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

“You should know,” Aouni explains for the third or fourth time, “that the problem of Ikrit and Biram is different from the problems of other villages and refugees. We did not flee and were not expelled. The army came, was our guest, ate of our bread, drank of our water, and promised to let us return.” His son shakes his head as one who knows that these are but dreams, words worth less than the air that carries them. “They don’t want to return us,” Halil bursts out in the end, “because that will reveal the truth about what happened in ’48. You are afraid to admit that the Palestinian refugees did not flee. They were plundered. If you return us, it will shatter the myth on which you’ve educated each generation of your youth.”

“The government,” I answer, my lips unmoving, “is afraid to return the people of these two villages to their homes, lest it become a precedent.”

“What do I care about your government’s fears?” Halil fumes. “It’s my right to demand justice for myself! Why do I have to deal with the whole refugee problem? That’s a problem you made, not me!”

We descend through the thorn bushes to the cemetery. The mountains around us are covered with green, the Galilee is drunk with spring, and only Ikrit’s hill is nearly bald. As if nature had decided to leave a patch of starkness here. Neither is the hand of man to be seen — the place has been declared a military area, so no one, Jew or Arab, may cultivate the fields, and they have wasted, as if the place is still staring around groggily, still in shock.

In the cemetery Aouni Sbeit shows me the graves of his father and mother. Since 1972 the Ikrit dead have been allowed to be buried in their village, and each family has established a plot of its own. All descendants of the villagers — even if they themselves were not born in Ikrit — are put to rest here. The first to be buried on Ikrit’s land after the eviction was Aouni’s grandfather. When he died, in 1953, his family brought his body and buried it here, in accordance with his will.

“When we left, the army came and asked us what he was doing here. We told them. They said, Now go back and take him out and take him back to Rama. We dug him up and took him back on our shoulders. What were they afraid of,” Sbeit asks, “that he might rise from his grave and sow the land?”

“Evil are those who make history,” said Hegel, but there, on the deserted hill of Ikrit, one could only consider how history makes people evil. I will not list all the promises made to the people of Ikrit and Biram. Promises by Labor governments and Likud governments. All were broken. Menachem Begin wrote to them to say he supported their return, but that it would be delayed because of the security situation. Most of the villages’ land was long ago parceled out among the surrounding Jewish settlements, and parts have been declared nature preserves. A minuscule number of the deportees have accepted the government’s offer of compensation. All of them rejected a proposal to establish new villages for them, because their original lands were not included in the designated area.

In June 1986 cabinet minister Moshe Arens declared his intention of returning the people to their villages soon. The villagers were carried away by a wave of joy and hope. They called Moshe Arens “our new Moses,” and hoped that he would lead them back to their land after forty years of exile. Yet this promise also came to naught — Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shot it down in a way that was described in the Likud as “a slap in the face for Arens.”

Until 1948, my grandfather and grandmother, my mother’s parents, lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem. It was then a mixed Jewish and Arab neighborhood. When the War of Independence began to intensify, my grandfather, Shalom Vermus, began each night to transfer his religious books and the lighter furnishings to the home of friends in the western part of the city. Afterward the war began to rage around them, and my grandfather and grandmother, with my young mother and her brother, became refugees in their own land. One evening, at the beginning of October 1991, I returned to that neighborhood to meet the Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens, in his office. “There is no justification for preventing the people of Ikrit and Biram from returning to their land. Today there are no security considerations to prevent it. Those who oppose it fear that it will be a precedent that will open a Pandora’s box. I don’t see a precedent here. Ikrit and Biram are special cases.”

I asked him why the Israeli government should not now, with the beginning of the dialogue between the countries of the Middle East, or during the process, make a symbolic gesture and call on the evacuees to return. If it is a precedent, I said, it would be a precedent of goodwill, of generosity, and of self-assurance.

“If it depended on me, I would do it,” Arens said simply. “I think that we need to do it, and I also agree with the idea that now is an especially good time for it. But there is no point in my making such a proposal now, when it is clear to me in advance that it will fail.”

Today, in the estimation of people who know the subject well, the Israeli government could solve the problem with relative ease, to the satisfaction of all sides. They surmise that a majority of the villagers will now agree to accept the compensation the government offers, and that about a hundred families from each village will resettle on land assigned to them. Most of the evacuees realize that their former land will not be returned to them. An old injustice should not be corrected by creating a new one.

“And write that since 1948 there has been no one from Ikrit who has done anything against the country,” Aouni Sbeit intones, suddenly exhausted as we leave the site. “All we did was in accordance with the law. And what did we get? Even a prisoner is better off than we are. A prisoner who is sentenced to ten years knows when it will be over. We don’t know when our imprisonment will end.”

We drove away. Halil got down to open and close the barbed-wire fence, so that Dari’s cows would not escape, so there wouldn’t be a scandal. Aouni, a warm man, all heart, embraced me and said, as if trying to comfort me, “We will return. There is no escaping it. We will return and build houses and plant orchards and vineyards, and compensate ourselves for what we missed all these years. And then you’ll come to visit me.”

I’m sure they will return. It is malicious to keep them from doing so. I know well how this sounds to sober individuals, to the experts, to the systems analysts, to politicians covered with the moss of experience, and to all those analytic brains that anticipated none of the important developments in our region and in the world. In their internal dictionary, the dictionary of life-survival, all the words of suspicion and entrapment and subterfuge are in bold type. They will say that the smallest of concessions will crack the entire line of defense. That Israel’s credibility as a country that sticks to its principles will be harmed if we make even one small retreat. That it is better, even, to stand by one’s errors and injustices, just as long as one does not create untimely doubts as to the justice of our case. Especially, they will say I am naïve.

That may well be, but perhaps the criminal naïveté is that of those who still believe that Israel can completely and permanently ignore the reasonable demands of its Arab citizens. Just as it can, they believe, create a “new order” in the region when it wants to, just as it can always win every war, and will certainly win American support for all it does.

How long will we prevent the Ikrit and Biram evacuees from going home? For how long will we brandish the justice of our 1948? At some point another, new process must begin. And we must fight for it with the only permissible naïveté in the Middle East, scarred naïveté, like that which may be heard in a poem by Yehuda Amichai, who also fought in that war: