Us as Equals

I spent the afternoon with an old friend who occasionally comments on my Blak and Black posts under the name of the Faceless Freedom Fighter. We met in Germany when we were both eighteen, and I have called him Fx3 ever since. He is Palestinian, because of this, his anonymity is important. Fx3 holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris. By a coincidence that pleases me, he sat in a few of the classes my uncle taught. I am Wiradjuri and I am Jewish, and it is my Jewish heritage that matters most to what follows. I live in one of Sydney’s Jewish enclaves, so when Fx3 came to visit I asked him, as a joke, not to arrive dressed as a slice of watermelon.

The joke needs explaining. In December 2024 a handlebar moustachioed NSW cop is seen in a video that went viral on social media to confront the driver of a car in respect of what he considers could potentially be an antisemitic watermelon inside of it. You’ve read that correctly, the NSW Police had stopped a person for displaying a watermelon image on their car, and the police alleged it was antisemitic because it resembled the Palestinian flag. When Fx3 looked confused, I explained the only way I could think of, by humming an Irish sectarian tune. The song is “Kinky Boots,” not the musical, and it is a parody sung by a British soldier in Northern Ireland. He kicks in doors at midnight, drives an armoured car through your garden, and cheerfully announces that the army has come to take your land. I cannot find who owns the copyright, so I will not reproduce the words, but anyone curious can find it easily enough.

We learned songs like that from Irish musicians we befriended after they migrated to Australia. We met them in an Irish pub in Sydney, and on Saturday nights, after a few drinks, we would sing sectarian songs together. Fx3 being Palestinian and me Australian Jewish, neither of us had any skin in the conflict, so we treated the songs as a joke. Our Irish friends treated them as a joke too, and that was the point. They had left Ireland because, in their minds, killing your neighbours simply because they belong to a different religion could not be justified. They understood that a song can be sung for laughs while the thing it describes is not funny at all. I hummed the tune to Fx3 for the same reason I raised the watermelon. I did not want the NSW Public Order and Riot Squad driving their armoured cars through my garden and kicking my front door down around at midnight.

Those friends deserve a little more than a passing mention. Since arriving in Australia, one of them has become a doctor, another an engineer, and a third a school teacher. Each could have served Irish society, and because of circumstances beyond their control that society lost them and the talent they carried. They fitted into the wider Australian community perfectly, and each of them benefits it today. I offer this as an aside, but it supports the idea of a multicultural Australia in which people bring expertise that serves the whole community. A country does not shrink when it welcomes newcomers. It borrows the best of what they were forced to leave behind.

Apart from the catch-up, Fx3 had come to take on the thankless task of improving my Arabic, and we planned to do it while discussing classical philosophy. By the chance of birth we sit on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we sometimes disagree about politics. But in philosophy there is no us and them. At the table where Plato and Aristotle are argued over, there is only us, as equals in humanity.

That idea is older than the modern quarrels of either of our peoples, and it has been reached from many directions. Aristotle called the human being a political animal, a creature who becomes fully herself only among others. Diogenes is said to have answered, when asked where he came from, that he was a citizen of the world, and the Stoics who followed him, Marcus Aurelius among them, built a whole ethics on the thought that all rational beings share one community. The Roman playwright Terence gave it its most famous line: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, I am human, and nothing human is foreign to me. The Hebrew Bible begins with the claim that every person is made in the image of God, and the Quran addresses all of humanity to say that peoples were made into nations and tribes so that they might know one another. None of these traditions agrees with the others on everything, and they do not need to. They agree on the point that matters here, that the person across the table is your equal before you know anything else about them.

Our conversation eventually turned to folktales, which are perhaps the most democratic evidence for that claim. We noted the similarities between the Brothers Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree” and the Palestinian tale “The Green Bird.” In both, a child is murdered, the crime is hidden, and the child returns as a bird whose song exposes the killer and brings justice. Fx3 told “The Green Bird” to my oldest daughter many years ago. It clearly had no lasting effect on her, since she is now happily married to a French-Israeli man.

