who holds the household together. For this reason, I would say that in Jaffa the woman is seen and heard.

The ODA opposes the political solution offered to the Palestinians in the framework of Oslo. Do you think Arabs in Israel have the right to express their opposition to the agreement and to the Palestinian Authority? Do they have the

right to put opposition to Oslo as one of their main electoral points, as you do?
It is not only a right but an obligation. The source of the Palestinian problem is the same everywhere, and this is the Israeli regime. True, it wears different clothing according to its limitations. Should we forget that until 1966 Arabs in Israel were also under full military rule? When its abolition finally came, we found that in many respects this was only a formality. Zionism has never accepted our existence here; therefore, the gate by which we can achieve our equality is through a just solution to the Palestinian problem. Only a change in power relations will impose this on Israel. That is why what happens in the Occupied Territories influences us, and what we do influences them. It has always been in times of political decline that the Arab political parties adopted the position that we are separate from the West Bank and Gaza. In 1976, when the Arabs in Israel were in the midst of a huge struggle over land, they all saw themselves as part and parcel of the Palestinian people. The Oslo accords are designed to nurture separatist tendencies among Palestinians in order to weaken the struggle for peace and equality.