22) My House is Your House

 

After a time, I finally bid goodbye to the city of Jerusalem. Sean was going to stay in Israel to travel around and see more of it. But I had been living out of a backpack for five weeks, and I was desperate to get back to Cairo, to our empty flat waiting there. Among other things, my clothes really needed a wash, and I was just tired of hoisting up my heavy backpack and always moving on.

Eilat is the southern border town of Israel…one that occupies a tiny stretch of ocean in between Jordan and Egypt. Israel has signed a peace treaty with both countries, and so there is relative peace, and a consulate of both countries in the city.

“You have to go to the Egyptian consulate if you want a visa…if you cross at the border you will get a Sinai-only visa.”

This advice was given to me by a 20-year-old traveler named Paul. He got off the bus with his two friends, Nathan and Brenda, in Eilat, and warned me not to go straight across the border as I had planned. They were also waiting to visit the consulate. I forgot about my pledge to get across the border as fast as possible, and not to spend any unnecessary Israeli shekels, and checked into a hostel with them.

The three of them were American students from Wisconsin. I was really happy to have some company, and not slum around a darkened hostel by myself. They were Jews, non-practicing Jews as so many American Jews are, and they had just been on the Birthright tour of Israel. They had postponed their plane tickets home, because they all wanted to spend a week in Egypt before heading back home to school.

“Wow”, Paul exclaimed to Nathan. “Now that we’re off that trip, I kind of feel like we should go find some meat and cheese and put them together.”

They told me about a line in the Bible that says ‘you should not cook a lamb in its mother’s milk’. This one line was interpreted to mean you are not allowed to eat meat and dairy products at the same meal: a spoiler for pizza-lovers. It became incorporated into Torah law over the thousands of years, right beside the law that says that you are not allowed to turn on light switches on Saturdays.

“It gets ridiculous. As Birthright participants we all spent a night in the house of an Orthodox Jewish family. It was interesting, but I could never practice like that myself.”

There are three types of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. The Orthodox follow the traditional laws that have been handed down for thousands of years. They wear skullcaps outside and often have single curls of hair coming down behind their ears. They all wear a prayer shawl with white tassels that hangs down beneath their clothing: this is a symbol for their memory of what the Hebrews wore when they were following Moses through the Sinai. They follow all the strict Kosher dietary laws, and they do no work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath, the Jews’ holy day, lasts from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. During this time, some of the strictest keep a non-Jew in their house to open doors for them and to turn on light switches, as both of these are technically forbidden by a strict reading of the laws.

Orthodox Judaism is the only type officially recognized by the state of Israel. Conservative Jews still practice the dietary laws, but the recognize the need to assimilate into whatever culture they have joined. They do not wear skullcaps, or dress in a distinctly Jewish way. Reform Jews are even more radical; they eat bacon.

The Americans were headed to Cairo eventually, but first they were going to see Jordan and then head south to Luxor and Aswan. When we parted, I invited them to give me an email when they passed through Cairo, and that they were welcome to stay at my flat.

At the Egyptian consulate, I arrived just in front of a large group of Spanish-speaking people. Their passports said they were from Argentina…most of them were around my age, though a few of them were younger. After we passed through the checkpoint that let us into Egypt, this group beckoned me over to them, and one of them who spoke English asked if I wanted to share a taxi to Cairo.

By the end of the trip, I had invited all of these Argentinian travelers to my house. They had slept for three days in a tiny flat in Eilat, and they were overjoyed that my house was so big and had so many spare places to sleep. The next day I sent them off in taxis to see the pyramids, and then we all met again to go to El Azhar park in Cairo, to watch the sun set and listen to the call to prayer. We went to the Grand Bazaar all in a giant group, and finally returned to the house exhausted and ravenous for pizza and beers.

When they left, I had all of them slapping me on the back and thanking me prodigiously for two nights in my house and for leading them around Cairo. What they didn’t understand is that it was even more fun for me: instead of coming back to a dark flat in Cairo by myself, I brought a party. And beyond that, it was truly fantastic to be able to guide friends around and make their short stay excellent in a part of the world that I knew fairly well. For all the times that people have given me hospitality, I was finally able to pay it forward, and say ‘my house is your house’ to a group of fellow weary and broke student travelers.

—–

I invited Tamer over to meet my new American friends. They had just been down to Luxor and were now circling back to Cairo to see some of the rest of Egypt. Tamer came into my house bringing a bag of beers and a big sheesha pipe. He greeted all of them with glee, even though he understood not one word of English and I had to translate.

