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

“The word ‘autonomy’ only partially describes that relation.”

“So please describe it in more detail. When you say ‘political links,’ do you see representatives of the Palestinians in Israel sitting in the parliament of the Palestinian state?”

“If we vote for the Knesset in Israel, then of course we will not vote for the Palestinian parliament. But if the Israeli Arabs are part of the Palestinian state, then they can send representatives to the Palestinian parliament.”

“Do you believe that there can really be a situation in which the Palestinians living in Israel are an integral part of the Palestinian state?”

“What do you mean ‘believe’? Not in the short run, but in the long run. Still, maybe that will remain a dream.”

“Your dreams also interest me, and I’ll tell you why. Today [August 1, 1991], when I was driving to meet you, the American Secretary of State James Baker’s motorcade passed me. He came to hear from Prime Minister Shamir whether Israel is willing to participate in the peace talks. So if there actually is a serious intention of solving the major problems of the Middle East, without leaving any smoldering embers, it’s best for us to know clearly what the aspirations of the parties are.”

“Look, if we’re talking about real peace, about a historic compromise, about nations that truly want to live together, about equality and well-being for all, then it is possible to think of all sorts of political arrangements that the Arabs in Israel will participate in. What I had in mind when I spoke of autonomy is that instead of dividing this territory into two states, Israel and Palestine, maybe there could be one state divided into cantons. Like Switzerland. And one of the cantons would be that of the Arabs in Israel. Jerusalem might be a separate canton. That could solve ethnic problems within Israel, as well as the Palestinian national problem within Israel. That’s all.”

“Could you describe life in such an autonomous entity in Israel?”

“That’s not simple. How can a national minority achieve equality in a society that has a Jewish majority, a country that is defined as a Jewish state, in the absence of a general Israeli nationality? How is that possible? There is discrimination at all levels and in all areas of life. The Arabs here are half-citizens, and the state, for them, is half democratic. They are in the middle — between citizenship and subjection. The doors are only half open to them in all areas of life, and there are areas in which the gaps are getting larger. And all this is after decades of struggle for some kind of integration of the Arabs into Israel. That struggle has not succeeded. So I ask you, What is the message? How should the Arabs in Israel organize themselves as a national minority in order to realize their different ethnic national identity and realize their equal civil rights? The idea of autonomy is intended to provide an answer for both those questions.”

He is forty years old, and studied philosophy and English as an undergraduate at Haifa University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His major fields of interest are aesthetics and ethics. Today he is a member of the Philosophy Department at Bir Zeit University. Zeidani, like other Arab intellectuals born in Israel, has moved to the territories — he lives in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina with his wife and two daughters. “It is not an ideological decision that I should be — you know — participating in the struggle and educating my daughters from within the intifadah. To say it is ideological is good for making speeches. What was important to me and my wife was to live in a Palestinian community, a normal community for us, one that does not discriminate against us. In which I have respectable work. I simply can no longer stand a situation of discrimination. When a policeman says that you’ve made a mistake on the road, be careful and don’t do it again, okay and thank you, and I go, and then he calls me back and asks to see my identity card, and you know from that moment on you’re done for. So you look at that policeman, and show him how much contempt you have for him. But inside it’s not just contempt. It’s so painful it kills you.”

“Explain to me how he knows that you’re Arab.” I stray for a moment (or perhaps not) from the main subject of our discussion. “You yourself told me before that you ‘don’t look Arab.’ Your Hebrew is perfect and you speak without an accent.”

“Maybe it’s something in my eyes. Maybe in my insecurity…I guess the uneasiness is evident. Maybe the way I walk, maybe the suspicion I feel envelops me. Maybe”—he laughs—“maybe it’s really an aesthetic problem.”

I asked whether his presence in the territories during the intifadah had led him to formulate his idea of autonomy.

