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

I then called Shammas and informed him that he’d “won” his Israeli “nationality.”

“You have no idea how happy I am,” he said, really sounding happy. “I’ve been asking Buli to do that for six years.”

I noted, bringing him down, that in my opinion Yehoshua had made only a small change in his position. He was still unwilling to bring the Arabs under the wing of the concepts of “the people of Israel” and “the nation of Israel,” as he, Yehoshua, understood them, nor under “nationalism” of the type that Shammas dreamed of. He was willing to grant only nationality, something Yehoshua saw as vague and somewhat hollow, a kind of honorary title.

“It’s not important, it’s not important!” Shammas responded elatedly (I was sorry I could not see his face at that moment). “I am a great believer in the power of words, and from my point of view the debate was very important, because it forced Yehoshua to see the problematic nature of the concepts we use in our discussion, and you’ll see that that ‘nationality’ will be a self-fulfilling prophecy!”

To what extent are the Arabs themselves responsible for the bad state of affairs between them and the Jewish majority? What is their part in the failure? Are they prepared to examine their own dereliction with a critical eye, or is it easier for them to blame the Jews?

“It is very natural for a minority to have grievances against the majority,” said Rafat Kabha from Barta’a. “If an Israeli Arab comes and you tell him, ‘Here, there’s progress toward equality, there’s an improvement compared with past years,’ I don’t think there would be one Arab in Israel who would tell you, ‘Okay, you’re right, I’m not discriminated against.’ That will never happen. Have you ever seen a minority that didn’t complain?”

The situation itself, the state of being a minority, almost inevitably creates feelings that cannot be assuaged or resolved — resentment and fear, suspicion and bitterness. There is something in the existential status of a minority that is liable to imprison it in a spiral of indignity — that is, an ever-present readiness to be hurt and insulted, followed by exploitation of the insult and wallowing in wretchedness, in a never-ending cycle.

Seniors at the high school in Jat pointedly complained about how they are not allowed to study the poetry of Mohammed Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, in school, and how this encroaches on their national heritage and Palestinian consciousness. This is a familiar and, in my opinion, legitimate complaint, but it was hard not to notice that the boys and girls were voicing their grievance in the very same words and expressions I had heard elsewhere in a similar context. To put it simply, they were repeating something they had learned by rote.

I agreed with them that they should be allowed to study Darwish’s poetry, and Palestinian history and culture in general. Then I asked who among them had tried to study this subject on his or her own. No one responded. I thought that they had not understood the question, so I asked it again: Have any of you tried to find reading material about the Palestinian people? Silence. One student — out of thirty-five — said he had once leafed through the Palestinian Encyclopedia , which is published in Arabic in Israel. The others studied their desks. They giggled. A girl mumbled that she had once read a book called The Palestinian Holocaust . Another had begun reading a book called The Tragedy of a Palestinian Girl . Have you discussed these things that are so important to you with an adult? They exchanged glances, began to guffaw, and turned contentious. It was clear that they had never considered that they themselves could cross the line that had been drawn by the accusation they made against the Jewish establishment. Indignity had become a slogan, producing rationalization instead of rationality.

I told this to Rasem Hama’isi, an urban planner born in Kafr Kana. Today he lives in Ramallah — a dynamic, active man, gravitating toward the future. He was long since sick of such stories, his expression said.

“I’ve had enough of always saying that everything is because of the government. We are also guilty! We’re not so quick to criticize ourselves. I’ll give you an example from my life. My niece, in fifth grade, showed me her geography notebook. I took a look and saw that two answers were wrong, but the teacher had checked them and signed it, as if everything was correct. I went to the teacher and asked him, Why did you do that?

“He said, ‘I don’t correct. I just sign to show that I checked to see that she did her homework.’

“I said, ‘That’s all? Maybe she copied out lyrics to a song by Um Kulthum [a popular Arab singer].’

“He started saying, ‘No…Look, we always do that, that’s the way it is.’

“And that’s a young teacher who should know better, given the system of values he believes in!

“This culture, this avoidance of responsibility, exists among us, and one of the terrible things is that we always have an alibi for it: Because we’re a national minority! Or: External factors don’t allow us to progress!

“So, true, sometimes that’s justified, but a lot of times it’s just rationalization. Once a boy came to me and I examined his notebook and saw that he had copied one exercise. He began reciting this excuse: ‘I want to finish. I want a degree, they don’t let us progress…’ I told him, That’s an excuse. Don’t try to give me that line. You want to be a teacher, right? How can I allow you to teach my children? What will you teach them? What values?

“So if you always limit yourself and say in advance, They won’t let me progress, you enter the destructive process of a people weakening itself and wearing itself out. Maybe there are some who enjoy feeling that way, wretched and insulted all the time. It gives them an excuse for all kinds of personal shortcomings. But I don’t want to educate my children and my society with such concepts.”

When he said that, I meditated on the extent to which offense is an emotion that — more than any other, perhaps — returns us to childhood. When we are angry, for instance, we do not revert to being children. Nor when we are bitter or sad. But when we are insulted, we are children again. Something vulnerable and helpless, burning and self-righteous rises from the depths of our memory and chokes us. So permanent indignity is liable to keep a person — or a group — in a kind of petrified childishness. It was, in fact, this very tone — childish, helpless, even spoiled — that was in the voices of the high-school students and in the voices of certain adults I met who lamented indiscriminately on the injustice Israel was doing them. It was depressing to encounter it among older people, older than I am, people with families, some of them teachers of young children. They were childish in the negative sense of the word, unable to take responsibility for their personal destiny, obediently adapting themselves to definitions dictated to them from outside, passively accepting grownup obsessions.

This is how the Palestinians in the occupied territories were for years. The sovereign states around them, the “grownups,” determined their destiny for them. They were given no right of self-determination, most of them were not allowed to carry a passport, most do not even have citizenship in any country — they are refugees with no home to call their own. Everyone treated them like children or minors, and never conceived they could suddenly become belligerents who would stand their ground. For many years they internalized this attitude. The intifadah was an act of self-deliverance — of a return to their chronological age and of linking up with adulthood’s sources of strength, the full integration of their national personality. Just as the Six-Day War had been a kind of collective Israeli “coming-of-age ceremony,” nineteen years after the country was founded, so was the intifadah, twenty years after the occupation, the “coming-of-age” of the Palestinian people in the territories. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it was the young people, the boys and girls, who made the revolution in Palestinian consciousness. Sometimes, meeting them, one can sense the extent to which they have managed to blend the energies of adolescence with those of nationalism, and how much each has served the others.