NAZARETH – Atallah Mansour’s journey to becoming the first Arab-Israeli journalist to write in Hebrew began with a chance invitation to the home of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister.

Mansour, 78, met “Israel’s George Washington” - as the pioneer journalist referred to the pioneer politician - back in September 1954, after Ben-Gurion decided to retire to the Negev desert.

Ben-Gurion wanted to inspire his fellow countrymen to join him and help cultivate the desert.

“He expected everybody to follow him and I wrote him a letter, asking if we [the Arabs in Israel] should also come.” Ben-Gurion answered and invited Mansour, 19 at the time, to his house.

“The meeting began with his wife asking me if I had plans to marry a Jewish woman,” Mansour, who is Christian, remembered the odd question.

“No,” he said, “I am going to marry a woman I love, Jewish or Arabic.”

During his long career, Mansour met every prime minister after Ben-Gurion. The most pleasant one, Mansour remembered, was Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister from 1974 to 1977 and again from 1992 to 1995, when he was still commander of the North in Israel’s armed forces (IDF).

“With Rabin I went to the theater in Haifa and we sat side by side,” Mansour said. During the break, they would run outside and share cigarettes and conversation, he added. And who was the most unpleasant one? “I never met Netanyahu,” he said with sharp eyes and a slight smirk in one corner of his mouth.

Another important event in Mansour’s journalistic life also began with a letter. When the first clashes between Arabs and the Israeli police occurred in 1954, Israel’s “leading newspaper then and now [Haaretz] wrote a very bad report based not on a police spokesperson, but on some sergeant,” Mansour said, his voice brimming with outrage.

He wrote a letter to the publisher, telling him how the author of the article got it all wrong. The result was a job offer for the angry reporter.

Fifty-six years later, the gray-haired soft-spoken man, spent an evening with young American journalists-in-training in Nazareth, his hometown. Dressed in a black coat to protect him from cold desert nights, the icon of Palestinian journalism discussed coverage of the Middle East.

Also present were a couple of members of the second generation of Arab-Israeli journalists that followed in Mansour’s footsteps.

“The Israeli media in general is not open when it comes to covering the Arab society in Israel,” said Maisoon Zoabi, producer of a radio show and former contributor to the Hebrew paper Maariv. He added that Jewish news were depicted much more colorful, including Jewish settlers with friendly faces, where Arabic issues were limited to conflict and crisis.

“He was a pioneer in his field, it is not easy to think in one language and write in another,” Zoabi said, full of admiration for Mansour.

Making conversation only interrupted by the delivery of vast amounts of delicious specialties of Middle Eastern cuisine, Mansour drew from his vast experiences as a reporter in the 50s, to spending time in Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967, to becoming a publisher of the first Palestinian weekly newspaper.

“In 1992 I decided I had enough from Hebrew writing and wanted to speak to my people directly,” he said. Twenty years earlier, an essay, simply titled “The Palestinians,” published in the New York Review of Books, became one of Mansour’s best moments during his successful career.

“At that time, in 1971, the American public in general knew nothing about the Palestinians, they knew about Israel because of the bible, and they thought that the Palestinians are also like the ones in the Bible,” he said.

“They gave it the front page, just like this” Mansour chuckled as he thought back to the satisfaction that the many letters he received from readers gave him.

“A journalist’s best reward is reaction,” he said.

In addition to being a trailblazing reporter and role model for Arab-Israeli journalists, Mansour is also a fiction writer. He published two books. “Wabaqeyat Samira,” came out in Arabic in 1962 and was ill received by Israeli reviewers.

“I was very angry so I wrote a novel in Hebrew to tell them they are racist,” he said. “Be Or Chadash”(In a New Light) was the first Hebrew-language novel by a Palestinian Israeli.

Both works of fiction, as well as most of his daily newspaper articles, dealt with the many layers of conflict between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel, as well as the fight over land and religion with the Palestinians. As a journalist at Haaretz, he said he did his best not to take sides.

“I am only committed to the truth,” he told people who pushed him to declare his allegiance. During his lifetime, Mansour said he has seen an increase in racism in Israel.

“Israel, when I was young, was a country that was trying hard to be a welcoming country, an egalitarian state, people spoke about ‘we’, not just ‘I,’” he said. Now, he sees the lack of integration of the Arab minority in Israel on all levels of public life as the main problem.

“The Israeli society never adopted the Arab minority of this country as full citizens that the government would look after their needs,” he said. Coverage in the domestic Israeli media about Palestinian issues is a reflection of this cavalier attitude towards the minority.

“Some publications seldom remember that there are Arabs living here, only if they are involved in road accidents or squabble between Arabs,” Mansour observed. On the other hand, Haaretz, the paper he remains loyal towards even after leaving his job as a reporter, “was always an Israeli publication, not a Jewish one,” he explained.

“If all the Israeli mainstream media handled the Arab issue like Haaretz, the Arabs would be far more integrated,” he said, with a look of certainty. The last couple of years were difficult on a personal level for the veteran journalist, who still writes a weekly column for an Arabic newspaper.

“I had cancer, I lost my best friend, I lost my wife and I broke my arm,” Mansour summarized with tears in his eyes and a breaking voice. The veteran reporter has been shaken by the disastrous past 24 months.

“Now I am an old man,” he said quietly, almost to himself. Mansour has three grown-up children. But as tired as his body and sometimes his mind might be, he is not shy to voice his opinion on the conflict.

“First of all, this is our country, before anyone else, if you try to make a list of who owns this country, we are the first!” he exclaimed. His great, great grandfather was born in what is now the state of Israel and while Mansour does not rule out the possibility that his ancestors were Jews who adopted Christianity, he makes it clear that no rights to the land can be derived from this historic circumstance.

“I don’t know if my great grand parents were Jewish, but whatever we were, this is our country,” he said. “The Jews who came here are not entitled to anything in this country that is not mine.” Nearing 80, Mansour has no intentions of leaving his home, regardless of a political solution that would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“I live here, what ever this town will be, I live here.”