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

“Maybe we’ve gotten into a vicious circle here,” I said. “On the one hand, the Jewish people have not been successful in fully forming Israeliness, because they have ‘partners’; on the other hand, as long as they don’t succeed in formulating a strong definition of Israeliness that will also relate to the Arabs here, they are doomed to remain more Jewish. Look how hard it is for us to feel like a sovereign majority here. We face the minority as if we are a minority in our land — in the struggle for survival that we still wage in our hearts against it, in the battle for all kinds of ‘territories’ in the country, in the difficulty in being generous and sure of ourselves.”

“You’re right,” Buli responded. “But even if there were no Arabs in the land of Israel I would still have serious problems with this Israeliness of mine, because the major front in my struggle for my identity is not with Anton but with you, David, because of your sweeping legitimization of the concept ‘Jewish,’ which in my eyes is a fractional concept, and because of your desire to make that fractionality a permanent element of Israeliness. As a result, you never leave out the word ‘Jewish’ when you speak of Israeli.”

I answered him with a line from his novel Mr. Mani— not the obvious one about how the Arabs are “Jews who have forgotten that they are Jewish,” but the one about the “Jews who cannot forget that they are Jews.” But since this was not the subject of our conversation (and it may well be that there is no way of resolving the ongoing debate on the relationship between “Jewish” and “Israeli” without first resolving the question of the relation between the Israeli Jew and the Israeli Arab, the question of “who is an Israeli”), I asked Shammas what he thought of the definition that was proposed to and rejected by the Knesset in 1985, according to which Israel is a “Jewish state and the country of all its citizens.”

“If it is a Jewish state because the majority is Jewish, and it puts more emphasis on the Jewish part, I have no problem. I have no objection to the educational system reflecting the makeup of the population. These are legitimate political power struggles as part of the game of democracy. But the minute you tell me that not only is the country’s ambience Jewish but also its very character as a national state; the minute the law faculty at Tel Aviv University drafts a constitution for Israel that opens with the sentence ‘Israel is the eternal state of the Jewish people’; the minute the Knesset inserts a racist definition into its amendment of the Knesset Basic Law, as it did in 1985, then I’ve got a problem with you, because you exclude me from that definition.”

“I’m not excluding you.” Yehoshua leaned over him. “My Israeliness includes you and all the Israeli Arabs as partners in the fabric of life here. Partners in that you vote for the Knesset, in the creation of Israeli citizenship as a whole—”

“I don’t vote for the Knesset!” Shammas raised a finger. “You want me to vote for the Knesset so that you can show off your democracy to the enlightened world. I am not willing to be a party to that. I know that all I can do here is vote for the Knesset, and nothing more. I know that my mother was never able to see me become Israel’s Minister of Education.”

“If your mother had voted for the Knesset instead of picking olives on election day…” A. B. Yehoshua sighed. “Oh, I’ll never forget how we sat and did figures during the ’88 elections; you could have put thirteen members in and changed the whole political map. Oh, I’ll never let you forget that olive harvest…”

On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in 1991, Shammas published an article in the Jerusalem local weekly newspaper, Kol Ha’ir , in which he announced that he was “weary of and disgusted by” the never-ending debate over “the Israeli nationality,” “an idea that (on a good day) maybe thirty righteous Jews believe in, along with even fewer (if any) righteous Arab citizens of the State of Israel.” “It is the best prescription for killing time and raising the blood pressure. And since life really is short, it is better to spend it making one’s garden grow.” He added: “I know today that ‘Israeli citizenship,’ as recorded on the first page of my passport, is all that the Jewish occupation state wants to and can give me. It is even more than I want. As for Israeli nationality — I am no longer interested. From this day forth, in the interests of all relevant parties, I adopt the national definition — I am a second-class citizen, a Palestinian without the nationhood of the Jewish State of Israel.” And here today, four months after he slammed his passport on us and retired like Candide to his garden, he is again making a no less determined charge on Israeli nationhood.

Shammas shrugged. “What I wrote there was, of course, a kind of tactical maneuver…Of course I’m not weary, it’s a life-or-death case for me.” I asked him why he had stayed away from Israel for so long, and what he meant to express by this absence throughout the entire intifadah, the climax of the Palestinian struggle for definition and identity. “I suppose that in my defense (I’ve got a list of charges against myself, as well) I would say that in Ann Arbor I am closer to the intifadah and can follow it through the media better than what the Israeli media would allow me to know from my house at 7 Menorah Street in Jerusalem. So, with the exception of going out into the field, as you did in The Yellow Wind— something I’d never in my life do—” “Why not, actually?” I asked, and he responded, “Look, I once tried to live there. I lived for a year in the territories, in Beit Jalla.”

Yehoshua, listening in silence, went taut. “Really, Anton? I didn’t know…What, you went to live in the territories? When was that?”

All three of us thought about that “rise up, take your belongings, and move 100 meters to the east.”

Shammas: “In 1978 the rents in Jerusalem jumped, I didn’t have money, so I looked for an apartment in Beit Jalla. I lived next to an olive press there. That experience was enough for me. After that year I know with absolute certainty that I will never live in the West Bank, as that man,” he said, pointing at Yehoshua, “wants me to do.”

Both of them laughed, and Shammas continued, “Not that I have a trace of feeling superior to the people in the territories. It’s only a sense that it’s not my geography there. Not my cognitive, spiritual, or mental map. I work according to other codes, my head, my imagination, my emotions.” I asked him to explain what had been difficult for him there. “If we return to the house metaphor, it begins with the process of looking for an apartment, the negotiation, and signing the contract. And the interpretation that the idiosyncratic landlady gave to that contract. What bothered me more than anything else in Beit Jalla was the gradual discovery that my neighbor spoke Arabic but not the same Arabic I did. An invisible but most palpable semantic Green Line ran between us. I suppose it’s as if a Hebrew Macintosh program were fed into your IBM word processor. I would guess that the neighbor had the same feeling — that here was a 1948 Arab speaking, really, a foreign language. Aside from that, the daily commute to work in the shuttle cabs running the Hebron-Nablus Gate line, and the commute back in a bus full of Jewish settlers going to Hebron, and the times that the driver refused to allow an Arab to board the bus and I didn’t say anything, I just sat inside and let it build up in me, gritting my teeth—”

You didn’t say anything? I asked.