“Only in the tactical sense. I mean, they say there should be autonomy in the territories, and I say that this is the wrong place to have autonomy. Autonomy is what you do with a national minority within a country, not in an occupied territory. But that’s not the thing. What we see is that the model of integration, involvement, of coexistence that most Arab political groups have championed has failed. I argue that even were there not a state of war, it would not be possible to overcome your attitude toward us and the discrimination. So we need to look for another model. That could be the model of separation. That is, we will separate from the Jewish state and be part of Palestine, for instance. Or we’ll want self-determination. An independent country.”

“What they call the ‘Galilean state’?”

“I think that a ‘Galilean state’ is not realistic. So I propose an intermediate model — that we be part of the state, but that there be both separation and integration. Look at the experiences of other countries, Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and Eastern European countries, and you see that all along the way the integration model did not work. In Belgium they’re now talking of a federative structure; in Switzerland there’s division into cantons according to ethnic affiliation — Italians, French, Germans — and it works. In Canada it’s working, but it’s harder.”

These ideas of his have already aroused anger at him, largely from the Arab establishment in Israel. In several private conversations I heard, however — mostly off the record — favorable comments about autonomy, which they see as the only realistic solution. Sa’id Zeidani himself voices his views in a quiet and serene voice. He is a slender man of intellectual appearance, his face delicate and expressive. With each statement he dives inside himself and disappears for a moment before surfacing with the word he wants. As he speaks, quiet but firm, discerning and somewhat distant, he seems at moments detached, strange to that clay of emotions and anxieties, the mortar from which the politics of the region are kneaded. Yet at the same time I felt that his philosophical attitude, hanging in the time-lessness in which anything is possible, was what really threatened me.

“I told the Arab leadership here, You are chasing after an illusion. There will be no integration here. There will be no real cooperation with the Jews. So we need to change direction. To search for another framework. And when I speak of significant and full autonomy, I am also speaking, of course, of the territorial aspect.”

“But it’s not realistic — Israel has no region that is only Arab.”

“The border does not have to be a straight line.”

I recalled the summer evening when I drove from Nazareth to Mghar by an entirely “Arab” route — through the villages of Rayna, Kafr Kana, Turan, and Ilabun — brown stony hills, shepherds with herds of black, scrawny goats, brown hens pecking along the roadside, a veiled woman picking figs, pages from Arabic newspapers impaled on thorn bushes. Later I went through the streets of Sakhnin — in the courtyards of small neighborhoods women and girls stood sifting rice, or kneeling and slicing watermelons. A green, pencil-thin minaret suddenly shot up through the long twilight, as did the jubilant voice of a boy singing a prayer duet with the muezzin . I drove slowly, immersed in the odd sensation of being able to watch without being seen. Present and absent. A pair of neighbors in undershirts played backgammon, and a boy served them coffee. A group of youths strutted down the street, hair greased back, eyeing a gaggle of girls out of the corners of their eyes. It reminded me of how I had encountered an identical scene in the Lebanese village of Mimas during the war in 1982. It had been this same languid summer evening hour; the boys and girls met on the village’s single main road, looking, giggling, and taking measure of each other at a distance, bold and demure. The war would end sometime, after all, things would change, and you have to live those moments now, for there will be no more like them. For a moment it was possible to imagine that Sakhnin was located in the Shouf Mountains of southern Lebanon, or in Jordan, or near Nablus — the neon signs were in Arabic, the music coming from the cars was Arabic, and the atmosphere had the self-assured tranquillity of the masters of their own homes. The way people walked, their body language, was different, freer and more relaxed than what they showed when they were in Israel’s “Jewish” regions. More than once this summer I noticed what happened to people when, after sitting with them in their homes, we went outside. Even one’s natural environment can be foreign. Their faces immediately took on a foreign expression in order to pass our scrutiny. They unwittingly adjust themselves to our surveillance and become attenuated or, paradoxically, more blatant. But that evening in Sakhnin they were among their own. The Jews were not present, and one could even argue that the “situation” was no situation. I also had a sudden sense of relief (when I write this now, in Jerusalem, I begin to doubt myself — did I really? No fear or threat from that freedom “they allow themselves there”? No. On the contrary). An unexpected, refreshing sense of relief; after all, a burden gets taken off my shoulders that way.