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

“Just a minute!” The internal security officer sets off his siren within me. “Where did you get those pretty words? Don’t you know that three weeks before your enchanted evening in Sakhnin we uncovered in that very village a cell that planned to blow up the Rafael military industries building, a real gang of terrorists?” You know what, I answer him, maybe not even a single group like that would have risen there had we been smarter and bolder. If the people of Sakhnin felt relaxed and free in Tel Aviv as well. Have you ever tried that line of thought?

The idea of autonomy for the Arabs of Israel celebrated its sixtieth birthday not long ago. In 1931 it was proposed by a Zionist leader: “We conceive of the regime in Jewish Israel in the following way: the majority of the population will be Jewish, but the equal rights of the Arab citizens will not only be ensured — they will be realized. Both languages and all three religions will have equal privileges, and each nation will receive the right of cultural self-determination.” The speaker is Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist leader whose ideological heirs in Israel today are Yitzhak Shamir and the Likud Party, and the words come from his article “Round Table with the Arabs,” included in a book with the ironic title of On the Road to Statehood .

Jabotinsky went into even greater detail in “The Revisionist Manifesto”: “Absolute equality of rights for the two races, the two languages, and for all religions will prevail in the future Hebrew state. National self-government for each of the races in the land — in matters of community, education, culture, and political representation — must be implemented to the fullest measure” (from On the Road to Statehood ).

On January 26, 1990, Sa’id Zeidani published his plan in the newspaper El-Arabi:

I conceive of an autonomous regime for the Arabs of the Triangle and the Galilee, including an independent elected administration that has the widest possible authority.

a. The establishment of one or more Arabic universities in Israel.

b. Making Arabic the official language in the zones belonging to the autonomous regime.

c. Decision-making authority regarding construction, development, health, and environment.

d. Decision-making authority on the issue of non-military national service.

e. The establishment of a local police system, responsible for internal security in the given area.

f. Decision-making authority in questions of education, and the establishment of the goals and contents of the educational system.

The autonomous areas will have federal links with the State of Israel. Their administrations will have a free hand in creating and strengthening ties with the rest of the Palestinian people and the Arab nation, both before and after the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The autonomous authority will not infringe on full and equal citizenship.

“Territorial autonomy,” I asked Dr. Zeidani, “is generally a stage preceding total separation from the mother state. Who can ensure that after the Palestinians in Israel have autonomy they will not want to adhere to the Palestinian state?”

“Such a risk exists, of course,” he responded sedately, “but, on the other hand, Israel has done everything to ensure that such a possibility will not come up for discussion. With regard to its population-dispersion policy. The Jewish border settlements, the kibbutzim, the locations of absorption centers…Adherence to the Palestinian state is not realistic.”

“Who will control the external security of the autonomous region?”

“Israel. But in all other matters — I’m the boss. The judicial system will also be separate. With regard to elections to the Knesset, the existing state of affairs can continue. Or the canton could send ten or twenty Knesset members, in proportion to its population.”

“In Switzerland, for example,” I noted, “the citizens of the various cantons send their sons to the country’s army.”

“Autonomy is a solution to the army problem as well. So far, the Arabs in Israel have not been required and have not asked to serve in the army. But in territorial autonomy, which has its own police force and its own national guard, it is possible to speak of national service. They can compel, or ask, every boy of a certain age to serve a year or two or three in public service of the autonomous region. In other words, Israel will not require national service for its own ends. Instead, the boys will serve their own society. They could work in public institutions, serve in the national guard, in the hospitals, in the police force.”

“Describe your ambitions in the field of education.”

“That’s what we want autonomy for, isn’t it?”

“Why, if that’s the case, don’t you limit yourself to a demand for cultural autonomy?”

“What’s cultural autonomy? Where in the world has that worked? I want an Arab university where I’m the boss, but as part of my control of my entire society. A Jewish man will not be the boss where I live. Today, say I’m interested in nuclear physics. Can I study that in Israel? And if, hypothetically, they were to allow me to study that, what work could I get afterward? In construction? You can’t separate the functioning of the educational system from what you do after you graduate. You can’t detach education from the economic life of the entire population. I want, after all, to direct my own education so that it will answer the needs of my society, as I see them, and not as the Ministry of Education in Jerusalem determines for me. What are our graduates when they finish their studies? Teachers teachers teachers. They aren’t taken in accordance with their abilities. Not into the universities, or the Israeli civil service, or the foreign service. They aren’t given places on committees; they are not directors, or deputy directors, or senior officials, or ministers. We have no place here. I want a society I have a place in. In which there’s something I can relate to and where I’m my own boss. I’ll decide who my supervisor is, and according to what abilities, and there won’t be anyone who will put a ceiling on my ambitions.”

Were I to speak with such a man in another country, I thought to myself, with a Basque in Spain, for instance, how easy and simple it would be to feel sympathy for him. Here is a man who dares to express radical opinions, to confront a hostile regime and, more important, his own society. People like him are models of courage, self-respect, and utter intellectual honesty. And when I recalled some of the interviews I had conducted these past months — the evasiveness, the pandering, the off-the-record courage — I could not but feel a certain relief in the presence of Zeidani’s openness and his egregious stand before me, before us.

“You certainly know,” I told him, “that your idea of autonomy puts you straight into the Israeli nightmare, one that wakes up the dreamer to tell him, ‘It is no dream.’ ”

“Listen. Israeli nightmares don’t interest me, if they’re at my expense.”

“So why should your ambitions interest me, if they are at my expense?”

“I want you to feel that you have a problem with me. And that problem will explode at some point in the future. I won’t go on being your obedient subject. There is a new generation of Arabs in Israel. A new potential. Ambitions open to the world. I won’t let the country treat me the way it treated my father. That has to be clear. I’m a proud, modern, educated man with a sense of pride. I, to speak in Darwinian terms, am already a different species than my father was. I want to be an equal citizen, without waiting for a hundred years! I want my daughter to be an equal citizen just like your son. And if you don’t want me to be your equal, go to hell.”