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

In the place where we are right

Flowers will never bloom

In the spring .

The place where we are right

Is trodden and hard

Like a courtyard .

But like a mole, like a plow ,

Doubts and loves make

The world crumble .

And a whisper will be heard

Where once there was a house

That was destroyed .

Friday, five in the evening and the village of Bara hums like a beehive — tonight they are paving sidewalks here, putting up fences, repairing roads. Two hundred fifty men run through the village streets with work tools in hand, breaking stubborn boulders, heaving picks, lugging bricks, no time to stand for even a second.

A pile of stones brought from the village of Jama’in in the West Bank lies in the middle of the road. One of the foremen, a sweating, large-boned young man, consults with the members of his work detail as to where to move the heap and how to parcel it out to the other details. A tractor honks at the crew’s back, passing by: it’s almost dark. When the driver sees the village’s mayor, Kamel Rian, he asks him at a roar to send two trucks with soil so that the new roadway can be lengthened. Best to finish it all tonight, it’s a good night to work.

Rian listens, cocking his head while half closing an eye, rubbing his beard. It’ll be fine. The truck drivers are praying now. Right after their prayers they’ll be with you. Take fifteen minutes. Come on, he calls to me, we’ll go see how the tar is doing.

He is thirty-three years old. Born in the village, a graduate of the teachers college in Netanya. Three years after completing his studies he became religious. “I began to read religious books. I became close to Usrat Eljihad, “the Family of the Holy War,” the forerunner of the Islamic Movement in Israel. Ever since then the Shin Bet has been following me. Even if I landed a job, they would fire me a week later. What could I do? I had an uncle, a partner in a stone quarry. I went to work for him, and there I found what I was looking for.”

Well built, bearded, with glasses. Good-natured. It’s hard to believe how he has transformed the village in the eight years he has been mayor.

“After you set off explosions in the mountains, you have to transfer the blocks of stone from the mountain to the work site, where you smash them. I worked at crushing the stone, at the hard stage of processing the stone. For two years I smashed boulders, ground them into gravel.

“I enjoyed the physical labor, and I liked being independent. I was completely free there. My own boss. During breaks I’d find myself a corner, sit down, and read religious books, commentaries on the Koran. Culturally, it was the richest period of my life. The Koran, after all, is not just a religious book. It is also the essence of literary power. There I was my own king. Then I also started being the imam at our mosque, and I’d give the sermons on Fridays. Then I was really religious;” he says, a bit apologetically.

“And today, less so?” I asked him, trying to talk over the clamor of the trucks.

“Let’s just say that I don’t have the time to exercise all the laws and precepts.” He mixes and mingles, in a single sentence, slang, military expressions, and biblical Hebrew. “I miss the days in the quarry. There I was calm. I put my trust in Allah. I did things in perfect faith. Today I’m in politics. Do everything relatively. Make compromises, put things off…

“But a group from the village decided that I should run for mayor. I didn’t want to. I had no chance. The incumbent mayor had had the job for twenty years. His father had been mukhtar for twenty years. He had Turkish roots! And he was also head of the largest clan in the village — they’re 70 percent here — and I’m from a small family. How could I run against him?

“But look, 70 percent of the village voted for me, and in ’83 I entered city hall, and for six months the security services slandered me in all kinds of ways, saying that I was a Khomeini supporter on the outskirts of Petah Tikva, and they quoted an article they claimed I’d written, that I was waiting for Khomeini to destroy Israel and that I was already inviting the PLO to come.

“In every government office I entered I’d see a photocopy of that article with its lies. Doors were closed to me wherever I went. They didn’t give money. They tried slowly, slowly to strangle the village because of me. We didn’t have money to pay for electricity; they cut our water off, too. The village didn’t have a single meter of pavement then. There was no sewage. No underground water network. You didn’t see a single flower. There was no place for sports, no place for culture. There was no medical clinic. Whoever needed a shot had to run to Petah Tikva! Our city hall was one room and one employee. Try working with that.

“I was young, a boy! From where do I know how to run a municipality? When in my life had I ever chaired a meeting? All that and the pressure from the Shin Bet outside. I went and studied in a program in local government at Bar Ilan University. I worked by day and studied by night. The people here helped. They suffered from the water being cut off, from the pressure, but they knew it was directed against me. The entire village would go seven to ten days without any water. We would bring water from Kibbutz Hahorshim, they helped us. The whole time I wanted to resign. My conscience wouldn’t let me leave the village without water. If the village hadn’t supported me, I would have resigned.

“But they supported me, and I kept going. I was twenty-five years old. Hot! I saw that I wouldn’t get anything out of the national government, so I began enlisting the Islamic Movement. Here, in Bara, we held the first muaskarat , the first Islamic work camp; today, praise God, you find them all over the country.”

I drove to Bara on a Friday, during the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth. I had heard enthusiastic stories about the Islamic Movement’s work camps, and I wanted to see one with my own eyes. Along the way I started to have doubts. I’d already interviewed several of the movement’s members and leaders. More than once I had come up against that invisible boundary no stranger can cross. He can only sense that beyond the faces smiling so cordially, behind the answers, which are always well-meaning, there is something else, something enigmatic, irrational — inaccessible to him.

The narrow road leading to Bara runs from Ben Shemen to Rosh Ha’ayin, northeast of Tel Aviv, along the marches of a marginal, forsaken land, a land of limestone and chalk, roads full of potholes, past abandoned quarries where huge cutting and crushing machines rust. The settlements scattered there, Hagor, Beit Nehemia, Givat Koah, are preparing for the Sabbath — children becoming formal in holiday clothes, a woman putting a cake out on the windowsill to cool. What are you looking for at this hour in Bara? What does the Islamic Movement’s Sabbath cheer have to do with you?

I picture the members of the movement I have already met. They are young and dynamic. They are feeling a growing sense of power. They are aware of the apprehension they arouse in secular Arab circles, and they are no less attentive to the tremors of anxiety and distrust the Jewish public feels about them. They chart their course with great discretion and awareness. “We have the ability, and the opportunity, to search and scrutinize the Islamic constitution to find the conditions and the means appropriate to our circumstances within Jewish Israel,” explained Ibrahim Sarsur, mayor of Kafr Kassem, one of the movement’s leaders. “The Islamic Movement in Egypt and Hamas, the Islamic Movement in the territories, oppose any move toward peace, and they also draw their ideas from the Koran and the Sunna. But I can understand the Koran and the Sunna as I wish, and I can prove to you that the Koran requires me to negotiate, and to solve the problems between us and you, between us and our enemies, in peaceful ways.”