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

“Had she obeyed the laws of Islam, it would not have happened,” I was told by Muhammed Saliman, Iksal’s baker and a member of the Islamic Movement. “According to that law, if an unmarried girl has sinned, she is to receive eighty lashes with a whip. If she’s married, she is to be stoned until she dies.” Something in my expression, in my secular skepticism, maddened him; his hands beat down the dough. “But Islam is very careful. You have to prove the act of adultery or sexual contact between her and a strange man. You have to bring four witnesses who saw her in the actual act, four! What do you think?”

Today there is a machine that makes the kanafeh . You mix flour and water, a little oil and milk, and add salt. The dough is then poured into a big funnel, from which it drizzles in filaments onto the circular brown wooden platter that slowly clangs on its axis. While the baker itemized with odd pleasure the laws of adultery and the types of stoning, his apprentice, a deaf-mute boy, gathered up the long golden locks and carried them carefully in his outstretched arms to the cooling rack.

The baker is about thirty-five years old. His beard is floury, his T-shirt soiled with egg and oil stains, and his sleeves swollen with muscles. Pictures of Islamic holy sites, the Kaaba in Mecca and the al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem, hang over his head next to his business license and his VAT certificate. He has three daughters. “I have never struck my daughters,” he said, and even though I had no doubts about it, he swore twice in the Prophet’s name. The boy behind us filled the braids of dough with soft cheese, and rolled them up with a quick movement. “If, God forbid,” I asked him, my eyes on the little kanafeh rolling and swelling behind the baker’s back, “one of them commits adultery?” With a sigh he placed his sturdy arms on the table in front of him and directed his gaze at me. “We’ll — put — her — in — a—circle”—he chopped his words—“and everyone will stand around her. And everyone will hold a stone in his hand, and they will stone her to death. That’s how it should be. There is no choice. I have pity on her, but whoever makes a mistake,” he explained severely, his face producing a deliberate stoniness, an outer crust of faith for me, “has to be treated in accordance with our law. The law is wise; whoever believes in it will go to paradise, and if you do not believe in it, you will go to hell, to the fire. The same with the girl in Iksal, the one who was burnt.”

“They burned her,” I corrected him.

“Burned, burnt. She died.”

“Arab girls are burned daily,” Marwa Jibara told me in her house in Teibe. “Not physically burned. When I am burned spiritually, when I hear that they have murdered another young girl like me, I cry out. I cannot be silent. I see what happened in the intifadah. How the women there began to liberate themselves, and then the men got frightened. And at the same time, the occupation authorities helped the religious movements grow, and in the name of religion men again began oppressing women. But they oppress us not because the Koran tells them to but because they choose from the Koran the verses that are convenient for them. Here, my father tells me all sorts of things that maybe in some way he wants to tell me himself, but it’s easier for him to say, Our religion, our tradition. He also takes advantage of this pressure. But actually Islam has things that women can exploit for their own good. For example, a woman can give a divorce decree, a talak , and not the husband, did you know that?

“So I, when I get married, I want to write in our marriage contract that I am the one that has the right of talak . There are already those who have put that in their betrothal contracts. In Teibe alone there are three girls who did.

“Or there are such simple things, like the bride’s father always comes and gives her, you know, to her husband. But according to Islam, the father only gives her away if she is under the age of seventeen, and after seventeen she’s exempt from that. Despite that, the father always gives away his daughter. What kind of thing is that? Is she some sort of object? Or has she no will of her own and he can market her?”

Twenty-two years old — her eyes are blue and her forehead gleams, her young and affable face bunching up momentarily like a fist, hard and bitter, and her speech is rapid and dense. There is so much to do, to accomplish, to catch up to. “Sometimes I say, if I were Marwa born in France, I would now have at least a master’s degree, maybe I’d be preparing for a Ph.D., and my life would be more in order. I would learn more, read more, go to plays, develop. And I–I still don’t have my B.A. When I even think about relations with a boy I realize that a relationship would probably demand a lot of energy from me, and I need my energy for places that are more important to me. Or sometimes I think, I’ll live without those things. Afterward I think, No…impossible. If I don’t have the ability to think of myself, how can I have the ability to think of others? It can’t be. Without love I stop being human. Without love, what humanity do I have within me? None.”

She founded “Jafra,” the Palestinian women’s movement in Israel, whose motto is “Both social and political change.” From the house sitting on the peak of Teibe’s hill she pulled strings, made connections. The movement already has a general staff, and there are women’s organizations that support her, Jewish and Italian and German women. They have public discussions on the status of women, on sex separation in the schools, on improving the lot of Arab divorcees, and on sex education — which does not exist at all in Arab schools. “Because of that just look, the biological track is always the biggest one at Arab schools, and that’s not because everyone suddenly loves biology; it’s because they at least explain about the body and about sex. There’s no chance of an Arab girl getting sex education in any other way. I used to sit with the older women, I’d listen to them — that’s sex education? They talk nonsense, they can’t speak openly, every second word is ’ eib , shame, the whole time ’ eib, ’eib , everything’s shameful, everything’s bad bad bad. So on the one hand they give us no explanation, and on the other hand they expect us to be, you know, sexy, to attract boys, to get married fast…”

When Jibara was six years old her mother died. Almost from that time on she has managed her own life as she sees fit. As a young girl she opened her own store, where she sewed dresses. She paid for a journalism course out of her own pocket so that she would not have to take money from her father. Father Jibara was willing to give her money, but according to Marwa, “I believe that independence begins with financial independence. As long as I keep taking money from my father, I can’t talk about equality. Right?”

She told a story:

“When I was in second grade, the teacher told the class — I still hate her for this—‘Tomorrow we will celebrate our Independence Day, when the Jews came and liberated our land from the British.’ Whenever there was a party I would ask my aunt to bake a cake. She baked me one this time, too. The next morning I took the cake like this, such a pretty cake”—for a solitary moment her voice is in rapture—“and I was about to leave the house, when Father came and smashed and pulverized the cake with his fingers. I didn’t understand why he was doing it, and he didn’t explain anything. He just destroyed it and left. I cried, I took it to school crying, and I told them that my father had done it and that I didn’t know why. I was so naïve.

“Afterward it was Land Day. In Teibe, this man was killed, and I was there and saw him killed. That began to open my eyes. A year later I participated in the first demonstration; only a few people came, because then they were afraid, and I remember walking in the first row, holding the wreath tightly. I was nine years old, and about then I began going everywhere with Father, to the symposiums, the meetings, and the whole time I was the youngest one there, and the only girl.