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

“I didn’t say anything. And I felt that on the most primitive level, without any fine points of ethics, I would expect the Arab to pull out a pistol and shoot the driver. I really felt that way.”

And you sat and said nothing? I said in surprise. If Buli or I had been in the bus and had said nothing in the face of such abuse, you would attack us rabidly in the newspaper!

“I wasn’t silent,” Shammas responded, mocking himself. “I wrote an article! I wrote a piece describing a similar incident. Listen, I have no knife, and even if I had one I wouldn’t use it. I have words.”

That’s a defense strategy, I said.

“What’s the charge? That I don’t feel all that much a part of it, of the intifadah. Not that I repudiate it, I’m an enthusiastic supporter; on the contrary, it should be escalated! But it’s not my intifadah. It never was and it never will be. Were I a refugee in Deheishe, a writer, I don’t know what I’d do…It’s all hypothetical, I didn’t grow up there, I’m not a refugee or the son of a refugee, I don’t have the basic psychological makeup of refugee suffering that grows and grows and makes you explode. But if I were there? I wouldn’t wish on myself to be forty-one in the Deheishe refugee camp, that’s the last thing I’d wish on myself. I’d do something desperate…I’d steer a Tel Aviv-Jerusalem bus over a cliff.”

I reminded him that in that same Rosh Hashanah article he advised an Arab from Nablus whose picture album had been confiscated by the Shin Bet and then gotten lost to set out on a spree of violent revenge. I asked what action he would advise the Palestinians in Israel to take in an ongoing situation of discrimination.

“My real ideological war will come the morning after the establishment of the Palestinian state. Only then will I have the absolute moral right to demand complete social and political equal rights from Buli, as was promised me in the Declaration of Independence. In the meantime, I wait patiently for the big conflict to end, and then my conflict will begin. Then I’ll open my mouth. I’ll shout for a year, two years, and if it’s not solved, I’ll make an intifadah.”

I asked whether, among the Israeli Palestinians he was meeting as a guest passing through, he sensed the fervor and the commitment necessary for such an uprising.

“In the villages I feel the frenzy. I know that deliverance will not come from the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa. Nor from people like me who live in Ann Arbor, or who sell candy, the corrupt bourgeoisie of Nazareth. But in the villages there are still people who lived through the Arab revolt of 1936–39, the people who live in Fasuta, and fifteen years from now, when they discover that they’ve been methodically screwed since 1948 and that they are going to keep on getting screwed, they will rise up and they will burn tires and they will think about bearing arms.”

“Will you return from Ann Arbor to participate in it,” I asked, “or will you follow it from there?”

Shammas: “I think I will return. I will return to participate, first in the ideological war, but when all other ways are exhausted, I’ll join”—his transparent voice rises momentarily—“the rebels in the caves in the mountain by Fasuta! And I will write their marching song!”

Yehoshua listened to the conversation, his writer’s eye wandering over Shammas’s face.

Afterward, after a brief lull, we returned — like someone who keeps touching a wound — to the question of identity. Yehoshua said, “The Israeliness of the Arabs here is big and strong, but part of it has been severed. I, for instance, am linked to my sources and history, and from them I construct my identity. Let’s take, for example, the question of how a prison should be built in Israel, how to treat jailed drug addicts, and so on. Now, I ask myself what the general theory of a Jewish prison should be, what the purpose of such a prison is.” “Interesting that you chose prisons of all things,” Shammas interjected in parentheses, and Yehoshua continued, “Should I give the prisoners vacations, what is Jewish punishment, and for that I have to go to my sources, to the sources of Jewish law and to the experience of the past, in order to construct a tradition of a Jewish system of justice and punishment. And here, if Anton were to ask, ‘Where am I in all this?’—in other words, can Anton take Muslim or Christian judicial systems and insert them as codes within the Jewish philosophy of punishment and justice? — he can’t! In other words, at this point he is no longer a partner. That’s the difference between my identity and his. But when, in the Palestinian state, he has to construct a judicial system for himself, they will have to give it their own nuances there, in contrast with, for instance, Saudi or Libyan or Egyptian justice.”

Shammas asks, “So what am I here, if not a partner?”

“You are a national minority! God Almighty, is it so hard for you to accept that? There are dozens of national minorities all over the world!” Yehoshua flashed. “Do you know what your problem is, Anton? That the Arabs were never a minority! You’re actually shouting your non-minorityness at us. Where in the world were the Arabs ever a minority? Listen to me, Anton, minorities have special rights, and they are also frustrated that they are not majorities. But the Palestinians will have a state where they will be the majority, and there you’ll have a place where you can experience your full identity — but here you will remain a minority!”

“In other words,” I put the echo into words, “you are again saying to Anton that if the reality you are proposing is not to his liking, let him take his belongings and move 100 meters to the east.”

“ If! ” Yehoshua called loudly, “ if he wants his full Palestinianness! But he doesn’t want it! You heard it yourself — in Beit Jalla he feels awful! There he had really deep Palestinianness, close to the land, to the fabric of life, right? There everyone spoke Arabic, and all the memories are there, and the united family…but he doesn’t want that! He wants to live on Menorah Street in Jerusalem! And I say fine! I’m very happy he’s here! He gives me a lot of happiness and joy by being here! But if he wants his full identity…”

He didn’t finish the sentence — he had already said it scores of times, as Anton had, and it was all in writing and in memory. Like another debate this book presents, the one between Jojo Abutbul and Mohammed Kiwan, the two of them continue to circle within a circular wall, unable to find the proper distance from which they can relate to each other, one to the identity-in-formation of the other, bewildering each other like magnetic poles, since the creation of an identity is a process of emphasizing the unique and the distinctive, of differentiation from another identity, and here, still, everything is itself blurred and confused — Israeli identity, Jewish identity, Palestinian identity, Palestinian-Israeli identity — and each of them must crystallize out of some painful contraction of its territory in favor of another, opposing identity.

“He’s a strange animal.” Yehoshua chuckled, gazing at Anton fondly, with fatherly bewilderment. “He pierces like a laser beam and discovers the problematic of every system…that’s to his credit. But most Israeli Arabs support what I say; you know, after all, that you are almost a lone voice among the Palestinians. For them, what I say is absolutely clear and natural and just. They don’t want to be part of the Israeli people or nationality! Or look at the members of the Islamic Movement, with their clear and different identity; they don’t want to be integrated into the Israeli nationality either! The Arabs here want to have equal rights, but they want the status of a minority! While you, Anton, you want to take my Israeliness, which is an ancient concept, and be a full partner in it! And I say no! You are a minority. So let’s write down in a big book what the rights of a minority are, over and above the rights of a citizen—”