A half-Israeli half-Palestinian teenager and his half-brother seek out some relief from their parents’ fighting.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
When I was young, my mom showered me with sweet nicknames. One was “a living bridge.” I’d often scratch my head, wondering what in the world she meant. Maybe it was a grammar mistake. After all, as an Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant, Hebrew was her second language, and her Romanian accent always reminded others of that. Every time she’d call me by this nickname, I’d imagine a living bridge, like the gray concrete ones our car passed on Haifa streets, but with a face and personality.
As I started to humanize the bridge more and more, I sensed its pain with each step someone took on it. One time, I returned from kindergarten with a gouache painting in hand; a bridge with a face that’d break your heart. My mom gazed, confused, at my painting and asked, “Why is it so sad?”
I answered truthfully, “Because everyone’s hurting the poor bridge.”
She said something, like moms always do. I can make her sound like Ghandi now, as if she said: “But this pain is needed because it connects people between point A and point B.”
Yet, here’s the thing: she called me a living bridge because I connected her, an Israeli Jewish blonde, with my Baba, a Palestinian Muslim brownie – the prototype of her cultural enemies.
Growing up half Israeli and half Palestinian wasn’t like being split in half. It meant being fully Israeli and being fully Palestinian. The stories, pain, and dreams I carried were from both sides. Celebrating holidays from three monotheistic religions simultaneously felt like juggling the world’s holiest cocktail, with Chrismukkah being just the tip of the festive iceberg. It was these bizarre collisions, of Ramadan fasting while feasting on Passover and Easter dinners, that printed out our liminal calendar.
Beyond divine discourse, on weekends, my family often spent time with Palestinian families in Nazareth or visited Israeli friends who lived in a kibbutz. No matter where we went, my parents guided us to adapt our identities to blend in. When we were with Palestinians, speaking too much Hebrew or mentioning Israeli books or music too frequently was discouraged. Meanwhile, around Israeli friends, it was better to avoid speaking Arabic and to minimize ties to religions other than Judaism. We were like water, adapting our shape to others, always reflecting the people in front of us and hiding what’s underneath.
Then my parents wanted to break up; oh man, it was nasty. I say “break up” and not “divorce” because they could never marry. Interfaith marriages are illegal here, casting me, the child, as a breaker of religious taboos and an outlaw bastard. Much less sweet nicknames than the ones my Mom used to call me back when I was a child.
Mom was temporarily insane the night it all started. She began accusing Baba of fucking communist Russian hookers behind her back. He tried to calm her down, but made the mistake of talking about the event that should never be brought up. He said the terrorist attack she survived changed her. It’s like she died there and a Doppelgänger took over her identity. She got upset in the way women do when tactless men ask them if they’ve got their period mid-argument. From then on, Baba was stuck in a lifelong Intifada. Every attempt to counter my mom’s conspiracy only brought more potential lawsuits his way.
Where was I meanwhile? In my room, blasting Nirvana. A seventeen-year-old who promised himself to do one thing for the rest of his life: smoke weed. It’s not that I always did it in my room, actually not at all. But that night, while hearing the nauseating echo of their screams, I just stopped giving a damn about what would happen if they knew about my new hobby. I kept rolling and smoking like moonstruck, without any clear grasp of what I was doing. Suddenly, a knock on my door. I saw the handle move.
“Two psychopaths. You heard them?”
It was Yirmi, my half-brother, my big brother.
“Yeah, I heard ’em. What’s new?”
He closed the door and whisper-shouted, “Fucking Arab.”
“He’s my father, remember?”
“Your fa-father just w-went to my library and replaced the Bible with a Quraan.”
“He can be wild sometimes, you’re right.”
“Adam,” he sounded worried. “I can smell it. Are you high?”
I wanted to answer with the obvious word cluster, like: No, what are you talking about? It’s just a cigarette, not your business, leave me alone, and close the door. But what came out of my mouth was: “Yes, I am stoned.”
“Give me some.”
I chuckled, prompting him to repeat himself. And he did. Yirmi, who always mocked potheads, the ultimate nerd who read superhero comics and played DnD, the big brother donning Iron Maiden tees even in his sleep, the ex-fatty, now wannabe bodybuilder, who never touched a cig. The traitor who ratted me out to Mom for having a hookah, the same guy that was serving in an IDF combat unit – all of this, and he was risking army prison with a positive THC test? Yes, he genuinely asked for it. Not just that, he pleaded for me to roll him one. When I revealed I’d already cleared my stash, he ordered, “Call your man.”
Under the bridge was my stash for anguish and secrets. The spot where I’d go to smoke dope when home turned into a war zone. A steel truss bridge, right above a green river that Israelis call Kishon and Palestinians El-Mokatta. Some biblical spot, mostly known as the place where Elijah the prophet executed prophets who believed in false Gods or idols. The bridge often made the local news, ’cause sixty fishermen sued the city after they got cancer, resulting in a long legal battle that still wasn’t resolved. Because of that, people knew the stream was polluted by industrial waste, so no one dared to bathe in its waters.
