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

But from this low point, from the caste of present absentees, one can descend to even lower levels.

Because Ein Hud here, the village I arrived at, had bad luck in pincers. Not only are its people present absentees, but Ein Hud is one of fifty-one settlements that the State of Israel does not recognize at all.

Their residents have been granted identity cards by the state, but outside this unavoidable act it refuses to recognize them, to provide them with services, to relate to them in any way — except when it is interested in evicting them from their homes. They have been living with us for more than forty years — that is, somewhere around us, on the lowest deck of the ship, in constant fear of being expelled even from the miserable places they hold on to. They build houses without licenses, since no one will grant them one, lurking in invisible villages, where they bring forth unrecognized children who bear, like a genetic birth defect, their present absenteeism.

It was morning and most of the men were at work; mostly women were in the village. For this reason I was not invited to enter any of the houses. In fact, faces turned angry and suspicious in a way I had not encountered in Arab villages up until then. But after a short while a woman brought out a chair for me and suggested I rest in the shadow of her house. Another chair came in its wake, holding a tray of fruit and a small cup of coffee.

A few minutes later all the children gathered around me.

Mustafa came to sit with me. He is a friendly young man, with a carefully trimmed blond beard. He earns his living shuttling the teachers at the local school to the village and back. He brings them in, then returns them. In the four hours between the two trips, he sits and waits. What can he do, he smiles apologetically — it’s not worth it for him to go home. You saw the road.

He related that he had had this job for several years. Last year the village council had decided to ask for other bids on the contract and a taxi company in Haifa had won. A week later the owner of the company came and pleaded to be released from his commitment — who was crazy enough to travel that road? Mustafa won the job back.

Then, walking heavily and sitting with a sigh, Ayad came. Twenty-two, epileptic. His entire body shook as he sat with us. A few years ago he had come home from school, it had been a very hot day, and it suddenly began, along the way. He fell down and fainted. He has stayed in the village ever since. Never leaves. Most of the day he sleeps. He has considered taking an accounting course outside the village, but who would take him out and bring him back along that road?

We chatted. I learn that Abu Elheija is a huge hamula , with almost 65,000 members in Israel. The name means “father of the wars,” a title the founder of the line had won as one of the senior commanders under Salah ad-Din Ayyubi, the Saladin who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine in the twelfth century. The woman brought out more cups of coffee. Time passed. Nothing urgent. Asem would come any minute. In an hour, maybe two. A hot wind blew dust along the goat paths between the houses. Across from me were bountiful fruit trees — pomegranates, grapevines, figs. Next to each house was a flower-filled garden.

At two o’clock Asem Abu Elheija, one of the village leaders, came and recounted: “I was three years old in 1948, when the Israel Defense Forces surrounded our village, the old Ein Hud, and everyone fled. They had no choice but to flee. They feared a slaughter, because before the army reached Ein Hud they heard that there had been some cases in the area, at Tantura, where there was a massacre, so they were scared, too, because they would set out from Ein Hud during the war to attack Jewish convoys and they thought the Jews had come to settle accounts with them, so they fled.

“Our family came here. We hadn’t had time to take anything from our homes. Here there was a piece of land that belonged to Grandfather, and his goats and cattle were here. Since there are wells here, he preferred to stay near his goats and cows, on his land, and we lived together with them, in the shepherds’ huts. Look over there, at the picture — that’s Grandfather, Mohammed Mahmud Abu Elheija.”

Grandfather gazes directly at the viewer from over his patriarchal beard. In every house I visited in the village I saw his picture in a place of honor.

“We would look from there down on our Ein Hud, and we didn’t want to believe that we would not return. We felt that we would return soon. Grandfather would always go down to his land there, plow it and sow it, so he would not die. He would sow hundreds of dunams, wheat and barley and chick peas, and he would pick the fruit from the trees. The whole area you see here was full of fruit trees.

“In the meantime, other people started living in our place. In ’48 they put Oriental Jews into our houses, but they didn’t last long. They believe in all kinds of superstitions, and they used to tell how at night they would see eyes looking down at them from the mountains, or stones falling on them from the sky, or all kinds of ghosts, or the land cried to them, or they saw the people of the village returning to take their houses back. So they didn’t last, and they left. I myself — what can I tell you — don’t believe those stories. When they left, the artists came in; it became an artists’ village and they called it Ein Hod.

“At that time the family began to grow. By ’64 we had fifteen houses here. They didn’t destroy them, but they threatened to all the time. They wanted Grandfather to give up all the land he had below in Ein Hod. They wanted us to give up the land there and buy here. But when we tried to buy, it turned out that it was all a bluff — there’s a law of the Jewish National Fund, the JNF, the agency that oversees land purchases, that it’s forbidden to sell land to non-Jews. When they saw it was no use, in ’64 they confiscated his land for good. They also came and fenced in the land on all sides around us, and then we began to understand that we would never return, that it was impossible to return.

“That didn’t satisfy them, the barbed-wire fence. They wanted to make another fence, and they put in those big cypresses, more pressure on us. And among the cypresses I showed you, wherever he had fruit trees, olive trees, figs, he had every kind of tree you could ever want there, they confiscated the land, and ever since no one works that land and no one benefits from it. It’s just fallow land.

“We still didn’t leave, because when you’ve already become a refugee, as we did in ’48, to become a refugee again from what you founded and built with your own sweat, that was very hard for us to accept. So.

“Ever since we’ve been closed in by barbed wire, and another fence of cypresses, and around us, on our land, they made a huge park, and a firing range for the soldiers — sometimes I would sit in front of the house and suddenly pssst— over my head — and they also put a gate at the end of the road that you have to close and open with a key, the gate to Nir Etsion, the Jewish village built on our land, and in some corner of your heart you ask, What does that mean, you’ve been put in jail?

“After they fenced us in, they again began pressuring Grandfather to give up the land in the old Ein Hud, and the houses, and in exchange they would give us the land here. Grandfather would not agree to that under any circumstances. Because, he reasoned, there, in Ein Hod, it’s my land, and it’s registered in my name, so I should give up my land in exchange for my land? Not I.

“In the meantime, the artists were already in our houses. I’m one of those who spent almost all my time there. The truth is, I don’t really like what they did to our Ein Hud. They made everything ugly. They changed a lot of the character of the area. But I had a lot of friends there, in the village. Jews. They became so friendly with me that they would come sleep with me here at night, in Ein Hud. I had a friend who lived in my aunt’s house — my aunt herself lives here with us. At night I would sit with them there. The truth is, you don’t feel good about it. But on the other hand, if something like that happens to you, maybe it’s better that your friend lives in the house and not a stranger.