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

“They gave you a little show,” that same Israeli Palestinian, from the same hamula , told me when I met him a week later and described the encounter to him. “There’s no real connection between the Barta’as. They only unite when there’s trouble. But normally — it’s like neighbors. If there’s a wedding in the other Barta’a, the immediate family goes and that’s all. And they don’t come to us. We actually tried to organize something, joint soccer games, but there was only one game. At first, our young people were jealous of theirs, who were fighting and being heroes, so they hung up some flags, too, or maybe they didn’t [Note: After the massacre on the Temple Mount, PLO flags were flown in eastern Barta’a, but in western Barta’a there were only black flags], or burned Israeli flags, or maybe they didn’t. Eighteen of our young people were arrested for a few months. They received harsher sentences than on the other side. But after they saw how much money the lawyer and trial cost their parents, they stopped it. Enough. Barta’a has proven that the Green Line exists.”

Toward the end of the meeting I asked the people of Barta’a if when, Allah willing, the peace talks began, they did not want to request that the strange circumstance of divided Barta’a be remedied. Just as an uncaring hand had cut the village apart, it could now, if the opportunity came, reunite it — heal it.

Riad Kabha: “It was our fathers’ mistake that they accepted quietly what had been decided about them. We today will not accept another such decision. We will not agree.”

“I don’t want there to be two Barta’as,” A responded, “I want there to be one. Under Palestinian rule.”

Sufian Kabha, the Israeli: “I…what can I say…Look, it would be nice if the Palestinian state grew by about two or three kilometers and I and my land were included in it. I don’t care where I am.”

“Still,” I persisted, “there would be a big change in your life, you’d live under Palestinian rule.”

Sufian: “If it helps bring peace…fine.”

“That’s a nice sound bite, but I’m asking you, Sufian, where would you like to live?”

He laughs. “Ask Nasuh first.”

Nasuh also smiles to himself. Refuses to answer. Refers me back to Sufian. The other Israelis avoid my gaze.

“I’m asking this because here there’s no problem of uprooting people from one place to another, or of being separated from your land. But the border itself could move, such that your particular problem would be solved. The question is only where you would like it solved: under Israeli rule or in some kind of Palestinian entity?”

“Then I want to move there…” Sufian concludes faintly.

“You want to be part of the Palestinian state?”

“Look, I still don’t know what there will be there, I’m not sure what kind of government will be there…”

“A democratic government!” A from eastern Barta’a lashes out. “What else would there be?!”

Silence. Something swift, unnamed, passes through the four Israelis.

Rafat cannot stand the silence. “I’d be very happy if there was a Palestinian state,” he said sullenly, “but I’ll be even happier when I can live in Israel and be the Palestinian state’s ambassador here. Just like American Jews — they live in the U.S. but belong to Israel.”

C, the easterner, says, “I don’t care. Under Israeli rule or under Abu Amar’s [Arafat’s] rule. The main thing is to be with my land.”

His words surprised me. I asked him to repeat them, and he did so and added, “If there is a Palestinian state, I am ready for them to unite Barta’a even under Israeli rule. The main thing is that we not be divided.”

A and B seconded him, and explained, “The main thing is that they not cut apart the lands again.” For a moment it sounded like an interesting version of Solomon’s justice — the baby itself asked to stay with the strange mother, so as not to be cut in two. On second thought, it was an expression of a characteristic pattern of behavior among Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line — the supreme loyalty is not to country or to nation; loyalty is, first and foremost, to land and family. A future agreement on the unification of the village — even under Israeli rule — may return the people of eastern Barta’a to the large tracts of their land that remained in Israel and which are now administered by the Israel Lands Authority or even by their Israeli brothers. “Every Arab has two mothers.” Nasuh laughed at my astonishment. “First, father’s wife, and the second mother is the land. The land tells us where to live.”

“If they unite us, then only in Israel,” the anonymous resident of the Israeli Barta’a told me. “I can’t even conceive of living in a Palestinian state. It will be a new country in which there will certainly be civil war. And there won’t be work. And there will be a government of young people, violent and unbending; even their children have changed, they haven’t gone to school for four years, everyone is outside the structure; and I still don’t know how they will treat us, because we were in Israel. I’ve already gotten used to living here.”

“That’s a compliment to Israel,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said.

“You wouldn’t have said things like that forty-three years ago, or even twenty years ago,” I said.

“Life has a power of its own,” he said.

At the end of the meeting with the residents of both Barta’as, when he walked me to my car, Riad Kabha told me a story. I had heard it once before, but this time something was added: “We are here, in this very house, thanks to the guys from eastern Barta’a,” he said. “In ’72, when the army wanted to put up a fence around the village and make a firing range next to us, in Israeli Barta’a they wanted to meet with the Minister of Defense, to write letters to all the important people, and the people from eastern Barta’a came and said, What do you mean you’re going to talk, to go to court?! They came and sat under the bulldozers and didn’t let the army by. That’s how we liberated that land,” he exclaimed, and I could see that he was privately enjoying the very use of those heroic words, so much a part of Palestinian rhetoric: “We liberated that land.”

Then he raised his head and looked me in the eye, Riad Kabha, whose hair had gone silver in the four years that had passed, Riad who puts all his time and strength into Givat Haviva, an educational institution that works for coexistence and tolerance between Jews and Arabs, who has spent his whole life running around devotedly, almost hopelessly, between the two rival sides. He looked at me, and his eyes, behind the lenses of his thick glasses, began slowly to smile in resignation and self-irony. “Okay, okay, so they liberated the land for us.”

“I am Anwar Shadfani, twenty years old, from the village of Iksal.”

“I am Suleiman Zuabi, twenty years old, also from Iksal.”

“We’ve been in the same class over the years. I majored in biology.”

“I majored in sciences.”

“I finished high school in ’89, and I’ve been working ever since in home renovation, agriculture, in the fields, non-skilled work.”

“I work in construction. I studied computer science at the Technion, but I dropped out after half a year, because in our sector there’s no demand for computer professionals.”

“Now I live in my parents’ house. We get along well, pretty well — well, not all the time. They argue with me over when I go out, how I come back late at night. I’m always going to Tiberias, Haifa. There are discothèques, places to sit, girls. You can hear music.”