I dug this place because it was quiet, and because of the river’s journey. It kicked off in Jenin’s hills, a Palestinian refugee camp beyond the wall, which I’d never seen despite Baba mentioning our cousins there. The river crossed the border, wound through villages and cities, and landed in Haifa – a city where Israelis and Palestinians rolled together. Under the bridge, the river flowed into the Mediterranean, keeping up its path to the Atlantic, connecting with Europe, Africa, America. And it was serene, like a world without walls in a dream.
Unlike me, Yirmi despised this bridge. Afraid of drugs and the loss of control; for him the place was a constant reminder of his past fender bender there. He also couldn’t stand my friends, hating their hip-hop tunes that clashed with his head-banging metal. They, in turn, labelled him a freak every time they saw him and his DnD pals.
But that night, history was about to be made, baby.
“How c-c-can you hang o-out in this junkyard?” Yirmi stuttered as usual.
“Blink twice with the lights, and whatever he asks, don’t tell him you’re a soldier.”
A man with a gray Nike hoodie approached the car’s window. “Adam, next time your freak brother wants to come, say no pussies in my smoke circle,” he hollered with a manic grin.
That was Mahmoud. Or as he called himself after five blunts: Notorious A.R.A.B. Which will eventually lead someone to jokingly call him something like Sheiky Minaj. Mahmoud was, by the way, a young Palestinian, a gloomy and lonely man. To this day I don’t know what motivated him to start dealing drugs – while he was a medical student. But I can guess that’s exactly the reason. An interesting and perhaps meaningless historical footnote: Mahmoud’s grandfather was a great Palestinian poet who once beheaded a white dove in protest in front of IDF soldiers, a kind of tangible metaphor for “there’s no chance for peace.” It cost him his life; one of the soldiers thought he was a terrorist and the great poet was shot twice in the chest, while still holding the headless white dove.
“Give me 5g,” I said while Yirmi counted his money.
“You got it, Habibi.” He picked a small bag and gave it to me. “Let’s burn one. On me.”
Yirmi was super stressed, hands in his jeans, looking to the sides every now and then. Above, the bridge carried the weight of traffic. A marriage of concrete and steel, it stood tall, rusted, and shaking. The pillars were stained with graffiti like the Bible verses of holy bums. Beneath layers of spray paint, the original gray of the bridge’s skin peeked.
Mahmoud showed us his new ‘outlaw’ tattoo, a Tupac tribute. Yirmi retorted with the Metallica black snake on his arm. Mahmoud sparked the joint, digging into Yirmi’s age. I felt it coming – the next question: “What do you do?”
Yirmi, on edge, trying not to spill “soldier,” stuttered without words. It was like he hit the rewind on a cerebral VHS, unspooling fragments from the day: [parental discord; the virtual violence of a video game; picking up the family dog’s poop; a muscle-flex in the mirror; doing a favor for Mom, a trip to the supermarket, a guy crafting slices of fish].
“Mm-hmm, I, I’m the guy who cuts fish in the supermarket.”
Without a voice, I mouthed: WHAT?
“A fishmonger,” Yirmi corrected himself while stretching his shirt.
Mahmoud stared into Yirmi’s eyes without blinking.
“If you tell someone I’m dealing, I will gut you like a fish. Understand, fish boy?”
Yirmi nodded, while Mahmoud finally passed me the joint. I needed to relight it, so I held it with my lips while I searched for a lighter in my pocket. Mahmoud was fast and did it for me, with his Formula 1 clipper. At the same second the fire came out, a big dazzling light appeared before us. The sound of walkie-talkies, and then a scream: “Don’t move!”
I never witnessed Yirmi speaking so fast.
“Shalom Mr. Officer, no inhalation here. This is an IDF commander speaking.”
He put his hands up like a good boy. Quick as hell, I threw the joint into the river.
“Ayyyyy!” Yirmi shouted.
I turned to the side and caught the last seconds of the punch that Mahmoud delivered to Yirmi’s face, right when the hand was retracting. Mahmoud mumbled something grouchy in Arabic and then jumped into the damn river. As he swam away like a mermaid, I couldn’t help but think about all the articles I read regarding commando divers who trained in the same place with their special suits, yet still ended up with cancer.
The three cops pulled up, squinting suspiciously at Yirmi and me, clearly hesitant to buy that we were brothers, until they checked our IDs. Nonetheless, they let Yirmi off when they found 5g in my pocket. They hauled me to the station, discussing some “investigation for being an accessory”. When I pressed for details, they simply said, “Middle-man. You do the crime; you do the time.”
When I got out of the police station, it was already 7am. Baba called a lawyer who helped expedite the process. My parents came to pick me up. Yirmi was already back at the army base. Before we entered the car, Mom just looked at me with that face she puts on when trying to hold back tears. “I’m sorry,” was all I said. She smacked my face in the middle of the street. Baba tried to block her hands and, in between, called me stupid. It started to rain.
In the car, Baba put a hand on Mom’s thigh, and she rubbed his shoulders, as if there were no traces of the crazy fight from the night before. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the last time I saw them touch each other like that. I looked out the window, through the steam, and remembered all over again the sweet nicknames my mother used to call me as a child.
