I think the world could use some more people like this fellow in it:
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Both sides now
Born in Taibe, Prof. Gehad Mazarweh left Israel as a youngster and forged a career as a psychoanalyst in Germany. The Arab-Israeli conflict, he says, can be seen in psychological terms - and he prescribes a treatment
By Avihai Becker
(Photo: Nir Kafri )
As the ship sailed out of Haifa bay, Gehad Mazarweh remained on deck, facing east. He watched as the city steadily receded from view, and when it disappeared, he was gripped with melancholy, even though he had no choice but to leave. He was 21, and his hometown of Taibe, like all the Arab villages in the State of Israel, was still under military administration. Mazarweh felt that, whatever happened, he could never return to what he was leaving behind. As painful as it was, he would rather bid farewell to his family than live as a second-class citizen in his own country.
Today, 40 years after he left Taibe and made a name for himself in Germany as a psychoanalyst who specializes in treating victims of torture, Prof. Mazarweh allows himself to smile when he recalls an episode from his childhood. Because of shortages in Taibe, his father sent him to Netanya to buy bread, without first giving him the necessary permit. The boy filled his bags with loaves of bread and started heading back to Taibe. When he reached Qalansuwa, he was apprehended and placed in detention. He still remembers the dogs that set upon him. The military court that tried him for having left the village without a permit fined him the hefty sum of 15 lira. His older brother Othman, who bailed him out of jail, was earning 30 lira a month at the time.
Despite such memories, Mazarweh has never given up his Israeli passport. "I've lived in Europe for 40 years," he said this week during a visit to Israel, where he was a guest of the Goethe Institute. "I never thought of changing my Israeli passport or even of taking dual citizenship. The reason is that I went through a lot until I got to the point where I could respect the Israeliness in me, and I didn't want to divide my identity again. Even though Germany welcomed me, I've remained a guest there. Just like a child doesn't have two mothers, I have no other homeland. I'm 60 and the older I get, the stronger my connection to my roots becomes. I don't want anything bad to happen to the State of Israel. The air, the trees,,,, the birds, the landscapes - these are all part of my personality."
Wandering years
Mazarweh, who comes from one of the two large clans in Taibe (the other is Haj Yihya), was born in 1941. He is the fifth of nine children. When he finished high school, he worked in construction and agriculture, and then in a small paper processing plant at the edge of the Hadar Yosef neighborhood in Tel Aviv. His work caught the eye of a Swiss industrialist who had business ties with the plant. The industrialist invited him to Basel to work for him at another paper plant. After consulting with his family and despite worries about the future, it was decided that Gehad would go. In those days, the future for an Arab youth who was a former detainee was not all that bright anyway.
He sailed off into the unknown and signed his first letter from abroad to his father with the words, "I shall never return to that accursed land." But Switzerland did not exactly roll out the red carpet. "It wasn't easy for me to acclimate, and I started running into problems. When I saw what was happening, I suddenly realized that injustice wasn't restricted to Israel, that it's something psychological that's found everywhere in the world. Put a duck among chickens and they'll reject it. As progressive as Switzerland is thought to be, it treats foreigners cruelly."
The aroma of garlic coming from his kitchen quickly led to his eviction from the rented apartment where he was living, and there were other worrisome incidents. "It didn't only happen to me. Foreign workers from Spain, Italy and Greece also were subject to humiliation. I was fortunate in that my experience in Israel helped me to be a man and stand firm without submitting. In other words, I never kept quiet. They wanted me to say thank you for merely allowing me to live among them, as if they were throwing charity to a beggar. `What am I supposed to be saying thank you for?' I wanted to know - `For the fact that I'm giving you my labor?'"
Mazarweh was too proud to ignore the condescending treatment he encountered. He was especially sensitive to prejudices about the Middle East, including those that related to both Jews and Arabs. He says the hatred of foreigners did not make any distinctions between the two Semitic peoples. "They threw us into the same basket," he says. "But when the Germans got drunk, their curses were directed at the Jews first. I didn't envy them. In the 1960s, Jews and Arabs in Israel didn't get along well, but abroad, we showed solidarity and supported one another."
Basel is where the Zionist vision was born and it's also where Mazarweh developed a strong Israeli patriotic consciousness. "I regret what I wrote the last time," he wrote to his father in Taibe. "No matter what, my true home is in Israel." From Switzerland, he went to Germany. "I went through some painful experiences that made me ask myself what I needed all this for. I could have stayed in Taibe and become a teacher or school principal like some of my brothers. There were times when I was on the verge of giving up, but I would have been too ashamed to go home and admit that I'd failed. There were entire days when I had nothing to eat. In my fantasies, I saw my family sitting together and eating kebab and it drove me crazy. I kept telling myself, let's wait until it gets worse and then we'll pack up. I thank God that he gave me the strength to hold on and not to give up on the dream. It gives me a lot of satisfaction now to think about the persistence that I was able to muster."
