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

And an Arab newspaper editor as a member of the sensitive Editors Committee, which serves as liaison between the press and the army censor? Yes. And an Arab El Al pilot? Certainly. An Arab general to head the Civil Defense Force? Of course. And an Arab police chief? Yes…but here I feel a little hesitation. Have I reached the boundary of my own private racism? Or the boundary of the dream at the present stage?

So even before we are privileged to see, let’s say, an Arab commander of the Rear Defense Command, there are simpler and more vital endeavors that have still not been realized, facts that are hard to face. Twice as many Arab babies die soon after birth as Jewish babies. And 92 percent of Arab wage earners are on the bottom half of the social scale. There has not yet been an Arab member of an Israeli cabinet; the highest political position an Arab has reached is Deputy Minister of Health. In 1989, out of the 1,310 senior positions in the government ministries and their associated bodies, only seventeen were Arabs. Among the 200 boards of directors of government-owned companies, with more than 4,000 politically and economically influential members, there is only one Arab director. Of the doctors employed by the Histadrut’s huge health fund, only 2 percent are Arabs. This year every second Arab in Israel lived under the poverty line. Six out of ten Arab children (as opposed to one out of ten Jewish children) live in poverty.

How much luck does an Arab child — as talented as he may be — need to live “just” the life he deserves? To not waste his mind and abilities under the high-jump bar? Are all these exaggerated hopes? Dreams? Visions of a storyteller?

Then what about an Arab member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee? No, not yet. What about an Arab deputy prime minister, who will fill in for the prime minister whenever necessary? Yes…why not? An Arab commander of an air force squadron? What about it? Just theoretically, when there’s peace? Ah, I need to think, to mull that one over…

During such moments of doubt I could understand that there was also something misleading about the immediate connection made between me and the Palestinians I met in the occupied territories before the intifadah. In one, obvious sense they and I had a common interest — to disconnect ourselves from each other. In other words, the aspiration to separate united us. But here, perhaps, in Israel, we, Jews and Arabs, must overcome the residues left by enmity and suspicion in order to come together under one definition, as Israelis, in the framework of a single general civil identity, and this “compression” demands of the two “partners” a huge emotional effort, no less difficult, perhaps, than the withdrawal from territory.

“You speak of national identity,” Irit sighed when we spoke of the difficulty of “compression” and on the internal concession it demands. “I can tell you about much more private problems, about my family in Tel Aviv, for instance, about my father, who cut off all contact with me, entirely, yes, the minute he realized that I was going out with an Arab. I haven’t seen or spoken to him for fifteen years. And that’s my father, who was so attached to me, as only a father can be attached to his youngest daughter. In the army they used to laugh at me, at all the things he used to buy me, always the best and the most expensive — and now he doesn’t know his grandchildren, he doesn’t know me. He’s losing something and I’m losing something. Once we received a videotape of a family wedding and my children saw my father, and my younger son said, ‘Wow, Grandpa looks so young, he’s really good-looking.’ The worst part was a few years ago, when my sister was dying of cancer; just before she died she spoke with my father and asked him to forgive me, to take me back. He went into hysterics. He wasn’t willing to consider it. She died, and I didn’t go to the funeral or to the shiva . My father said, ‘Okay, I’m sitting shiva on both my daughters together.’ Do you understand? He sat shiva for me, like for Chava, who married a goy in Fiddler on the Roof .”

She goes silent for a minute, getting control of herself. Then: “I have a close relative, very close, who married a Christian. She lives with him in Switzerland. But when she goes home, the whole family receives her with so much love. They fight over who will host her, they make pilgrimages to come bid her goodbye. That sharpened the matter for me, that our problem is not religious. It’s political. A European or Swiss is not on the same level as an Arab. The opposite — she actually became a model of success, a Swiss!”

I asked how she felt in the village during the Gulf War.

