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

“ ‘Our enemies’?”

I could hear his brakes screeching: “Just a minute! I’ll retreat! I take it back!” He raises a finger in front of me, closing his eyes as if reciting. “Even though the Israelis are always saying ‘our enemies the Arabs,’ and in doing so they make no distinction between Israeli Arabs and Arabs from the territories or from Syria. But I still take it back! I’m a human being like you, and you are like me; I’m not willing to have even the spark of a thought that you are my enemy enter my head. Under no circumstances!”

His eyes stay closed tight, and it is clear how that sophisticated, pragmatic mechanism works. It was certainly this way, with eyes shut tight, assimilating new conditions, that the Islamic Movement decided to turn into a law-abiding organization, to raise itself up out of the ruins of the Family of the Holy War underground, after that movement’s members and leaders were released from prison eight years ago. It is really this internal control, this self-programming, that disquiets me. The Islamic Movement smiles broadly at me, but with a twitch in its cheek, and when Ibrahim Sarsur again looks at me with his bright eyes, I know that he has already jotted down a warning to himself.

“And if Hamas believes in expelling the Jews from their homeland, from Israel, then they are also the enemies of Islam!” he added. “Anyone who wants to expel the Jews from their country is my enemy as a Muslim, an enemy of Islam, an enemy of humanity.”

So says Sarsur, one of the leaders of the movement, but in As-Sirat , the movement’s monthly magazine, printed in Israel, there was recently an article stating that “the problem of Palestine and its Muslim nation is a purely Islamic problem, which may be solved only by means of fundamental Islamic solutions.” Another article declared: “Palestine is not merchandise to be sold and bought in a slave market, on the principles of profit and loss…Palestine is Islamic holy land…It is not the property of the Palestinians, or of the Arabs, but of all Muslims of all past and current generations, and no man, whoever he is, has the right to abandon or concede one inch of its land.”

“Hey, you’re treating those sentences as if they were straight from the Koran! Very good!” Sarsur spun threads of ridicule around me. “It’s good that you take us so seriously! Here, I’ll give you some tafsir , some commentary, of a modern type. It says there that the Palestinian problem can be solved only with fundamental Islamic solutions? I agree! We, as an Islamic movement in Israel, believe that the Jews have a right to exist in Israel, which is part of Palestine! Even Salah ad-Din Ayyoubi resolved with the Crusaders that they would remain on the coast. Can I come and tell you today that Salah ad-Din Ayyoubi, a celebrated leader, a [winking] fundamentalist — did he really give up part of Palestine to infidel Crusaders? Or was it an entirely different matter, one of shrewdness and tolerance? And the Crusaders, you know, had no right to this land, unlike the Jews, who really do have a certain connection, they have a history and a well-known right here; but the Christians, they’re from Europe, they claim that Jesus’ grave is here. And I thought Jesus ascended to heaven, didn’t he?”

Thirty-two years old. A graduate of the English Literature and Linguistics Departments at Bar Ilan University. His face is pleasant, candid, his forehead high and glistening, his voice musical. Quick of thought, swift of speech, enjoys an argument. “If fanaticism means devotion to the principles of Islam,” he says, quoting Sa’id Kutub, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, “then the entire world should know that I am a fanatic. In order not to be a fanatic, I must really be torn. I must tear away all the roots that connect me with Islam. If you think that when you call me ‘fundamentalist’ you are insulting me, you are very wrong! The word in Arabic is asuli , ‘rooted.’ So I am proud to be a fundamentalist.

“But you”—he nods at me—“your Western eyes see another fundamentalist, an evil one, with a big beard, a shaved mustache, wearing a robe, with a sword in his hand and blood dripping from the point of the sword. That’s how the world sees fundamentalism today. It’s in the West’s blood.”

I asked, “And whoever says, ‘You make compromises over money, compromises over property, but you don’t make compromises over the soul of the nation,’ and by that he means land, what is he in your eyes?”

Sarsur chuckles. “Who said that land is the soul of the nation? I’ll give you an example. Mohammed was in Mecca, at the Kaaba, and he heard a Muslim praying, raising his hands to the sky: ‘Allah, bihak el-Kaaba! ’ He was asking Allah’s aid and invoking the name of the Kaaba, that Allah answer his petition. So the Prophet took him to one side. Listen, he said, you are calling on God and invoking the Kaaba. You should be doing it differently — you should be calling on God in your own name, your own personal name! ‘Because he who raised the sky without pillars, the name of the believer is for him more sublime than the name of the Kaaba,’ so it is written in the Koran. So do you want to tell me that this dirt that they call Palestine is more important than the Kaaba to a Muslim? If the Kaaba is no more important than a human being, then Palestine isn’t either.”

“What I just quoted you on the soul of the nation,” I admitted, “was said yesterday on television by a Jewish settler from Hebron.”

“You played a trick like that on me?” He laughed long but silently. “Oh, a Jewish settler said that? With fundamentalists like that we’ll really find ourselves at war, God willing.”

I said, “Your slogan ‘Islam is the solution’ is too cryptic for my tastes.”

He said, “What’s cryptic? What’s unclear? It’s very simple and straightforward: Islam is the solution!”

“Still,” I insisted, “I was once the subject of a solution, so I’m a little suspicious. A solution to what? A solution for whom?”

“David, David, don’t be scared. We’re not the Islamic Movement in Jordan or the territories! We live under other conditions. They have the opportunity to fight the occupation in their own way and to save themselves. We have the opportunity to find other ways and interpretations to live together with you. As a Muslim, I now accept the existence of Israel as an established fact. We have nothing to say about this given. God forbid, you should say we’re against the country,” he warns me with a smile, always a smile. “We’re against the policy, not against the country. After all, under today’s conditions it would be foolish to expect the establishment of an Islamic state inside Israel. So we act within the framework of the law.”

“And what is the nature of your ties to Harnas?”

“They are there — we are here. Each one functions in his own reality. Listen, there is not a single regime in the Arab world today that will allow its country’s Islamic Movement to progress and develop. We’re fought against everywhere in the Arab world. They know that if we gain control it will be the end of their regime. Our luck is that in Israel the regime is different from those in the Arab world. Despite it being a Likud government, there’s democracy, and if you don’t undermine Israel’s security, if you are aware of the limitations imposed by law, you have a chance to act. We had a certain experience with that in the eighties when Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish and other leaders and members were accused of various things, of supporting the Fatah, and were imprisoned. Since that experience everything with us has changed completely, and there has been a 180-degree turn.”

“You mean,” I asked, “according to what you said, that Israel is actually the only country in the Middle East that allows its Islamic Movement to act freely?”