David Grossman - Sleeping on a Wire - Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

For eighteen years they longed for each other. For each side, the amputated limb was no less sensible than the remaining one. Israeli and Jordanian soldiers prevented free passage of civilians, and afterward, when incidents between the armies became more frequent, a border fence was erected in the wadi. Despite this, the separation was not complete. Smugglers crossed the frontier and passed on news and greetings; family celebrations were held on a hill overlooking the other side. A narrow canal was built to bring water from the spring, which remained on the Israeli side, to the center of Jordanian Barta’a, and the women in Israel launched paper boats down the canal with cargoes of letters to their friends. The people would shout the family “bulletin board” to each other over the hills — who had been born, who had died. Mostly they would watch each other curiously, as if they were looking in an enchanted mirror with a life of its own that could show them themselves and their other, possible, fate.

In the Six-Day War the Green Line was punctured. The two halves of the whole tottered toward each other, met in the wadi, clove to each other for several hours, and then each individual returned to his village, bewildered.

“We suddenly saw how different they are,” Riad Kabha, the mukhtar— village elder — of the Israeli village told me in 1987. “We had already been living with the Israelis for nineteen years. We were more modern than they, emancipated and open. It was hard for us to get used to them. Their internal rhythm was different…contact with them was awkward and unpleasant. They had lived the whole time under the oppressive Jordanian regime, and their links with the outside world had been extremely limited. The Jordanian soldiers lived among them and imposed a reign of fear. They were always saying, “Yes, sir,” and that affected their entire behavior…With them, a married son continues to live with his father. With us, we already give less weight to a father’s advice, and everyone goes out into the world on his own…”

I took down his words. I wanted to organize a meeting of the two Barta’as. I did not succeed. Both sides refused. For this reason, after the meetings on the Israeli side I went over to the Jordanian side of the village and spent long hours talking with the young people there. Three of the young “east siders” I met with were riled by what the “west siders” said about them: “ They suffered more than we did? How many years did they have a military regime in Israel and how many did we? And with us the end still isn’t in sight! They talk about oppression? What do they know about oppression? They say we sold lands? Well, there are those who sell land, and there are those who sell their souls.”

“Look at it this way,” Jawdat Kabha said to me then. “By living here, in the West Bank, I am an international problem. The entire world talks about and mediates for me. No one does that for him. I’m free in spirit, I know that I can say with a clear conscience what I feel about them, about the occupation. He can’t do that. He’s already completely tangled up with them. He can’t even think about it. Better for him not to think.”

Four and a half years have passed since then. With much effort I was able to organize a meeting in Israeli Barta’a. The two halves of the village were not excited about getting together this time, either. Yet after delays and evasions, the meeting took place.

The Israelis waited for me at Sufian Kabha’s house. A house of magnificent beauty, “the lifework of Father, my two brothers, and me.” Actually, many houses on this side of the village look like the projects of a lifetime — huge, rounded, like small seacraft on pillars. The yards are well cared for, containing olive and pomegranate and all kinds of fruit trees. Facing them is eastern Barta’a, poorer to the eye, austere, as if it were stuck to the hill, its unpaved roads kicking up dust and its walls stitched with slogans. Most of its houses are closer to the earth, a kind of architectural steadfastness and devotion —sumud in Arabic. We sat and talked in Sufian Kabha’s house, waiting for the east siders.

“What did we, the Israelis, experience during the intifadah?” responded Rafat Kabha, twenty-nine, a teacher at an Arab school in Jaffa. “The truth is that on this side we didn’t experience anything special. Except for the expansion of our national consciousness. Most of the people here, especially most of the young people, know now that there is a nation. That they belong to that nation, which is struggling for its freedom.”

“So now you feel more Palestinian than you did five years ago?”

“Well, before the intifadah I was hesitant about saying out loud that I’m Palestinian. Now I say it openly. Before, if anyone asked me, I would say that I was, you know, an Israeli Arab. Now I’m proud of being Palestinian, because it does not contradict my citizenship,” he asserted, “nor Israeli law.”

“And how are relations between the two parts of the village now?”

Nasuh Abd Elkader Kabha, thirty-three years old: “Relations are very good! Both now and beforehand, excellent relations!” He clamped his lips shut. He hadn’t made a statement but a declaration, one of those declarations that challenge something hanging in the air. He, Nasuh Kabha, was declaring himself spokesman for the cause. “We’ve always been one family! After all, my uncles live there! Relations have gotten even closer since the intifadah! I really don’t know why you’re asking.”

“Because it seems to me,” I said, “that four years ago no one was speaking so warmly of the other side. Neither here nor there.”

“No, no. One family!”

“Before the intifadah you were one family, too.”

“Now the relations have more — what shall I say? — political significance,” Rafat interrupted defiantly. He is broad-shouldered, quiet, mild-mannered, and Nasuh’s challenge to me was hard for him to take. “You could say that just as the political situation once pulled us apart, the situation now brings us together. For instance, before the intifadah, a man would be careful about giving his daughter to someone from eastern Barta’a. Now, even though we know that their future is perhaps uncertain, and it is impossible to know what will happen with them, we don’t hesitate, because they have pride there.”

“And what do you feel when your relatives pay such a high price and you remain passive?”

“We’re not passive,” Rafat explained temperately. “We give them humanitarian aid and financial aid. We live in Israel, and I’m more or less pleased that I live here. At least I’ve got some kind of definition; I live within certain borders, in a certain country. And that country has laws. Nothing to be done about it.”

“I wasn’t asking about your formal status. Your cousin is cooped up by a curfew and you aren’t. How does that affect your life?”

“I feel tension, that’s clear. Hatred, too. That is,” he quickly adds, “localized hatred, hatred only at that particular time. Listen, today, for instance, something happened on their side. It hurt me so much I couldn’t eat. You can’t have an appetite when you see them peeking out of their windows to see whether there’s a soldier near the house. And there were days when the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] went in there and imposed a curfew, and the soldiers walked the streets, and we here were all on our roofs, watching. You see the soldiers going into your aunt’s house — my two sisters live there — breaking lamps, closets. I could see a soldier shooting at the loudspeaker on the mosque…and when the army goes in there, the feeling of connection actually becomes stronger, all your blood rushes to your head. But I know that I’m subject to the law, and there’s nothing we can do .”