‘We were raised to feel shame’: The Arab lawmaker challenging Israel’s old politics

Read More

In her first documentary film, 2003’s “Paradise Lost,” Ibtisam Mara’ana set out to uncover the story of Suaad Genem, a woman from her coastal hometown, Fureidis, who in 1979 had been arrested on vague security charges and imprisoned. At the same time, the director attempted to learn more about the recent history of her hometown, which was one of the few Arab villages in the area to remain intact after the Israeli War of Independence in 1948.

Mara’ana, who will be 46 next month, grew up with a silent father who spent most of his time tending the trees in his family’s small garden. This left her mother with the responsibility of supporting the family, which she did by cleaning homes in the more prosperous Jewish town of Zichron Yaakov, which looks down on Fureidis from Mt. Carmel. Both of these facts – her father’s passivity and her mother’s need to leave the home to work – were sources of shame in their conservative, patriarchal village.

In the film, we see her asking her father, Saleh, where he was at the time of Fureidis’ surrender to Zionist forces in 1948, when he was just 10 years old. But Saleh, who died in 2007, evades her questions, claiming not to know anything, while expressing his fear that her independence and curiosity will get her mixed up with the Shin Bet security service, like Suaad before her. Finally, Saleh gently explains to Ibtisam that, “It’s not our time, my daughter.”

Mara’ana could never accept the idea that reality had its own timetable. For her, shame was a catalyst for anger, and curiosity a catalyst for action. And in her April 29 maiden speech before the Knesset, to which she was elected a month earlier, squeaking in at the number seven spot on the Labor Party list, she recalled her father’s words.

“When I decided to run on the Labor slate and was chosen for the Knesset,” she told an audience that included her Knesset colleagues, and in the visitors’ gallery her mother, Hatam, 71, and husband, Boaz Menuhin, “there was a sentence that echoed in my heart and my mind: This is our time.

“This is the time for us to do something, to create a real partnership, one that is based on mutual recognition of the pain of the Other. This is the time for us to cease to be silent and to silence others, the time to undertake a revolution.”

In each of her eight full-length documentaries, we see the filmmaker, who is a graduate of the film and television school at Givat Haviva, herself as she undertakes a very personal examination of a topic that occupies her as a Palestinian-Israeli woman who doesn’t accept things as they were. One is about a Druze woman who entered an Israeli beauty contest and aspired to become a model, until the male leaders of her town persuaded her that she was disgracing their community.

I’m an Arab woman who broke the glass ceiling. I won’t be anybody’s token

Winds of change are stirring in Israel, but they may not be felt in the Arab community

Citizenship Law’s expiry is ‘window of hope’ for Arab Israelis, but a narrow one

Another explored the little-known love affair that Palestinian “national poet” Mahmoud Darwish had as a young man with a Jewish Israeli woman. A third concerned a woman from Gaza married to an Israeli Arab who divorces her after she bears him six children, and finds herself unable even to meet with her children as she cannot enter Israel.

Now, as a legislator, Mara’ana has a rare opportunity to effect change – and in her five months in parliament, she has certainly demonstrated that she intends to try.

She has been appointed chair of the Knesset Special Committee on Foreign Workers, and also has joined the prestigious Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee as an alternate member – an appointment that Arab MKs have traditionally avoided because of the panel’s responsibility for overseeing security matters, and that Jews have been no less reluctant to see them fill.

Writing in this paper, for example, columnist Odeh Bisharat was unusually harsh in bemoaning a fellow Arab for allowing herself to be co-opted, as he saw it, to the defense committee: “‘Look,’ the establishment wants to tell the world, ‘even a talented female Arab film director is a partner in the formulation of our justified security policy.’ Ibtisam Mara’ana will serve as a fig leaf for the occupation, the closure and aggression against the Palestinian people.”

Mara’ana also took an active and painstaking role in attempting to hammer out a compromise version of the citizenship law, better known as the family unification law, which came up for renewal shortly after the 24th Knesset convened. That law sharply circumscribes the right of Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from the territories to bring their spouses to live with them in Israel. Having directed a recent TV show on just that subject, she found herself explaining the painful implications of the law, which has been on the books for two decades, to numerous Knesset colleagues.

