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"Are you Arab or Jew?" I said, "What does it matter? I'm an Israeli." The cashier said, "Sorry, no Arabs allowed." Not Page One.
There is something different about these Arabs sipping sweet Turkish coffee round a table at the Abu Ghosh Restaurant. It seems to be the same for all the men in town. Something missing.
Mustaches.
Truck driver Moussa Abu Ghosh laughs. "We're the Ashkenazim of the Arabs. We look different, no?"
"We are different. We're not mainstream," says Jawdat Ibrahim. Their village exists today because it dared to be different. The distinction Abu Ghosh enjoys dates back 50 years, to when it declined to join the war against the Zionist drive for statehood.
"There were 36 Arab villages in the region in 1947. Only one chose to be neutral. Only that one is still here." Mohammed Abu Ghosh, eight years old when the clashes first began, retains shards of memories from that epic era. "We kept our homes thanks to one brilliant man, the mukhtar, Mahmud Rashid Abu Ghosh."
Mohammed, a thin, intense man who works in the building trade, speaks the mukhtar's name reverentially, adding the traditional Jewish homage, "zichrono livracha" (of blessed memory).
"The mukhtar decided we should not fight the Jews, and everyone in the village accepted his wisdom. Baruch Hashem, we've always been on good terms with everyone."
A minor debate erupts over whether Abu Ghosh actively abetted the Zionist cause, or passively helped by remaining neutral.
There might not have been a debate had not a lawyer, also named Mohammed Abu Ghosh, come to join us. "What do you mean, we helped - did we fight? We didn't fight."
"By not fighting against the Jews, we helped." "What do you know? You weren't even born then."
"We were called traitors. We were even blamed for the death of Abdul Khader Husseini, over there at Kastel: the Arabs drew an X over Abu Ghosh for that. This was why other Arabs hated us."
"Some still do." "Because we...