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

I also read Arnon Sofer’s words with my bifocal eyes. To do this I enlist the gaze of Riad Kabha of Barta’a, for instance, who works at Givat Haviva for Jewish-Arab coexistence and integration; and the eyes of Amal Yunes of Kafr Ara, who said, “I feel that I belong here, this is my place. I so much want to be a part of it, to be ‘someone’ in this society”; and Lutfi Mashour’s wink: “I don’t want autonomy here! That’s all I need, autonomy: to live in a ghetto. Maybe we really deserve a ghetto, but I want to be equal. To belong!” Of course, not all the Arabs in Israel want to be part of Israeli existence. And those who do did not arrive at that desire out of overwhelming love of Israel but rather out of acquiescence and prudence, through an arduous process of formulating a new identity. Their struggle is for the achievement of civil equality. When I read the new partition plan proposed by Arnon Sofer, my Arab eyes go dark — my homeland unremittingly measures me through the lens of a numerus clausus , counting my babies and my dead. Switching me by decree from fate to fate, and in any settlement that is reached, no one will ask my opinion.

(Maybe on this matter it is worth asking the Jews who have come from Russia what they felt when they heard the sighs of relief of so many Russians when their homeland’s door slammed behind their backs.)

“Their allegiance to the state is exactly commensurate with the distance of the Syrian tank from the border,” Professor Sofer says, and for a moment I accept his words at face value, because the assertion fits in well with my fears. Then I examine his statement in the light, and I am already unsure. No, I don’t think Israeli Palestinians will fight shoulder to shoulder with the Israel Defense Forces against the Syrians, but neither am I convinced that many of them will be prepared to act to exchange Israeli rule for a Syrian, Iraqi, or even PLO regime. I have no doubt that today many of them have a good sense of what Israel still has to offer them. For them, Israel’s destruction will mean the end of a dream that has not yet been fulfilled but which is worth fighting for.

Arnon Sofer: “So you’ll say, Very nice. You’ve solved the problem of the Triangle. But what about the Galilee? And I say, If —if there’s a role for population transfer to play in this country, it’s not with the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It’s with the lower Galilee. If! Now you’ll probably ask, How is it that liberal, progressive Arnon Sofer can say a thing like that? Well, first of all, the Labor Party has done it twice already. The classic case is the Golan Heights. There we feverishly deported 70,000 Syrians in the space of two days. Now when you, sir, travel through the Golan, everything is nice, and you’re a good Zionist and you can explain to your children how nice it is here. Or in the lower city of Haifa. Or in Jaffa, from which you transferred 60,000 Jaffans! Don’t try to escape that! So you know what? Ten hard minutes, and maybe it’s the right solution?”

“Ten hard minutes,” I reminded him of what we both knew, “and afterward forty even harder years.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t do it. You see? Here my entire model collapses, because I’m not able to take it through to the logical conclusion. I won’t deport my good Arab friends. Do you think I can tell people I’ve known for years, with whom I work, to leave their homes? I recently told one of those friends, If something should happen, call me immediately and I’ll be right over!

“So, in theory, transfer might be the right solution. With the Bedouin in the Negev, too, since they are an absolute majority in their territory. In theory. In practice, that’s a different story. Because I am not morally able to carry it out. Even if my life was in danger. I can’t. Even if it costs me my life. [He shouts.] What will I do? I’ve got a big moral problem. I don’t have an answer. We’re in a horrible, terrible, vicious circle. I take figures like these home each night and I can’t sleep. I have no answers. All the tricks we can do can put it off only for a week or a year. The Arabs don’t want us, and that’s horrible!

“So what can we do? Not much, but something. First of all, get out of the territories. That’s the only logical response to the demographic problem. Get out of the territories and you’ve created an overwhelming Jewish majority in the State of Israel. A fifth of the country’s population will be Arab, and that’s not a binational state. That’s a normal ratio of majority to minority, like in most countries. Even if the minute after our retreat there’s a bloodbath in the territories, get out!

“Then, divide and govern. Yes, that blunt, cheap trick. Cultivate the Bedouin. Cultivate the Druze. The Christians. And give. Give to whoever is good to us. If he feels good, he won’t want to rebel against us.”

“One of the things that really drive me crazy,” says Lutfi Mashour, an Israeli Palestinian Christian Arab and a newspaper editor, “is how smart Jews make the same mistakes that others have made. The Jews will fall the same way the English fell, with the ‘divide and rule’ method. You, too, are always redividing the Arabs into Christians, Muslims, Bedouin, and you explain to us that we, the Christians, we’re really part of the West, who got here only by chance, and that we’re not Arabs at all. You said that the Druze aren’t Arabs, and now you’ve started saying that the Bedouin aren’t Arabs! And we call the Bedouin Al-Arab— they’re the original Arabs, not us! Then you made a new division, and said that the Christians themselves are divided into Maronites, who are, as you know, fervent, strictly kosher Zionists; and the Catholics, who are, you know, still on probation, and the Protestants, whom you once thought of as the best Zionists, but today they’re the top PLO supporters. So you play nicely with your toys and don’t understand anything.”

“And what are you?” I asked Mashour.

“Me?” Mashour, an intricate, quick-thinking, and ironic man, chuckled. “When I am cursed as a Catholic, I’m Catholic. When they discriminate against me as a Muslim, I immediately become a Muslim. Ask — what about Jewish? Well, in the original sense, as I understand Judaism, I’m more Jewish. More than the Jews here, because what remains in your Israel of Jewish values?”

“…and reinforce the Shin Bet,” Arnon Sofer keeps hammering away, “and the police and border guard! A Shin Bet and police state, yes! Without any window dressing. There’s no choice. We really are doomed to make a Sparta here. A country with a military landscape!

“And bang in wedges! Put new settlements between them wherever you can. Push them in here and here and here. I can be proud of that, because I am one of those responsible for the idea of Gush Segev [a cluster of small settlements in the western Galilee]. We shoved wedges in here and here and here, so that as much as possible they don’t have territorial continuity.

“But in any case, all that is only a delaying action.” He slowly gathered up the papers, documents, maps. “It only postpones it for a few years. If you see the future with open eyes — the demographic balance, the youth leaving the country, the deterioration of society, the defense effort that is pushing us into economic catastrophe, and the disappearing democratic forces…. We don’t live on a desert island, and one day, when we’re weak, we’ll take the blow. The State of Israel, I very much fear, will be destroyed.”

“So why do you stay here?” I asked.

“A wonderful question. Why do I stay here? Because I was born here. Because my parents were Zionists. Because I’ve buried so many here. I’ve buried two hundred people here — friends, relatives, students. My brother fell in the War of Independence. And mostly — I don’t want to live in the Diaspora. I can’t. I told my children, That’s the way things are. This is my prediction. You are free to decide. I’ll stay here to hold the fort.”