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

I saw the nursery school. Happy rooms, full of color and stimuli and places to play and equipment. “Sure. Because the budget doesn’t come from the Ministry of Education. It comes from us. From a charitable society we established. What do you think, that we can’t have a separate educational system, like your religious people?”

He ticks off on his fingers: Today the village has a senior citizens’ center, there is a regulation basketball court and two public playgrounds with the best equipment. We finally put the cemetery in order. We constructed a sewage system. Roads. Streetlights. The Ministry of Education hasn’t built a single room in the school since I’ve been in the village, he notes, with no tone of reproach in his voice. The whole school had two bathrooms. The teachers go together with the students — what kind of thing is that? We built twenty bathrooms. We added classrooms. In my village the Islamic Movement did what the Ministry of the Interior won’t do for the next fifty years. Even if it doubles our development budget for fifty years, it won’t attain what we’ve already done in the village. Today’s project will cost me $22,000. If I had it done by outside contractors, it would have cost me $130,000.

Of course we want autonomy, said the men — each in his own way — with whom I ate a sumptuous supper during one of the breaks from work. “We talk about it a lot,” said Sheikh Kamel. “Everything’s moving in the direction that in the end will bring us autonomy here. The establishment is pushing us by force to want it.” His fellows, in chorus: Take the matter of the appointment of the religious judges. How can a bureaucrat in Petah Tikva who doesn’t know Arabic appoint a kadi for a village, especially when everyone knows he’s a drunk and was appointed only because he’s a Shin Bet informer? How can you appoint an illiterate imam? Why do I have to wait ten years before I can build a nursery school out of the municipal budget? You’ve seen what we can do ourselves. Why don’t they let us set a traditional Islamic curriculum for ourselves? Why don’t they accept our soccer team into the league? The Islamic League was established for lack of any alternative!

“Little by little,” Kamel Rian sums up the furious shouts, “our private projects add up and give us a sense of independence. The Islamic Movement today already has its tools and its institutions and its representatives. These things push us in the direction of independence.”

We continue to run. The time is short and the work great, and you are the master, and that, apparently, is the secret. The air shivers with emotion. Now I understood why I had to come and how pale words are when compared to deeds. I recalled the ziker ceremony of the Darwish sect I once attended in the Old City of Jerusalem — for several hours the men of the zawia fired themselves into an ecstasy. A hint of the same internal fire and addiction is here tonight. Everywhere you look hammers clang and picks strike. The odor of asphalt sticks to the skin. Piles of gravel and sand disappear in the whirlwind of a few minutes. An old Zionist pioneer song ran through my head: “We will dress you in concrete and cement.” Facing us, in the dark, is Petah Tikva, rejoicing in the Sabbath, gathering around the bowls of soup, and here where we are, that is, where they are, a truck unloads another heap of stones, and the “stone detail” charges to distribute the stones to the “fence detail,” and in different parts of the village six bulldozers, twelve trucks, three cement mixers, and steam shovels are all working, and amid all this commotion a three-year-old boy named Wasim deals a blow to the asphalt in front of his house with a yellow plastic hoe. That child’s tool reminded me of another boy of his age who aimed a yellow plastic rod at me at the Deheishe refugee camp and shot me because I was Jewish. That boy is already eight today, and if nothing has happened to him he has presumably graduated from plastic to stone. Wasim is enchanted with the asphalt. With great seriousness and dedication he smooths a little hill, sniffs it, touches it with his hand — an unforgettable sensory experience. Maybe, without his realizing it, his political and religious consciousness is being fixed within him.

Beside the small post office the village manager scrubs splotches of cement from the new fence with a stiff brush. “The finish is important, too,” Rian says, sharing his concern for detail. It makes me think of that expression “Arab work,” Hebrew slang for a sloppy and badly done job. Nearby, before my very eyes, in the space of two hours, a narrow dirt path turns into a broad, comfortable, tree-lined sidewalk, and the team responsible for painting the curbstones charges at it, and after them the clean-up crew to cart off the debris, and the frames are already going up around the saplings, and the trash cans are already being put in place…

A different, almost forgotten spirit. A kind of momentum that a stranger finds difficult to face. “You asked if we’re connected to Hamas,” Kamel Rian reminds me. “What’s for sure is that we have a connection with hamasa , with zeal.”

