Nothing About a Hijab-wearing Palestinian Israeli Woman Driving a Bus Is Normal - Opinion - Haaretz.com
It's morning on the No. 25 bus, which traverses Tel Aviv from north to south: older people on their way to give a urine sample at a clinic, young adults on their way to work. Behind the wheel, a surprise: a young woman wearing a hijab. Driving with obvious confidence, at each stop she waits for the older people to sit down before resuming the journey.
A seemingly normal scene: a Palestinian Israeli woman wearing a hijab is in the driver's seat. Responsible for the lives of dozens of Jews, she is welcoming, brings them to their destination and they place their trust in her.
But nothing is normal about this picture. It's not hard to imagine what would have happened in similar circumstances in Jerusalem: a potential lynching. But in Tel Aviv, few people even noticed the scene, which in the reality of this country represented everything except normalcy. A Palestinian woman driving a public bus through the streets of a city in the state of the Jews.
It's true that Palestinians built it and that Africans sweep its streets, that in its hospitals senior physicians speak Arabic and that in branches of the Super-Pharm drugstore chain it's hard to find a Jewish pharmacist, but nevertheless this scene hits like a lightning bolt.
The bus speeds southward, and with it the fantasies. If we can have a bus driver in a hijab, why not a prime minister, or at least a mayor? Why is it possible in London and New York City but inconceivable in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. And if a bus driver, then why not an El Al pilot? What's the difference after all? And an anchor on Channel 12 News? CNN and Sky News have anchors who wear hijab, why not here?
Women wearing a Hijab in Ramallah, in 2013.Credit: Michal Fattal
My thoughts continue to wander. For years now we have lived in a single state, half of it Jewish and half of it Palestinian. Shedding each other's blood and hating each other, one half on top, imperious and dominant over the other half, and yet there are islands of coexistence here, coexistence that was absent in Northern Ireland or in South Africa. The ultranationalists in Serbia probably wouldn't have permitted a bus driver in a hijab either.
Don't deride bus drivers. Even if they don't have the aura of self-important airplane pilots in their suits and ties, they carry a heavy responsibility. When I was a child, I would flip my tricycle on its side and play bus driver, with my younger brother standing behind me selling the tickets. I wanted to be a bus driver or prime minister, whichever came first. Nothing came of either dream.
Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, in a single state whose government and military control the fates of everyone, Jews and Palestinians have been living together for nearly 60 years. Only one thing is missing: equality. The day it is achieved, all the other problems will be solved much more easily than it would seem. A bus driver in a hijab is a small step for man and also for the state, on the long road to equality.
A few days after that bus ride, at the Zim Urban mall in Nof Hagalil: a bustling, colorful Christmas market; Jews, Russians, Arabs. A few minutes by car, in Nazareth: the wonderful Luna Bistro, packed with Jewish and Arab diners. Most of the servers are Arab, but sometimes there are Jews as well. Jews serving Arabs: another small step on the road to equality.
The UN General Assembly meeting in New York in 1947 on the partition plan.Credit: Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons
In a small apartment on a street called Gaza in Jaffa, a small group of Israelis gathered this over the weekend to watch a beautiful film by Michael Kaminer, a member of Kibbutz Zora. The movie was about the lost Palestinian village of Sar'a and the disregard of the kibbutz's founders to the history of the area they had just taken control of.
Now it's the end of November; two days before the 78th anniversary of the United Nations' approval of the partition plan for Palestine on November 29, 1947, Ilan Pappe, a historian of the Nakba was giving a lecture about it.
The partition plan never stood a chance even if the Palestinians had accepted it, he said. Israel never intended to implement it, even while accepting it. The fact is that years before the 1967 Six-Day War plans were drawn up to conquer and occupy the West Bank. Partition was a colonialist plot, and these always end badly, Pappe said – in India, in Ireland and in Palestine.
I'm already looking forward to my next trip with the hijab-wearing bus driver.