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

At her house in the village I asked her whether, deep inside, she didn’t want her children in the end to cast their lot with “her side.”

“They’ll make their own choice, just as I did. I never even thought of asking them what they felt about themselves — more Jewish or more Arab. It’s not a pertinent question as far as I’m concerned. The main thing is that they be good people, with a good education, with a universal outlook. True, in each person’s unconscious there is the identity with which she was born and educated, and it is very hard to free yourself from it. But little by little something is happening. To me also. It’s harder and harder for me here. A lot of times I’m shocked by what I see around me. When an Arab child is hurt, no one knows who he is, what his name is, who his parents are. He doesn’t exist. He’s inconsequential. But when a Jewish child is hurt, they make a whole spectacle of it: they show him on television, give his biography, who his grandfather and grandmother are. Not long ago, two weeks ago, two Arab boys from my village were kidnapped by a Jewish bus driver. Did you hear about it? Two children were kidnapped and beaten, one eleven years old and one thirteen years old, wonderful Israeli kids who speak fluent Hebrew. They know who the assailant is. He wasn’t even arrested and there was no investigation. You don’t know about it, but such stories reach me every day.

“And I, who was born here, who was part of…Oh, I remember, as a girl, when the prisoners of war came back from Syria, I was so shocked. How could there possibly be a nation that could do such things? And to think that my country, in its own prisons and interrogation rooms, does the same thing…It’s hard for me to cope with that. I don’t know how other Israelis deal with it and remain silent. Maybe it doesn’t matter to them because it doesn’t touch them. Maybe they actually think it’s good. I’m not prepared to accept it, but on the other hand I don’t know what I can do.” She speaks with great composure, without raising her voice. “I remember that once, on Land Day, we sat here weeding our lawn, and I asked Rasan what we should do. Demonstrate? Be more violent? And Rasan said that he is not a violent person, is not able to pick up a stone and throw it. He’s not the only one I’ve heard that from: We’re citizens, the country has laws, what can we do?”

“Still,” I commented, “you’re ignoring the fact that over the years there has been improvement. Only twenty-five years ago there was a military government here, and today there’s more openness and consciousness of the problem, and the Arabs in Israel can express their opinions and demand their rights—”

“That’s precisely the illusion!” Rasan interrupted me angrily. “That’s a fiction. And anyway, what we’re doing here is, if you’ll excuse me, masturbation! Because what good will it do me if I tell you that I’m discriminated against? That I feel bad living in my own country? Will that improve my life? After all, the system is built so that it allows some exceptional people, like me for example, to advance, and it exploits those exceptions to say, ‘Hey, look how this man expresses himself, and we don’t cut off his head.’ But practically, check it out and you’ll see how the system blocks me in all directions.”

“The absurd thing is that the discrimination is especially sharp in our situation,” Irit said. “The law says that an Israeli couple can get a mortgage from the Ministry of Housing if both of them are citizens and one served in the army. Okay. We meet all the criteria. We’re Israelis, I served in the army, we have the right to a mortgage. But they got around it and said, ‘Aha! Since you’re building a house in an Arab village, you get only what the residents of that region get!’ ”

“Look how much democracy here is an illusion,” Rasan added. “The ultra-Orthodox are also a minority here, a smaller minority than the Arabs, a minority that has declared itself non-Zionist, and look how they dictate your life for you. Look how much money they get. But in 1990, when there was the big political crisis here, and Peres thought of making a coalition with the Arabs, everyone had a fit. ‘How can you do that? With non-Zionist Arabs!’ As if the ultra-Orthodox are Zionists! As if they serve in the army! We’re a priori outside the game. Politics, the media, and the economy.”

“I understand,” I asked him, “that you would like the manifest Jewish character of the state to disappear?”

“A country with a majority of Jewish residents — I have no problem living with that. Even if the country tries by all sorts of legal means to preserve the Jewish majority, I have no problem, on condition that it be determined with the agreement of the minority.”

“Describe such a situation to me.”

“Israel can be a country with a Jewish majority but shouldn’t define itself as a Jewish state. When its symbols include me as well, I’ll have something to say and even more to give to such a country.”

“You didn’t explain what you mean by ‘legal means…determined with the agreement of the minority.’ ”

Rasan sucked on his pipe for a long moment. “If Israel says, I want to be a normal, democratic state with a separation of church and state, where every person will have the right of self-fulfillment, then we can sit down and agree that the president and prime minister always be Jewish, according to the constitution. And we’ll also write a constitution that will ensure the citizen’s fundamental rights, his basic freedoms. (And that’s one of the reasons, by the way, that you have no constitution.) There will be a constitution. There will be a Jewish majority. But its laws will protect my rights as well. They’ll allow me, not some Jewish official in the education ministry, to decide what my son learns in school. Under those conditions it wouldn’t bother me that the majority is Jewish.”

“It doesn’t bother me that the flag is blue and white,” Lutfi Mashour, editor of As-Sinara , told me with regard to the same issue. “It’s not important to me and I don’t care if they call it Israel or Shmisrael or the Jewish state. The decorations don’t bother me, the essence of it bothers me. Am I equal to you or aren’t I? In practice, do I or don’t I have rights? I’ve even given up on getting a Law of Return for Arabs. I’ve already made my peace with the fact that the Jews have a place to return to and that the Palestinians can’t return here. I hope that the Palestinian state that will be established will be “Jewish” in this sense. But all that is secondary. The main thing is your attitude to me as a human being. You bring in a huge wave of immigration — very nice. But a year from now the Jewish immigrant will be a master. We’ll remain the slaves. So I say, Fine, let it be a Jewish state. But give us the same opportunities you have! Let it be as in India — a Muslim as the head of state. You can make agreements like that!” He thought for a minute and began to chuckle. “It’s true, if you were to tell me now that the president’s chair is open to Arabs — I’d kill you! Because who would we put there today? What Arab can be such a leader? I prefer living another thousand years without an Arab president to putting any of the people I know into that position!”

Open parentheses:

“The president’s chair is open to Arabs.” In Israel will there ever be a reality in which that sentence comes true? There are those for whom the idea is a nightmare, and the very writing of the words, in Hebrew, rubs their nerves raw. But maybe there are others for whom such a thought — even if it is not practical for now — may massage a pulled muscle in their consciousness and create a surprising sense of relief—“Why not, after all?” Really, why not? Why shouldn’t Israel have an Arab Minister of Justice, an Arab State Controller, an Arab as director of the water company or the telephone company, as director of the social-security system, all of them Arab citizens of Israel? Or a Minister of Agriculture and a Minister of Finance and head of the water supply, and director general of the Histadrut Labor Federation and editor of Ha’aretz and heads of the boards of directors of national companies and chairmen of Knesset committees? Why not? There, in Irit and Rasan’s yard, I knew how little all of us, Jews and Arabs, allow our imaginations free rein with regard to the possible joint future. It’s as if the paralysis and lack of willpower that control us with regard to our relations in the present restrict our gaze, so that there is no power to hope, and within this empty space our traumatic past still rises endlessly, perpetuating and preserving the pattern of our relations.