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

“My children, when I have them”—she sighs—“will not speak in generalizations, that’s certain.” Her lips purse. “And I can’t take anything all the way. What little I’ve seen of Israel I can’t love all the way. Today, when I leave Jerusalem, for instance, and see the mountains, I think, Oh, how much you’ve been through, mountains. And I think, If the sea could talk, if the mountains could speak. Who dwelt on you? Who built on you? Who lived here? Who will live here? Are you mine? Whose? And all the questions start up again.”

During one of the lessons in the twelfth-grade class in the village high school, in the center of Israel, I asked the students what they knew about the Holocaust. At first they could not figure out what I was talking about. Maybe they didn’t know the word. I translated it into Arabic. Most of their expressions were still blank. One girl said hesitantly, “What the Nazis did to the Jews?” When I confirmed this, everyone remembered. They had spent four hours studying World War II, and they knew. “That they put them in the ovens? I heard that he killed six million Jews.” She smiled. “That’s what they say.”

A boy named Munzir, who sat in the first row, said, “I saw a television documentary on that. In my opinion, what they say about the Nazis isn’t right. They killed maybe only a million.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because human beings can’t kill so many people. He wasn’t as cruel as you say.”

“Do you see anything good in what Hitler did?” I asked.

“First of all, he brought the whole German people together under him, and wanted to unite all the nations of the world. But the Jews were a problem for him, because they’d gotten control of all the money in Germany. Hitler wanted the Germans to be in control, and the Jews interfered with that. So he killed them. But certainly not more than a million.”

Most of the students in the classroom nodded their heads in agreement. I thought, Arabs have so often accused us Jews of guilt in the deaths of the six victims of the Land Day massacre in Sakhnin in 1976. They saw the murdered men as symbols, as a myth, and made demands in their name.

I asked, “And do you think it is justified to exterminate a minority that interferes with a majority?”

“Well, not eliminate it. But deport it, yes.” Munzir chuckled. “All they did was a population transfer.” But here another boy, Amir, spoke up: “Population transfer isn’t legitimate! What Munzir is doing is to justify the Israeli regime that wants to do that to us. After all, we interfere with Israeli rule here!”

I asked if they feel that the Jews in Israel treat them the way the Germans treated the Jews. The young people had no doubts. Cries of agreement came from all directions. When I noted that Israel is not trying to physically destroy the Palestinian people, neither from racial nor from other motives, a boy named Naim threw this out at me: “It’s exactly the same thing there and here! Israel wants to get rid of the Arabs, wants to exterminate us!”

“Exterminate you?”

He thought for a minute. “Okay, maybe not physically, but spiritually! It wants to eliminate our history and literature. They forbid us to study our national poets. In a moral sense, they are destroying us!” As he spoke he grew feverish. “They want us to assimilate, to become Israelis, to detach ourselves from the other Arab nations, to forget what it is to be Palestinian. Isn’t that destruction to you?”

“Of course, they don’t know anything about the Holocaust,” said Mohammed Handuklo, a history teacher at the Jat school. “What do they know? That the Nazis were against the Jews and wanted to evict them from Europe, and they know some of the solutions that Hitler, let’s say, made use of. I’ll tell you straight out, we don’t give that any special attention. We study it the way we study, say, the Vienna Congress. We talk about it for as long as the curriculum says we should, give assignments; the students debate a little about whether he was right or not, if he should have done it or not. Various opinions are expressed, and that’s it.”

“How many hours, on the average, does the Arab student spend studying the Holocaust during his time at school?”

“There’s no average.” He laughed. “Exactly one lesson. I teach one lesson about it.”

In other words, fifty minutes.

I asked Dr. Ali Hidar, the director of Arab education in the Ministry of Education, why so little attention is given to the Holocaust in the Arab curriculum.

“I can understand it if they don’t go into the Holocaust in depth,” he said. “Because it’s a sensitive matter.”

“Very sensitive,” I agreed.

“In everything that relates to the extermination of the Jews,” he went on, “the Arab teacher is afraid that they’ll say that he — you know — that is, who knows, maybe some of the students will suspect him of, you know, being glad of what happened…”

“But the teacher can present the Holocaust objectively, according to the facts, and that way he can teach what happened there.”

“No, no…” Hidar mumbled.

“He can find universal lessons in the Holocaust; he can also tell them that the Arabs were the next ones in line for extermination, according to Hitler’s book.”

“Yes, that’s the way I explained it when I was a supervisor and I was once invited to a school where they had painted swastikas on the road. I explained it all to them — until they cried. But I have the background. I’ve visited the Ghetto Fighters Museum, and I know. But another teacher, whatever his position is, there are those, his enemies, who will claim that he taught the Holocaust and favored the extermination. With us, in the Arab sector, there’s no small problem of informants.”

Does the situation seem immutable? I asked. He said that he, together with Lapid, an organization that seeks to educate the public in the lessons of the Nazi extermination program, had recently begun to formulate a lesson plan for Arab teachers, to help them give their students the facts about the Holocaust. “It all depends on the teacher.” He sighed. “But not every teacher is able to cope with it. It’s a big problem.”

“Why should we learn about it?” a girl from the Jat twelfth-grade class shouted at me. “They’re always teaching us about how the Jews suffered!”

I prefer to answer her by quoting an Egyptian, Tahsin Bashir, formerly President Mubarak’s personal ambassador. “The Arabs have no consciousness of the Holocaust,” he told me. “At most we see it as the way you justify what you are doing to the Arabs, and for that reason we have little patience for it. Before we made peace I always argued that we lacked a serious book about Judaism in Arabic, a scientific and well-documented book. Not propaganda. We also lack any acquaintance with Israeli literature, especially that part of it that deals with the Holocaust. There is not, for example, an Arabic translation of Anne Frank’s diary [actually, there is, translated by Mohammed Abassi]. How can we understand you? The Holocaust is, after all, one of the main keys to the Jewish soul. As long as the Arabs do not hold that key, we will not be able to gain entry.”

“Last year I took an organized tour of Eastern Europe,” Dr. Nazir Yunes of Kafr Ara told me. “The group included the children of Holocaust survivors, people whose families had been murdered there, people who themselves had been there, and partisan fighters. Obviously, the tour was centered around the extermination camps. I heard their stories, and they’d talk on the bus rides. They made everything I’d read in books very concrete. I went with some of them to look for their old houses. I took a cab with one member of the group and we went to his hometown, in Czechoslovakia. He remembered every street and every house. We reached his house, and his nurse was there, old and blind. In the extermination camps we visited I stood in front of the gas chambers. We lit candles, and all of a sudden everything you knew about the suffering and the history of the Jews runs through your head, and you tremble, almost enough, I’d say, to make you cry. At the gas chambers I asked a friend of mine, an Arab who was there with me, ‘What does it mean to you that entire villages, whole towns were erased there in a single day?’ And he answered me, ‘What do you want, look what they’re doing to us now.’