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

“And if circumstances don’t change to your liking?”

“Then I’ll try to make your life miserable,” he said simply. “If you have thousands of Arabs with Ph.D.s who can’t find work, it will blow up on you. If you have tens of thousands who have no place to work in this country, and if you have more than 50 percent of the Arabs under the poverty line, even though we’re barely 18 percent of the population, you can certainly expect an explosion. Listen, I’m not describing anything apocalyptic here — there are lots of problems we’ve waited decades to solve, and we don’t see that in the foreseeable future, with the current form of struggle, we’ll have a solution. So do you want me to live in a state of inferiority for the rest of my life? And the future I make for my children will be that way, too? I don’t want that. I think every political theory justifies the use of different means — civil resistance, even violence — in order to achieve one’s goal.”

“…so even if there are a few Jews here and there in the Galilee, there can still be Arab autonomy there! Absolutely! And the extent of the Arabs’ allegiance to the state will, if you ask me, depend precisely on the distance of the Syrian tanks from the border! You saw in January 1991, in the first moment of the Gulf War, how all the truth came out. If we succeed in Judaizing the region, we will have put off the danger a little. It all depends on us.”

Professor Arnon Sofer, a Haifa University geographer. For the last twenty-five years he has been sounding the alarm against the trends he sees in Jewish-Arab relations in both Israel and the territories.

“First, the facts. Human beings behave in an interesting way. Over the years the birth rate has been declining steadily, while the death rate has not changed much. There is the primitive stage — many are born, many die. Then there’s the ‘Ashkenazi’ phase — you have fewer children because your wife wants to fulfill herself, wants a Subaru, and you put off another child until next year.

“The Israeli Arabs have sustained for almost fifty years the phase in which there is no decline in the birth rate, but a unique historical event has happened to them. We have brought their death rate down drastically over the space of four years. It happened when the people of Sakhnin stopped giving birth at home and started giving birth with us, at the Rothschild Hospital in Haifa.

“So we find a situation in which their birth rate is as if they were the most primitive people in the world but their death rate has dropped below even the Jewish death rate. Is it because they’re cleaner than you are? No! It’s because they are a population made up entirely of children. Here I want to touch on the worst situation, about which the public is generally mistaken. Approximately 50 percent of the Israeli Arabs are young children! Nearly 12 percent are high-school students. In other words, 62 percent of them are under the age of twenty! There are almost no old people! Because those are fellows from the Ottoman period, when the life span was short. There are very few old people in Arab society, and the great majority are young people and small children.”

I remembered that pleasant afternoon with Tagrid and Abed Yunes in Arara. The two children in diapers, and the couple’s argument over how many children they should have…

“True, true,” he confirmed patiently, “there is a decline in the birth rate. We see it in the tables. In recent years, however, there has been a small rise, which is also a cause for concern, and I think it is intentional. Women have come to the hospitals — in Afula, for example — and asked to have their IUDs removed, saying that it is their contribution to the intifadah. Yes, yes — Israeli-Arab women. A pediatrician reported it to me. But that’s not the decisive thing. What will be decisive will be the demographic process that I call ‘momentum.’ Even if Israeli Arabs today decide not to have more than two children per couple, there will still be twenty years during which the business will keep on going just as it does today, and it will explode. You don’t believe me? Take their one-year-olds. What will happen with them twenty years from now? Even if we suppose that they have only two children, think of what massive numbers of young couples there will be. The coefficient will remain horrible .

“And there are those who don’t limit themselves!” he shouts, as if outraged by some disgraceful breach of faith. “Sometimes you go to a village — and I have to tell you, these are my real friends — Feisal Zuabi in Miser, thirty children, all of them accountants, teachers. There’s a village here, Hajajra, and there’s a man there: when I was a student he had eighteen children, and when he was killed in an accident in 1978 he already had forty-eight children. Today he has 671 descendants in the village! Unbelievable! To put it concisely, religious Muslims continue to have children as if nothing had happened. The Druze continue. The Bedouin, too. So even twenty years from now you’ll have no consolation, so don’t look for it.

“Now, the main thing. In the year 2000—without counting immigration — the Jewish population will be 4.2 million and the Israeli Arabs will number 1.2 million; there will be about 1.5 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria and close to a million in Gaza. In other words, in Greater Israel, if we continue to control the territories, there will be 4.2 million Jews and 3.7 million Arabs. That’s already a binational state, clear and simple.

“Even if we add a million Jewish immigrants, and add them in as if there is no emigration, and as if the big wave of immigration does not increase emigration, and assuming that the Arabs continue to act just as they do now — compute the figures and you’ll be surprised. The Jews will rise from 54 percent to 57 percent of the population, and the Arabs will drop from 43 percent to 40 percent. That’s the whole difference. The binational state remains.”

He is about sixty years old. Tall, gangly, with glasses. He is open, patronizing. He piles the table before us with documents, studies, tables, data, with an aura of energetic, military, almost Hardy Boys-type enthusiasm. It is apparent that he sees himself as the last soldier on a mountain ridge, defending the lost cause of an inattentive and indifferent convoy. I, in contrast, in the face of the flood of numbers and maps and photographs that he stacks up around me, photographs he takes to keep track of illegal construction in the villages — I get more and more depressed.

“What’s wrong with there being an Arab majority in the Galilee?” young Mohammed Daroushe of Iksal asked me bitterly. “The Galilee has been Arab for two thousand years! So why have they made such a ruckus about an Arab who bought a dunam in Kfar Tabor [a Jewish town in the lower Galilee]? He’s not an Israeli citizen? He didn’t pay for the land?”

“What effect will an Arab majority in the Galilee have? Oho…” Arnon Sofer sighed deeply. “The effect will be over a very wide spectrum of phenomena. First, the sense of being a minority, or the other side’s sense of being a majority. When I go on a bus alone, I hide myself in a corner and read a book quietly. When two of us travel, we talk. And when we’re seven school friends, we shout.

“Because when you are part of a group, you behave differently. In the large Arab concentrations in the Galilee 90 percent voted for non-Zionist parties [in 1988]. Ninety percent! That’s not the case in small Arab settlements distant from the Arab center. You also behave differently on the road. You observe Israeli law less. There are areas in which you feel — from the driving, cleanliness, illegal construction — that the State of Israel ends there!