January 7, 2024 at 6:00 AM ET
For Pinchas Homener, who runs a laundry in Efrat, it has come at a personal cost as well.
For decades, two Palestinian brothers – Abdel Salam Al-Maghribi, 51, and his brother Mohammed, 56 – formed the backbone of his laundry operations. Homer has provided them with a reliable source of income while raising their family and striving to build a better life.
In the fraught and unequal context of occupation, marred by violence, discrimination and mutual mistrust, the men developed a true friendship, the three say. The relationship continued with the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, reaching Palestinian cities and villages. But the Hamas attack on October 7, and the Israeli war in Gaza, put relations between the two men to the test in an unprecedented way.
Determined to keep the relationship alive, Homer turned to a new daily ritual.
On a sunny November day, he loaded a pile of button-down shirts into his white Hyundai, drove through the settlement's fortified gates and onto Route 60, the main artery through the West Bank.
Five minutes and a checkpoint later, he stopped his car along a steep road in the Arroub Palestinian refugee camp. The call of the muezzin, calling Muslims to prayer, echoed in the valley filled with olive trees. A young man is tied to a hummer. “Hello!” He said – Hey! – And shook his hand.
The young man's father, Abdul Salam, came out of a house surrounded by fig trees and greeted Hominer in Hebrew. The men hung the freshly pressed shirts in Humner's car and retrieved the crumpled batch from the back—a feat that afternoon. Then Humner headed back down the hill.
This has been their routine since October 7, when Hamas militants rampaged through communities in southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 240 hostage, according to Israeli authorities. The retaliatory war launched by Israel against Hamas led to the deaths of more than 22,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The United Nations says at least 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces across the West Bank, many of them in military raids.
The government has barred most of the approximately 200,000 Palestinians who work in Israel and West Bank settlements from entering Israeli communities.
In Efrat, a Jewish settlement of 15,000 people located 12 miles south of Jerusalem, Palestinians from Arroub and other nearby villages ran shops and cleaned homes, often receiving better wages than they would have received from their Palestinian employers.
Even that small window for coexistence has now closed.
“It's very difficult, very difficult,” said Hominer, a short, bespectacled man with chunky gray hair and piercing blue eyes, shaking his head as he turned onto the road leading out of Al-Arroub.
The car crawled until it stopped in front of the checkpoint. An Israeli soldier told Huminer that he was concerned about his frequent trips to Al-Arroub. Homer said he wasn't worried.
“Maybe I'm stupid,” he told a Washington Post reporter traveling with him that November morning. “Maybe I should be afraid.”
A “very good” relationship.
Homer was born in Jerusalem to a family that had lived there for generations. But housing was expensive, and he and his wife, Drora, were looking for an affordable place to raise their young family.
In May 1987, he took a Palestinian bus to Efrat to buy an apartment. He said: “I was a Jew alone with the whole bus full of Arabs, and without fear.” “It was natural, you know?”
Hominer, Drora, and their four children moved to Efrat in July of that year, four years after the settlement was founded, joining about 50 other families.
In December, the First Palestinian Intifada broke out, marking the beginning of years of violent and often deadly confrontations in Israel and throughout the West Bank.
“We were going to [Palestinian] “The villages are free, no problem,” Hominer said. “But then…” he trailed off.
By the early 1990s, violence had declined. Relations between Efrat and neighboring Palestinian villages improved, as can be seen from the settlement located on top of the hill. Palestinians were employed in new supermarkets and restaurants in the growing community. Homer attended the wedding of a Palestinian employee.
He appointed Muhammad at that time, and a decade or so later, he appointed his brother Abdel Salam.
Abdel Salam described Hominer as a “good man” with a sense of humour.
“I was happy and he was happy. He would often leave me alone” at the laundromat, Abdel Salam said. “He would let me manage the laundry and deal with customers. “We used to see each other more than we saw our families.”
Mohamed retired in 2020 but has kept in touch, describing his relationship with his former employer as “fantastic”. His brother stayed.
Efrat has become known as a place of relative peace, in contrast to the hardline outposts where violence by extremist settlers against Palestinians has drawn international condemnation.
Efrat The city's mayor, Oded Revivi, has long encouraged coexistence with their Palestinian neighbors, inviting them every year to celebrate Sukkot. Palestinians can obtain medical treatment at the settlement's clinic and pay traffic fines at its post office.
Abdel Salem said that the laundry customers treated him with kindness and respect. Someone started teaching him English when he got dressed every week. He gave him the last of the candy on Rosh Hashanah.
Years ago, Hominer couldn't remember exactly when a Palestinian man tried to stab someone in an Efrat supermarket. But Hominer said the incident did not harden residents' attitudes against their Palestinian neighbors. He says that before October 7, he always felt safe.
He said: “The relationship between us and the Arabs here, and the villages here, was very good.”
