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

“?”

“My dream goes like this: There will be a Palestinian state. That’s already an established fact. And I’d leave them the damn settlements we have there. Let those settlements stay there, if they don’t slaughter them. I’ll give them all Israeli passports. They’ll have the right to vote for the municipal authorities there, but they won’t vote for the Palestinian parliament. The same way I dream that the Arabs here in Israel will vote for their municipal authorities, but with a Palestinian passport! Let them finally have a flag of their own, for God’s sake, they’ll belong to something; let them vote for the parliament there, and if they want, let them serve in the Palestinian Army.”

“Do you foresee a situation in which someone from Horfish or Tarshiha, your neighbors here, will serve in the Palestinian Army?”

“Oh, they won’t go.” He chuckles, not contemptuously, but out of appreciation of the survivor’s cleverness. “Trust them not to go to the army. But I think it will be like this: There will be a Palestinian state, and we’ll have relations with it, a kind of federation and strong ties, because, despite everything I told you up until now, the Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Arab are the two most similar nations in this region, and the most different from the others. In their energy, their vitality, in having the mentality of immigrants, the Palestinians are all immigrants as well, like us, and I can’t describe to you how different a Palestinian villager is from an Egyptian villager or a Syrian or Iraqi villager. Worlds apart. Here, let me tell you a story about an Egyptian and a Palestinian.

“Before they built the Aswan Dam, the Nile would bring with each flooding the alluvium that fertilized the ground. When the dam was erected they held back the water, the alluvium did not come and the land became less fertile. The government began supplying the fellahin , the peasants, and the agricultural cooperatives with fertilizers, for next to no money. Heaps of fertilizer, thousands of sacks of fertilizer, are still rotting in the warehouses today, and the farmer descends with his donkey and two baskets, goes kilometers to seek out the Nile, and takes a little mud to spread on his land. Now I’ll give you another picture: After the Six-Day War I worked in the Ministry of Agriculture, and they gave me an assignment to do a survey of water sources in the West Bank, of the wells. This was two or three weeks after the battles. Disabled tanks were still scattered all over. So in some desolate village, a hellhole with no paved road, I saw a well with a put-put sprinkler or, rather, with a pipe coming out of it and a sprinkler at work at the end. I was astounded — a mirage! A sprinkler! I asked the fellah where he had gotten a sprinkler. Oho! He knows Abu Yosef, a Jew, and Abu Yosef knows Abu Yehuda, a long chain of names, and he brought him a pipe and fixed him up a modern sprinkler. That’s the difference.”

“You, the Israelis, are more similar to the Palestinians,” a young Egyptian, Mohammed Ayin, once wisecracked to me near the pyramids. “You and they are just the same — short-tempered, worked-up, insecure. One minute you feel like big heroes, and the next like the most miserable wretches in the world. You’re always sure someone’s trying to cheat you. And you are greedy. You love money. What you won’t do for money and power! We’re not like that. We won’t lift a finger for anything. That’s why we look the way we do.” He laughed, waving his hand over the desert shimmering in the heat.

I’d add — apologizing for the generalization — a few more similarities between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. There is an attraction to the imaginary and illusion, a delight in words and mesmerization by them, and an exaggerated confidence in their strength. There’s also excitability, and a talent for stirring up emotions to the point of impairing the sense of balance reality requires. Then there’s our type of humor, somewhat bitter. And self-irony. And curiosity and vigilance. A kind of strange attraction to self-destruction. Diligence. Great suspicion of foreigners. Excessive pride, and self-pity, and an eagerness to be insulted, and an inclination to self-hatred. And great ambition, I would emphasize, with regard to the Palestinians outside Israel’s borders —Yahud al-Arab , “the Jews of the Arab world,” as the Arabs call the Palestinians, a label that evinces acute envy of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have made their way into the social, economic, cultural, and political elite of the Arab countries, where they play the same role that the Jews did in the lands of their exile — a catalyzing, galvanizing, generative, and not much loved force. This ambition is by now hard to detect among the Palestinians living in Israel — neither the drive to excel nor the strength that motivates so many of the world’s minorities to stand out and force their way upward into the majority’s elite. As if they are still walking gingerly under a low roof — the fiddler’s new roof.

“And don’t forget that our elites are hard to penetrate,” Sami Michael notes. “ Very hard to penetrate. I learned that the hard way when I came here in 1949. We are willing to open up only in a superficial way. It’s interesting that the farther down you go on the ladder there’s more and more cooperation. For instance, in the underworld — gamblers, drugs, prostitution. There’s real cooperation there. Racism — to contradict conventional wisdom — is farther up. The members of their elite are dying to gain entry to ours. They’re itching to be part of us. But they’re not interested in meeting your common Buhbut and Boskila. They want to meet the parallel stratum in Israeli society. And the Israelis are unwilling.”

“But maybe your comment brings us to the question of Israel’s integration into the Middle East. If Israel is at all interested in that.”

He laughed. “Look, Israel wants to be part of Europe, and the leading force in Israel in all fields, in economics, politics, sport, culture, like it or not, is the Western-minded. What’s that line? ‘My heart is in the East…’? Where do you see my heart in the East?! My heart remains entirely in the West! No one here wants to be part of the East. And what complicates the whole business is that the East itself is pulling westward.”

“In the East,” I said, “you actually meet many Arabs — in the Egyptian intelligentsia, for instance — who have developed their own way of taking a lot from the West but without giving up Arab culture. They don’t indiscriminately internalize all the West offers.”

“Don’t forget that they didn’t come from Europe and settle in the Middle East! They were born in the East and have lived there for five thousand years. So maybe they’re not ready for huge leaps, as we are. But step by step they are turning to the West, and the ones who are remaining authentically Eastern in Arab countries today are primarily the Islamic movements — Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Al-Azhar University.” *

“So, in your opinion, Arab culture as you know it cannot serve as an attractive challenge to Israel?”

“Absolutely not. Because it itself is seeking a different way today. Look at this search for roots that has begun among the Oriental Jews here. In my opinion it is meaningless. Those roots have grown obsolete even in the Arab countries. No one misses them any longer. On the other hand, take a country like Iraq or Syria. The minute they buy weapons from Europe, a plane and a missile and a French or German or Russian tank, they are buying an aspiration to be more efficient, like the West. Accurate like the West. Purposeful like them. You can’t chant an Arab folk song for five hours and race around on a modern tractor. That was good in the period of the plow and the camel. Today?”