“Are they Christians?”

“Of course they are!” I replied with a smile. He nodded in approval. Any Jew immediately turned into a Christian when he crossed the border into Egypt. Many Jews traveled to Egypt, but none wanted to risk the social reprisals they might get if a lot of Muslim Arabs found out their true religion.

“He’s Christian though, Kieran. I wonder if he would care if we were Jews or not.”

Paul made an interesting point. I knew Tamer was quite racist against Muslims in his own country…perhaps he would side with a people that also traditionally didn’t get along with Muslims. As the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“Jews? NO! I don’t like Jews. Jews are no good.”

Tamer waved his finger in disapproval, and then took another pull; the water in the pipe bubbled fiercely. I couldn’t imagine he would like Jews. Christians have a traditional dislike of Jews that goes back two thousand years…right back to the days when groups of Jews stoned the first Christian prophets to death. Egyptian Coptic Christianity was no different than the Christianity that existed everywhere else.

But there was likely more to his view than simple religious prejudice. Jews have a bad name in this part of the world because of Israel, and only because of Israel. Nowhere is this more true than among the Muslims of the Middle East. Jewish communities have lived in the Muslim societies of the Middle East for over a thousand years. They were given the freedom to practice their own religion and follow their own religious laws. There was no hatred between Muslims and Jews until 1948, when Israel displaced the Palestinians and began to exercise their own muscle upon the Arab world.

Egypt’s last major war with Israel was 1973, called the Yom Kippur war by most of the world, and the 6th of October War by Egypt. Six years before, in 1967, the Israelis had taken the Sinai peninsula and marched their troops to the Suez Canal. Egypt wanted it back. It conspired with Syria to attack Israel on the same day. On the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, when the Israeli Defence Forces were manned by a skeleton crew, they attacked.

There is a special war memorial built in Cairo in honour of the war, known as the “6th of October Panorama.” I visited it with my friend Sarah one afternoon. It was housed in a large circular building, surrounded by gates. The grounds around this buildings were reserved as a display area for some of the equipment that was used. There were jets and mounted rockets; there were pieces of fuselage from Israeli skyhawk planes shot down by Egyptian forces. There were tanks and gun batteries from either side; there were sand-coloured Egyptian tanks, there were smaller green British model tanks, and American anti-tank guns captured from Israel. All the Soviet-built Egyptian tanks had their guns pointed upwards; all the gun-barrels on captured Israeli machinery were lowered in defeat.

Inside the round building was probably the most laughable monument to false nationalism that I had ever seen. There were six stone-sculpted reliefs on the walls, arranged in a panorama, moving right to left just like Arabic script. The reliefs were of every war in Egypt’s history that was remotely similar to the 6th of October War. There was one of the oldest wars known, that of Pharaoh Narmer who unified Upper and Lower Egypt, thereby making it again one country. There was another Pharaoh shown chasing out the Hyksos, another foreign people who had come to dominate Egypt. The third sculpture was of a great battle in which Arab cavalry expelled Christian crusaders.

Finally, there was a plaque called “The Great Crossing”–a memorial to the day when Egyptian troops stormed across the Suez Canal and pushed the Israeli troops back. The depiction of it was jaw-dropping. It had reliefs of strong, glorious-looking Egyptian soldiers marching boldly, carrying the flag of Egypt. It showed Zodiac landing boats filled with soldiers, and it showed rows of tanks and rocket-mounted trucks advancing in line precisely in the same way that the ancient Egyptians showed chariots advancing in line on the walls of temples. And the mighty centerpiece of The Great Crossing was a handful of defeated Israeli soldiers, on their knees with their eyes closed and heads bowed in surrender, their helmets bearing the Shield of David lying on the ground before them.

The next relief was called “The Return of the Land”. It showed president Anwar Sadat, who led the war, standing with a flag of Egypt in his hands. A large public celebration was going on in front of him; old men clutched their prayer beads, men danced with joy, small girls offered bunches of flowers to lines of soldiers who stood by looking on.

The Great Crossing, and the Return of the Land. I took a picture of the archway between the two. The war memorial missed a relief. They forgot the one where the Israeli army retaliated and smashed their army all the way back across the Canal to the gates of Cairo.

The Egyptian army was crushed, as it always was, by the superior firepower, technology, and organization of the Israelis. But the Yom Kippur War nevertheless was a victory for Egypt, the historians all agree. Egypt was the small kid in high school that always got his lunch money taken away by the big Israeli bully. One day the small kid had had enough, and he fought back, kicked the bully in the shins, and bit him. The bully then beat the tar out of the kid in retaliation. But the bully won’t take the lunch money away again, because he knows what sort of retaliation that can evoke.

