Funny, you don't act Jewish..

Hubby was driving Abed from our town, where they're both working and on the way to Jerusalem saw alot of army personnel and bulldozers. Abed said - they're there because they're going to demolish a house. Sure enough, when they came back an hour later, the house was nothing but rubble. Sometimes, homes in Arab towns get demolished because terrorists lived there, but most of the time it's because the family didn't get a permit to build a home there. Usually because families live together, they build additions or attachments. You need a permit and you could wait for a permit for years on end, sometimes it never coming at all. So with families bursting at the seams, they build without permits. Along comes some bozo, looks at the house and says - Oh a new house, let's check if they had a permit to build. Usually it's not and the bulldozers come and raze the buildings. Well, there is The Committee Against House Demolitions - but they can't possibly make it to all of them. Israelis on the other hand, live in towns with Western-style infrastructure, buy their apartments from the builders, who had permits to build to begin with, and don't have to deal with this type of annoyance, unless they build a home extension without permission - which they will have to take down. But Arab culture is not Western culture. Go figure. Hubby was upset by the house demolition and they went on to buy building supplies in a Palestinian-owned store. The store owner got into a discussion with Abed and Abed yelled at him "He's not Jewish. Look at him, he's Canadian, he's not Jewish." After Abed got into the car and looked at my bewildered Hubby and told him point blank - "You're not Jewish. You can't possibly be Jewish with your attitudes. You must be Christian." I laughed at first when I was told this story, but got upset later on. Do Palestinians really believe that if you show a bit of compassion, you can't really be Jewish? That it's not a Jewish trait? It's very depressing when you think about it because compassion is very much a Jewish trait, but unfortunately, the Palestinians living here do not see it very often.