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

“The father of Raful, you know, Rafael Eitan, the one who was Army Chief of Staff, he was a very good friend of ours. I remember Raful as boy. Working on the combine. He was harvesting. One day I rode next to him on the seat of the combine. He didn’t talk much even as a boy. Afterward, when he was northern area commander, one day there was a police celebration in Nazareth. He saw me there and said, ‘Guys, do you get along with Ahmed Musa? Ahmed Musa is a great neighbor!’

“To this day we’re okay with the authorities. Ask the Jews. Every time there’s a wedding in the village, Jewish people come; you should see how we receive them, how we honor them. When I married off my son I slaughtered forty sheep for them. There were three hundred Jewish guests here. Each one someone important. Even Shimon Peres’s brother. Gandhi *brought him to me. And Gandhi — every holiday he would come here with his wife, with the generals; he even brought Moshe-and-a-Half, *the Chief of Staff.”

I was impressed at his knowledge of our ministers’ and generals’ nicknames.

“Know them all! Here there’s good relations between the authorities and the people. This village is the best one in the whole area. The intifadah doesn’t affect anything, either. There couldn’t be any intifadah here. You won’t find anyone putting up Palestinian flags or painting slogans. We want our children to go to college. That’s the most important thing. You can’t drink from a well and throw a stone in it, right?”

I asked him what he would do if Gandhi — who was elected to the Knesset in 1988 on a platform advocating the transfer of Arabs to Arab countries — came to visit him today.

“Welcome him. Our house is open to everyone. That’s the Arab custom.”

“But he wants to eject Arabs from here.”

“I’ll receive him. What do I know…maybe he talks about transfer because he wants to be in the Knesset? I don’t know what happened to him. When I hear statements like that from people who were guests of Arabs, whom the Arabs served, I don’t understand where their heads went. But Gandhi, I can’t say anything bad about him.”

“?”

“No, no. Gandhi is a government minister. I was in his house. I ate his food. I can’t talk about him.”

He enveloped himself in a robe of silence, and listened to my conversation with his fourteen-year-old grandson, Amjad, and his friend, eleven-year-old Usama.

“The land of Israel,” Usama said, “belongs to two nations, but the Jews left here two thousand years ago and returned with the help of the British, so they have no rights here, and it’s an Arab land. But they’re already here, so we have to find a way to live with them. As for the Russians who are coming, that’s a big problem, because the Israelis want to transfer us and bring the Russians in our places, and that’s bad, if we don’t get equality here like…”

His grandfather let out a snort of anger and the boy swallowed his words. We talked for a few more minutes, drank coffee, and before parting I asked the boys what they wanted to be when they grew up.

“I want to be a doctor,” said Usama, looking warily at the old man. “To treat Arabs, and Jews, too. I won’t make any distinction between them. But I won’t treat Jews like Gandhi!” he spit out all at once.

“What are you talking about?!” his grandfather shouted, glancing anxiously at my tape recorder. “Gandhi is a very good friend of ours!”

In his wonderful novel The Opsimist , Emile Habibi describes a boy, an Arab in Israel, the protagonist’s son, who flees from the army and hides in a cave on the beach. His mother calls for him to come out of the narrow, close cave lest he suffocate there. But he says, “Suffocate?…I came to this cave to breathe freely. To breathe freely for once! You smothered my cries in the cradle, and when I grew and listened to you, I heard nothing but whispers. In school you warned me: ‘Watch your tongue!’ I told you that my teacher was my friend, and you whispered: ‘Maybe he is reporting on you!’…I called my friends together to declare a strike, and they too told me: ‘Watch your tongue!’ And in the morning Mother told me: ‘You are talking in your sleep. Watch your tongue in your sleep!’ I hummed in the bathtub, and Father scolded me: ‘Change that melody! The walls have ears, watch your tongue!’ Watch your tongue! Watch your tongue! I want just for once not to watch my tongue! I can’t breathe! True, the cave is narrow, but it is broader than your lives! True, the cave is blocked, but it is the way out!” [Translated from Anton Shammas’s Hebrew translation of the Arabic original]