“All of us here were horribly frightened of the gas, the first night was a real nightmare, my son cried because he thought that the mask wasn’t sealed properly, and he didn’t eat for two days, and I had the additional burden of being far from my family, from all my relatives in Tel Aviv. Imagine how I felt. I hurt so much for my Tel Aviv. I cried when I thought of my city destroyed. And there was no one around me in my situation. No one with whom I could share that anguish. After each alert I would call my sister in Ramat Gan to ask where the missile fell. Twice the call was disconnected, and Rasan shouted, why are you asking her questions like that on the telephone? Don’t you realize that you live in an Arab village? Don’t you know that they’re listening to us?”

“Did you encounter people here celebrating Israel’s distress?”

“First of all, and most important, they didn’t dance on the rooftops, like the Jews said. In my village, and in other villages I know, they didn’t dance! Almost everyone here has Jewish friends, and we live right next to Jewish settlements, we’re all in the same boat. True, there were Arabs who told me, You don’t care when Palestinians are killed, now you’ll learn how hard it is. That I understand. Real celebration of distress — I didn’t see any.”

Rasan: “If you ask the Arabs in Israel if they want to see Israel destroyed, my bet is that you won’t find 10 percent that want that. People already accept Israel. They accept that the country exists but want it to change its character. So that a man like me, a citizen, can say, It’s mine. But if the government’s policy doesn’t go in this direction, our demand in the future will be for some kind of autonomy here, or some kind of recognition as a minority. And it looks to me like that’s where we’re heading. After all, Israel doesn’t intend to change in the coming decade, and I won’t undergo auto-castration, suddenly turn into a kind of Zionist Arab, a good little Jew.”

“It’s interesting,” I said to Irit, “that during our entire conversation your disappointment and hostility is directed only at the Jewish side. Don’t you have any criticism of the Arab society in Israel?”

“The Jewish side is the strong and controlling side,” she said. “It’s easier for me to understand the Arabs. They’re so pressured by Israeli society, you have no conception. Only someone who lives here can understand it. And I, at least, have an advantage over other Arabs — I have another identity I can hide behind whenever I choose. You understand. My fluent Hebrew and the whole Jewish side of my identity allow me, really, to go from one side to the other whenever I want. Others don’t have that privilege. Yes, the feeling of being an Arab among Jews is so hard that when there’s the possibility of fleeing, it’s a good feeling.”

I asked what made them feel Israeli.

“There are moments,” Rasan said, “when, despite all the harassment and the way the situation closes in on you, you still believe in something. You look for the corner in which there’s a bit of light, to tell you that it’s still worth trying. At least for the little bubble you live in and bring up your children in and for your friends around you — it’s still worth making an effort. Then, on the other hand, you run into cases when you start asking questions. What does my activity here mean? What is the significance of all my efforts for that human robot who stops me at the roadblock? What does my citizenship mean? Income tax and VAT? Stopping at a red light? Eating food produced by Israeli companies like Osem and Telma? Studying in the Israeli educational system, one I did not choose? After all, really, if I’m honest with myself, my citizenship here means no more than having an identity card which isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Tell me what collective elements are here that I as a man can feel any connection to. Why can you, theoretically, be the director of the government television station when I could never be? What, I can’t be just as professional as you? I’m not as reliable as you are? That is, for me being Israeli is what keeps me from self-realization! It is a system that prevents me from deciding my fate! I live my entire life in an existential system of foreignness. Do you understand what it is for a man like me to be a priori outside the cultural, political, and economic game? Even the Israeli left, which I know wants to make things better for me — when there’s a demonstration in Teibe, the left stands there and the right faces off with them — what does the left do? Their leader tells them, I’d better fucking hear you singing ‘Hatikva’ louder than they do! So with all their might they sing the line from the national anthem: ‘A Jewish soul yearns’! So I’m always ‘out’ in these battles! When I go to Tel Aviv — the heart of your Israeliness, right? — I feel foreign there. Suspicious. Ask my wife. I get nervous and tense. I go there only when I have to.”