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

“Then there’s the language. You won’t speak Hebrew there anymore. You’ll speak only Arabic. And you’ll put on your kaffiyeh . There’s already the beginning of national consciousness. If a Jewish person goes there, the Arab’s territorial imperative stirs. A foreign body has entered the territory! And you ever so slowly gather strength. Then Jewish people have trouble getting there. When you, the Jewish idealist, settle in the Galilee, and everything is taken by masses of Arabs — from land, to shopping centers, to employment — because they’re the cheapest labor force — and you have that great magnet, Tel Aviv, acting on you, then you’ll get out of there pretty fast. You know, in the sixties the Galilee absorbed about 150,000 Jews. Guess how many were left ten years later. Guess. Thirteen thousand.

“In the meantime, all the essential components for the actualization of autonomy have been created. They have territory. In that territory there is a group that constitutes the majority. There you already have the two major factors in irredentism and autonomy.

“Technically, I can trace the borders of that autonomous entity. There is already a physical Arab continuity, including land ownership, that turns the entire area into a kind of territory. Take Arabeh, Sakhnin, Dir Hannah, Nazareth, B’aineh, Rumana. That’s a continuity. And remember that the most difficult areas in Yugoslavia today, between the Serbs and the Croats, are areas of mixed population. That’s where the battles began and got serious. That’s where the destruction is.

“That’s exactly what’s simmering under our noses. And it was spontaneous. No one planned in advance the establishment of the Arab Committee for the Preservation of Land, or the Arab Mayors Committee. But how was I brought up as a Zionist Arnon Sofer? I remember how we cried at the song ‘On the Negev Plains,’ and the eleventh of Adar, the day Trumpeldor fell, it was terrible, it hurt as if it had happened just yesterday! We beat the Greeks and got back at Pharaoh and screwed Ahasuerus. That’s how that little Zionist, Arnon Sofer, was brought up — as a great national patriot.

“Now look.” He bends his fingers one by one. “Land Day and Brotherhood Day and Home Day and Olive Day and Water Day and Equality Day. They stand at attention, they write songs, and our friend Toufiq Ziad, the mayor of Nazareth, writes: ‘Here in the enchanted Galilee we have a homeland!’ At their summer camps they celebrate that and draw pictures of it and cry for it, and when you go through Arabeh, you see stores painted with PLO colors, because they’re building a national consciousness!

“I sit with my good friend Majed Elhaj, who may be the next leader of the Israeli Arabs, and he tells me, ‘I won’t live with you in peace if you don’t change the flag. I want a Muslim color on the flag! And until you change that national anthem that does not speak of me or to me, I’ll fight for a binational state!’ ”

“No no no…” Majed Elhaj protests angrily when I quote that to him. “If I were really demanding everything Arnon Sofer says, it would mean that I’m demanding fully equal rights. I’m not demanding that! Under current circumstances, there can’t be equal rights. The Arabs in Israel are struggling for equal opportunities , not equal rights! It’s important to distinguish between the two. When Jews and Arabs speak of ‘full equality,’ they actually mean two different things. The Jew means changing the Jewish character of the country, and he fears that. The Arab means equal opportunity as regards budgets, services, and so on. There can be full equality only at a later stage, only if — in a peace process — the country begins to think again about its orientation, and to define for itself what it wants, whether to continue Zionist nationalism forever or whether there’s a new situation that allows a new social contract, in which all groups in Israeli society, including the Arabs, are partners as legitimate elements in Israeli society. Then, under such circumstances, it will be possible to speak of full equality of rights and responsibilities in all senses. Today there can’t be anything like that. Not yet.”

“Oh, don’t be so naïve,” Arnon Sofer prodded me. “That’s their goal. They’ll fight for it. Their goal is not equal rights. Here they’re already talking about a deep national problem! Their battle won’t end if Majed receives four tons of gefilte fish for Friday night! They’ve already built the institutional infrastructure for autonomy. But let’s examine what will happen from here on out. A Palestinian state will be established — something, by the way, that I favor — and the Israeli Arabs will tell us, Hey, guys, no more excuses! Now give us full equality! Now give us work in factories and industry and in military camps! But we won’t give them that. For objective Jewish reasons, we’ll always think of Arnon Sofer’s son before Majed’s children. And of your children’s education, and the new immigrant who will come to you, and not of him.

“Then the million and a half that will be in the large concentrations around Um Elfahm and the central Galilee will begin to say, as in Kosovo, that they want to be annexed to their country, to the Palestinian state. Irredentism. I ask my good friend Majed about that and he has no answer. Why should you be different from any other group in the world? Why should you be any different from the national groups in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia? Why should you be different, especially when you have a historical account to settle with me, and especially when we will never agree to non-Jewish rule here?”

“I am very concerned,” Majed Elhaj responded in his home in Shfaram, “that all this talk of irredentism, and about the ambitions of the Arabs for autonomy within Israel, will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s because it will grant policymakers the legitimacy they need to persist with their current Arab policy, even to make it worse. It confirms their assumption that nothing has changed with the Arabs, that nothing will help, and that the Arabs’ ambitions will remain, when it comes down to it, antithetical to Israel. My friend Arnon Sofer forgets, for some reason, that there are many minorities in the world and that not all of them demand their own country.”

Arnon Sofer: “All I am saying is that if the Palestinian state comes into being, and they really do deserve it, let’s redraw the maps of the old State of Israel. Because I say, Damn it, Jews, you don’t want to live in Um Elfahm, you don’t want to live in Wadi Ara? Then give them up! Let’s, for instance, give them that whole area, here, the southern Triangle, with its tens of thousands of Arabs, in exchange, for instance, for the security guarantees that were included in the Allon Plan. For all the army outposts along the Jordan River!”

I read what I have just typed with eyes that have recently become somewhat bifocal. This way of seeing with a Jewish-Arab double focus helps me a lot. Without it, how could I know how to find my way when, over the thousands of kilometers I’ve burned these past months, I saw almost no important road sign written in Arabic as well, even though Arabic is an official language in Israel? At the grocery store, how would I be able to tell the difference between spaghetti and macaroni, between yogurt and sour cream, if I didn’t know how to read Hebrew? How would I know that I should keep my children away from poisonous cleaning fluids and pesticides? Could I tell the difference between aspirin and antibiotics if I couldn’t read Hebrew and English? How could I understand that a sign says FALLING ROCKS, while another says CAUTION — HIGH TENSION WIRES? (At least I’d be spared the bumper stickers on the pickup trucks that read JEWISH LABOR! and the placards pasted up by Meir Kahane’s disciples that proclaim “We propose five years’ imprisonment…for every non-Jew who has sexual relations with a Jewish woman.”)