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

“Even today, go into the houses in Ein Hod, you’ll still see a lot of things they found in our houses — pots, pans, plows, urns — that they hold on to to this day, but for decoration.”

“In the house I was born in lives a girl, Z. She’s my friend [he laughs], even though she’s afraid when we meet. I haven’t seen her in a long time. I went home with her a few times, and she photographed me in the house, and — okay, I explain it this way, they’re scared, too. When they see that our people live near them, come to Ein Hod, they are afraid.

“And despite that I say, That’s reality, that’s reality! There was a war, the village was lost. Now I’ve built myself a new village here. All I want is for the government to recognize me, and all I want from the neighbors living in my house is that they support my struggle for recognition.

“But they don’t support us. There are some among them who help, contribute, and we have an open invitation to go there, come whenever you want, come into the galleries, but the majority doesn’t support it. They claim that they’re afraid. If we support your struggle, they’ll recognize you as a village and tomorrow you’ll start asking for the houses there and make all kinds of demands. On one hand”—he suddenly raises his voice, forgetting the acquired caution of the refugee, which guides his steps—“on one hand, they wanted me to be, you know, their friend, but on the other hand, they say, We’ll trample you down, you and your honor and your feelings, and don’t open your mouth!”

He halts. Actually clamps his jaws down over the words.

“Nir Etsion,” he resumes, “is also situated on our land. My father works there, for them, on land that was his. A man like Father, who had hundreds of dunams, with farming in his blood, has reached a time when he works his own land for $400 a month, after working for them for thirty-five years. And I had an uncle here, he’s dead already, he had thousands of dunams. Not hundreds, thousands. All this was his. And he also worked for them as a simple laborer, for pennies. More than that — they would remind him, Mahmud, do you remember who this land belongs to? They’d make fun of him, because they knew it was his land. Every time they told him that, he would say to them, Today it’s yours. Get it? Today. But it would eat at him inside.

“Okay, not important…” He waved his arm heavily. “The main thing is that recently we’ve really wanted to improve our relations with the people at Ein Hod. We had meetings with their town council, we invited them to meetings here in the village, and they came, and we really turned over a new leaf with them.

“The first problem is that they made our mosque into a restaurant and discotheque; that’s the source of our difficulty with them. But an even greater problem is that they desecrated our cemetery. They destroyed the graves. Now, it could be, I’m saying it could be, if I didn’t know who was buried there, it could be that it wouldn’t hurt me. But if you know that that’s your uncle’s grave, and your grandfather’s, your father’s and your mother’s, and among all those graves an artist came and buried his dog — that’s not right.

“So our first condition is that they no longer walk over our cemetery and not make it into a garbage dump. They have garbage bins in the cemetery itself. So at least move the garbage. Up until now they haven’t done it. One thing they did in accordance with what we agreed on is that we want them to put up a sign there, temporarily, until we receive permission to fence in the place, to write there MUSLIM CEMETERY, HOLY SITE, LITTERING FORBIDDEN.

“They really did take that initiative. But it was a little hard. They didn’t want it to say MUSLIM CEMETERY, HOLY SITE. So we reached a compromise — that temporarily it say DO NOT LITTER ON THIS SITE. We’re currently in the middle of the struggle to get that sign. It’s being held up in some office. We don’t know what’s causing the delay.”

Architect Giora Ben-Dov lives in Ein Hod with his wife, Mara, a sculptress, and their three children. They bought their house, adjacent to the graveyard, from an American woman who had lived there until 1974. The Ben-Dovs are among the residents of Ein Hod who have supported Ein Hud’s struggle to receive recognition and services from the state. Ben-Dov has even drafted a plan that would make the people of Ein Hud rangers in the national park surrounding them, responsible for its up-keep. In 1985 Giora and Mara took part in a large Jewish-Arab demonstration calling for a solution to the problem of Ein Hud. But at that same demonstration they decided to wash their hands of the whole affair. “The minute that the people from Ein Hud started making extreme demands,” Giora BenDov said, “the minute their politicians started talking about ‘the holy land of Ein Hud,’ and Ron Cohen, the Knesset member from the Citizens Rights Movement, said, ‘Ein Hud will not fall again,’ even those of us who always supported them, even the professional agonizers, went cold and packed up. Listen, I didn’t capture the village from them, and I didn’t evict old people from their houses with clubs. I came and bought a house, and if we go backward, we’ll never finish the conflict, because maybe they’re right if we go back to ’48, but if we go back to the Crusaders, some Polish graf will come to me and want my house, and there’s no end to it. The guys in Ein Hud suddenly began to feel like the representatives of the whole Palestinian problem. No matter that none of them was born here, among us, they’ve developed such an exile’s longing for this place…”

I asked, “Why do you care about fencing their cemetery and putting up a sign? What are they endangering with that?”

Ben-Dov: “To the best of my knowledge, the Arabs don’t have the concept of the holiness of the dead. With them, after twenty-five years, if the Muslim judge, the qadi , gives permission, they come with a tractor and turn the land over, and that’s it. But they come and told us, No, we buried an aunt here two years ago. You understand? They started all kinds of attempts to gain a foothold here in our village. Our impression is that they want to gain recognition in the village up there as a first stage in returning to Ein Hod. So, if you give them a toehold here among us, you immediately recognize some, I don’t know, injustice, and turn them into poor people who were expelled from their land. That’s passing judgment on the entire War of Independence of the Jewish people, and we’re already robbing land and exploiting people, and I’m not sure that it really was that way. There was a war. It’s over, and now there is a status quo. This status quo involves a measure of separation, and this separation allows each of the sides to develop within its culture, to live a normal life.”

“A normal life? Have you seen how they live there?”

“I have no argument with you that their conditions have to be improved. But first they have to renounce their demands to get a single meter here. Any new toehold will challenge our right and our status here. If you give any kind of recognition to what existed before ’48, you’re actually toppling the foundation on which the whole deal is trying to come together.”

“The whole deal, Giora?”

“The whole deal, the whole country!”

“We now get water from the water company, via the water of Nir Etsion,” Asem Abu Elheija goes on. “At first there was a problem. They didn’t want to give water. So until ’62 we drank rainwater. Once there was a spring in the area, but the JNF did some work in the area and they buried the spring and it was gone. Sometimes, in the summer, when there was no rain, we had to take water from the Nir Etsion sewer, but actually, then we didn’t know it was sewage, we saw water and we drank it.