What if they ask me to join them? What if someone hands me a hoe or a pick? How tempting it is to forget what lies beyond them and to surrender to that patriotic fire that blazes in the heart. How is it possible, in that all-encompassing storm that sweeps you off your feet, to refuse a human hand offering you a work tool? It’s such a complicated question; it asks, through intermediate stages of evasive and roundabout translations, one thing: Do they and I have the same goal?

Yes, yes, they are building the country. No, because I feel that they are not building my country. Yes, because they are doing exactly what any Israeli group with initiative and vision would do. No, because that hamasa is part of an entire web of desires and beliefs that are not mine, and only for now is that fire being used to heat the huge tank of asphalt. A brawny man with kinky hair approaches Kamel Rian. His hair is white with dust. He is in charge of the asphalt. There’s an unexpected problem — because of the quick pace of the work, the asphalt has run out. Seventy tons. Some 1,700 square meters of sidewalk have been paved in a single day. Everyone marvels. Torpor begins to seep into their movements. Kamel scratches his head as if just waking up. “Everything’s gone? But it was for two days!”

“The Islamic solution is for us, for the Jews, and for all of humanity…There is room for only one country between the river and the sea. That country will be Muslim,” I read a week previously in the Islamic Movement’s newspaper, Sawt Elhak Walhuria ( The Voice of Justice and Freedom ), but under the existing conditions in Israeli-Arab society, passivity and abnegation, it was hard not to be impressed by the deeds and not to understand the secret of their attraction for so many. There, in Bara, across the way from the drained swamps of Malabis in which the water buffalo once waded, out of which the very earliest Zionist pioneers built the first new Jewish village in Israel, Petah Tikva, the Gate of Hope, it was possible to sense and understand this Muslim Petah Tikva, and to feel a surprising pang of remorse, a longing for ourselves as we once were.

“Come on, what are you dreaming about?” Kamel Rian had already recovered. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me after him. “Come see something you won’t believe.”

But I stopped and stared ahead. At the edge of a dark empty lot I suddenly made out many, many figures, swaying silently. I saw only their backs, kneeling and rising and kneeling, their faces to Mecca.

In January 1986, in an interview with the magazine Politika , Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua said the following: “I say to Anton Shammas — if you want your full identity, if you want to live in a country that has an independent Palestinian personality, that possesses an original Palestinian culture, rise up, take your belongings, and move 100 meters to the east, to the independent Palestinian state that will lie beside Israel.” Shammas is a Palestinian-Israeli poet, translator, and writer in both Arabic and Hebrew, known for trenchant and ironic newspaper articles in which he takes Israeli society to task for its occupation regime. He responded sharply, lumping Yehoshua, known for his liberal views, with “his brothers, the members of the Jewish terror organization.” He also gave notice that if and when the Palestinian state is established, “I do not wish to leave my country and my kindred and my father’s house for the land that he, in this case, A. B. Yehoshua, will show me.” A little tempest blew up, smaller than it should have been, given the subject — the nature of Israeli identity and the Arabs’ place therein. In one corner of this debate over the nature of “Israeliness” was Shammas, who aspired to create a single Israeli nationality common to all those living within the borders of the state, both Jewish and Arab; in the other corner was Yehoshua, for whom Israeli identity is the consummate expression of Jewish identity. Part of the Israeli left was shocked by the position taken by Yehoshua, who is one of the Israeli left’s most prominent and bold spokesmen. There were those who saw his “rise up, take your belongings” as a call for the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, and some annulled his membership in the left. What was interesting was that in the verbal violence that Shammas and Yehoshua kicked up around them it was possible to feel, even in their passionate public attacks on each other, an ever-present thread of mutual amity, a thread that was not broken even after the debate was over.