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

“No, no, you really succeeded! God help me if I understood right what I understood!”

They sat and talked for a few more minutes, repeating their indictments and marveling at one another, trying to find a crack in the round, cornerless wall. Afterward Mohammed told of the classroom where his son studies, “in a four-meter-by-four-meter storage room, and in the winter, for there to be enough light, the teacher has to leave the door open.”

“The country should be ashamed of itself,” Jojo said. “It hurts me, it wounds my pride in my country, I won’t accept it.”

Mohammed continued to recount the daily hardships and harassments he endured as an Arab, problems deriving from the law and an abuse whose source was deeper. He told of a Jewish boy who had come up to him on the Netanya beach when he was there with his two small children and demanded that he, Mohammed, leave “because you’re polluting our beach.” Jojo listened. Before they parted, in an effort to smooth over — in retrospect — the sting left by the conversation, a clumsy effort but still heartwarming in its magnanimity, Jojo tried to put the best possible face on Kiwan’s demand for autonomy. “If we want Mohammed and his people to be loyal Israeli citizens,” he said, “first we have to be loyal to them. That means we can’t take what little remains to them: their honor, their pride, the little that a man needs in order to live. We won’t think only of what we want from them, we’ll also think of what they want from us. They’re part of us. And if there’s a Palestinian state next to the Jewish state, and Mohammed has the right to choose where to live and he decides to live here anyway, that will be to our benefit, it will bring us honor that he feels good and equal here. And when a man like Mohammed comes and says that he wants that, autonomy, his canton, he, in my opinion, doesn’t really mean it. He wants security. He wants a way to defend himself. That’s what he means when he asks for a canton. He actually wants a lot less than that — equality.”

Mohammed Kiwan accepted the hand proffered him. It seemed to me that Jojo’s moving gesture was more important to him — at that moment — than standing his ideological ground. Maybe Jojo really had understood Mohammed’s intent. I don’t know. “Maybe, as Jojo said with great justice,” Kiwan responded, “it may well be that the ideas I raised with regard to the canton were raised as a kind of shield, as the result of the cumulative and very bitter experience of the way the government here has behaved to the Arab population. But for me the most important part of this meeting was that I met Jojo the man. I felt in a very human way Jojo’s willingness to understand me, to identify with my suffering, and I leave here exhilarated, not because of what we said, but because of the sublime values of man and humanity. I always believed that every human being is, when it comes down to it, human. The stigmas, the labels Jew, Arab — this conversation proved that they are as important as an onionskin. And just for that I’m happy I came.”

The two of them stood, exhausted from the conversation, and then, in an impulse of the moment, embraced.

“Sure I want to be part of the country,” says Rima Othman, twenty-three, from Beit Safafa, a village nestled between Jerusalem’s old and new southern neighborhoods. “And I want to feel a little as if I belong here, but they don’t give me a chance. Even if there’s no law that’s overtly discriminatory, they always push you away here. Close the door in your face. Ask me why I so much want to get through that door they keep closing on me. The truth is that I don’t want to go all the way in. I don’t want to cast off all my culture and society, I don’t want to assimilate. But I want to get ahead like you. I’m not saying really compete…”

“Why not?”

“Okay, why not. The truth is that competition makes for quality. And I think that Israeli society brings us quality and progress. If I weren’t an Israeli Arab woman, if I were a Jewish woman, I’m sure I wouldn’t be studying speech disorders. I’d be a secretary. But our society imposes on us a responsibility to advance, to improve ourselves. Because we need doctors, lawyers, social workers. We have to move forward.

“As a Jewish woman I’d study. What would I study?” Her eyes float through space as she smiles to herself. “Maybe I’d study business, have a briefcase, meetings, telephones, long-winded talk. But I’d be learning something useful. The truth is that I wanted to do a master’s in speech disorders between different nations, but that seems too abstract to me. And we don’t have the luxury of occupying ourselves for no purpose with useless things. Not only that — curing international speech disorders is too discouraging. I’ve stopped believing in it.”

She pauses for a moment. Begins to say something. Laughs at herself. “Because I still believe. Or hope. I fool myself. You see, I’m always changing my mind…unstable…you know, in that I envy the Arabs in the occupied territories, everything’s much clearer to them. They know that they are there, and know whom they are fighting against and whom they should hate. They don’t have to go to a clinic and be treated by a Jewish doctor, who’s nice to you and helps you, and yet maybe he’s a Kahane supporter. But if I lived in Ramallah, would it bother me to hate Jews in general? What contact would I have with Jews? Only through repression. Sometimes I get upset about something and say, I hate Jews. Two minutes later I think, But I can’t hate. Noa, my friend, is Jewish. And my friend Miriam is Jewish, and religious. When I studied at Tel Aviv University I was the only Arab among forty Jewish women, and it was important for them to make me feel that I was accepted. They were all so nice to me, I’d be hurt if they told me that they hate Arabs.

“The same is true in the opposite direction. Jews who don’t know Arabs — it’s easier for them to hate us. They know the Arab laborer, the terrorist, the Arab with a kaffiyeh and a knife. That’s why I, when I was an Arab woman in Tel Aviv, maybe I went out of the way to be very nice to the women in my class, to show them that I’m an Arab and you can get along with me, and if you can do it with me, there are many more like me.”

She is a tall young woman, well dressed and made up. Her hair is chestnut and falls to her shoulders. She is soon to marry a man from Teibe. For the time being she lives with her parents on the edge of Beit Safafa, almost on the tracks, in a neighborhood where the walls tremble when the train, the village’s timekeeper, passes by. A woman I once met told me that “Jerusalem is every place from which you hear the train whistle.” Beit Safafa, by that criterion, is in the center of town.

Like Barta’a, Beit Safafa was also cut in two by the Rhodes armistice agreements. By night smugglers spirited tomatoes and potatoes across the border from Israel to Jordan, and spices and pine nuts and almonds in the opposite direction. Rima’s parents were married a month before the war that united the village, and they conducted the wedding procession right along the border, so her father’s sister could participate in the celebration. The village school has “Jordanian” and “Israeli” classes in adjacent rooms. When she was seventeen Rima passed the Israeli high-school graduation exam, while friends of hers took the test devised by the Jordanian Ministry of Education. She studied Bible, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history. They studied Arabic, Koran, and Arab history.

“In our civics lessons I saw that there is no such thing as a pure democracy. I saw how much you could play with the law. Still, there’s nothing like democracy! During the Gulf War I was on a trip to London. In Hyde Park I argued with Kuwaitis and Egyptians — even Israel is better than you are, I told them. There was a Jordanian there who got me so mad! He told me that he blamed the Arab leadership for the Arab nation’s problems. I shouted at him, And I accuse the people of acquiescing in such leaders. Because if we, the Arabs, were a courageous people we would get rid of all our leaders! You should have thrown King Hussein out a long time ago! And I told him how in the intifadah there had been a lot of excesses by the Israeli Army, and they caught the soldiers who did the excesses and put them on trial, and they wrote about it in the newspaper. In what Arab country could that happen? Suddenly I felt I was defending Israel. How did that happen to me? But I was just making a comparison.