I want to tell a story of a woman whose name means hope. This woman, in fact, had two names signifying hope, one in Arabic, Amal, and one in Hebrew, Tikva. And I want to consider what we might learn from her biography about history and hope. 

Amal was born to an Iraqi Jewish family in 1926. Iraq, at the time, had a thriving Jewish community, whose members were hopeful about their future in the new state. Amal’s grandfather, Abraham Haim, was an influential Parliament member. She attended excellent Jewish primary and middle schools in Baghdad and then transferred to a high school for girls where she studied with Muslims and Christians. An Iraqi patriot, Amal loved to salute the flag during school morning ceremonies. She yearned for Arab freedom and independence and collected songs about such hopes in her notebooks. Arabic was her favorite subject; she read books on Arabic rhetoric and prosody, wrote short Arabic essays, and edited her school’s newspaper. In one essay, she advised fellow female students to be hopeful and smiling and promote knowledge and learning for the betterment of their society. Amal’s love of literature originated from her family. Her grandfather read her stories from the Arabic medieval literary tradition, and her extended family included Anwar Sha’ul, one of Iraq’s most important short-story writers and journalists, and his wife, Esterina Ibrahim, a writer and a journalist. Amal later attended the law faculty, where she not only studied but demonstrated for independence and social justice, and eventually worked as a teacher at a Jewish school for girls.

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Amal’s hopes to be an equal citizen in Iraq did not materialize. After the Nakba in Palestine (1948), Israel pushed very hard to have Iraqi Jews immigrate to Israel, while Iraqi ultranationalists began equating every Jew with a treacherous Zionist. Iraq and Israel engaged in secret negotiations at the end of which the community immigrated to Israel after having its property taken (officially “frozen”) by the Iraqi state. Iraq was consequently emptied of most of its Jews during the years 1950-1, and Amal was one of them. 

Israel had no means to take in so many Jews, and thus Iraqi Jews resided in tents and wooden shacks in transit camps, alongside Jews from the Middle Eastern and North Africa (MENA) as well as Holocaust survivors. In the new state, MENA Jews suffered from racial discrimination because their culture was that of the “Arab enemy.” Amal found herself in one of these transit camps, attempting to make a living for herself. Poverty, loss of social status, and longing to Iraq now characterized her life. As the immigrants from MENA states were pressured to change their Arabic names into Hebrew ones, Amal took on the Hebrew name Tikva.  

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Even under such difficult conditions, Tikva tried to find some hope. She found work as a teacher in the transit camp of Ramat ha-Sharon, where many Iraqi Jews resided. The children in the transit camps received poor education and poor nutrition, and their parents’ demands for better education often resulted in demonstrations in the transit camps. Tikva did not know Hebrew well, and therefore one of her Iraqi friends helped her memorize the lessons by heart. And yet, she felt she had something native Israeli teachers lacked, namely, empathy for her Iraqi Jewish students. She loved these children, who were often categorized as “disturbed” by the state, and she visited them often in their shacks after school hours. When Tikva complained about their harsh living conditions to some social workers, she became suspected of being a communist. In response, she advised the social workers to visit the children’s shacks, as she did. 

Eventually, Tikva managed to get out of the cycle of poverty thanks to her talents and her knowledge of Arabic. This move, however, came with a price; she now worked with state organizations that monitored the lives of the Palestinians who managed to remain in Israel after the Nakba and were treated as second class citizens. Tikva worked in the state’s labor organization for Arab working women and later as a translator in the state’s intelligence services. Despite her Israelization, however, she remained loyal to Iraq. She even wondered why God ordered Abraham to leave fertile Mesopotamia, the true Garden of Eden, and come to Palestine. While Tikva admitted she adored Jerusalem, she would have liked God to leave Abraham in Iraq. 

Amal/Tikva’s story, especially if told in a linear fashion, as I have done, does not leave us with much hope, as Amal, who was raised in Iraq, was forced to forsake her Arab-Iraqi culture and to suffer tremendously as a penniless immigrant in Israel. Nevertheless, certain moments in Amal/Tikva’s life can give us glimpses of hope, as we reveal that Jew and Arab are not antonymous terms and that Jews enjoyed, loved, and played a part in, modern Arab culture and saw a prosperous future for themselves in an Arab state. We also discover that even under conditions of racial discrimination and poverty, teacher-activists and their students found ways to reach one another, often while resisting official state policies. It also gives us hope regarding the discipline of history, where through the discovery of new archives, paying heed to subaltern voices of children, women, and immigrants, working in multiple languages, and reading accounts across and beyond national boundaries, we can tell stories that challenge racism, chauvinism, and marginalization. Memories of shared Arab-Jewish coexistence in the past can thus offer us a modest hope for the future, which we very much need in these dark times.