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

“I have no problem with that,” Shammas replied. “But on condition that you declare that Israel is an enlightened apartheid state.”

“Why apartheid?” Yehoshua was wounded. “You’re a minority just like the Basque minority in Spain!”

“No no no!” Shammas howls. “The Basque in Spain is offered the possibility of being a Spaniard, of being part of the Spanish nationality!” The word “nationality” he said in English, and Yehoshua followed suit: “You also have Israeli nationality!”

“Good God!” Shammas lets loose. “For six years I’ve been trying to explain to you, Buli, that citizenship is not nationality! That’s the major problem between us!” He clarified it for us slowly and painstakingly: “The minute we carry out our conversation in Hebrew, it imposes certain semantic usages on us that bind us. When I debate with you over what it is to be Israeli, both of us are victims of the fact that the Hebrew word le’om does not translate into the term ‘nationality.’ ‘Nationality’ has no translation in Hebrew, because the Zionist founding fathers thought of a nation-state only from the point of view of the Jewish, Hebrew nation and not in terms of the European concept of nationality at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. *The term has no translation in Arabic, either, since Arabic was not, like other languages, exposed to the reality of the nation-state. For instance, a Corsican’s passport states ‘Nationality: French.’ But in our passports it says ‘Citizenship: Israeli’!”'

Yehoshua: “But a state grants citizenship, not nationality!”

Shammas: “But Israel defines itself as a nation-state, and a nation-state has to give me nationality! That’s the root of our debate! Take out your identity card and look at it for once!”

We all took out our identity cards, and Shammas took his passport out of his suitcase, and we examined them. The young faces that looked out at us asked, “You’re still having that same argument?” Yehoshua was about to call the French embassy to ask what was written in French passports, but it was Sunday and the embassy was closed. The more Yehoshua refused to accept Shammas’s demand for a “nationality” in its English sense, something superior to mere citizenship, at least to what Israel offers its Arab citizens, the more upset Shammas got, and it was obvious that within him, as within Yehoshua, this “external” debate, seemingly over nationality, was setting off an internal tempest that was being carefully steered, just as with Yehoshua, into a semantic, linguistic, abstract channel. I admit that I am a bit suspicious of this channel. For whatever reason it seems to me that debates over semantic precision are not always really concerned with calling something by the right, true name but are intended, rather, as a defense from it, while the most important thing remains unsaid. Perhaps for Anton Shammas the main thing is concealed in that “Israeli hunger” of which he accuses Yehoshua; or maybe it is hidden in the epigraph that Shammas chose for the first chapter of Arabesques , from G. B. Shaw: “You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks and forgets its own…Well, I am a child in your country…” From those three dots at the end one can divine, as with ants, one can follow the riddle of the internal confrontation with Israeliness, the apparent enemy that is also the source of abundance and stimulation. Perhaps it is actually this two-facedness that may awaken the pressing need to rub up against, to be cut to the point of pain and ecstasy on this barbed wire that divides the identity; and perhaps reality as offered in the Hebrew, foreign translation sharpens and clarifies the original for him. I am a child in your country…

It was finally agreed that Yehoshua would call the French and Belgian embassies the next day, and if it was true that these enlightened nations write the word “nationality” in the passports of their citizens, Yehoshua would “agree” that in Shammas’s passport a similar definition should appear—“Nationality: Israeli,” and peace came to the land.

“If only you had patience,” Yehoshua grumbled, “If you would wait until we finished with the Palestinian problem and we established here a majority-minority covenant for fifty years, a common identity would slowly take form, and then you would see Arab cabinet ministers, and intermarriages, and we might even return to the situation of the First Temple period, when Jewish religious identity was not at all a necessary element of Israeli identity. After all, King Solomon, builder of the Temple, did evil in the sight of the Lord and married foreign women, and an Israeli king worshipped Baal — that is, he didn’t act only in accordance with Jewish religious codes. He had another culture, and was even linked to a different religious system, and that worked for a thousand years, and not so badly, it would seem. In the end, if we do this, if we return to the situation in which those who reside in the country become the framework for national identity, and along with it larger frameworks come into being around us, like the European community or a regional community here, this nationalism that so bothers us today will be much more moderate and subdued. Then there will be cultural symbiosis, and a flow of identities, because the common Israeli identity will be natural and will come up from the grass roots rather than being imposed. We will arrive at it gradually, in stages, through an attitude of respect between minority and majority and not by a sudden shock. Then maybe we will reach the point where you, Anton, will feel yourself so much a majority here that you will long for the time you were a minority.”

Shammas’s response was: “In the long run there may be a congruence of our visions, Buli, but we have vast differences in our understanding of the present and past, and especially on the steps leading to realization of the vision. I think that when we begin something in error, we will never reach anything, and for me the root of the problem is that Israel does not define itself as the country of its citizens.”

“Israel as the country of all its citizens is the definition of my Zionism!” Yehoshua decreed.

Shammas: “Do you really believe that the State of Israel ever felt the desire to be my country, too?”

Yehoshua: “Yes, I think so. Look at what it was created from and you will understand its difficulties. Look at France, whose identity was crystallized like a diamond. Today, when it has three million non-French citizens, look how it’s squirming. And you take this country of Jews who came from Holocaust and war, and had to find common ground between Yemenite and German Jews, without a common language, and with the Arabs on the border and the Arabs inside. With all that, you expect some kind of omnipotence from us? Don’t you have any historical perspective? You come to me with demands from within your private little hurt, and you forget—”

“Little? Why is it little? Don’t you measure my pain for me!”

“It is little compared with the horrible pain, yes, compared to, first of all, the pain of those people from your own Fasuta who were uprooted from here and ended up in refugee camps! Compared with the pain of Jews who were at the ovens and came here! You stayed on your land, you weren’t uprooted, they didn’t force you to take up arms to fight your brothers — we defended you in that — they did not strip you of your identity, of the Koran, of the church — you’re spoiled!..Anton is a spoiled boy, spoiled at home. His mother spoiled him too much! I say that it is our honor that such a spoiled boy has risen to flog us, and we’re all amazed by him and read his Arabesques with such an appetite!”