Sinai was returned to Egypt during the Camp David Accords. Among the conditions of that peace were the following: Egypt no longer became the center of Arab resistance to Israel, Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist as a nation, Egypt would permit Israelis Sinai-only visas to travel to resort towns on the Red Sea, and through some loophole, the local Bedouins were legally allowed to grow marijuana.

Paul sprinkled a dash of Egyptian hashish onto the sheesha tobacco, and Tamer took a long pull before passing it on. He didn’t care for Jews at all; none of his countrymen did. Twenty percent of the army was Christian; they had all suffered equally at the hands of the Israelis. For Tamer this was just one more knee-jerk xenophobic prejudice that I found somehow childishly charming.

“What are they reading?” Tamer asked. My American friends were engrossed in a bit of the literature I had picked up from one of Cairo’s mosques, encouraging others to convert, and professing the scientifically proven existence of Allah. I handed the book to Tamer, who couldn’t read even a symbol of the English on the cover. But within seconds he had understood the photo of the crowds of people praying around the Kaabah in Mecca. He snarled and pitched the book across the room, folded his arms, and frowned.

This prompted unbridled giggling from myself and my friends, and so I went back to my bookshelf to present him with something else. This one was a book on St. Paul, one of the key figures in early Christianity, and on the front of the book was an icon of him. Tamer nodded in reverence and mumbled Arabic words of approval, hey crossed himself and kissed the cover, saying a small incantation with his eyes turned towards heaven.

Next I brought him a book by Friedrich Nietzsche with a big picture of the German philosopher on the front, with his big, bristling moustache. While my friends giggled furiously, I watched Tamer’s face react with puzzlement to this seemingly neutral book. Next I picked up “A History of the Muslim World”, a small paperback with a picture on the front of a mosque and minarets. He grunted and bounced it violently off a nearby wall.

When my friends had stopped chuckling and drying their eyes, Paul spoke. “Kieran, after we leave you should tell him that we are Jews.”

“Yeah, I think I will.”

The night wound down when we ran out of beer and sheesha. The Americans wanted to get to sleep for another good day in Cairo, and Tamer needed to get back to his house. He had church in the morning. While the Americans went back to their rooms, Tamer invited in his friend Asharaf, a local taxi driver. The men smoked the last of the sheesha together, laughing and slapping each other on the knee.

“Bush…is a donkey!” they said, using one of the more pointed Egyptian insults.

“And president Mubarak…is a donkey!”

“Yes, Mubarak is a big, big donkey. When is he going to die?”

I had challenged Tamer’s hypocrisy earlier on, when I asked him if he liked Asharaf, the Muslim taxi driver. “No,” Tamer said. “He’s a Muslim.” I replied of course, but everyone here is a Muslim. The people who run the coffee shop next to you are Muslims, and the people who buy from your shop are Muslims. And besides, isn’t Asharaf your friend?

“No”, Tamer shook his head. “He’s a Muslim. Muslims are no good.”

And yet, as I looked at Tamer and Asharaf, sitting across from each other, trading jokes and talking about prostitutes, and laughing deeply, I shook my head in amusement. Was Tamer really pretending to be this man’s friend? Or was he pretending not to be?

—–

When I approached Tamer’s fruit shop a few days later, he pulled up an extra chair and bellowed at the man in the nearby coffee shop for tea with lemon, my favorite drink.

“Where are Paul and Nathan and Brenda?”

“They had to leave for America.”

Tamer looked insulted. “They didn’t even say goodbye? Why didn’t you bring them here to tell me goodbye!”

“Sorry my friend, they didn’t really have time.”

“Why does Paul keep hanging up on me? I call him every day and he just hangs up.”

I started to laugh. “He doesn’t speak any Arabic!”

“I know, but I can still say ‘hello.’”

“What time to do you call him? During the day?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the middle of the night in America! Tamer, don’t call up these guys in America and speak Arabic to them at 3:00 in the morning!”

He looked sheepish. “Ok, I won’t. No problem”

“Did you like them?” I asked as I started in on my tea.

“Yes they were great. I really liked them.”

I nodded.

“You know something? They were Jews. All of them. Paul, Brenda, and Nathan.”

He paused, and regarded me with surprise.

“Huh” he said, and smiled. “Well, they were great.”