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

Once or twice during this summer it happened that I glanced at my Arab interlocutors as they stretched their hands out to the view, or rubbed a fragrant sage leaf, the local yemshan, and held it out to me to smell. In doing this, something was conveyed between us — a gift, and a pain with no outlet, and confusion, of the type that can be caused only by another whose life is a kind of alternate possibility to yours .

“You see the wall there, by the bank?” Mohammed Kiwan swings his swivel chair around and points. “There they wrote, in big letters, ‘Death to the Arabs.’ And next to it, ‘A good Arab is a dead Arab.’ And that in the heart of the fair city of Hadera, straight across from my office window. Fine, so the day they wrote it I call the Hadera municipality and tell them, Hey, guys, right across from my nice little office they’re hanging me! So please, come clean it up. Ten days passed and they didn’t come to wash it off. The graffiti pricks me in the back. When did they come? When we brought the press into it; within a day the mayor had ordered the graffiti cleaned up.”

He is an attorney, lives in Um Elfahm, works in Hadera. At the beginning of the 1960s he had been a teacher—“an educator,” he corrects me — and was fired because of his political activity. At the time Kiwan was active in the Nasserist nationalist movement Al-Ard. In 1965, after Al-Ard was outlawed, he was among the founders of Sons of the Village, a radical Palestinian movement whose aim was to fight for an improvement in the status of the Arabs in Israel. “We called it Abna el-Balad, because balad means both ‘village’ and ‘homeland.’ It’s the unfortunate villager as opposed to the snobbish rich. It’s the common man, Voltaire’s Candide. I always look for that man. Among you and among us. I’d like to get to the Candides among you, too. But your communications media are blocked to us. How many times have they interviewed an Arab on a television talk show? Despite the fact that we’re nearly 20 percent of the population and talk, God knows, just like you. Where’s equality of opportunity? We’re always shouting, but no one hears. They don’t allow us to reach you. Here, two months ago I saw this guy Jojo from Ashdod on television, the one on the beach. What a wise and simple man! What common sense and humanity! I wrote him an open letter, for the newspaper, and called to him: ‘I, Mohammed, am searching for Jojo from Ashdod.’ The paper, of course, would not print it. So I’m still looking for those Jojos.”

“It’s not that complicated,” I told him. “Let’s drive down to see him.”

It wasn’t all that simple, either. Jojo Abutbul lives in Ashdod, Mohammed Kiwan in Um Elfahm. Who should go to whom? “Tell him we’ll meet halfway,” Kiwan suggested. “What do you mean halfway?” Abutbul grumbled. “I’ve got to be in my restaurant on the beach every day, tell him to come here.” I mediated, shuttle diplomacy by telephone, one day, another day, until Kiwan finally gave in; after all, he wanted to talk to Jojo, and if Jojo won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the beach.

On a hot summer’s day, at Jojo’s café-restaurant, The West Coast, under the palm branches spread over the roof, the two sat facing each other. The restaurant loudspeakers played American music, the beach slumbered beyond. Jojo took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Mohammed took out his pack. They lit their own, relaxed, and Jojo, the host, began.

“When we lived in Morocco, my mother had an Arab housemaid. She nursed me. That is, I grew up with her. I drank her milk. Let’s say that when you go to sleep your life is a kind of box that you have to deposit with someone for safekeeping. That’s an allegory. My mother would have had no problem handing that box, my life, over to her Arab neighbor. What I mean is that even when it was really a matter of life itself, the trust was so great that it was possible to place my life in her hands.

“So I–I don’t have any preconceptions about you. An Arab is a human being. An Arab has a soul. I once talked about the pain. Fifteen get killed in the territories and they put it in small print in the newspaper. A Jew gets killed in an attack and it’s on the front page! Why do they make distinctions when it comes to pain? If today I take my cigarette and put it out on Mohammed’s hand, and take a cigarette and put it out on my hand, you’ll measure the same force and feel exactly the same pain. Emotion. Love. Concern. Your son. These are things that weren’t given to us by the Likud or the Labor Party. Not by Judaism or Islam. I lost a son. I know what pain is. And that woman in Ramallah or Nablus, and don’t think I’m justifying in any way their stone-throwing, but he’s dead. She feels the same pain I felt when my son drowned in the sea. Pain can’t be divided; its force can’t be measured, because of its relation to a particular person.

“So I ask you, Mohammed, where do we want to get to? Are you satisfied with your plate, your bed, your house, or are you satisfied only with my plate, my bed, my wife, and my children? On the other hand, when a Jewish guy tells me he wants security here, you know? Security has no bounds! You can put a ground-to-air missile on every square meter. Will that give you security? Tomorrow some Ahmed won’t come and knife you? So where’s my security and where’s Mohammed’s security? So that’s what we have to talk about today, me and you — what are we willing to give each other? And I’m certain that if the two of us sit down and talk, we can finish off all the problems in two minutes.”

Mohammed listened quietly, nodding all the while. When Jojo finished talking, he said, “First I want to tell you that I’m glad I came to meet you. We don’t know each other. I saw you one time on television and I had the impression that you are a person with healthy natural instincts and a love of life, and I felt that this person is really looking for a way to live together. I’m happy that the minute we met you said that we can solve all the problems straight off in two minutes. So the only question is, What work will that leave you, Grossman?”

We laughed, and drank our first cup of coffee. The beach was still empty — only a few new immigrants from Russia cooking in the sun.

“Before we solve all the problems in two minutes,” I said, “maybe we could clarify the most basic concepts, so that we’ll know if we’re talking about the same thing. What do you, Mohammed, call this country, the one Jojo calls Israel?”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Mohammed said, “it’s always Palestine. I don’t care if Jojo calls it Israel. Jojo has the right to live here as an individual and as a nation, and my right as a Palestinian is to live in Palestine, as an individual and as a nation, with the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. That’s the basic principle, and I’m convinced Jojo will agree with me.”

“I agree 100 percent,” Jojo confirmed, “but you accept that this is also the Jewish state, right?”

“As far as I’m concerned, Israel can call itself whatever it wants.” Mohammed smiled. “If it’s just a semantic problem, I don’t care. But if it means — like now — that it’s a Jewish state with all the privileges and laws that discriminate in favor of the Jews, then other questions arise that I don’t agree with.”

Jojo stiffened. “Let’s get this straight. I, as a Jew, have no country other than Israel. I have to have one country that will be mine. I, Jojo Abutbul, was born Jewish. I did not decide that. I didn’t have a store where I could take from whatever shelf I wanted. I was born Jewish. I deserve a place somewhere in the world to live the way I want, yes or no?”