Because life is life-size, academic discourses, let alone grand
worldviews, can only ever be approximations. Yet, direct
observation and engagement with a specific situation raises the
most complex and, at the same time, the most diverse questions.
From this point of view, the experience the young Moriel Bareli
recounts in his book When a Jew and a Muslim Talk is of such a
dense and unusual nature. Yet his starting point was relatively
simple: a young man growing up on Long Island, New York, who came
to Israel when he turned eighteen. And since he lived near
Jerusalem's Old City, inhabited mainly by Israeli Muslims, he
developed a desire to learn Arabic – and in this way, to approach
and become closer with his neighbor—the unknown being, as Rilke
had named him. In practice, however, this wasn't quite so easy to
accomplish because, at the time of the so-called Knife Intifada,
Jewish students were only allowed to enter the Old City if
accompanied by guards. So, as a digital native, Bareli downloaded
an app and arranged to learn the language through various online
conversations. Because he soon realized revealing his identity as
a Jewish Israeli wouldn’t help him achieve his goal, he decided
to focus on his New York background, presenting himself as an
American college student who taught English in exchange for
Arabic classes. And it was in this way that he was able to strike
up conversations with all kinds of people in the Arab
world—conversations that would have been impossible in everyday
life. This experience, with its unmistakable anthropological
significance, drew our attention to him – leading to the
following conversation, which, despite the subject's dark and
confrontational nature, was characterized by a wonderful sense of
humor.
Moriel Bareli lives in Samaria, teaches Arabic and gives lectures
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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