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

But for Kiwan this is not just a one-shot argument. He’s fought his whole life for these ideas of his, and he’s paid the price. So he gets precise: “Just as you said. We need to look for a way to live together. But if your basis for discussion is to equate the rights of the settlers who stole land from Palestinian peasants with my rights in Um Elfahm, where we’ve been living on the land since time immemorial, then there’s no symmetry in your comparison!”

Jojo is again surging forward, and Mohammed’s lips are already moving, mumbling his prepared answer, and it is already manifestly clear how each argument lights a long wick of memories with the other, running swiftly down the fuse of painful wounds. You can see how in each segment of their conversation the entire conflict is reborn, from its shell made of yesterday’s newspapers back to Sarah the matriarch saying, “Cast on this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, with Isaac.” And in the background — the sea, which also, you may recall, was once assigned a role in the conflict. “You’re still not answering me about that, Mohammed, and time is running out. Think about it now and tell me yes or no, in one sentence; it has to be only one sentence, from the guts; you’ve got a problem, Mohammed, maybe because you’re a lawyer, you send it from the guts to the brain and then to the mouth, and the whole time I’ve been talking to you out of my nature. Will you, Mohammed, recognize without any challenge my right to one Jewish state? Yes or no?”

Mohammed laughs. “Look, my dear Jojo, from the cumulative experience of the Arabs in Israel…”

“He’s being a lawyer again.”

“Just a minute. Listen to me. After the Palestinian state is created, we’ll still have a problem with you. Our land. Our education. Our definition as a national minority here. Our national symbols. I’m coming out of all this, and in the most democratic way possible trying to change the situation, trying to convince you — not violently — that my good is your good. That we, the Arabs in Israel, will be a kind of, a canton, we ourselves will manage the—”

“Canton?!” Jojo burst out, from the heart. “Now you’ve killed me! Now you’ve actually created a state within a state!”

“Just a canton,” Mohammed Kiwan blurted out, “a small kind of authority…”

“A canton is a state within a state!” Jojo Abutbul repeated.

“Switzerland, for instance, is one country and it has cantons in it!”

“So you know what?” Jojo banged his fist in his hand. “I’ll keep the whole West Bank and Gaza under my control, and I’ll make cantons there! You decide what canton you want to live in!”

“I want to explain to you, Jojo, that autonomy, or a form of self-administration, call it whatever you want, does not diminish your future State of Israel; it can even augment it and be helpful to solve all the problems now, and not to leave any wounds under the skin, because I don’t want to reach a situation where ten years from now, because of the country’s discrimination against me, there will be an internal intifadah.”

“So there can be an intifadah of Ethiopian Jews, too, and an intifadah of Russians, and of the oppressed Moroccans, too! So we should make a Moroccan canton? Listen, Mohammed, what you’re actually saying is that a man like the Transferist is right. Gandhi says, I’ll transfer out the Arabs, by consent or by force, but when I finish there will be only Jews here. That way I prevent any wounds under the skin! Then they’ll be one wound, one earth-shattering scream, but that will finish it off and it will be healthier for everyone! You live with all your brothers in your Palestinian state. You won’t have double identities, you won’t have a problem that you need ten words to explain who you are, Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, Muslim, and I won’t have any problems either with citizens that threaten me constantly with an intifadah.”

Mohammed’s face paled. “If you are such a racist and ignorant man that you think, like Gandhi, that in the twentieth century it’s possible to transfer nations, then please. I think it will fail.”

Jojo: “I’m against it! But now you’re coming and scaring me, and not leaving me a choice!”

“People aren’t sheep to be taken to slaughter!” Mohammed shouted. “They’ll oppose the transfer! There will be more bloodshed here!”

“Then 200,000 were killed and the problem was solved!” Jojo came back with a shout. “Then 400,000 were killed! But with that we’ve solved it for good!”

“But you already know from historical experience that that won’t solve the problem! There will be a new problem!”

They pound the table furiously, shouting without listening. Two families of Russian immigrants, who might very well have arrived only a couple of days before, watch them in astonishment. They certainly have no conception how much this debate touches on them and their children. When Mohammed gets up for a moment to make a phone call, Jojo turns to me in amazement: “So there’s a problem here that will never be solved! So whoever is strong will live! There’s no other choice. Our leaders apparently know this problem. That’s one of the things we don’t know as citizens…So we’re back at square one with them again. We’re in a round room without corners. No one can sit in his own corner; wherever you sit there’s no corner…”He whistles in amazement. “So it really has to be clear in the peace agreement that we solve this problem finally, and this is the last opportunity. If the PLO is Mohammed’s sole representative, the PLO will have to commit itself to not having any more claims on the Galilee. We’ll be sorry if that’s not in the peace agreement.” He rose, then sat down. “And even though I’ve been arguing until today that peace is the thing Israel needs most urgently, now I’ll oppose it! With that kind of peace I’d rather not have it! Because then I didn’t heal a wound, I only covered it up, and underneath, the wound will continue to become infected. Then my situation will be that much worse, because I’ve already handed over my best cards, Nablus and Hebron…very interesting…and he’s honest, Mohammed, he’s speaking sincerely. Someone will have to give way here, no arguing that…I’m starting to understand what’s happening here…I’ve discovered a point of view that I, as an Israeli, never knew about.”

Mohammed returns, sitting down heavily opposite him. Jojo turns to him with a now quiet, slightly wounded voice. “I always thought that you and I were equal. You and I — part of the map. Sure there are problems, sure there isn’t complete equality, but we try to attain it. You are an Israeli Arab, I don’t interfere with your feelings or with your religion, and I’ll try to help you as much as I can, so that your son will go to a good school, so that he has a future here like my son. I was ready to put my shoulders level with yours. But to reach a state where one day you’ll want to set up a state within a state? I don’t care what you call it — canton, self-administration, the Autonomous Region of the Galilee. I, Jojo Abutbul, would be making myself a misery that I never thought of! So Jojo Abutbul is sitting and thinking that if that’s the case, maybe Gandhi and Sharon really know what I didn’t know and what you knew.”

Mohammed’s face isn’t what it was before, either. With a weariness much greater than that caused by the conversation itself he says, “Linking my ideas and Gandhi’s is very strange. Because if I wanted to be like Gandhi in my opinions and demands, I would have to say, Transfer the entire Jewish state of Israel! Abutbul will go to Morocco, the one from Russia will return to Russia, the one from Romania will return to Romania. But what I’m trying to explain to my friend Jojo, unfortunately not with any great success—”