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

Forty airplanes came and went, for an entire day and a night. On one of the flights, before landing, they were spoken to by a member of their community, Eliezer Rahamim, who came to live in Israel twenty years ago and who had flown to Ethiopia to bring his kinsmen to Israel. “Our dream of 2,500 years is being realized,” he told them as the plane circled over Jerusalem. “This we have prayed and longed for, and now we have won the right to achieve it; all thanks to the government of Israel, because, blessed be God, we have a country, and we have a home.”

On the night after that same emotional Sabbath, when I saw the immigrants who had just come sitting in a Jerusalem hotel and watching the evening news on television, I asked myself if, when I say “I am Israeli,” this definition from now on includes them as well, these new and different ones?

This question obviously did not concern only the technical, formal act of granting Israeli identity cards and citizenship to the newcomers. It related to a kind of effort of the spirit and of consciousness, to a kind of mental extension of that invisible cloak that, by its coverage, defines whom we include and whom we exclude from our nation. Every citizen stretches such a cloak unconsciously over his country (if he has a spiritual attachment to it). At times I examine the boundaries of my private cloak. In my internal experience, does it cover Neturei Karta and the rest of the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox groups? Does it still take under its (the chauvinistic brood hen’s) wings the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have preferred for many years to live in other countries? And what about their children, whose concrete links with Israel are even fewer?

In the face of the tidal wave of Ethiopian immigrants, or of the new immigrants from Russia that I meet each day in the large immigrant absorption center near my house, I feel the effort of will, not a simple one, to “make a little room” under the common cloak. Not that there is any lack of room under this abstract cloak, but there is certainly something around me and in me that will be changing in the coming years. New tastes and aromas are now being stirred in abundance into the Israeli stew, and they will change it profoundly. Also, in the new stew my portion will be smaller; my aspirations and my values will encounter — and perhaps collide with — a different world. Despite this, I am happy at the change, curious about it, and ready to endure for its sake the pain of mutual adjustment. In some ways it is a spiritual pain, equal perhaps to the not unpleasant physical growing pains of adolescence.

And there is a question.

“No, I don’t want to be hypocritical. When I say that I’m Israeli, I don’t include in it that woman from Kafr Kassem or that man from Jaljulia.”

Writer Sami Michael:

“When Israeli Arab movements rise and say “We are Zionists,” I consider them hypocritical and dishonest. Because this is a Jewish state. That’s the way I feel. That’s not what I want, but that’s the way I feel . It may be that I should, somewhere, broaden the ‘umbrella’ of this definition, but I’m talking now not about rational judgment but about emotional judgment. They instilled in my mind, my heart, that this is a Jewish state, and for better or worse I feel that this umbrella covers only the Jews. Not the Arabs. I remember my first jolt with regard to this identity. When I came from Iraq at the end of 1949 and enlisted in the Israeli Army, we had shooting practice, and instead of saying, ‘The enemy is coming at you,’ they said, ‘The Arabs are coming at you!’ What? What did that mean? I was shocked — after all, I was an Arab, too! In Iraq it was understood that I was a Jewish Arab! So little by little, through dozens of such incidents that happened to me here, the Arab apparently left the cover of that umbrella—‘He is the enemy.’ Understand that I don’t see him as an enemy when he is under the umbrella, but I see that anyone who argues that the umbrella includes him too is confused, asinine, and dishonest. I have not seen that any of them — except for a few very special people, like Anton Shammas — consciously want, with all their hearts, to be under the umbrella.”

“Still,” I reminded him, “there are clear trends toward the Israelization of the Arab minority.”

“Of course! There are such trends! That’s the steamroller of daily life, forcing it on them, as they force it on themselves. Listen to a story. I was with my wife in Cairo, and we were walking across Al-Tahrir Square, and suddenly we heard Hebrew being spoken at a shout, fearlessly! It was strange for us to meet Israeli youngsters speaking Hebrew provocatively and proudly in the very heart of an Arab country. We approached them and we saw that they were Israeli Arabs! They were sitting there on the fence showing off their Israeliness. Hebrew wasn’t then for them the language of the Jewish people but the language of Israelis. I addressed them in Arabic, and they answered me in Hebrew! Do you understand? They were in the heart of Cairo, where it’s crowded, filthy, poor, what they call Third World, and what it awakens in them — something characteristic of Arabs in general — is the idea that Israel is not only Satan; it is strength. It is a power. Development. And they brag about it!”

It is nighttime, and I am in Sami Michael’s house in Ma’alot, at the edge of town, looking out over the mountains of the upper Galilee. I asked him to explain something he had said previously.

“It really was that way! To the Jewish generation that raised me in Iraq, it was clear, as it was to me, that I was an Arab. With regard to values, with regard to culture — I was an Arab! In addition to that, I was Jewish, just as a French Jew is French and a Turkish Jew, Turkish, That is the origin and the crux of the whole matter. I was a Jewish-Arab-Iraqi, and I couldn’t identify with Iraq’s aspirations, with Islam, with the official anti-Jewish policy, with the anti-Semitism that grew during the Second World War. I, with my whole struggle against those trends, came to Israel.

“My first refuge was when I settled in Jaffa. Jaffa was then a kind of ghetto of Bulgarian immigrants and Arabs. I had a room in the house of an Arab family, and I felt good there. It felt like my natural place. Afterward, in Haifa, I also lived with the Arab population, in Wadi Nisnas, and after that I worked on the Communist Party’s Arab newspaper, Al-Itihad , to the point where the Arabs often forgot that I was Jewish and they’d talk to me about ‘those Jews,’ just as my mother-in-law used to forget that I was Sephardi and would talk about them in front of me. So I know these things from the inside. When it comes to the whole web of relations between the two peoples, I know it as a Jew, as an Israeli, and also as a man who until the age of twenty saw himself as an Arab, who was suckled on Arab culture, and whose first friends in Israel were Arabs.

“The Arabs, in the early days of the state, did not call us Sephardim. They called us ‘Ibn Arab.’ That’s an honor, ‘the son of the Arabs.’ But remember what happened afterward. Who was the state’s representative among the Arabs? Who was the implement used to impose the military regime, persecutions, and arrests? It was the Jews from the Arab countries, mostly Iraqi and Egyptian Jews. The policeman. And the Shin Bet agent, the interrogator, and the jailer. That created hostility to the Sephardim among the Arabs, hostility they have trouble freeing themselves of. The negative, daily, traumatic contact was with them. The teacher sent to them by the state to teach them Arabic with a grammar different from theirs, and who failed them in that different grammar — and maybe he himself didn’t even know how to write a letter in Arabic, the teacher who taught them Zionist history and Arabic literature. Then the border guard, which is almost completely made up of Jews from Arab countries, and the military governors; there was always an attitude of disdain and hatred of the Arab population.”