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

“And is there a place you feel more comfortable? How do you feel in Ramallah?”

“In Ramallah I feel foreign, too!” he burst out.

“So what’s left?”

They fell silent. Looked at each other.

“Nature,” Rasan said in the end. “Only nature. We go on a lot of trips. To the north, to the Galilee or to the Negev, to the craters. I cultivate my private relationship with nature.” He smiled bitterly. “There it’s still a little free of meaning.”

“Still,” I insisted, “there’s a whole country here, such a complex and multidimensional whole. People, opinions, art…”

“I don’t see any of that art anymore. I—”

“There’s some reason that you’re staying here. You are people with free professions, you could manage elsewhere also, and you’ve chosen to live here.”

They laughed, unsettled. “We’re leaving,” she said.

“Planning to leave,” Rasan corrected her.

“It’s actually because of pressure from the children,” she said. “They don’t want to be here.”

“For a few years, no more,” he added. “The kids are sick of the tension here, of this whole struggle.”

She: “The truth is that I’m actually the one who wants to leave more. More than Rasan. I look around and I know that I’m no longer at peace with the fact that I live here. I’ll join a Hebrew book club — what’s so surprising about that? You asked before how it is that I have no criticism of Arab society. Of course I do, after all I live here and see horrible things here, too: see a petrified society, see educated people who find it easy to criticize but don’t do anything to change it, and an educational system in which the teachers stand in front of the class and curse the children. ‘You’re failures, you’re asses and blockheads.’ To this day teachers hit students, my son was hit more than once. I have lots of complaints. Maybe I don’t dare criticize them in public because I’m a foreign implant, I’ll always be a foreign body to them, but I expect more of Jewish society, in all areas. It could be that I’ll see discrimination in the U. S., too. It exists in every society. Maybe I’ll feel that it’s not my home there. But I have many more expectations from my home than from other places, and here I’ve already seen too much, and I can’t go on.”

Siham Daoud, poet, a delicate young woman of thirty, from Haifa:

“During the war, I heard that there were Arabs who were happy that Saddam was firing Scuds at Israel. I, I have so many friends and people I care about, both Jewish and Arab, so joy never passed through my head, not even for a second. On the contrary. I remember, during the war, a missile fell here near my house. I was horribly afraid. All the neighbors left, the Jews and the Arabs who live in the housing project here. I went down and the guy across the way was sitting in his garden. He had to stay home because he was on emergency duty, he’s a nurse at the hospital. An Arab, right? He sat like this, as if all the world’s problems were on his shoulders, and said to me, ‘I’m very, very worried.’

“I asked him what he was worried about, and he says he is worried because for two days he hasn’t sent a thing. No Scuds .

“When I read about it in the papers I didn’t get upset. But when it happened to me? Do you understand? Here a man was sitting, a missile had fallen a kilometer from him, and instead of worrying about himself, instead of — okay, don’t worry for the Jews, worry for the Arabs here! We’re all in the same boat…and he’s worried why for two days he hasn’t sent anything!

“I was speechless .

“That same day I had moved in with my friend, a Jewish woman. And most of the days of the war, I was with her. The whole thing, that because of his missiles I couldn’t stay at home, really made me mad, and I remember that once I lost my cool; it was the day that there were some four false alarms, and each time we went into the sealed room and came out, my friend and I and two more friends, all of us together, and then at one point I took off the gas mask and said — you know how I cursed him! — Son of a bitch! [She laughs.] And I never curse, so everyone broke out laughing, because it was clear who I was saying son of a bitch about.”

Question: “During the alerts did you sit in the sealed room?”

S. A. (a woman of about twenty, who asked to remain anonymous): “Yes.”

“Were you afraid?”

“I was very afraid. My sealed room could have told you how afraid I was. I sealed it outside, I sealed it inside, twice, and between the plastic and the glass I also sealed it with silicone, and I sat with the gas mask on, and I was so scared, and I was happy he was shooting the missiles.”

“You mean you were happy that they were firing missiles at you?”

“Let’s say, not real happiness, just…yes, despite it all, I was happy that you, too, a little…because a lot of times, when I saw the world’s reactions, their support of Israel, when you destroyed our houses in the occupied territories and you imprisoned my family there during the curfew and shot us with bullets containing all kinds of materials and all kinds of gas, that whole time, twenty-four years already, no one in the world did anything to stop it, and I cried when I saw how cheap our blood, the Palestinians’ blood, is…”

Zuhir Yehia, forty, Kafr Kara:

“During the Saddam period my thoughts were divided. I was cut in two. Should I invite friends from Tel Aviv? Invite them here? Because if I invite them it’s an invitation for them to run away from the responsibility that the Jewish people imposed on them. In the end I invited them; they came to visit, but not to stay.”

I asked what he thought about those who left Tel Aviv during the war .

“As an Arab, were the positions reversed, I think that I wouldn’t run away and I wouldn’t leave.”

“In ’48 most of the Arabs fled.”

“They didn’t flee. They were forced to flee. The Arab countries tempted them to come, promised they would return. We’ve learned a lesson since then. We won’t move anymore. The Jews left Tel Aviv out of fear. Maybe correctly, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t have the nerves for this tension. Arabs already have stronger nerves. We’ve had a lot of disasters here. Maybe we’re more spoiled than the people in the territories, but less than the Jews. You’ve already gotten used to things being nice.”

In the month of May 1991, at an air force base in the center of the country, some 13,000 Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel in the space of twenty-four hours. Their dark, bare feet felt their way down the plane’s metal stairway. Their first glance around was cautious, bashful — not a look that dares to demand possession of its new surroundings. All was suffused with silence. The nobility of the newcomers invested also those who had come to greet them. We saw an entire culture uprooted before our eyes from its habitation come to resurrect itself in Israel. Lofty Kaisim , Ethiopian Jewry’s religious leadership, swung the chira , made of hair from a horse’s tail, the emblem of eminence. And almond and olive boys, and little queens of Sheba, and teenagers who don’t, really don’t, have that bold American look of our own adolescents. And wrinkled, angular, coal-black old men and women, their eyes living embers. A scorched Judaism that strayed for 2,500 years in the snarls of history, rose and declined; and what remained from all these metamorphoses was, perhaps, the thing that we search for in that eternal question Who is a Jew? Because maybe it is precisely they who, in their indigence and their longings, bring to us the unadulterated answer, the Jewish ore itself.