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

“That’s not an answer,” I pointed out. “That’s a press release. I’m asking about your feelings.”

“I don’t think about what he does or doesn’t do for me!” A fumed. “When you’re under curfew, when the army surrounds you and knocks on the door, do you have time to think about someone else? I save all my thinking power for resisting the occupation! To keep going!”

“But you still made attempts to drag them into the violent struggle.”

A calmed himself down and thawed out a smile. “That was only for propaganda purposes. We knew that if we did something in eastern Barta’a, no one would pay any attention to us, because we’re far off the road. But if we were to do it in the Israeli Barta’a, everyone would come. Newspapers and television. It was just a ploy. Tactics.”

A few days later I met a young Israeli Palestinian, about thirty years old, from Israeli Barta’a, who had not taken part in our conversation. From him I learned a few things that I had no chance of hearing at that encounter. He said that the people of his village were very anxious about the struggle the easterners had begun to conduct on their western land. It included raising PLO flags over houses despite the objections of their owners. One homeowner who dared remove such a flag had been severely beaten. It also included painting anti-Israeli slogans on walls and setting fires in the forests near the village. The leaders of Israeli Barta’a sent a delegation to the other Barta’a and petitioned the intifadah leaders to consider their position. During these talks the people of Israeli Barta’a were subject to a harsh indictment: “We’re fighting for you, making a country that you’ll be able to live in, too, while you go on with your lives as usual. They’re killing us and you give only money, not blood,” they told them. Also: “What kind of common fate is it when you live like that with the Israelis who torment us?” But in the end, after receiving instructions from “outside,” both boundaries and expectations were defined. Even so, there is still tension, even outbreaks of anger. “This week, for example,” the Palestinian Israeli told me, “there was a wedding in the village, and a Palestinian had just been killed in Jenin. The groom’s mother wanted music. Some young people from eastern Barta’a came to her and told her that if she put up the loudspeakers they would send four or five masked intifadah fighters to break up the wedding. She gave in.” I asked him if my impression was correct that the people of his village were afraid of their brothers in the east. “Of course, there’s fear. If you take down one of their flags, it’s as if you’re against the whole intifadah. There’s a lot of violence in them now. They’re wilder. Their entire family structure has been destroyed. The adults have no control over them, and the police won’t come here every day to save me from them. Even if I brown-nose the police and the authorities, I always have to remember that I live in Barta’a and have to keep up good relations with the easterners.”

Riad Kabha from Israeli Barta’a: “During their curfews, there are people on our side who warn them. We’re closer to the main road, and if someone sees the army coming along the road, he can give a warning. On the telephone, or by whistling, or…[a quick exchange of glances]…never mind. The main thing is that we try to notify them. And during the curfew a lot of young people from the other Barta’a who run away from the army come to us, and there are those among us who open their doors to them…and we go visit their wounded in the hospitals, and we look after the families of their prisoners, and we put out press statements if they’re hurt.”

I suddenly had a feeling that I was not all that expendable there. That perhaps, without intending it, I had given the Palestinians living in Israel a rare opportunity to say a few clear things to their brothers in the other Barta’a.

“…and that’s not all,” Riad Kabha continued. “The Israel Lands Authority suddenly gave us fifty plots in the Build Your Own Home program for young couples. And we need land like the air we breathe. But what should we do — the Authority chose a tract that belongs to someone from eastern Barta’a, one that the Authority considers abandoned land, that it can hand out as it sees fit. So no one from our side agreed to build there.”

Sufian Kabha: “After the army completes its mission [Sufian the Israeli said without noticing, “completes its mission”; A, describing the same kind of action, said, “When the army attacks the village”], you immediately see a caravan of cars and people running from western Barta’a eastward. They’re running to see what happened, who was hurt. True, it’s a symbolic act, but it shows them that we care about what happens there. That we don’t close the door to them. We can’t do more than that. What do you want? If I, for instance, were to go there when the army was there, the soldiers would say I was working with the masked fighters. So it’s better for me to keep myself safe, and my feelings to myself. I can feel them without actually being there.”

“You know the Arabic proverb that the one who counts the blows is not at all like the one who receives them,” I said. “Have you in the Israeli Barta’a, during this entire time, done anything, even symbolic, to identify with the hardships and suffering of your relatives? To demonstrate for your children — as an educational act — your common fate?”

Hesitation. They glance at each other. For a while they had refrained from holding wedding celebrations, like their West Bank brothers. Yes, but now the celebrations had resumed. What could they do? Whom will it help if we suffer, too? And we suffered a lot…The roadblock at the entrance to the village doesn’t distinguish us from them. They humiliate all of us there…

Really, I thought, why am I nagging them? After all, I know the answers, which are of human dimensions. What, in any case, did I expect when I asked to meet with the two parts of Barta’a? Did I hope that I would find some kind of common fate in life and death? A heroic covenant of blood?

Maybe I read too many books when I was young. Any hope we have lies in the cautious and troubled prudence of the Palestinians. And anyone who, like me, is the scion of a nation of expert survivors can well understand this shared common sense, as well as its price. They had decided not to participate in the intifadah, and so had been separated by a clear line from the Palestinian struggle (and they — in their internal code — understand better than anyone else the meaning of that separation). They support the struggle financially and morally, and for that reason had been propelled into the margins of Israeli society, losing social advantages and the precarious legitimacy they had gained after much labor. They judiciously looked after their security, and they lost a great deal. There, in the expansive home of Sufian Kabha, over coffee and baklava, when my eyes wandered between the two groups, between the two sets of countenances, that of the exclamation point and that of the elision, it became very clear and concrete to me. Israel may well magnify the feeling of a common fate that Israeli Palestinians feel with their brothers — in the negative, hostile, and tragic sense. The more it represses their brothers, the more Israeli Palestinians will be forced to amplify their own Palestinian nationalism, and the more it will chain them to automatically making themselves into representatives of the other side — something that is not always to their liking. When any of them made a “declaration” to me, it was clear from his expression that he realized how empty his voice sounded. They sat there, cowering a bit, apologetic, guarding both their flanks, soberly observing the nationalist fervor of their other cousins, the militant flush that set them off every few minutes. Facing each other, the two sides looked like two sides of the same rug, and one’s heart was actually drawn to the confused, hesitant ones, who implore us to be discerning and generous enough to get them out of here already.