A screenshot of filmmaker-turned-politician Ibtisam Mara’ana on television earlier this year.
Screenshot from Channel 12

Political calling

The sides used to be well-defined in Israeli politics: There was left and there was right, and there were the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox, who could more or less be depended upon to align, respectively, with left and right. During the past few years, however, the Arab political field has been in play, as they (and Israeli Jews) discovered that a 20-percent minority of some 1.2 million people constitute a force to be reckoned with. At the same time, it’s become more obvious that a community of that size is no more monolithic in its opinions and values than the divisive and fractured Jewish majority.

Sociologist Ameer Fakhoury, who studies the political divisions and distinctions among the Arab minority, notes that Mara’ana lies at the opposite end of the same political spectrum as MK Mansour Abbas – the chairman of the United Arab List who played a key role in the current shakeup when he negotiated with Benjamin Netanyahu before the last election over the possibility of joining a Likud-led government.

That may sound odd, considering Abbas heads a traditionally Muslim party that espouses many values that Ibtisam Mara’ana is diametrically opposed to. But Fakhoury says that both politicians – as opposed, for example, to Joint List head Ayman Odeh – exemplify a shift in the Palestinian component of the Israeli-Arab identity from being national in character to more of an ethnic, or “tribal,” one.

“The more that the significance attributed to the Palestinian category is an ethnic one,” Fakhoury says, “the less the Israel-Palestinian fate remains connected to the fate of the Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens, though they are still under Israeli control.” According to Fakhoury, who co-directs the Nationalism and Partnership research group at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Mara’ana personifies a “Palestinian-ethnic, feminist-liberal [worldview], while at the other extreme stands Mansour Abbas as an example of the Palestinian stream that is both tribal-ethnic but also conservative in terms of its understanding of the relations between genders, and especially the status of the Palestinian woman.”

I asked Fakhoury whose approach was better positioned to grow and, not surprisingly, he said Abbas’. “Under the current political conditions, Abbas’ ‘conservative tribalism’ paired with partial integration into the Israeli power structure,” seems like a more winning formula, he predicted.

For both right- and left-wing Zionist parties, the Arabs are increasingly viewed as legitimate partners. Who could have imagined, even a year ago, the United Arab List being part of a government headed by Yamina’s Naftali Bennett? Among the shrinking left, too, there has been a growing realization of late that only by joining forces with like-minded Arabs can they maintain any political influence.

But the Arabs have had their hearts broken by the Jews too many times over the years – including as recently as last year, when the Joint List supported Benny Gantz’s Kahol Lavan party to form the coalition, and Gantz chose to succumb to the siren’s song of Netanyahu over forming a government with an Arab alliance – to rush into the embrace of the Jewish parties en masse. For them, the question of whether they aspire only to equal rights as individuals or also a national minority is also far from resolved. So, while most see the utility of forming alliances with Jewish parties, there remains disagreement on whether true political partnership with Jews is advantageous or even possible.

Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin (her full married name) belongs in the group that aspires to Jewish-Arab collaboration. Although she has many political goals on her agenda, she isn’t terribly concerned about the name, or history, of the political organization she has joined. She herself has said that her affiliation with Labor became possible almost entirely due to the election of Merav Michaeli as leader last winter. (“Merav, my sister, my friend,” she declared in her maiden speech, “you are a model to follow, an inspiration. It’s because of you that I came to the Labor Party.”) Like Michaeli, she is staunchly and conspicuously feminist, an outlook that is in her case inextricably connected to her Palestinian identity.

But the process that led Mara’ana from a career as movie producer and director and film-school lecturer (she has taught at Sapir College and Bezalel Academy) to the Knesset did not begin with the new leader of the Labor Party. Rather, she attributes it to her most recent project as a filmmaker, in which she oversaw the production of two seasons in 2019-2020 of an Arabic version of the television series “Sorry for Asking” for Makan, the Arab-language channel of the Kan public broadcaster.

Based on the Australian series “You Can’t Ask That,” each episode of both the Hebrew and Arabic versions examined a different issue or population group by way of interviews with some half-dozen individuals with personal experience of the subject at hand. The subjects in the Arabic version ranged from blindness to the largely underground Arab LGBT community, and also a segment in which the interviewees had all had loved ones murdered by other family members, in addition to the one about couples separated because of the family unification law.

The breezy filmmaking style and clever editing make the episodes – though they almost always deal with difficult if not painful subjects – both touching and entertaining. The Arabic show won the Israel Academy of Television’s prize for best nonfiction series last year, and can still be seen on YouTube (with Hebrew subtitles).

