Will Yitzchak Rabin be allowed to stay in Israel?
Protecting Yitzhak has been her life’s mission ever since he was born, in January 1996, near the city of Irbid in northern Jordan—just two months after the assassination of the original Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of an extremist Israeli Jew opposed to the prime minister’s peace overtures to the Palestinians. Miriam decided to name her son after the Israeli leader in honor of the historic Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty signed in 1994 by Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein.
The problems started almost immediately. The media in both Jordan and around the world got wind of the plan, and the Jordanian Interior Ministry wouldn’t approve the name. Only the personal intervention of King Hussein, Miriam says, allowed the couple to prevail. “The king said, ‘Let them name the baby whatever they want.’”
Local opposition to the move didn’t subside, however, especially after King Hussein himself fell ill (he would die, in 1999, from complications arising from cancer). The family was harried by Palestinians inside Jordan who were strongly opposed to any reconciliation with Israel.
(Yitzhak’s parents are Bedouin Jordanians, also referred to as native “East Bankers,” as opposed to Jordanians of Palestinian origin who came to the Hashemite Kingdom as refugees in 1948 and 1967.) Miriam and her infant son were forced to move from place to place like fugitives, even spending nights in bus depots and a safehouse with an uncle in Amman.
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The former first lady of Israel arranged for the family to emigrate, and assisted them in their early years in Israel with work and navigating bureaucratic hurdles. But she passed away in 2000, after which the family fell on harder times.
Yitzhak, entering first grade in central Israel, was picked on by kids in his class—“Arab-Israeli children, whose parents put thoughts in their heads,” Miriam recalled. There were issues, too, between Miriam and her Palestinian co-workers, who knew the family’s history. But the most tragic situation befell Miriam’s brother back in Jordan, who, according to Miriam, was murdered by a group of thugs as revenge for his nephew’s name. Miriam took Yitzhak to Jordan with the intention of attending her brother’s funeral, but, in her telling, a melee ensued at the border crossing, where a small group of protesters awaited them. She put Yitzhak, still a toddler, back on the bus to Israel, bruised and bleeding. It was the last time he would set foot on the soil of his native country.
Seeking a quieter existence away from the major Arab-Israeli population centers of northern and central Israel, the family moved down to Eilat, and have called the resort city on the Red Sea home for the past 11 years. Given everything that has transpired, it’s no surprise that Yitzhak has grown up wholly Israeli, surrounding himself with Jewish friends, speaking Hebrew, and adopting Judaism as his own (he is set to officially convert in the coming weeks).Read the whole thing.
Labels: Arab anti-Semitism, Jordan, Muslim anti-Semitism, Palestinian anti-Semitism, Yitzchak Rabin
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:25 PM
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