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

“It was really at college that I encountered the human being within the Jew,” Rasan told me at their village house. “All other encounters with Jewish people were racist or exploitative, as far as I could see. At college I discovered something else, other types of people, and I slowly began making my way into that society. At first it was kind of romantic — I discovered some special personalities, I spent most of my time with a group of artists, like a commune, a feeling of being cosmopolitan…But outside that bubble my experiences were very difficult. I lived in the dormitories on Mount Scopus. There was the way they kept guard on us, and the way they scattered us, the Arabs, in the far corners of different dorm buildings, so that if there was an attack we’d be hit first — such absurd stories that you can hardly believe them. And there were also the encounters at the bus station with the border guards every time I traveled to the village and back. You don’t find anywhere the human Jew who suffered, suffered from racism. Where is he? Is he now transferring it to a different victim, looking for someone else to piss on?”

He is forty-one. A research assistant at the university. One of the 14,000 Arab college graduates in Israel. His beard is short and carefully groomed, his glasses round, and he holds a pipe in his hand. He speaks quietly and with self-assurance, but someone humiliated and wounded lurks in the darkness between his ordered words, and the more he talks the more you see he is one great bruise.

She is thirty-nine, born in Tel Aviv to parents who had come to Israel from Iraq. Today she works in education for Jewish-Arab coexistence through drama. A very pretty ivory-skinned woman with black hair and green eyes. They have three children, two boys and a girl, a nice but modest house at the edge of their village, two dogs, and a litter of newborn kittens. We sit in their yard in the late afternoon. The table holds a bowl of grapes and peeled sabras— cactus fruit — straight from the supermarket. The two of them vacillate for a long time before agreeing to talk; he is willing to talk openly, she is apprehensive, for personal reasons, and in the end they agree to talk on condition that their identity be kept confidential. They chose the pseudonyms themselves.

“I suppose I was very naïve when I lived in Tel Aviv,” Irit began. “Israel was something holy for me. I was very patriotic. Then suddenly it all became questionable. I met Rasan and I witnessed things I couldn’t believe were happening here. I began to be frightened. I discovered all kinds of things I hadn’t known about the Jewish people, my people. The world changed before my eyes. I was afraid for my life and that of my partner. I thought, One day they’ll come and bang on the door and take us away, and no one will lift a finger.

“Afterward, very slowly, I began to realize that this was reality for people like Rasan, that there is even a kind of routine to it. A routine of discrimination and ostracism. Even with regard to me. When people hear I’m married to an Arab…Here, a year ago I took a course at Bar Ilan University, and when they found out I was married to an Arab everyone got tense. It was a fairly long course, and people got close to one another, but they stayed away from me. One woman told me straight out, ‘It’s very hard for me with you. You’re a very nice and smart girl, and if we had met without this thing of yours, I’m sure we would have become friendly. But it’s hard for me to swallow it.’

“Or, for instance, a year before I met Rasan I went overseas. I went through airport security normally: you go, you fly, you return. A year later I traveled with him, and then, all at once — the search through the suitcases. They undressed us. They took my hair dryer completely apart. I told them, Wait a minute, last year I traveled with the same hair dryer and it wasn’t dangerous then! I was pregnant. They stripped me down to my underwear. The guard came with an electric instrument. I told her, I’m asking you please, I’m pregnant, don’t check me with that instrument. Check me with your hands, do whatever you want. She wouldn’t agree. She said, I’ll only check you from behind. I said, But I’m pregnant! Do you know anything about the way a woman is built? What difference does it make to a pregnant woman if it’s in front or behind? It didn’t help. I don’t understand, I told her, I’m a student like you, I’m Israeli like you. She looked at me funny and said, I have orders and I carry them out. Those were my first steps as an ‘Arab.’ ”

I asked if her children consider themselves Muslims or Jews.

“The children will define themselves when they decide to do so,” she said.

“The children already define themselves,” Rasan corrected her. “And it happens to them exactly the same way it happened to Irit. People always used to ask me if she feels like a Jew or an Arab, and I never told her anything about it. I didn’t ask. But the first time, at our first roadblock, when we left the village and the border guard policeman didn’t tell her, ‘You’re Jewish, get out of the car and wait until I examine your husband,’ but treated her the same way he treated me, that’s the moment the change in her began. That is, the Jews pushed her to belong to me.”

“The roadblocks…” She smiled helplessly. “Look, that’s already happened hundreds of times, so it doesn’t bother me anymore. Isn’t it a horrible thing when you become accustomed to the absurd? Whenever they stop us I calm Rasan down. I remind him, You know how they are, there’s no way of avoiding it, so let’s try to take it easy. I try to calm him down, but it hurts Rasan so much that as soon as I see them in the distance I get all nervous.”

Rasan: “The same thing happened with the children. When our son was five years old they stopped us near Kfar Saba. The boy asked, What did the policemen want from us, why did they ask if you’re an Arab, why did they take your identity card, why didn’t they stop other cars? That way, automatically, and it makes no difference whether I want it or not, whether I teach it to him or not, he’s already defined as belonging to the Arabs, but in the negative sense.”

“My son was born in Jerusalem,” Irit wrote me after our meeting, “and two years after he was born we moved to the village, and that was because in Jerusalem I was the one who had to sign the apartment rental lease. We knew that if the landlord knew that Rasan was an Arab he wouldn’t rent us the apartment. I’d sign the lease as if I were the only tenant, and then he would move in with me. Living a pretense and a lie put a lot of pressure on us and we felt uncomfortable and frustrated. Then we thought, What about the children? Will they also have to conceal their Arab father? I wasn’t willing to live that lie. My children have to know the facts and learn to live with them. In the end, that will be the reality of their lives, and they have to know how to live with it honorably. Here, in the village, unlike in the city, everyone knows that their mother is Jewish. They don’t need to hide that fact from anyone. I’d say that they manage it pretty well. Until they were ten years old I’d read them a story in Hebrew each night, and they speak both Hebrew and Arabic as mother tongues. They watch all the Hebrew television programs and are at home with everything that’s connected with cultural life in Israel. On the other hand, they study in the village school and live in an Arab society. Not only does no one bother them about it, there’s sometimes even a feeling that they are the subjects of positive discrimination. After all, in the consciousness of the village society their mother belongs to the majority group, the ruling group, the elite.”