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

“Sometimes,” I said, “you can hear Sephardim making fun of the Ashkenazim, especially the ones from the peace movements, telling them, ‘You don’t know how to talk to the Arabs. You don’t understand the Arab mentality.’ ”

“I’m afraid,” he responded, “that that’s a form of racism. As if the Arabs are a certain breed of dog or mouse and you have to talk in their special language. What makes the difference here is not how to talk to the Arab, because he’s an intelligent person and however you talk to him he’ll understand it. The important question is what you really say to him. What your declared policy is, and what you carry out in the field. That’s not a communication problem. Even if you’re the best Arabist in the world, it won’t make you a man of peace.

“But the big problem is that in the ‘what’ we deceive each other, with deceitful words and intentions, so it is a dialogue of deaf people. Sometimes when I see meetings of Israelis and Arabs, I could burst out laughing. They say the same word and mean something entirely different! The word ‘peace,’ for example. The simplest of words. For the average Arab, from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, ‘peace’ means that this country will be destroyed, will disappear along with all its institutions, with all its tradition, with all it brought here, and then there will be real peace. That all the refugees will return to their houses, that their land will be returned, that there will be an Arab majority here again, and then there will be either a PLO state or one based on the Koran.

“The average Israeli Arab — if there really is such a person — his hope is a kind of thing whose realization is hard to conceive. A kind of mad dream of waking up in the morning with the same High Court of Justice, the same efficient police force, the same nice buildings, the same democracy, and the same social-security system — but what? Without Jews. That would be paradise. It means that I, the Israeli Arab, will be a first-class citizen here, with all the values that exist in the country today but without the Jews. Not, God forbid, that they should be thrown into the sea — I am, after all, an advanced humanist liberal — but that some nice spaceship will swoop down and take them away, and each of them will return of his own free will to his place in the world, and we’ll meet every fifty years or so on a hike, to share memories.”

“No…no! I’m sorry!” fumed Dr. Majed Elhaj, whom I met the next day in Shfaram. “Maybe that represents what an average Jewish person secretly wants deep down inside — to wake up one morning and not find Arabs here. I think that the Arabs here, over time, have learned to distinguish between dreams and reality. The Israeli Arab is a realist. Otherwise he might slip into some other orientation to the state. But it’s no secret that there are a lot of conditions in Israel that encourage extremism rather than the adoption of an attitude of coexistence. Despite that, I’d define the Arab minority as the quietest minority in the world , relative to its solidarity and political awareness. I think”—Elhaj smiled at me, or maybe to himself—“that it’s really an ideal minority.”

“But there’s one thing that the Israeli Arab has not and will not come to terms with,” Sami Michael continued, “and that’s that he is a minority. ‘True,’ he would say, ‘I’m a minority here, on this little island, but look behind you and you’ll see a whole ocean of Arabs.’ Because in international terms, the Arab world is a great power — economically, numerically, in the number of countries, the number of votes at the U.N. And the Israeli Arabs still have a living memory of the way things were fifty years ago. ‘We turned into a minority only because of a temporary malfunction. We look to the future. We, with our birth rate, will again be a majority here. And you, the Jews, are in crisis, both economic and moral. You are failing. The day will come, and with one good battle it will all change.’ That’s still in the back of their minds. ‘So why,’ the same Arab asks, ‘should I wear the suit you’ve sewn for me, the suit of a minority? I’ll just wait.’ ”

What a combination, I thought — a majority that doesn’t feel like a majority and a minority that doesn’t feel like a minority.

Sami Michael: “And don’t think that they aren’t scared of that future! Because either Israel will exist forever and they’ll always remain second-class citizens, or Mohammed will come with his scimitar and I, the Israeli Arab, will have to flee from the houses I’ve built and from the money I’ve made under Israeli rule, and all those people from the refugee camps will flow in here, to my house, to my store, and I’ll have to pay the price of all those years of plenty I had here. Because you should know that the Arabs outside hate those who are inside. For instance, until 1964, when it was necessary to establish pan-Arab solidarity, Syrian Communists would refuse to meet Arab Communists from Israel. I remember that very well — when they met they would spit in the face of the Israelis. I saw it in Prague: ‘You are traitors! You stay there! You benefit from the Zionists and serve Zionism! You don’t take up weapons, you don’t fight, and you even work for the enemy army and police, and there are Arab teachers and Arab court clerks, and you open profitable restaurants that the Jews come stuff themselves in, and what are you doing sitting in the Knesset? To promote the big lie of Zionist democracy? You are already Zionists yourselves!’ That’s what they told them. I heard it.”

I asked whether, in his opinion, there could ever be among the Arabs of the Middle East true acceptance, the kind that is internalized deep in the unconscious, of the existence of Israel in the region.

“It’s doubtful. Let me tell you something: If today some Arab tells you he accepts that in Madrid and Spain there is a Christian, European state, don’t believe him. When I was in school in Iraq the teachers taught me about Spain. How my heart ached that I, an Arab, had been defeated in Spain! I didn’t even know that we, the Jews, had also been in Spain. They didn’t teach me that, neither my parents nor my teachers. To this day every Arab feels the pain of the loss of Andalusia, and when was that — seven hundred years ago? Is that an answer?”

He’s over sixty. When he was born in Iraq his name was Samir Mared, and his books deal with the duality, or the split personality, of Jews and Arabs trying to live together, in Iraq and in Israel. He is a man of imposing, dignified appearance, with a long, dark face. Very private, austere. His voice is deep, muted, and each of his words is suffused with his Iraqi pronunciation, accentuating the kinship of the languages. As he speaks, he continually displays the speech of “the other,” and then his eyes suddenly return to life, and a dialogue is woven between his long hands.

“Listen, we have a big problem here. I’ve already been breaking my head over it for years. For me, the intifadah did not change the major thing that awaits us. With regard to what’s happening in the West Bank, the solution is already on the horizon. Whether we want it or not, whether we bend our backs or walk erect, the solution is there. The Palestinian state will come in the end. Remaining then will be the difficult and complex and most dangerous question of the Israeli Arabs. And no one is really conscious of that, not Peace Now, or the Jewish liberals in Israel, or the intellectuals who are willing to meet any Arab in Paris but not here. These people do not know the Arabs’ secret longings. They don’t know the differences between the language they speak with a stranger and their internal language. That is the greatest problem we have here, and I, as a Jew, how will I solve it?”