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

Language brings out certain nuances of consciousness. It has a temperament and libido of its own. Even one who is unaware of all the mysteries and secrets of the language he uses comes to know instinctively, non-verbally, the huge reservoir of codes that act on different levels and offer ways of addressing reality. One of the marks of the enemy is that he makes use of other names, opposed to mine, in order to describe me and my world. From this point of view, the Palestinians in Israel can certainly also be enemies. They no longer, however, have the doubtful privilege of being only an enemy. Anyone who has assumed a language the way they have assumed Hebrew has also become subsumed in it.

And when they attack or despise me in Hebrew, there is something confusing and implausible about it. Sometimes the threat is augmented by the similarity of the language, but sometimes the very use of Hebrew moderates the declared alienation. When Sa’id Zeidani promises me that if Israel does not grant him and his children equal rights “I’ll try to make your lives bitter,” his words make me shiver from the depths of my Hebrew consciousness, which remembers how in Egypt “they made their lives bitter with hard bondage.” When, however, Zuhir Yehia explains how Palestinians in Israel must take care not to have any contact with the Shin Bet and concludes with the rabbinical maxim “Beware the authorities,” I know that we speak not only the same language but the same code.

I don’t know if there have ever been so many non-Jews speaking Hebrew. I’ve heard an estimation that today more Arabs than American Jews speak Hebrew. One thing is clear — the Arabs and Jews in Israel have a common language, with all that this implies. There was a period — about a thousand years ago — when Arabic was the literary language of Jews all over the Arab empire. Maimonides wrote many of his works in Arabic, among them The Book of Commandments and The Eight Chapters ; Yehuda Ibn Tibun, the greatest translator of Arabic works into Hebrew, testified in the introduction to his translation of an important work of philosophy and mysticism, Obligations of the Heart , that most Jewish community leaders in Mesopotamia, Persia, and Palestine spoke Arabic, and that the Bible, the Mishna, and the Talmud all had Arabic commentaries written on them, “because all the people understood that language.”

One might suppose that today’s Hebrew speakers would better understand how the Arabs experience life in Israel if they knew Arabic and could be sensitive to the worldview and nuances of Arabic and its culture. In a country like Canada, where there is a large French minority, civil servants must be able to speak both English and French. In Israel, where Arabic is an official language, there was a decision in 1988 by the then Minister of Education, Yitzhak Navon, to require all Jewish students to study Arabic at school. That decision has still not been fully implemented — the target date is the year 2000. I am not convinced that these students will be able, by the end of their studies, to read a book, or even a newspaper, in Arabic. They might, however, be able to engage in everyday, practical dialogue with Arabs.

The men of eastern Barta’a speak Arabic clearly.

A: “We want to talk first of all about the subject of the liquidations, which in Israel they totally distort. The constitution of the intifadah states that not every Israeli agent should be murdered. A collaborator will be murdered if that accords with his crime. If his crime caused death, they will kill him. But if it caused only damage and not death, he will not be killed. They will only give him twenty-three lashes and send him on his way. That’s all. But you people don’t understand that! You should know that with us an action like that has all kinds of stages and procedures! We have an investigatory body. Like your intelligence agency. We have files on suspects. They catch him, interrogate, try to understand him; if he killed, he’ll be killed. And there’s a committee of seven or eight people who decide what to do with him. They don’t just come out of nowhere and cut off his head, what do you think.”

Riad Kabha, the mukhtar of western Barta’a, listens silently to this explication. When I ask him what he thinks, he shrugs his shoulders, hesitates for a moment, adjusts his glasses, and decides to speak in Hebrew. “Well, these murders are apparently part of the intifadah…and you should know that they check out every person very well before they kill him, warn him…”

“And do you accept that? Do you see it as something worthy of your support?”

“Look, I also criticize it. I say that it’s not good, but if after a long period the person keeps on doing it…”

“It’s an internal Palestinian matter!” interjected A. “You are forbidden to interfere!”

For a moment I was unsure at whom he had directed his order — only at me, the foreigner?

“Maybe it’s possible to say,” I asked the Israeli citizens, “that in your case, over the last forty years your thinking patterns and even national character have developed differently from those of the Palestinians in the territories?”

Rafat laughs. “The difference between us and them is mostly that we’re under more pressure than they are…making a living, loans from the banks, our responsibilities, our overdrafts.”

A taunts him, intentionally switching to Hebrew: “You’ve taken out a mortgage, eh?”

“I don’t think that a different national character has been created among us,” responds Sufian Kabha, soft-featured, slightly stooped, as if overburdened by troubles. “What happened to us is that, until ’67, we were isolated from the sources of the nation, both geographically and culturally, and that delayed the development of our Palestinian national identity. And if you ask why there was no violent resistance to the regime among us, as there is with them, I think that it’s because the PLO conceded the Israeli Arabs. The PLO, in the mid-seventies, said that it was developing a diplomatic rather than a military strategy. So it always demanded that the Arabs in Israel, as part of the Jewish state, conduct a purely political struggle. It did not ask them to make an intifadah in Israel. The Israeli Arabs accepted this, because they saw it was in their own best interests.”

“And you don’t feel that they in fact betrayed you? Gave you up to the Israelis?”

“They did not betray us.” He shook his head. “If a Palestinian state is established in the territories, I’ll feel that it is being established for my brother in the other Barta’a. If Arafat says that I’m part of Israel, I accept that just as I have to obey the head of an Arab family, as if Father divided his land between his sons. I’m prepared to accept that, even if my brother’s portion is better.”

I asked the people of the other Barta’a what changes, in their opinion, the intifadah had made in their brothers in Israel.

“Now the ’48 know who they are,” C asserted, “because there were among the ’48 some, not many, who became so much a part of Israel that their consciousness went into hibernation. They got some rights, got a certain education that wanted to make them into citizens, to make them Israelis, and that of course had some effect on a few people who lacked consciousness. Not everyone, you know, has consciousness.”

“And did you expect that your relatives in the Israeli Barta’a would behave differently, or provide a different kind of support for your struggle?”

A is the primary speaker. His comrades speak only with his approval. Every gesture and expression of his exudes scorn and arrogance. “It was decided prior to the intifadah that the Arabs of ’48 did not belong to the framework of the intifadah. That they would provide only political, moral, and economic assistance.”