Trip about Arab Israelis
Wow. Today we did a lot. But I am feeling lazy right now and tired so I will not write everything. So this morning we woke up at 7 and left at 8. We got to this place called Givat Haviva. It has a center for peace where Israeli Arabs and Israelis come together and talk. We met this lady who was nice but pretty boring. She talked to us for like 3 hours!!! Told us the whole history of Israel. It was so boring when she said it!! I was falling asleep! Then we had lunch and then we met this Israeli Arab named Amir. He told us about himself and we were allowed to ask questions. I had been looking forward to this but by the time we finally got to meet him I was so bored of listening and I was not in the mood to pay attention. Honestly, I doodled in my notebook and played games with other people for the first half of the talk. I don’t remember like anything he said! But I know that I don’t agree with him. We talked about the army, money problems, Palestinian refugees, borders, and how and why they feel like second class citizens. It was boring and that guy was an uninformed idiot. Or so I felt. But in real life by his looks he was normal. Shaven, nice car, and he was a lawyer. Whatever.
Then we got on the buses and got a tour of an Israeli Arab town called Barta. It is one of those cool Arab towns that grows outward from one family. Every person in Barta has the last name Habbaka. They are all related, how cool is that? But the bad thing was that when the green line was drawn, they used what they thought were “Natural borders” like natural stuff, valleys, that make a border. So Barta was cut in half by the green line. However the barrier was put outside of Barta. So from the barrier, its inside Israel. But from the green line its half in Israel half in the West Bank. Weird, I know. Plus all the houses there were so nice!! They were actual mansions and palaces! Since lots of the Arabs are builders they build themselves these amazing houses! Plus, many of them don’t have to pay taxes because they are in between the green line and barrier. They are lucky. But most of their houses are illegal anyways!
So after that we saw a Jewish settlement that was near Barta. It was nice!! The houses were very nice (the new ones) and it seemed like a cool place to live. It was one of Sharon’s seven stars. He wanted more Jews in that area so he made seven Jewish settlements. The one we visited one a particularly good and successful one. After that we went to a mall in Tel Aviv and had DOTS. I had frozen yogurt!!! It was so good! And then I did some shopping and I bought a belt. And then I got frozen yogurt again!! YUMMY!!! And then we got on the buses and drove to this theater in Yaffo where blind, deaf, and blind and deaf people put on a play. It was really amazing. They all have their own ways of communicating. The lucky ones were those who could still hear a little with their hearing aids or see shapes and colors. It made me appreciate what I have. Plus they baked bread that we could eat after the show and it was really yummy. They were so cute and there were a bunch of skits. Something that stood out to me was these two little ladies who could still hear and talk. They were always together and it says in the playbill thing that they are best friends in real life. How cute! And they put on a play every day. It was weird because the people had to be tapped to do their cues or lead around by people and everything was translated and spoken for us. It was so sad! Their play was about their hopes and dreams. They fulfilled them in the play. Plus the stage was genius. It had an incline so the people would know to stop walking and so they would not fall off the stage. It was nice and that is my short blog because I am not in the mood to write a lot.
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