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

“You mean an internal Arab boycott?”

“Not a boycott as Arabs! Not a boycott as Palestinians! As Israelis! And as an Israeli I won’t be ashamed to have a black crowd march through Tel Aviv and upset the city. The inhabitants of the territories can’t do it, but we can. I should have and could have organized marches at the beginning of the intifadah. There was enough anger then for a step like that. But our leadership died of fear. Our leadership is afraid that all those nice Jews who are responsible for the ‘sector’ [he spits that word out the same way he did “solidarity”] will smile at us and say in a nice voice, ‘You want to be like they are in the territories? Go on, do something, and then we will treat you just like we treat them. And remember not to take anything for granted in our attitude toward you, Israeli Arabs. When it comes down to it, you are tolerated guests here. And guests can be shown the door.’ ”

He is thirty-five years old, black-haired, with a dark face and a thick mustache. At age sixteen he founded the National Committee of Arab High School Students in Israel, the first nationwide organization of Arab youth. In the mornings, instead of going to school, the young Bishara grabbed his satchel and set out on “working tours” of the villages in Wadi Ara and the southern Triangle, organizing high-school students to fight for equality in education. “We closed down the schools a few times, a very militant story. We could decide just like that to shut down a school, no problem. Remember that it wasn’t an easy time — in ’74 we went around with kaffiyehs . That was when Arafat addressed the United Nations and the Egyptian Army crossed the Suez Canal. We had a lot of Palestinian sensibility.

“Today? Today there’s a difference between us and the Palestinians in the territories. Our experience is different from theirs. The sensibility is different, too. They can conduct a violent struggle against you. We can’t anymore. Not because of the Shin Bet [the internal security service], but because we ourselves are no longer able to see this as a possibility. It is already contrary to the temperament of our population, which has lived with you for decades and is already part of the economy and the way of life and a million other things. The Arabs here are an integral part of your story, even if you haven’t fathomed this yet. When the intifadah began, we had to make a quick and clear decision: are we part of it or not part of it? Period. And we discovered that our aspirations branched off at this point from the aspirations of the Palestinians in the territories.

“But in one thing there is no distinction: as far as you’re concerned, both we and they are strangers here. Unwanted here. Rejected. And for this reason I say that the old way that Israeli Arabs think about Israel is bankrupt. It can’t be allowed to go on. Precisely because of the alienation that you impose on me, precisely because I am frightened, precisely because in your opinion nothing can be taken for granted in your attitude toward us, so I’m also allowed not to have my attitude toward you taken for granted.

“When Martin Luther King put together his movement for equal rights in America in the sixties, he called for total equality, period. Equality that would go as far as positive discrimination in favor of the blacks, in order to correct the injustice of decades. Together with that he had no problem shouting, ‘I am proud to be an American,’ in other words, as a black man, the country was his, too. The flag was also his. The blacks emphasized that they were no less American than others. Now I ask myself if the American Indians could do such a thing. Can an Indian shout with all his heart, ‘I am proud to be an American’?”

“And you, in this metaphor, are the Indian?”

“I think so. From that point of view I am like the Palestinian in the territories. Neither of us is wanted here. Both of us are ignored. And on top of that I’m caught in the perfect paradox — I have to be a loyal citizen of a country that declares itself not to be my country but rather the country of the Jewish people.”

Vehement in expression, emotional, a dissenter from birth, his movements untempered, Bishara looks as if a struggle is always going on within him. He lives in Nazareth, in Jerusalem, in Bir Zeit. He likes big cities and divided people. “The most dangerous people are healthy people at one with themselves, people without contradictions — I’m wary of them. I also liked Berlin when it was divided. Now I can’t set foot in it. It disappointed me. It became normal.”

“And do you feel a link to the land here, to the country?” I asked. “A link to nature? To the view? Is there any place in the country that you especially like?”

He let out a long laugh, a laugh to himself. “You want me to feel something for Karmiel? For Afula? Nothing is as gray as those places. However you look at them. Or Migdal Haemek. Would I take a tour of Migdal Ha-emek? You’ll find that resistance stronger in me than in Israeli Arabs who have already assimilated the situation and their experience, who have married here, who have children, who go for weekends at the beach. I don’t go for weekends at the beach. I don’t recognize the beaches in this country. I hate the Israeli beach bum. He reeks of insolence and violence and swagger, and I can’t stand it. I feel very foreign among Israelis. It’s not just that I have white spots on the map where the Jewish settlements are; I’ve also got a great emptiness of nature. They always talk about the Palestinians’ links with nature and the land. I have no link with nature, not to woods, not to mountains; I don’t know the names of the plants and trees as even my Israeli friends do. In Arabic poetry in Israel the names of all the plants appear, the za’atar and the rihan , but I don’t know them, can’t tell them apart, and I don’t care about them. For me nature is, somehow, the Jewish National Fund. All the forests and flora are the JNF. It’s all artificial and counterfeit. Can you see me wandering the mountains, hiking for the fun of it, and suddenly the Green Patrol [charged with guarding state lands] comes and asks me what I’m doing here?”

When I met Bishara for the first time, years ago, there was something forbidding in his appearance. I force myself to write this because it is part of the subject as a whole. There’s something forbiddingly Arab, I thought — his face is dark, his mustache thick — in the belligerence I attributed to him, all this formed part of the rough outline of the archetypical foreign and frightening Arab. Since then, every time our paths meet, I reflect on that. There is a special joy — joy in the victory of the weak, in the unraveling of any stereotype.

I asked how, in his opinion, Palestinians in the territories relate to the dilemma of the Arabs who live in Israel.

“They look down on us. Yes, yes. Before the intifadah it was the opposite — there was admiration. For a while even phony admiration. Admiration that was meant to inflate the Israeli-Arab experience. Yet I am not proud of anything. What do I have to be so proud of? Of the fact that the Arabs in Israel have not produced anything of significance? No culture, no elite, nothing. Their intellectual life is shocking. What is there for them to be proud of? Of their pursuit of lucrative professions, of money and more money? Of the lack of any intellectual dimension? There is not a single intellectual I can be proud of. Not a philosopher, not a single writer I’m proud of. They’re all dwarfs. Look at Emile Habibi, who makes an ideology out of the ‘Israeli-Arab experience,’ and every time he talks he declares, ‘We’ve stayed here for forty-three years!’ What do you mean you’ve stayed? What’s the big deal? But for him staying is a conspiracy . Do you understand? [He lowers his voice and whispers.] Some people got together and held meetings and consultations, and after a month of uncertainty they decided to remain in the State of Israel, to keep the flame burning…After all, our whole story, of the Arabs in Israel, is no more than the struggle to survive. That’s not such a heroic struggle. It was largely a story of cringing, lots of toadying and opportunism, and imitation of the Israelis. And when the Arabs here finally started feeling a little more sure of themselves, they had already turned into Israelis. What Israeli-Arab symbols are there that a man like me can identify with? Nothing. Even when you think that there’s an authentic phenomenon like the Islamic Movement, it turns out to be counterfeit. I debated their leader, Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish, in Haifa. An open debate before an audience. I was astounded at how little he understands Islam. Superficial. He doesn’t know it. For him, Islam is only a political tool.