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It was late in the day and all that Rami wanted was to put his head against the bulletproof window of the "Settlers Bus", as he called it, and fall asleep . But stuck in traffic, the religious Jew next to him saw an opportunity for conversation. He gestured savagely, telling Rami how tired he was of living in fear of the Arabs. Rami nodded but did not answer. Even with his mastery of Hebrew, his accent would have allowed him to become a Palestinian Arab.
The traffic has intensified. As they approached Gush Etzion junction in the West Bank, they met several dozen police officers, soldiers and pbaders-by. A riot broke out. There was another terrorist attack – a Palestinian tried to stab a soldier. The army had shot and killed him. Rami was petrified. Arabs do not usually ride buses, but they are more common than Arab buses from Jerusalem's bus station. It took all his strength for his legs to move. He got off the bus and ran to a nearby gas station where he knew that there was an Arab worker. He was sitting there, shaking, until his mother came looking for him.
Rami, 29, is full of similar stories. Even as we were talking in a Jaffa café, an Israeli asked if Rami had served in Duvdevan – an elite antiterrorist unit in the Israel Defense Forces. With shorn hair, hazel eyes and a chiseled physique, the awesome Eastern-looking appearance of the Middle East of Rami means that it blends into a crowd as well in Tel Aviv as in the center. city of Ramallah.
Rami was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern hills of Hebron. One of five children, his parents instilled in him the importance of respect for others. Nevertheless, he grew up in a culture of hate.
"I did not choose my childhood," he said. "My neighborhood, my school, my university, all these influences have pushed me to hate the other side."
"For a Palestinian to come to Israel and work in an international company like Intel or Google, it's a dream." – Rami
These days, his badociation with the Jews is the reason why the links with his closest childhood friends have been broken. But when he was a guide at the age of 20, he had a meeting with Israelis at a tourism summit that was a turning point for him. Until then, the only Israelis he had known were soldiers, and his memories of their treatment were not good.
Rami recalls angrily telling an Israeli at the top how his grandparents had been forced to leave their homes during the War of Independence. He denounced Israel's policy of changing the Arab name from their hometown to an Israeli city, Kiryat Gat, to try to erase Palestinian history. He expressed the hope that his grandmother (who, like many Palestinians, still carries the key to the house that she fled) would someday come back.
Nine years later, Rami changed his mind. The "right of return" of his grandparents to their former home? "I do not believe it anymore," he said. "Put the story – the Nakba (the Palestinian" disaster "marking the establishment of the state of Israel) or the Holocaust – all the time on the table [means] will not change anything, "he said. "Both sides [are] are sad and full of trauma, but we do not need to allow these things to live with us.We must start thinking about the next generation."
Rami works to do exactly that. He works as program coordinator for the Palestinian Internship Project, an organization that places Palestinian university graduates in three-month internships in companies in Israel.
"For a Palestinian to come to Israel and work in an international company like Intel or Google," he says, "it's a dream."
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