The two tales have no direct connection. There is no line of transmission from a German forest to a Palestinian village, and neither story needs one. What connects them is our shared humanity. People in very different places, facing the same griefs, such as cruelty inside a family, injustice that goes unpunished, and the hope that a wrong will not stay buried, have told similar stories about them. Humanity addresses similar problems in similar ways.

Stories also stay with us. Many decades ago Fx3’s mother told my daughter and me the tale of “Half-a-Halfling,” the sixth tale in Speak, Bird, Speak Again, the collection of Palestinian Arab folktales gathered by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana. I still remember its details as if I had heard it for the first time yesterday.

A man has two wives, one his first cousin and the other a stranger, and neither can conceive. A sheikh sends him up a mountain to a ghoul, who sends him on to his elder brother, who sends him on to a sister, a ghouleh. At each meeting the man says, “Peace to you,” and each time the ghoul replies that, had the greeting not come before the request, he would have crunched the man’s bones. The man shaves the first two ghouls’ beards and trims their eyebrows, and with the ghouleh he suckles at her breasts, which makes him her son. She gives him two pomegranates. On the way home he grows hungry and decides that his cousin will not mind receiving only half of hers. The stranger bears twin sons, Hasan and Husen, and the cousin bears half a human being, whom they name Half-a-Halfling. The half-child, in other words, is born of a small meanness in a man who simply did not think.

The brothers choose mares and guns, and Half-a-Halfling asks for a lame, mangy she-goat and a wooden poker. They hunt and the brothers miss. He lies in wait until the deer come near and breaks their legs, and he lets the brothers have the deer on one condition, that he brand each of them on the backside. They agree. Their mother cooks the deer and throws the bones on the doorstep of Half-a-Halfling’s mother, who weeps, until her son sends her to see the brands for herself. Anyone who has watched a household favour its larger, louder children will know that small cruelty.

On a second hunt the brothers come to a town where the only person is a ghouleh chasing a rooster. She greets them as her nephews, feeds them, and lays out their beds. Half-a-Halfling asks to sleep in a hanging reed basket, with a pierced waterskin dripping above him and a handful of fava beans to munch, so that she will think he is full and safe from her. When she dances around singing that her teeth are growing sharper for Hasan and Husen, he demands a stuffed rooster, and then a stuffed and roasted lamb, which keeps her busy until morning. He wakes his brothers, and they flee. She stops their horses with a spell, but the boys escape on the she-goat, which flies when he prods it with the poker, and she devours the horses instead. Their father says he would confess Half-a-Halfling cleverer than his brothers if he could bring the ghouleh herself to the house, and so he does. He loads a donkey with a huge box of halvah, sells her piece after piece until her endless hunger is plain, and persuades her to climb into the box and eat as much as she likes. He closes the lid, ropes it shut, and carries it into town, calling out for a fire to be lit. The box goes into the flames, and the townspeople are rid of her and her evil.

What strikes me is how recognisably human the monsters are. The editors observe in their notes that the tales extend human behaviour and institutions even to ghouls. A greeting of peace can calm a ghoul, and a man who has suckled at a woman’s breast becomes her son, just as milk kinship in Islamic law makes a nursing child a sibling to the woman’s own children. The Hebrew shalom aleichem and the Arabic salamu alaykum are the same greeting in two sister languages, and in both tongues it is a way of telling a stranger that you mean no harm. A tale from a Palestinian village therefore asks of its hero what the best of any tradition asks of anyone, which is to approach the stranger with peace first and to win by wit rather than by force.

I return, then, to the watermelon. A symbol is a shorthand that people use for their own loyalties and griefs, and it can mean different things to the person who displays it and the person who reads it. A friendship between a Jewish Wiradjuri man and a Palestinian philosopher is not a symbol of anything. It is two people who argue, laugh, correct each other’s Arabic, and trade stories that their grandparents’ grandparents might have recognised. If there is a lesson in that afternoon, it is that equality in humanity is something we practise at a table, and it comes before the flags and the politics rather than after them. This post is only an introduction to a wider discussion of that theme, and I hope Fx3 will keep commenting on the rest.

– – –

Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, November 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010