“One of the things I discovered during these two years [working on the series] was that I wasn’t just dealing with TV and film, but I was also dealing with shame,” Mara’ana told me when we spoke at her Knesset office this summer.

Ibtisam Mara’ana making her maiden speech in the Knesset in April.
Danny Shem-Tov, Knesset Spokesperson’s Office

Disarming sense of candor

It’s difficult not to be captivated by Mara’ana, whether in person or on screen, in her films or in her public appearances. She has a large and warm smile, a direct gaze and an extraordinary command of Hebrew that allows her to express herself with precision while radiating a disarming sense of candor. Compact but with big, frizzy hair, she dresses casually in pants and a shirt buttoned up to the neck, and seems completely at home as she moves briskly about the Knesset.

After we have spoken for 30 minutes in her office, she says she’s promised an interview to Makan TV news and invites me to accompany her to one of the building’s many mezzanines, where several open mini-studios have been roped off for legislators to give television interviews. She puts on an earpiece and grabs a microphone to speak with a remote host, while a cameraman shoots the video.

After she completes the Arabic interview, she is informed by her parliamentary aide that she needs to stick around outside the Knesset hall for an impending vote, and leads me to a nearby corner where we can continue our conversation. After a few minutes she calls out warmly to a passerby whom I recognize as the Knesset secretary-general, Yardena Meller-Horowitz, whom Mara’ana recently praised from the Knesset dais – part of an ongoing effort on her part to encourage her colleagues to show more respect for the nonpoliticians who keep the parliament running. She and Meller-Horowitz, whom she calls a “pashosh” (sweetheart), agree that they need to meet up soon for coffee.

Mara’ana is also proud to have stood up to MK Eli Avidar (Yisrael Beiteinu) when he advised MK Galit Distal Atbaryan in the Knesset to drop the name of her former husband (“I know Oded [Distal], and it doesn’t fit you”). Distal Atbaryan is one of the new faces of Likud who have worked hard to outdo their master, Benjamin Netanyahu, with outrageous remarks about the “radical left,” but Mara’ana told me the two have bonded over the incident, and that she also has been reading and enjoying Distal Atbaryan’s 2014 Hebrew novel “Peacock in the Stairwell.” (“I wrote her and told her I found her book in my home library, and I began reading it, and I discovered, damn it, that the world Distal writes about there is a world that’s very familiar to me.”)

Mara’ana takes a circuitous route in explaining how directing “Sorry for Asking” contributed to her decision to enter politics, but as noted, it’s connected to shame.

“In Arab society, we were raised to feel shame. It’s a burden that has been placed mainly upon women. On females, on young women. And on every boy who strays from what’s expected of him as a male. We have the word ‘ayeb‘ – shame.” She spits out the word another four times.

She felt her own responsibility in conveying the destructive power of shame to her own people while directing the segment on members of the LGBT community. She says that awareness of the phenomenon within the Arab community, not to mention acceptance, may be 20 or 30 years behind that among Israeli Jews.

“I felt I had to translate for the Arab public: what is an LGBT person. They don’t know what that is. It’s not an alien beast, it’s not an aberration, it’s not evil, it’s not people going around with some communicable disease. No.

“And I had to bring people from the [Arab LGBT] community … who could tell their story, in order to mediate for viewers, to understand that you don’t just wake up one morning and decide to be a homosexual; you don’t wake up in the morning and decide you’re going to be a lesbian. No. You grow with this identity, it develops in you and you live with it until one day you decide to reveal your true identity.”

She continues: “And also I kept myself in my mind, as someone who lives with Jewish society, who has a Jewish partner, who has a daughter who is 100 percent Arab, 100 percent Jewish, 100 percent of everything, I had to put myself in a place where I was telling a story to a public – where, with my familiarity with the LGBT community, for example, I have been living their story, and been exposed to it, for many, many years.” She says she didn’t dare raise the subject of transgender Arabs: “I said, let’s start slowly.”

(Mara’ana’s husband, Boaz Menuhin, is a computer engineer who has worked in the industry and who recently completed his master’s in mathematics and computer science at the Weizmann Institute. The couple live in Jaffa with their daughter, Sophia, who just entered second grade there.)

