A Life With No Shame

Once upon a time, Jews and Arabs lived together happily. Not in Israel or Palestine, of course, but in a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago around a place we called "Pill Hill."

When I was a child, Pill Hill was where all the doctors and their families lived. "Bill Hill" is what we called our neighborhood, where the people lived who were the patients and paid the bills.

In the 1950s and most of the 1960s, the largest group of residents living in and around Pill Hill were Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

Imagine. We actually all lived together. We shopped together. We went to the same schools, libraries and parks. We played together, and I even recall attending Rodfei Shalom synagogue as a guest and playing basketball and dancing at the JCC. Jews came to our homes to enjoy mensiff, hummus and stuffed grape leaves.

It's because of that experience that I know, deep down, despite Israel's refusal to stop expanding settlements in exchange to end this conflict and the resistance of Hamas, two-states can work.

The only problem we had in the 1960s is that our peaceful coexistence came to an abrupt end. Turns out although most Americans hated both Jews and Arabs, they hated black people more.

This Arab-Jewish nirvana ended when realtors brought a black family into the neighborhood to rent an apartment. Suddenly, all the white people wanted to run. They wanted to sell their homes to get as much money as they could, and then move someplace else. They didn't say that publicly, of course. They said it privately. In the six months after the first black family moved in to the rental apartment in Chicago down the block from my home, the entire neighborhood went from 99 percent white to 90 percent black.

They knew that what they were doing was wrong. So many families moved out of their homes not during the light of day, but in the middle of the night.

I documented the experience in an online book I wrote called "Midnight Flight: The Story of White Flight in Chicago." It's online at TheMediaOasis.com/flight/flight.htm.

Writing it made me feel good. Even though I was just a child at the time, I still experienced the collective shame of what the adults did back then. What we did to black people was wrong. It was shameful.

It's kind of ironic that more than 40 years later, Israelis and Palestinians in another neighborhood in the Middle East have decided they will not move or leave their neighborhoods. In fact, Israelis want to expand their settlements. Palestinians are sticking around, too, despite the occupation pitfalls and their second-class citizenship status in Israel.

Instead of fleeing the black people, whites in Chicago could have passed laws to ban black people from moving in to their neighborhoods. They could have passed laws to ban people from selling their homes to black people. They could have passed laws banning black people from riding buses or attending our schools.

Oh, that's right. White people did pass laws like that.

Although the experience back then has some similarities with the experiences we face in the Palestine-Israel conflict today, there is one difference.

White people fled from the black people, but they did it with a heavy sense of shame. There doesn't seem to be any shame among either Israelis or Palestinians for all the things they continue to do to each other.

Maybe, Palestinians and Israelis don't have two states because they don't want to have to acknowledge that lingering shame. As long as there is a conflict, we can push the issue of shame aside and deal with the everyday crisis by pointing fingers of blame at each other.

If we don't achieve the two-state dream, we're destined to have the one-state nightmare. Imagine, Israelis having to pass more laws to control the fast-growing Palestinian population.

Maybe we don't care because that nightmare seems like it is years away, something we won't have to deal with, but something our children will have to face.

For now, us Palestinian and Israeli "grownups" are apparently happy turning away from our shame and pointing fingers of blame.

To find out more about Ray Hanania, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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