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

Shammas: “The minute you start talking on a large scale, my pain is obviously small. My pain, and that of the Palestinian in the refugee camps, will never be heard, because it always has to pass through the filter of the Holocaust. But I am continually trying to draw you out from your pathos, from your pathos of tormented Judaism, to say to you that it makes no difference what the magnitude of my pain is. What is important is the reality we define for ourselves together, so that our grandchildren will not have to continue coping with the mess being created today. I am telling you that your dream of creating a minority that will find its ethnocultural, even linguistic place here, such a framework is unacceptable to me, because your entire view of reality is Jewish, Buli, Jewish! You see only yourself and forget the other components. How can you want to make me a partner in an Israeli identity, if Israel is the totality of Judaism?”

“You know what?” A. B. Yehoshua sighed. “Let us suppose that I am ready to give you this ‘nationality’ that you want, an Israeli nationality. From here on out you can become integrated into my identity, just as a French Jew integrates into France.”

“No! No!” Shammas cried. “Because there is a French nationality but there is still no Israeli nationality!”

Yehoshua: “A French Jew has many French values, some of which are Christian and some traceable to the French Revolution, to Napoleon, and to Louis XIV. He internalizes it, and that is his Frenchness.”

Shammas: “That’s a false equation, because the French Jew’s passport says that he’s French, and only after that can he define himself as a Jew!”

“So I’ll give you that!” Yehoshua erupted. “Done! You will receive ‘nationality’ from me! You came here at 10:30 and you’re leaving at 2 p.m. with nationality! But Israeli identity you won’t receive. You won’t receive it from me! Why do you need my identity anyway?” He was inflamed. “You have Palestinian identity! You can’t have five identities! Wait a minute — will you give up your Palestinian identity?”

Shammas: “Yes, I am prepared to give up my Palestinian identity in the sense of ‘nation,’ as in ‘nation-state.’ In other words, I am ready to give up being a national of the Palestinian state that will be established. I am prepared for my Palestinian identity to be an ethnic identity, the same as your Jewish identity.”

“Oh, really, really,” Yehoshua said dismissively, his hands spread over his head, pointing ten points of incredulity and contention at Shammas. “Suddenly you’re bringing in ethnicity, American concepts that are valid only in a small part of the world. I don’t need that folklorist ethnology. What interests me is whether your identity teaches you how to run public transportation. How, for instance, do you make a Palestinian traffic light?”

“What are you talking about, there’s no such thing!”

“There is such a thing! The French have a little traffic light at eye level that you don’t have to strain to see. That’s why their traffic flows and doesn’t get backed up like in England. That’s the greatness of the French, that their identity is expressed even in a little traffic light.”

Shammas: “I bet some Algerian invented it, there is no such thing as a French traffic light, Buli.”

“Sure there is. A French traffic light and a French police force and a French place for a French policeman to carry his pistol, and French cooking and French foreign policy, just as there are Scandinavian ways to fight unemployment and Dutch ways of treating drug addicts. All those things, Anton, believe me, are important. They are significant. And they are constructed and cultivated from the past. They are life, and that is the meaning of life within an identity. I don’t want my identity to be nothing more than my going once a week to see a Jewish show at Beit Ha’am. Identity is not a bookcase, Anton! I want to get out of the bookcase, and bring the bookcase into my life!”

Shammas: “If you want to share all those things with me, give me a feeling that Independence Day is my holiday, too. Okay, Passover and Hanukkah are religious holidays, but make some civil holidays, so that I’ll want to go out on Tu Bi-Shvat and plant a tree!”

“I want that very much,” Yehoshua said simply, but immediately shook himself. “But Passover is not just a religious holiday for me! It is a holiday that defines me in relation to freedom, it gives me important moral values! It’s not only eating ethnic matzah! For an American Jew, Passover is an ethnic holiday, but for me; in Israel, it is a holiday that also should be establishing my relation to you. That’s how my identity is constructed.” “In which I have no part,” Anton said. “In which you have no part,” Yehoshua said.

“So we’re back to square one,” Anton said.

Gentlemen, I said, it is time to sum up. What has changed in these six years and three and a half hours?

A. B. Yehoshua: “Anton speaks about some great, far-off future; Anton is a kind of bird that has come here from some period fifty years hence…a soul born too early that passed by us on its way. It could be that what he’s saying now will then be much more relevant and comprehensible to us, and I’ll seem outdated, living in the past. I can only hope it will be so. But then they will say that we got through those fifty years thanks to my precise position, which also saw the evolution but didn’t allow it to make the kinds of jumps that would destroy the entire country. Because if we don’t formulate the concept of Israeliness most carefully, we will remain forever with two fundamental concepts, Jewish and Arab, which will ensure the permanence of the conflict. Yes, that is my summing up — Anton is the man of the future, and I protect the present for that future.”

Shammas listened with a smile and said, “I would add only that Yehoshua is a nostalgic man, and I am a utopian man.”

“I haven’t got a trace of nostalgia,” Yehoshua protested. “Check all my works — not a drop of nostalgia! But I want to tell you, Anton, that in the reality of Israel, if you’ve got an ally deep down — deep down! — it’s me. More than David, even. Because he, with all his liberalism and The Yellow Wind, with all that, I’m more your ally, because my conception is Israeliness, while he still sees himself as Jewish in a partial way, tied by obsession to some Yiddish ghosts from Poland which you’ll never be able to share, they’ll drive you crazy…”

The next day A. B. Yehoshua called the French embassy and was informed that French passports indeed contain the classification “Nationality: French”; similarly, the passports issued by the Belgian government state “Nationality: Belgian.”

“Anton wants ‘Nationality: Israeli,’ and I’ll give it to him,” Yehoshua said, a bit surprised at the results of his research. “But without identity! Identity, no!”

I asked, If so, what does such nationality mean to you, if it has no component of identity? A kind of advanced-level citizenship?

“Precisely,” Yehoshua said. “Advanced-level nationality is precisely it. It satisfies Anton’s need to receive something that is more than just the paper certification of citizenship. It seems to me that nationality is a concept that Anton has built specially for the bubble in which he, and maybe not just he, lives. A kind of framework in which he can be an Arab who lives together with Jews, an Arab who writes in Hebrew and lives in Hebrew, so he’s made this definition for himself. It’s hardly a coincidence that there is no equivalent word in Hebrew or in Arabic — that, apparently, is the comfortable position for him. Even so, the debate achieved something, some sort of movement. It advanced the matter of nationality, which is something I was unable to ‘give’ Anton up until now. It contains a certain advance toward the component of identity in the definition of the Israeli.”