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

“Of course! I admit it.”

“And what about the commandment to fight a jihad [holy war] obligatory on you as a Muslim?”

“Good thing you asked. What is a jihad? There are many forms of jihad . Seven or eight gradations, maybe even twelve. The military jihad is only one of them, and it’s the last one. If I improve my life in the village, and hold a work camp — that’s a jihad . If I add rooms to a school — that’s a jihad , too. If I sit with you and persuade you that it’s worthwhile for us to live in peace — isn’t that a jihad? Now, the most important thing: if I have the possibility of liberating the part that was occupied in ’67 peacefully, then I’d be guilty, a criminal, if I caused the blood of a Muslim to be spilled in a war, when I can obtain the same thing with a jihad of peace. That’s what Sadat did, after all, when he liberated all of the Sinai peninsula, without spilling the blood of one Muslim!”

“And what about the territory that the Muslims lost to Israel in 1948? Here you make a tactical concession in your faith?”

“We don’t deal in tactics. In 1948 there was a war, and there was a decision of the United Nations about dividing Palestine into two countries. As a Muslim today, I accept the existence of Israel as an established fact. We have nothing to say about this given. The occupation of 1967 is an occupation, according to all the countries in the world and according to the U.N. But if Israel does not offer its hand in peace and does not withdraw from the occupied territories, and does not return the land to its owners,” he declaims in his pleasant tenor singsong, giving everything he says the same strange amicability, “only then must the Palestinians and Muslims all over the world fight Israel in accordance with the precept of the jihad and expel it from their land.”

“Does that include you, within Israel?”

“No. We are not part of the Islamic nation which is required to fight against Israel. We live as a minority that cannot fight, and according to the principles of Islam, we are not required to fight Israel. Islam says: When you are a minority, you are not even allowed to behave in a way that will undermine the security of the ruling nation — on condition, on condition , that it allows you to live as a Muslim. If the Knesset comes and decides that I am not permitted to pray, if it decides to damage the mosques, in such a case Islam compels me inexorably to fight and to maintain our rights. So long as that does not happen, we do not fight.”

I examine him carefully. There were no surprises. He does not deny his ambitions. He is pragmatic and sober. Islam does in fact concern itself first and foremost with the well-being and security of its adherents. After the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the community of believers was torn apart by a great and traumatic civil war, the Fitna . Ever since, Sunni religious sages have advocated refraining from rebellion against the ruler of a Muslim country, and all the more so when the Muslims are a defenseless minority. Ibrahim Sarsur is without a doubt giving me the interim truth. But in his fluent Hebrew discourse I hear also the echo of far mosques, and the roar of the aroused crowds in the streets of the Sudan and Iran and Algeria, the sound of the bullets that Muslim fanatics fired at President Sadat. And it was not long after this conversation, in the winter of 1992, that three Israeli Arabs, members of the Islamic Movement, butchered three Israeli soldiers with knives and a pickax — the most serious act of terror yet perpetrated by Arab citizens of Israel. I listened attentively as Sarsur testified: “I am worth nothing without the Islamic Movement. I am zero without it. Whatever it tells me to do, I will do.”

The sun is already setting in Bara. The village roads are boiling. Steam rises from the sidewalks as they are leveled by steamrollers. I compress a lump of warm, sticky tar in my hand. Wherever I look I see people working, eyes sparkling, bodies heaving. Boys run between the workers carrying trays of cold drinks and coffee. The neighbors beside whose houses the sidewalk is being laid invite the laborers in to get their wind back. In the afternoon all the workers eat at the home of one of the neighbors. Two sheep were slaughtered. Two hundred people squeeze into the yard. It is a privilege for a Muslim to slaughter a sheep when a son is born to him. But this privilege, the akika , may be “saved” for another opportunity. “What’s better, to give the meat to satiated, celebrating people or to people who are working hard?” asks Kamel Rian. “So we ‘save’ the privilege, sometimes for half a year, until the Islamic work camp.” Two other villagers have asked to host the work details for meals tomorrow. The day after, there is a problem — too many villagers are fighting to host the meals. Most of them do not even belong to the Islamic Movement. “It looks like we’ll have to extend the camp for a few more days.” He roars with laughter.

I’d bring activists from poor neighborhoods, people from urban renewal programs, mayors, here to learn from this young man. How, without any experience and, especially, without support from the national government, did he turn this backward village into a place it is a pleasure to live in? I’d bring the Arab mayors whose towns contain neighborhoods of luxurious houses lying along miserable dirt roads, stained with sewage, where no one lifts a finger to help himself. Rian, one of the people, sharp, tolerant, omnipresent, picking up every piece of trash from the ground, hugging the whole village to his barrel chest. I rush after him to one of the distant fields outside the village. Bulldozers are working there, their headlights lit, conquering another detour. The trucks dump earth. “This is soil I kept from the roads we built during the last work camp. Instead of throwing it away I saved it, and now I can use it for this new pavement.”

The two bulldozer operators descend toward us in the light of their vehicles. Sweaty, grimy, glowing. Nidal Sutani from Tira, and Ali Abu Sheikha from Ara. They have come for a week. Staying with friends in the village. “I can sleep wherever I want. Wherever I want, they’ll let me eat,” Ali says. He is working here as a volunteer. He is sacrificing a week’s profits from work on his Volvo BM tractor and a week’s salary from another job. He even pays for the bulldozer’s fuel. “I’ve already learned that if I do a good deed here, I earn more afterward outside.” His friend adds, “In these camps I’ve learned what the power of religion is, what the power of work is when you do it for yourself and help yourself. Look at how the people here are giving with all their hearts. I got up this morning when it was still dark, at 4:30, I prayed, and ever since I’ve been working, and we’ll keep working until we collapse.”

Over the last seven years the movement has succeeded in “conquering”—a characteristic term — seven local authorities, a most respectable achievement. It is also well represented in the councils of two cities and twelve villages. It is steadily gaining power in the Histadrut labor federation; it has founded an Islamic soccer league (with prayers at the beginning and end of each match); it has founded dozens of nursery schools, youth clubs, and clinics. Um Elfahm, inspired by the Islamic Movement, is about to establish fourteen separate classes for boys and girls in its high school, and Teibe is establishing a religious college. As the feeling of discrimination and frustration grows among the Arabs in Israel, an ever greater number, it seems, seek the solution to their troubles in religion and in the Islamic Movement. As faith wanes in the power of the Arab leadership in Israel to achieve real progress, the movement is reinforced by new recruits. Perhaps, instead of listing all its achievements, I should have noted one detail — during the last decade more than one hundred mosques have been built in Arab settlements in Israel.