Attacks Target Palestinians In Israeli Towns
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[3 min 39 sec]
Enlarge Ammar Awad/Reuters /Landov A woman shouts slogans during a demonstration against the desecration of headstones at a Muslim and Christian cemetery in Jaffa, Israel, last month. A few dozen Israelis and Palestinians turned out in a show of protest against recent attacks.
Locals blame activists from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
At a recent demonstration on a street corner in the central Israeli town of Jaffa, protesters chant in both Hebrew and Arabic. The crowd is made up of Jews and Palestinians angry over the attacks, which have rocked their community.
Tamar Avia, a 35-year-old Jewish resident of Jaffa, says the neighborhood is being torn apart.
"The problem is national, but it is one that starts on a personal level," she says. "It is a problem that is hitting us in Jaffa hard."
Enlarge Ahmad Gharabli /AFP/Getty Images A man stands near tombstones vandalized in a cemetery in Jaffa, Israel, on Oct. 8. Headstones at the Muslim and Christian cemetery were defaced with messages like "Death to Arabs."
Avia says she came to the protest because she was shocked by what is happening. She points out that many right-wing Israelis use different terms for Palestinians who live within Israel.
"They don't call them Palestinians; they call them Israeli Arabs. That's their way to erase their Palestinian identity and kind of contain them within Israel," she says. "The agenda is to have a purely Jewish state and to get rid of all Palestinians, the ones in the West Bank and in Israel."
Avia says these kinds of attacks are new in Jaffa, a coastal community hugging the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel's largest city.
For years, Jews and Arabs coexisted there in relative peace. That was interrupted in early 2010, says Fatima Helewa, a local Palestinian activist. That's when Bemuna, a construction company that specializes in building subsidized homes for religious Jewish families in West Bank settlements, started building in Jaffa.
Its first project was in the largely Palestinian neighborhood of Ajami. The Israeli Association for Civil Rights petitioned Israel's High Court to stop the building, claiming that Bemuna's openly stated policy of providing apartments only to Jews was racist.
The court ruled against the association, and Bemuna continues to build in Jaffa.
A spokesman for Bemuna insists there are no ethnic tensions here, but he refused to answer questions on tape. Helewa, who lives just minutes away from one of the building projects, disagrees.
"I think it's a development of racism," she says. "I know many Jewish friends, but I think the general society of Israel is developing racism of Arab people inside and in the West Bank."
She feels that groups such as Bemuna are becoming increasingly popular across Israel. She points to a series of attacks that have occurred this year against Palestinian communities in both the north and the south of Israel.
"You can't argue with me that racism is not developing here," she says. "It's a fact."
Helewa stands in front of the once popular restaurant Abu Elabed, set ablaze earlier this month and spray-painted with graffiti calling for death to Arabs.
She says the attack made her feel unwelcome in her own hometown.
"Arab people, they already live with the Jews. We're living with them years by years," she says. "It's just that Zionism made the settlers more and more racist."
For now, she says that all she can do is continue to protest — and hope that more from the community join her.
Genocide Survivor To Sit On Holocaust Museum Board
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[6 min 21 sec]
President Obama has appointed Rwandan refugee Clemantine Wamariya to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Wamariya, who's an American now, talks to Renee Montagne about surviving the Rwandan genocide.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: Clemantine Wamariya knows more about death than a young woman should. She's an American now, but hovering always in her memory is one of the horrors of the 20th century, the genocide in Rwanda, where she was born. President Obama has now named her to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, at 23 the youngest person ever appointed and the first from Africa. Clemantine Wamariya was still a child when she and her sister ran for their lives. She didn't see her parents until 12 years later, when she won an essay contest sponsored by Oprah Winfrey. Today, she's a student at Yale and her early memories of Rwanda are not without joy.
CLEMANTINE WAMARIYA: We had this huge mango tree in my backyard. Every afternoon we'll have literally just tons of kids climb that tree and play and make as much noise as we want. And that tree became sort of a world where we could travel. You know, it was a train. It was a plane. It was a car. My memory of childhood is so rich, and I think that's why I was able to just sort of live and overcome things that had happened, 'cause I remember how beautiful it was growing up in Rwanda.
MONTAGNE: Everything changed in the spring of 1994 when, over the course of just three months, one ethnic group, the Hutus, killed hundreds of thousands of people from mostly another ethnic group, the Tutsis. You were just six and alone in the house with your sister when the killers came for you.
WAMARIYA: Well, I just remember being in a room and being so scared because I did not know who or what was going to happen. I never knew what death meant. To me, whatever was happening outside, I called it noise. I didn't know it was genocide until I started studying about it. But no one is telling you what's going on because everyone is busy trying to find a way to hide and where to pray and how to pray and how to kneel and how to, you know, raise their hand up high so that they can pray more.
MONTAGNE: Do you remember running with your 16-year-old sister when you were six out of the house into a field? I gather you walked and walked and walked for days to get to the first of many places that you spent as a refugee for the next six years in Africa.
WAMARIYA: Yeah. I mean, how can anyone forget waking up and you know that someone's going to come and get you. You do not know where they're going to come - if they're going to come from the front door, the back door, the window. You're in a panic, absolutely panic, and jump out and go and run and crawl so much that, you know, your knees are completely bleeding but you can't stand up. And all you could think about is your stomach. You know, from morning you think of what you're going to eat to a night where what food, what water can you drink?
MONTAGNE: Your life changed so dramatically when you came to the United States, as a sixth grader.
WAMARIYA: Well, a sixth grader who hadn't been in school until sixth grade.
MONTAGNE: Well, you did pretty well because you ended up at Yale. So how do you do well and still hold this other part of your life in your mind? I mean, how is it even possible?
WAMARIYA: Well, I have had so many incredible people in my life. You know, my first role model being my mother and then my sister, nothing can gander(ph) away. And so when I'm place in a challenge to finish the sixth grade, I will ask for any help I could get so I could get through. But then, you know, to realize that being in school is not only, like, oh, I have received an education, but it's more to learn about others. You know, why we do things to each other as the way we do, such as killing a whole race. What does that really mean? You know, slowly, yes, that it - sort of learning about it, especially in eighth grade, that's that question. And since then I've been hunting it down, trying to understand psychologically why do humans do such terrible things to each other.
MONTAGNE: Do you see your work in the future, your appointment to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, helping you find an answer?
WAMARIYA: I think just sitting with incredible leaders who are making decision of others – they might never have an input of what it means to grow up in a refugee camp as a little girl. You have no mother, you have no father. Am I going to give them an input what it means to live in seven countries where people look at you and they think, oh, you are nobody.
MONTAGNE: Is there a particular person who didn't survive that you think about or that you want especially to be remembered?
WAMARIYA: There are too many. And it's not only people that I lost in the genocide. I am most talking about people that I lost along the way, you know, living in refugee camp and dying with diseases that can strike you in a second. Those people had become my family. What I want to remember is the joy that filled my house every Sunday when we had visitors and the joy that I had playing in the mango tree.
MONTAGNE: Clemantine Wamariya, thank you for taking the time to speak with us.
WAMARIYA: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONTAGNE: Clemantine Wamariya is the newest and youngest person to join the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. This is NPR News.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/17/142437686/rwanda-genocide-survivor-to-sit-on-holocaust-museum-board
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