Encounter with the Holocaust
He was overwhelmed by the bustling metropolis of Munich. "In Taibe, there were about 8,000 people. In the University of Munich alone, there were 25,000 students. It was too much for me. After a week, I went to my room, packed up my clothes and got on the train." He headed for the southern city of Konstanz on Lake Bodensee. There, he studied at a mechanical engineering college for two years and did odd jobs at night to make ends meet. But trouble awaited him here, too.
During a lecture on German literature, he criticized the teacher for an anti-Semitic remark he'd made. The exchange sparked a scuffle in the lecture hall and reports about it reached the college rector. Mazarweh was also assaulted in the street by members of a right-wing organization and the incident was reported in the local papers. When he naively phoned the Israeli Embassy in Bonn to ask for its protection, they basically laughed in his face.
In 1966, he felt he was at a crossroads and decided to move to Freiburg. Suddenly, everything changed. "There, I was given every possibility," he says. "I estimate that Germany invested at least 100,000 marks in stipends for me." The rest has to do with luck. In Konstanz, he met a young woman who told him that her mother had taken part in an archaeological expedition at Tel Balata in Nablus in 1914. "I told her that Taibe, the place where I grew up, wasn't far from there. She was intrigued and invited me to meet her family." That is how he became acquainted with Kurt Muller, then the general secretary of the Communist Party in Germany.
Muller, who became Mazarweh's patron and mentor, lived a very turbulent and eventful life. When the Nazis came to power, he was imprisoned for his opposition to the regime. He was released after six years, but his freedom would not last long. When Walter Ulbricht became the leader of the newly created German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Muller received an invitation to meet friends in the east. He didn't guess that the invitation was a trap set by Stasi, the secret police. Muller was abducted and put on trial, charged with ideological perversion and collaboration with the capitalists in West Germany. He spent 11 more years in prison, though he was a loyal communist. When he was released and returned to the West, he joined the Social-Democratic Party and was appointed as an advisor to Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Muller was impressed by Mazarweh's determination and gave the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation a glowing recommendation about him. The foundation funded his studies for the next 10 years. "As a token of my gratitude, I now donate 100 euros to the foundation each month," says Mazarweh. Mazarweh studied sociology, criminology and psychology at the University of Freiburg. While he was there, he developed a close friendship with one of his teachers, Prof. Heinrich Popitz, a man who fascinated him from the beginning, and not by chance. Popitz's father ("who was a friend of Chaim Weizmann") was involved in a plot against Hitler. When the assassination attempt was foiled, he was hanged.
For Mazarweh, Kurt Muller and Heinrich Popitz were proof that there was another Germany, liberal and enlightened. He also says that life in Germany opened his eyes to the great Jewish trauma. "I've come to see that the Jews have good reason to live in paranoia. We Arabs have to recognize this," he says. "I read books about the Holocaust and I visited Buchenwald. How could they have thrown millions of Jews into concentration camps as if they were animals while the whole world closed its eyes? The only chance for reconciliation in the Middle East is if the Jews and Arabs both show understanding for the fears of the other side, and for Israel to stop thinking that it's the land of Jews alone. Nineteen percent of the population is not a small minority."
Cases of horror
After completing his master's degree in 1971, Mazarweh tried to come back to Israel, but he says that he was turned down by every government office to which he applied for work. "I don't want to think that I was rejected solely because of my background," he says today. He decided to go back to the University of Freiburg - "the city of my success, the place where I stopped being ashamed that I was an Arab," and began working on a doctorate. His doctoral thesis was entitled, "Juvenile Crime in Freiburg."
When he finished his studies, he worked as a psychologist at an institution for teenage girls and in a prison. In 1976, he opened a private practice as a psychoanalyst, dealing mainly with the problems of the average middle-class German. But the big turning point in his career came about eight years later, when he began to treat victims of war and torture.
His first such patient, a 12-year-old boy, came to him after being referred by a colleague in Berlin who, like many others before him, had given up on the case. The boy was a refugee from Beirut who had stopped talking from the moment he saw his beloved brother lying dead on the kitchen floor, his head split open by a bullet. When Mazarweh took the case, he never imagined the kinds of horrors he would be exposed to. He began to specialize in cases of war trauma and torture and became something of an institution in Germany. There are days when he comes home totally exhausted from all the tales of horror and cruelty.
"So far, I've had 200 patients like this. I could have taken more, but I didn't have the mental strength for it," he says. His patients have included Syrians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Argentines, Brazilians and refugees from Rwanda and the Congo, all of whom had lived through terrible tortures. From his experience, he finds that Israel appears to rank pretty high on the list of countries where torture is inflicted. "But my reaction to testimonies I hear about Israel isn't hatred for the country, but a strong desire to change the situation."
Mazarweh has been married since 1977 to Susannah Schwarz, a woman from Berlin whom he met when she was his student at the University of Freiburg. She works as a family therapist. "I'm a patriarch," he says, referring to the division of tasks in the family. The couple has three sons: Nadim, who is majoring in politics and Islamic studies in Tubingen University; Yunis who is studying psychology in Berlin; and Samir, a high school student. They are German citizens, but they speak Arabic well and have visited Taibe a number of times. "I think I've managed to instill in them a sense of identification with the Middle East," says Mazarweh.