Ibtisam Mara’ana attending the premiere of her film “Write Down, I Am an Arab” with her husband, Boaz Menuhin.
Neta Lantzman

‘I kept on driving’

As happens in political campaigns, as soon as Mara’ana announced her candidacy for the Labor primary at the end of January this year, there were people who began combing through her past for acts and statements that might be useful in sabotaging her campaign. Among the embarrassments dredged up was a Facebook post from 2013 in which she described what it was like not to stand at attention during the siren sounding on the morning of Memorial Day, when people honor Israel’s fallen: “I was driving while all of the country was standing at attention. I decided to keep on driving. And those two minutes, during the siren, were wonderful,” she wrote.

Mara’ana apologized for the eight-year-old post and reported that now, on Memorial Day, she does stand respectfully if she’s in public. But if there was anything Israelis learned about her prior to the March election, it was about her supposed contempt for the memory of Israelis who gave their lives in defense of the state or died in terror attacks.

Members of her own party, including Gil Beilin – a fellow primary candidate and the son of former left-wing minister (and “architect” of the Oslo Accords) Yossi Beilin – called on her to withdraw from the race. The Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify her candidacy for election after a challenge by the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party based on the Memorial Day post and several other provocative statements, but that decision was overturned by the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Mara’ana was subject to vicious social media attacks, as well as opposition from within her own party. “I don’t know what, from the Jewish side, led people to do it, but from my perspective, the effect was to shame me. To cause me to feel humiliated. I was supposed to be ashamed of what I had done; nu-nu-nu-nu-nu. The experience that was inside burst out, and basically overpowered all of my functioning, my self-perception.”

But you don’t appear to be someone who is easily shamed. I have watched interviews with you from 10 years ago and more, and you’re not someone who feels the need to apologize for yourself.

“I agree with you. I don’t apologize. The thing that balanced these feelings of shame was the courage. So, on the one hand, I’m very courageous, very charismatic, I will say whatever is on my mind, will look my fears in the eye. But the feeling of shame is there: it’s deep inside, it’s buried, it’s an adorable little monster. It’s masculine, not feminine, and it’s in my belly, asleep – but with any little tickle, it’s bound to wake up, to be revived. Anything can trigger it. It also leads me to be more courageous, understanding that something has set me off to go to battle, to prove myself.”

MK Ibtisam Mara’ana speaking during a demonstration outside the Knesset against the citizenship law’s family reunification amendment earlier this year.
???? ????????

That sounds pretty exhausting.

“Very much so. And the problem is that, with the image of an Arab woman in the State of Israel, it’s an eternal battle of existence. You’re always fighting not to be frightening, to prove that you’re deserving of a good life, to show that you’re a good citizen. … And this existential fight for my place as an Arab woman never ever lets up. And here, in the Knesset, I encounter it in an extreme form.”

Mara’ana says everyone in the Knesset appears to know who she is. “At the beginning, everyone wanted to take a selfie with me. People from the most right-wing of circles, the most racist, because they want to be able to laugh at me in their own circles. All kinds of settler types come and say, ‘Hey, can I take a selfie with you?’ And I ask, ‘Why?’ And they say, ‘For the guys.’ It’s so they can laugh at me.”

As a consequence, she acknowledges she’s “always in a state of readiness, on the alert for dangers. Who is laughing at me, who wants to hurt me and who’s mocking me, plus the few who like me.”

If it sounds like Mara’ana is preoccupied with feeling sorry for herself, that’s not the case. Though it may be a toss-up whether people are nastier to their fellow humans in social media comments or from the podium of the Knesset, it’s clear that Mara’ana is taking blows in both forums and she’s still smiling.

What’s perhaps disappointing for her is that she probably has more support among Israeli Jews than Israeli Arabs. Political and social commentator Samah Salaime, who writes for +972 Magazine and its Hebrew-language sister publication Local Call, says she’s “ready to sign on to” a prediction that Mara’ana won’t make it into the Knesset in the next election, whenever that is, at least not representing Labor.

Salaime says she and Mara’ana are old friends, and that she admires her greatly as a filmmaker. However, she is disappointed over the backtracking that Mara’ana has been willing to do in order to represent Labor, such as apologizing for her Facebook post about Memorial Day.

“She got into Mapai [an earlier incarnation of Labor], the party that was responsible for all the crimes of the Nakba. She stands there at Labor Party headquarters, and the Israeli flag is flying everywhere. But to admire [David] Ben-Gurion, that should be the limit of our two-facedness.”

