The story of Isaac.

The story of Isaac.

Few days ago seven Israeli innocent tourists have been killed in Bulgaria after a suicide attack on their bus. Those people have been killed for the simple reason that they have the citizenship of a certain country. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hezbollah and Iran of committing the crime. The attack can never be seen out side the context of Arab-Israeli conflict. The ramifications of this conflict seem have extended to every single part of the world only with few exceptions.

Away from all this gloomy news about suicide attacks and boomings, a small village Sixty kilometer away from the city of Agadir in Morocco seems to make another type of news.  The village is made up mainly of Berber population, although there are some Arabs. One cannot, but notice the poverty of the people of this town, and clearly see that they are fighting to earn their very day living. What is interesting about this town is not the well of its people to survive, but rather how they treat each other. The town boasts of having few Jewish families still living there.

The news about some Jewish families living in some small town in north Africa would have been boring, but if you consider the experience of the Jews in the Arab world, this town would seem to you utopia. The lives of the Jews in the Arab world can be described by everything except being peaceful. Just few kilometers away from away from this town, the Jews in Algeria had a different life ,just after independence their number dropped from to 40.000 into ziro just ine few years.For some reason this town seems to be immune from all the hatred that is hovering around in the area.

Isaac is the father of one of families living in this village. Before I talked to him I expected that he would be telling me stories about his fight to survive in this hostile area or the reconciliations and compromises he makes so he can co-exist with his Muslim neighbors, but I was mistaken. Isaac s life seems to be so normal that is boring, his life contains no stories about epic fights for survival and running a way from massacres. He might be the last one you would think of writing a story about. He wakes up in the morning have his breakfast goes to work then gets back at the afternoon for lunch and so on. His life is very ordinary, but as they say, out of the ordinary come the extraordinary.

Isaac is making jewelries He speaks Hebrew, Arabic, French and Berber, so he could communicate with a lot of people, although this town was isolated and very few tourists came to the area and so he really didn’t get the chance to practice his French. Maybe the villages is living in such peace because of its isolation, I mean news inciting media content.  In this village there is no place for derogatory words to refer to Jews or any cranky jokes about them. For some unknown reason the people of this village fail to recognize that they are different. Those people are so busy with enhancing their own lives that they don’t have time to pay attention to their differences.

One would make the assumption that those people have takes extensive courses in cultural diversity or some thing like that. One would think that they have learned to be tolerant are culturally sensitive, but it is not the case.  Ironically Many of them say they tolerance has nothing to do with their situation. “For a start we don’t have anything to tolerate and second you have to have problem so I can have tolerance, but we don’t have problems. I don’t know what I mean by cultural sensitivity but I know that we don’t see each other as different so we don’t have to be sensitive towards each other.”