The family lives in the village of Reute, north of Freiburg. Mazarweh is very proud of his five-dunam garden, where he grows fruit and vegetables. His clinic is in the city, a 15-minute drive away. He keeps in close contact with friends and family in Israel. When a terror attack occurs, he calls right away to check on everyone and find out more about it. He used to be a member of the German branch of Friends of Neve Shalom. He and a friend, Peter Dreyfuss, started a discussion group called Freiburg-Basel, which includes Jews and Palestinians and has been active for 14 years now.
Tragedy of two peoples
When the Oslo accords were signed and the winds of reconciliation started blowing in the Middle East, he decided to build another home in Israel to use on his annual summer visits. But by the time the nice house in Taibe was finished, the atmosphere had changed completely. This week, after not having been in Israel for two and a half years, he came back for a visit - this time, as a guest of the Goethe Institute. The lecture he gave at the conference, entitled "Memory-Violence-Dialogue," showed why Mazarweh is a much sought-after interviewee in Germany. The audience was spellbound. When Mazarweh is asked how he feels about hostility he encounters in Israel, such as an especially zealous security check at the airport, he says that he differentiates between the behavior of the authorities and his Jewish friends.
"My relationships with them are stronger than the impact of the terrible experiences I have when I'm walking down the street in Israel. The tragedy of the two peoples is that we're raised on hatred before we've had a chance to see each other and get to know each other. I'll tell you about an incident that had a big effect on me and my outlook on things. I was 26, and had just bought my first car - a Renault 4 - and I went on a trip to Finland with a girlfriend. One night, we didn't find a place to sleep. So I stopped next to a potato field and we decided to put up the tent that we'd brought with us. A very dapper-looking man came up to us and invited us to sleep at his house. As we were talking, I found out that he was a well-known architect, and he also happened to mention that he was Jewish. All my fears resurfaced. I didn't sleep the whole night. Even though I was younger than him and several times stronger, and even though we weren't in Israel but very far away in Scandinavia, the stories that I grew up on - about the Jews being killers - suddenly came flooding back and I couldn't close my eyes. When we parted the next day, I felt ashamed for what I'd thought. The big tragedy is that the same thing happens on the Jewish side, too."
Mazarweh says the hatred and the hostility are not inevitable. "My hope is that we haven't destroyed everything in the intifada, because when hope dies, so does the person." Using psychological tools to help explain the roots of the conflict, Mazarweh says: "A group with strong feelings of inferiority is projecting its destructive tendencies onto the other group in order to see it as the source of its feelings of frustration. The Jews and the Palestinians both emphasize the importance of their history. When there is a gap between these grandiose emotions and the current situation, negative phenomena are created and expressed in deep feelings of inferiority."
Offering an example from his own world, Mazarweh notes that this inferiority complex exists even in the attitude of Arab patients toward Arab doctors, even if the physicians are world renowned. "For instance, the Kuwaitis will always prefer a blue-eyed, blond-haired Anglo. They won't pay us [Arab doctors] on time, but they'll double or even triple the fee they give to a non-Arab doctor, and add gifts on top of it. This happens a lot overseas. The Arabs don't respect their own scientists. In my case, they can't figure out how the Germans could respect me as they do."
Mazarweh says some things that may not please Arab ears. "The Arab world is still governed by myths and prejudices. Academic education and learning have had very little influence on people's thinking. Arab education is based on obedience, adaptability and a constant effort to fulfill the desires and expectations of the authorities. This type of education leaves clear signs of insecurity, lack of initiative, lack of self-esteem, fear of failure, apathy, docility and fear of innovation.
"When I see the demonstrations in Israel saying, No more war! I ask myself when similar processes will finally take place in Arab countries as well. Have you ever heard about a demonstration in Jordan, or in Syria or Egypt? The time has come for us to face the truth. We've been lying to ourselves for too many years."
Such views have already led Mazarweh to be accused of self-hatred. "There can be no reform of Arab society unless we open ourselves up to a new path," he says. "It's a process that will last for generations, but we must begin. We can't go on pinning the responsibility for our miserable situation on others. Yes, there is discrimination in Israel, but who's stopping the people in Taibe from cleaning the streets, for instance? You should see how filthy it is there. Every time I come back to visit, Taibe looks worse. It depresses me because in my father's time, Taibe was a paradise. Mention Taibe anywhere today and anyone will tell you that it's a disaster. Murder, prostitution, drugs, all the world's ailments have come together here. You look around and you're probably impressed with the cars and the villas. I'm not. I'm familiar with the discrimination in Israel. I'm horrified to keep hearing every day that they're threatening us with transfer. But the government isn't the only one responsible for the crime and neglect in Taibe. We have a big part in it, too."
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