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

“Now, I’m not willing to make that comparison,” Yunes said, “but the link between the two things certainly exists. The principal impetus that led to the establishment of Israel was Jewish experience in the Exile and in the Holocaust. That traumatic experience affects all of life here. When you see those things you understand it in such a concrete way, and you realize how much the element of fear in Jewish society was deepened by the Holocaust. Fear of the foreigner. Fear of everything.”

When Nazir Yunes was fourteen, his father sent him to study at the agricultural boarding school at Pardes Hannah, together with Jewish children. “Father knew that we had to have strong ties with the Jews. To learn about them and learn to live with them. If we don’t know each other we won’t be able to live together.” Nazir entered the school not knowing Hebrew, and found himself studying about the early Zionists and the ‘redemption of the land,’ and singing ‘Hatikva’ devotedly. When his father found numerous mistakes in the Arabic of his letters home, he said, ‘I’ve lost my son.’ Today Yunes, forty-four years old, is a surgeon in the general and plastic surgery department of the Hillel Yafeh Hospital in Hadera. He speaks with a perfect Hebrew accent, reads for the most part in Hebrew, dreams in both languages, and counts in Hebrew.

“If I remember that 26,000 out of the 36,000 dunams of my village’s land were confiscated; if I remember that until the end of 1966 I needed a special permit to go from my village to the neighboring one, because of the military government; if my village received electricity twenty years after the Jewish settlement next door received it; if the road to Ara was paved only three years ago; if the ‘nationality’ and ‘religion’ entries on my identity card raise eyebrows in every office; if I see Arik Sharon’s maps in the newspaper showing how he wants to surround me with thirty to forty thousand Jews, to cut me off like a dangerous criminal; if every day more voices are calling for my, an Israeli Arab’s, eviction from the country — if I put all those together, I should hate you. But I just can’t hate you.” He nods his heavy, prematurely gray head. “I grew up within your culture. I was educated in a certain way. I can no longer hate you.”

He is a brave man. In 1991 with Palestinian-Israeli leaders declaring that the PLO, not Israel, represents them in the peace talks, Yunes rose at a stormy political rally in Um Elfahm and said, “The PLO does not represent us. The people that should be representing me in the negotiations with Israel over my fate as a Palestinian are we ourselves, the Palestinians in Israel.” This opinion is certainly that of many Israeli Palestinians, but Yunes was among the first to express it openly. In doing so he revealed the divisions among the Palestinians in Israel as to their role in the future peace treaties. Why am I relating this? Because it is all woven up with the central point, the special Israeli identity that might someday be created here.

“My children have a hard time understanding me,” he continued. “It’s strange for them to see me and my wife crying out of emotion and compassion when there’s a film on television about Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. What do they know about the Holocaust? My daughter, thirteen years old, never heard of the Holocaust. They also don’t understand how I can have a party at home and have twenty Jewish guests, colleagues from work, when the same night the Jewish army has been conducting searches and abusing people in the Nablus refugee camp, where their aunt lives. It all gets mixed up with them.

“Or one day I took the kids to the swimming pool at Gan Shomron, the Jewish settlement next to us, and bought them tickets, and the woman selling the tickets suddenly heard the children speaking Arabic and said, Just a minute. Wait outside. I have to find something out. Then she comes back and says, I’m sorry, this is a private pool.

“I took my children to one side,” Yunes related. “They were already in their bathing suits. I explained to them that the woman said that it’s a private pool and that we need special permission to enter. My two older children said, No, it’s because we’re Arabs.

“I took the woman to one side, and I told her that what really irked me was that I didn’t know how to explain it to my kids on the way home. You tell me what to say to them.

“So she said, I don’t know. It’s not my orders.

“I kept insisting: The children want to know why you aren’t letting us in. And I hope that because of this refusal my children and your children will not meet on two sides of a rifle fifteen years from now.

“She burst out crying. Afterward it turned out that she is a Holocaust survivor, and maybe she saw herself in a situation that seemed like somewhere else. I don’t know. We went home. They called later from the pool and apologized, and invited us to come again, for free, but we didn’t go. That is, I go there regularly. I’m the doctor at Gan Shomron. I care for them. Give their women their periodic breast examinations and stand in for the regular doctor when he’s not around.”

The idea of Palestinian autonomy within the Israeli state has churned beneath the country’s surface, invisible but present, threatening and suspicious, like a false bottom hiding no one knows what, and it echoes in all discourse between the two peoples. The things that Mohammed Kiwan hinted at during his conversation with Jojo Abutbul on the Ashdod beach gave me no rest. I searched for someone who could clear up the haziness and put it in perspective. So I met with Dr. Sa’id Zeidani, a native of the village of Tamra, in the Galilee.

“The Israelis always ask the wrong question, one I reject,” Dr. Zeidani said. “They ask me, ‘If a Palestinian state comes into being alongside Israel, will you remain in Israel or will you move to the Palestinian state?’ I think that we need to ask a different question: ‘If a Palestinian state is established, how will you, as an Arab in Israel, see your relationship to it?’ This allows a discussion of a much more complex and richer relationship. Of all kinds of mechanisms and arrangements for ties between the Arabs in Israel and those in the Palestinian state. I don’t know if I myself will move there, but I very much want there to be such a country, one that I’ll be part of, or at least that I’ll be on intimate terms with, even if I live within Israel’s boundaries.”

I asked, “What exactly is that ‘intimate relationship’?”

“For instance, if I live in the Galilee and a Palestinian state is established, it should mean something to me, and not just abstractly. It should solve my problems. It should represent the Palestinian experience I am a partner in.”

“How could you be a partner in it if you live in Israel?”

“That’s a difficult problem. There have to be, for instance, open borders between Israel and the Palestinian state. There has to be a certain link, maybe administrative, between the Arabs in Israel and Palestine. There can’t be a situation in which the Palestinian state comes into being after decades of struggle and we here remain indifferent to it, and it to us. This intimate relationship can be like that of the Jews in the Diaspora, in America, to Israel.”

“There’s an ocean separating the Jews in America from the Jews in Israel.”

“That’s right. And here we are talking about territorial continuity between Israel and the Palestinian state. So that we can have even stronger cultural, family, and commercial ties, ties of all types. Maybe a political link between us and them, maybe an administrative one.”

“What you’re actually speaking of is complete autonomy for the Arabs in Israel.”