To place Salaime’s comments in context, it should be noted that she has lived for years in the Jewish-Arab community of Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salaam (Oasis of Peace), which in 40 years of existence has proved, she tells me, that “no one can say that it’s impossible for Jews and Arabs to live together. It’s not easy, but it’s worthwhile and it’s equal and democratic.”

The problem with Israel, she says, is Zionism, and the solution to it can be found in the platform of the Balad party, which calls for “a state for all its citizens” – meaning complete equality before the law. “The Jews have been undergoing brainwashing for a century that this place can be rid of Arabs, that this place is connected only to the Jews, and that the Arabs who remain are an unfortunate side effect.”

From knowing Mara’ana personally, says Salaime, “I think she has the same vision. And she’s fighting for the same things – that it’s possible to live differently. But I’m not convinced the Knesset is the right place.”

Ibtisam Mara’ana seen interviewing a subject in one of her films. She made eight before moving into politics.
Ibtisam Films

‘No one’s going anywhere’

One recent summer’s evening , Mara’ana spoke before a small group of people from the Arab-Jewish organization Neighbors for Peace, who had gathered at the Bridge on the Wadi bilingual school in Kafr Kara, central Israel. She spent much of the time explaining her own complex identity, which comprises a national component (Palestinian), her citizenship (Israeli), an implicit connection to Islam, her profound connection to feminism, and a liberal sensibility that champions the concept of individual autonomy. She doesn’t see any contradictions there.

“It is permitted to the Arab minority, first of all, to define anew its individual identity, not just its collective identity. We have always talked in collective terms – ‘We are the Palestinian people’ – and have been dealing with this issue while not going into the details, into the personal, private identity. This is what needs to be given space, and the time has come – in fact, it came a long time ago – for space to be given for the individual, and personal identity to be at the center.

“This self-definition of individuals doesn’t need to take place at the expense of the group identity. If I, Ibtisam, define myself as Ibtisam, a mother, a woman, an Arab, it doesn’t prevent me from being at the same time a Palestinian, an Arab or an Israeli.

“We can relax, everything’s alright. No one is going anywhere; we all seem to be planning to stay here. But I believe that, for this to happen, there has to be real and genuine Arab-Jewish cooperation – without anyone having to leave the room, and without anyone banging on the table and saying, ‘No, you’re not going to play this game.'”

Shuli Dichter is one of the Jewish pioneers of the movement to create a “shared society” in Israel (he and Ameer Fakhoury are in the process of establishing a new professional organization, Nisan, devoted to developing “new concepts, language and ideas for practitioners in the field of shared society”).

He was present when Mara’ana spoke in Kafr Kara, and later engaged in an online conversation about her appearance on Facebook, where he also posted a video of Mara’ana’s presentation. In his own comments, Dichter asked rhetorically whether this is really the “right time” for someone like Ibtisam Mara’ana to be presenting her complex, nuanced approach to – well, life.

“I think,” Dichter wrote, “this woman actually doesn’t wait for it to be the right time: in registering with the Labor Party, in running in the primary, in entering the Knesset, in becoming an alternate member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense committee. She also didn’t wait for the right time when she asked her father those hard questions [about the past]. She most certainly does not wait for the right time – she creates that time.”

‘I want to be in the room’

Mara’ana stood for more than an hour before that group, who comprised fewer than 50 people, that summer night and she appeared to be speaking from the heart, though she knew her words were being recorded. I would suggest that she would like to think that human beings, whether on the individual level or the societal one, need not be imprisoned by their history or by their presumed destiny or fate.

“There has to be between us a principle,” she declared at Kafr Kara, “first of all, that our fate is shared. … I don’t want someone, say the majority, to decide for me. I want to be in the room until white smoke emerges, and I won’t leave the room before it’s agreed upon, every day, all the time, between me and the Jewish majority.

“It is possible,” she continued. “And when it happens, it can be amazing. I also think that we don’t have any alternative. This is something that needs to be said, and should have been said a long time ago: We need to create a joint society. Maybe [someday], we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Wow, how could we have lost so many years in not recognizing this, and living in hatred and alienation, and living separately, and not speaking Arabic and not speaking Hebrew, not this and not that, and not the other thing.’ Everything is possible.”