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

The fate of the people of Biram was no better. They were living in abandoned houses in Jish (called Gush Halav in Hebrew). In September 1953, five years after they had been duped into leaving, the Biramers stood on a hill above their village. Now they call it “the hill of tears” and “the Biram Wailing Wall.” Down below, not far from them, the village of their birth was abuzz with unusual activity. Military vehicles and bulldozers surrounded it, and a company of soldiers walked through the village laying out wires.

The refugees heard a loud explosion and saw their houses fly up in the air. The whole action took only five minutes — brief and efficient. For five minutes the village, with its people looking down from above, quaked and was destroyed. Then the bulldozers began leveling the ruins.

Now the whole area is silent. The air is clear. Tangled thorns sway in the breeze. A small hill, a ruin, with little vegetation, rises up over the plain. Here and there broken stones are scattered about. Above, a single structure — the restored church. We climb up a difficult, rocky path, but here Aouni Sbeit has almost no need of his cane. He skips between the stones and shrubs, using his stick to point out a rusty olive press, a small pool for collecting the olive oil that runs off the press. We step over a path of cut stones, hidden among the thorns and the caper bushes. Aouni’s legs lead him without needing directions — Here was the road that descended from the village. I would go down from here. Here is the well. And from within the deep well grows a magnificent chinaberry tree.

I ask him how he felt when he came here for the first time and saw the ruins.

He turned to me, smiling benevolently at my foolishness. “Let’s trade places. I’m David and you’re Aouni Sbeit. Now write what you felt.” He adds, “Man is not stone, hawajeh .”

He calls me hawajeh , “sir.” You can tell the members of his generation, the generation of defeat, by that hawajeh . Even after forty-odd years they seem not to have recovered from that huge upheaval that undid their lives and turned them from masters of their homes into barely tolerated guests. “…the event that emptied our heads and erased memories from our memory and blurred the contours of our world,” as Emile Habibi wrote in his novel Ahtia . “Beyond their comprehension,” as Shakur said, was this cruel awakening into a morning that was not theirs, the morning of a nation that was at the pinnacle of its new ascent, which had given birth to itself out of cataclysm and had vigorously suckled all the future that was then to be had in the region. They slowly awaken to find themselves bound in the strong cords of ingenious laws, unintelligible to them, and arguments that could not be challenged — historical justice, ancestral right, security needs — yes, who could possibly doubt the right of adversity we had then, but “then” (have I said this already?) is over.

“Returning the villages would weaken faith in Zionism, and create doubts about the justice of its claims,” Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1972. She thus placed above the justice of our claims a huge billboard that said: CAUTION: WE ARE RIGHT! Lutfi Mashour sighed, “That’s what I always say: Our problem is, we’re dealing with Jews.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s our problem. If we had been conquered by someone else…but you were always better bastards than we were, stronger than us, more legalistic than us, more paranoid than us. Take, for example, the Turks. They conquered us and went to hell. They had no culture. What was their culture? Large pots! That’s all they left us here…They didn’t have the brains and the character that you have. With you it is very difficult,” he said, and then grew serious. “You are a very strong nation. Too strong a nation.”

“Here there were figs, and here olives, and here grapes.” Sbeit’s cane waves in the air, drawing orchards and vineyards. “And here was my house.”

Now it is only a mound of wreckage next to the church. Aouni Sbeit’s father had been the village mukhtar , and his house had been the only one with poured concrete. “Father himself chose every stone in the house. When the house was destroyed, people came and stole the stones. Not one remains.” With his cane he straightens a trailing raspberry bush, pacing absentmindedly between the large pieces of dung shat by Dari’s cows in his living room. It shocks him anew each time he sees it.

“If they allow you to return, would you come back here?” I asked Halil, Aouni’s son, who now lives in Haifa. He shakes his head definitively: No. He has already become accustomed to city life. He’s used to living away from his family. He will not return. But his father differs. “If they let me return, I am ready to sleep even on this,” he said, striking a thorn bush with his cane. “Look what a crime they have committed against us. We are refugees in our own homeland. And how often we have asked to return. And how much they promised us. Who didn’t promise us? Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann and Begin and Golda Meir and Ezer Weizman and Moshe Arens. I said to Shimon Peres, ‘Mr. Minister, let’s put the Israeli Declaration of Independence between us and go over it section by section, and let it judge between us.’ Yigal Allon once asked me if the children of Ikrit who were born in Rama still think about Ikrit. I laughed. I, to this day, live in a rented house in Rama. I did not build a house. Because I believe that my sons will be able to return. If you gather together all the children in Rama and ask them where they’re from, the smallest of our children will tell you that they’re from Ikrit. I’ll take you to a pregnant woman, put your ear to her belly and you’ll hear: ‘I’m from Ikrit.’ ”

Afterward, in his home in Rama, Sbeit shows me a picture that an anonymous Jewish photographer took fifty years ago, “one who used to wander around the Galilee looking for pretty things to photograph.” Aouni’s wife also came to look, and her eyes immediately filled with tears. “Look what we had and where we are now, refugees…” She waved her hand at the bare floor of their rented house, the peeling walls, and fled. The photograph in my hand showed a village blooming with flowers and green with trees: Ikrit when it lived.

Halil: “For Father, Ikrit is memories. It’s his childhood. For me, Ikrit was the escape from the Rama that didn’t want us. Didn’t absorb us. To this day we’re considered refugees there. We’re considered homeless. The people of Rama did not intermarry with us, will not give their daughters to a refugee. To this day — forty-three years later! — they make us feel like strangers. They curse us. Humiliate us. Rama is a very closed society. I have no chance of getting involved in the municipal government. If I tried to get involved, they’d tell me I don’t belong.”

Do the people of Rama act that way because the people of Ikrit moved into their houses when they were exiled? Is it because the people from Ikrit are Christian, while the rest of Rama is Muslim and Druze? Is it because the people of Rama wish — in accordance with instructions they received from somewhere, or of their own volition — to keep the Ikrit refugee problem alive? Halil listens to the questions and nods, but makes no response.

“Will you, despite all that, be a candidate for the Rama village council?”

He smiles. “That’s the other side of the matter. The people of Ikrit won’t support one of their own.”

“?”

“Because they refuse to participate in the elections in any way. It is liable to be interpreted as an acknowledgment that they already belong to Rama and not to Ikrit.”

Today the people of Ikrit are spread all over the country. Yet they hold their religious and family celebrations here, and the whole community gathers. The same holds true for the people of Biram. I heard of a man from Biram, Joseph Elias, who for nineteen years has worked a small piece of land at the edge of the ruined village. He goes there three times a week to water his vegetables. Sometimes, on Saturdays, there is a long line of cars along the road to the two villages. On weekdays you are also likely to find an Ikrit family having a picnic. “They come to take a little of the air here, to renew their strength.” The younger Sbeit laughs.