“A member of a minority group, the Oriental Jew, the Arab, always speaks two languages at least,” said writer Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Jew who until about the age of twenty considered himself — in his culture and values — an Arab. “First, the language you speak with the authorities, with the hostile regime, and the regime was always hostile, from the dawn of history, always intending to harm you, or to take something, or confiscate something, or to take a bribe, or to spy. So you have to be careful. From this come all the conversations that sound empty and simply polite — How are you, how are you feeling, how are things going, may Allah bless your mouth, alhamdu-lilah ; to a stranger it sounds idiotic and useless, but in the meantime he’s giving you a psychological test. To see exactly who you are. To appraise you. Forever, as much as you prove that you’re a friend, you’ll remain a foreigner. You can join a Bedouin tribe and stay with them for sixty years and they’ll still call you ‘the foreigner.’ That’s the first language. They have to use it in order to dissemble, to please, to mislead.

“The second language is the one which they speak among themselves when they’re alone, and that needs no explanation.

“The third language is an intermediate one, between those two languages — for instance, when you leave the incubator of your family and go outside, to study or work, then you need to find a language in which you can cope with the teacher or manager who is foreign and perhaps an enemy, but you also have to be yourself.

“Other than that there is, of course, the language that every person has for himself: the internal, individual language. When you’re a minority in danger, you sometimes can speak truth only to yourself. You can’t trust anyone else. Consider what it’s like to live with four languages, four simultaneous ways of thinking. You turn into an actor. That’s the perpetual theater.”

On my trip back from Iksal, after the meeting with the elderly Ahmed Musa, I meditated on how many of the Arab men and women I had met during these weeks had soft handshakes. I wondered at this dialect of body language, this agreed-upon social sign. Because the soft handshakes had been a surprise. Not weak — soft. Warm. Not the crushing thrust of an Israeli-Jewish hand declaring, “This is the hand of a proud, self-assured Israeli who has nothing to hide, and who, should that be necessary, can grind more than just your fingers into a pulp.” No, the hands that I shook were not held out to me in order to say anything about themselves — on the contrary, they were to serve as a kind of passive testing pad for the imprint of my own hand. To take measure of its “voice.” I continued to go astray with such questionable thoughts, on the edge of being gross stereotypes, and I tried to remember the hand strength of the Egyptians I had met, and the Lebanese, and there are other nations in the region who still don’t put out their hands to us…I thought of ploys and camouflage, on how the two partners in Israeli citizenship turn their lying side to each other, and that from such a point of contact no true partnership could possibly grow. How could it grow if Rima Othman, whom I met in Beit Safafa, already knows that she will have to silence her children (who have not yet been born) so that they won’t speak Arabic in the presence of Jews, just as her mother silenced her? I considered that the Palestinian minority in Israel — like other minorities in the world — stands out and excels most in the field of theater, and wondered whether there was a special reason. I also recalled the secret languages Jews had developed in their various exiles, with words taken from ancient Hebrew, with the addition of suffixes and declinations from the local language, so that the Jews could speak freely in the presence of those who were not members of the covenant. I also recalled what Primo Levi wrote about the special idiom of the Jews of the Piedmont: “Even a hasty examination points to its dissimulative and underground function, a crafty language meant to be employed when speaking about goyim in the presence of goyim ; or also, to reply boldly with insults and curses that are not to be understood, against the regime of restriction and oppression which they (the goyim ) had established.” It was already autumn, and the cotton plants were turning the fields white, there were wild lilies and herons, and I traveled slowly among them, trying to find my way along the snaking path leading from lie (even if white) to deception, and from that — to what Ghazal Hamid Abu Ria of Sakhnin described to me as “our psychology, that of the oppressed — if they repress 70 percent of your personality, you yourself repress the remaining 30 percent, until in the end, even if they no longer repress you, you continue to repress yourself.” The road went on from there, to the question of whether, because of this repression that the Arabs in Israel impose on themselves, it is so easy for Jews not to hear them and not to see them, and if this has not opened the way to Jewish self-deception.