Efrat expanded, attracting new immigrants from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Drora taught at the local school. Their children grew up and moved away. When Hominer's daughter, Nurit, got married in 2006 in the Ariel settlement, Muhammad obtained permission from Israeli authorities to attend.
“I was the only Arab person, but I knew the whole family,” he said. “I know the people in Efrat better than I know the people in the camp. I worked for 33 years in Efrat. The people who were sitting at the table were my friends.”
When the Moors' parents died, Homer went to Al-Arroub to pay his respects. When Drora fell several months ago, Muhammad visited her in the hospital. She died on October 11 due to internal bleeding.
“Now I'm alone,” said Humner. “But we had a pretty good life here.”
The Mughrabi family came to the West Bank during the Nakba — “catastrophe” in Arabic — the term Palestinians use to remember the mass expulsion from their land when Israel was founded in 1948.
Al-Mughariba's father lived with his parents and siblings near the city of Ramla, in central Palestine, which was under British control at the time. After being expelled from their home, they ended up in Al-Arroub, a camp established by the United Nations in 1949.
Each family was given a small one- or two-room house with an outside toilet. The Israeli army maintained strict security measures. Abdel Salam says that when he was growing up, his parents told him to take detours to avoid soldiers — and “if you drop a pen in the street as you pass by the army, don’t pick it up.”
He added that life in Al-Arroub, which is inhabited by about 15,600 people, is “difficult.” Many refugees live in “substandard shelters,” according to the United Nations; During the winter, the sewer system often overflows. Unemployment is high. Most of those who can find jobs work for the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations, or private sector employers in Israeli towns and settlements.
Israeli raids and clashes occur regularly between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youth in Al-Arroub. The Maghribi family tried to stay out of the conflict.
“We are not involved in anything,” Muhammad said, sitting in front of his brother in their home. “None of us had been in prison before.”
But the brothers say it is impossible to escape the violence and discrimination that constrain their lives.
Abdel Salam and his brothers built their house in the 1990s to provide more space for their growing family. It is located on a hill near the entrance to the camp, within sight of Route 60 and an Israeli watchtower.
Abdel Salam says that ten years ago, some neighborhood children threw stones at the soldiers there. The soldiers responded by firing stun grenades. One of the grenades entered the family home, where his wife, who was five months pregnant, was standing by the window.
He said it caused her to miscarry.
Abdel Salam said: “The occupation does not differentiate between those who throw stones and civilians like me who live in their homes.”
His brother said that friendly workplace interactions with Israeli civilians had no effect on the behavior of soldiers: they treated Palestinians “with violence and brutality.”
“The punishment for the Palestinians is collective punishment.”
“This time is different”
The shocking attack on October 7 turned Homer's understanding of his world upside down.
Before that, it was believed that Palestinian militants attacked Jewish Israelis “because they do not have a state, and we are occupying their lands,” he said. “Now, I know that all of this is not true – the only reason is hatred of Jews.”
Abdel Salam, stuck at home, now spends his days watching the news from Gaza with his brothers, horrified by Israel's Western-backed bombing campaign and its impact on women and children.
Civilians in Efrat and nearby settlements, newly suspicious of their Palestinian neighbors, are arming themselves and conducting night patrols.
The brothers say that the soldiers at the checkpoints outside Al-Arroub are more aggressive than usual.
Hominer says he no longer knows how to interact with Muhammad — or whether their relationship can regain its easy rhythm. He was hurt when Mohammed did not call to check on him and his family after October 7. His in-laws are in the army.
“I really don't know what to do,” he said, staring into the sink's doorway. “I need him, I love him, I’ve been working with him for 20 years.”
“We all love him!” replied a woman with a British accent who had come to collect her dry laundry.
“I really care about him,” Hominer said. “But on the other hand, I don’t know that he cares about me as much.”
Transporting the shirts to Moroccan's house every day kept the relationship going on some level. Hominer says he gets some help with the business, and Abdel Salam can still make some money, although it's a fraction of what he earned before.
From the brothers' point of view, a Hamas attack was inevitable. Mohammed described it as a response to the tightening Israeli occupation, escalating settler violence and challenges by far-right Jewish activists to the delicate status quo at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, a site of deep religious significance for Jews, Muslims and Christians.
“All this accumulated pressure led to the explosion in Gaza,” he said.
He insists that the family has nothing against Jews. He added: “At the end of the day, we want to live in peace.”
Abdel Salam's brief interactions with Huminer leave little time or space to talk about October 7 or the war in Gaza. “It's better not to talk about it,” he said.
He was distressed because the new restrictions prevented him from visiting Homener after his wife died in October. “If the situation was normal, I would have gone to pay my respects,” he said.
Muhammad fears that “the relationship will disintegrate.”
Abdel Salam, who is more optimistic, noted that his long friendship with Huminer could return to normal, “but it will take some time.”
But his brother disagreed, saying: “It's different this time.”
Sufyan Taha contributed to this report.
