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

Nasuh: “The intifadah showed me the true face of the Jews. Things I only heard at a distance, and suddenly it was close to me personally. How they go into a house and break things, for the hell of it, and curse, and they include the people from west Barta’a in their curses: dirty Arabs; Arabs, go fuck yourselves — in front of our children, and they even say it in Arabic, to be sure that everyone understands. But what can I do, except help out with money, with food. I’m not willing to give real physical help. I live under the laws of the State of Israel. It hurts me. Listen, on one side are the laws of the country, and on the other the laws of blood!” He falls silent, and suddenly erupts before me again: “But what can I do?! Only envy them, that they are fighting for freedom, and be silent, and tie my own hands, and be furious with myself and silence my inner voice, because there’s nothing to do…”

Nasuh Kabha is a nature teacher. He studied at a teachers college in Haifa. He has five children. Gaunt and sinewy, he speaks bitterly and very quietly. His emotions are revealed largely by the way he sculpts his words: “I belong to the State of Israel only in the geographical sense. According to an agreement they imposed on me. I am an employee of the Ministry of Education. Receive a salary. Live here. But in the spirit, in the soul, I belong to the Palestinian people. So you tell me how I can educate children in these circumstances. A simple example — I’ve run into a lot of pupils here who draw, let’s say, a Palestinian flag. Now, I’ve got to tell the pupil that this is forbidden. But the pupil will consider me a traitor. And maybe I’ll also feel that I’m a traitor. But if I show any approval of his picture, maybe they’ll fire me, or summon me for an investigation. So what do I do? I don’t tell him anything. I pretend that I don’t notice.

“How is it possible in such a situation to teach young people values, honesty, courage?”

But then the conversation was cut short; I received no answer for the moment. Three young men from eastern Barta’a strode into the room. “Strode” is the wrong word; they swaggered. Three men of twenty or more, apparently from among the intifadah leaders in eastern Barta’a. You could sense how a very slight timidity had suddenly settled over the Arabs from the Israeli side. Not fear, but lowered spirits. After the discussion, when I asked one of the westerners if they still dismissively referred to the easterners as dafawim , West Bankers, he took a quick look around him. “You only call them that if you want to die,” he said.

The three easterners interrogated me for a few minutes, their eyes trained on me expressionlessly. In the end they consented to talk, calling themselves by false names. I will refer to them below by letters, in accordance with their relative ranks, which were quite evident. First I asked about the changes that had occurred in eastern Barta’a since the outbreak of the intifadah.

A: “Sure, of course there have been changes. Our solidarity and cooperation have developed considerably. And there is also organized resistance to the army. There are youth groups responsible for organizing the struggle against the army. How to defend the village when the army attacks by day, how to defend it at night, and all this in the framework of a contingency plan. Obviously, because of our struggle, we have economic difficulties and social problems, and the organizations work to solve all these problems, and work for solidarity, and they also assist poor and hungry families.”

He reached the end of what sounded like a fixed recitation. Afterward he pointed a finger at me. “Write: The ’48 are part of us. We share ties of blood and Palestinian identity. The intifadah did not create this link. It only exposed it to some of the people. Most of the people of the ’48 had discovered it long before.”

I looked at the ’48—those Palestinians, like Riad Kabha, Sufian Kabha, Nasuh, and Rafat, who came under Israeli rule after Israel won its independence in 1948—complex people, unraveled people, already tied to Israeli existence by many branching filaments, some of pain, some of hope. Maybe because of this, every time during the conversation that one of the easterners threw out the term “’48” like a lasso to tie them to the pole of their common flag, you could feel something in them twitching, for an instant in discomfort, with a trace of discerning reservation, like the flitting of the pupil in the eye of someone who has been called by the wrong name.

I turned to them and recalled the harsh things I had heard about them during my previous visit here, from their relatives in eastern Barta’a.

“I know the people who told you that,” Sufian Kabha responded. “I don’t think that whoever said that to you has more national pride than I do. I only know that I’ve gotten over the whole dilemma of my identity as a Palestinian in Israel. You can’t say I’m ‘dormant.’ On the contrary, I’ve invested thought in it, perhaps no less than he has. I had to explain to myself circumstances more complicated than his — how to live in an Israeli state and also fight for my people. I don’t have a dual identity nor do I have a blurred identity, and I certainly don’t have a dormant identity. I’ve learned to fit my Israeli citizenship and Palestinian identity together, and it is now a single identity, only more complex.”

The easterners listened to him attentively. Afterward A opened: “With regard to the book The Yellow Wind— that is, with regard to what you wrote about Barta’a — it wasn’t objective. The criticism you heard about our brothers in the west, and also what they supposedly said against us, came from people who now stand against the intifadah or who do not assist it. Such people have no right to determine who has understanding and who doesn’t, who has national consciousness and who is a Palestinian.”

A spoke Arabic and I, who knew that he and his comrades spoke Hebrew, suggested that we now speak that language. He shot a long glance at me and sputtered contemptuously, “I know only Arabic!”

This was one of the few times during these interviews that people spoke to me in Arabic. The rest of the conversations reported in this book took place in Hebrew, unless otherwise stated. This, of course, is one of the ironies of the situation — when I met Palestinians in the territories they spoke to me in Arabic, made accusations against me in Arabic, hurt and laughed in Arabic. It was very clear where their world and mine were. Things had different names. Even the intonations were those of another language; that internal melody conveys something that words cannot. When I translated what had been said to me from Arabic to Hebrew, it was sometimes fascinating to see the points of contact and similarity between the two sister languages. The Arabic word for “war,” for instance, is harb , which to my Jewish ears sounded sharp and immediate, yet also ancient, since its root appears in the Hebrew word for sword — and in the Hebrew word for catastrophic destruction, as in hurban habayit , the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. When things were said to me in Arabic, by Arabs, they always had a more definite, unambiguous, and sharper quality.

Now I was speaking to Israeli Palestinians in my own language, in Hebrew, with its special slang and literary references and protocol, and this was confusing. Even Yiddish creeps in, as when a member of the Islamic Movement tells me that his interest in the Israeli government is purely financial—“It’s just gelt, understand? Gelt! ” The everyday conversation of Palestinian Israelis sparkles with expressions from the Bible and the Talmud, from Bialik and Rabbi Yehuda Halevy and Agnon. Poet Naim Araideh effuses: “Do you know what it means to me to write in Hebrew? Do you know what it’s like to write in the language in which the world was created?” When all this is said to me in Hebrew, something gets irretrievably tangled, knotted up in itself.