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

Rasem Hama’isi is the first Palestinian in Israel to win a competition for planning a major urban center, and today he does strategic planning for cities, including Arab cities. He is short of stature and slightly balding, his eyes full of life under a jutting, convex forehead. He is sharp-tongued and expansive, and you feel right away that time flows through his veins.

“Listen, we’re way behind…The gap between the sophisticated tools today available to mankind and the values and knowledge our children receive is very large. This gap creates something terrible —that you don’t live the time in which you live! What I mean is that, when it comes down to it, you live only half a life! What a waste! Today you have a telephone in your car, a fax machine at home, there’s a computer that can connect you to anywhere in the world, but the big question is how do you translate that into your own thought processes. How can I translate that? Because time will not wait for me!” (Arab, Jew — when he said that, we were just two people fighting the only fit enemy, the real enemy.)

“Our internal ability to adapt to these things, to the conceptual world they create, is very limited. We still do not ask ourselves the important questions about our responsibility to society — for how many generations onward are you responsible, can you see only the end of your own nose? Are you responsible for the future of your children? Do you want to do something that will have an effect on your children’s children as well?”

Rasem Hama’isi.

I asked others as well. Again and again I asked how it could be that the state’s attitude of rejection could so paralyze the Arab minority. Why did the Arabs in Israel not react differently to this rejection? Other minorities in the world, in similar circumstances, react with an ambitious foray into the majority society’s centers of power and influence, into its elite. They are rejected but charge again, until they impose their presence on the majority. They transform the natural bitterness that every minority feels as a result of its circumstances — the “minority toxic syndrome”—into a powerful fuel, into an enzyme that magnifies their competitiveness and drive to excel, until they force the majority to attend to them. The Jewish and Japanese minorities have done this in the United States. So has the Chinese minority in East Asia. So have the Palestinians themselves in the Arab countries. Here are some of the answers I received.

Nabih Kasem, fifty-one, teacher and writer, Rama.

“I say to my students, First of all you have to be the vanguard. Be a good student. But know your limitations. There are things that you can never be in Israel. Not a member of the cabinet or director general of a ministry or a pilot, nothing that is really important to Israeli society. This is what I say to them, This is what you should know. Dream up to this point and not beyond. If you dream too much, you’ll ruin your future.”

“How can you tell a sixteen-year-old, Dream up to this point? After all, that’s the age of dreams.”

“Listen, he has to face reality. If he goes out without facing reality, in the end he’ll destroy himself. He has to know that he must achieve his rights, but he must also know that he cannot reach a key position. Why are you looking at me that way?…Dreams! I didn’t dream too much either.”

That attitude was addressed by Dr. Majed Elhaj, a sociologist at Haifa University. A young man, very eloquent, who some see as the future leader of the Arabs in Israel.

“The Arabs do not have to concede anything,” he said. “They are 18 percent of the population, and the state does not exploit their potential in all fields! It’s a huge loss! How can the Jews not understand what that means? More and more the country is losing a part of itself, because the Arab elite finds doors closed to it, and there is no employment, and first preference is given to immigrants and to Jews. So the gap grows, and with it alienation and bitterness.”

Elhaj himself was underprivileged in childhood. His mother was widowed, and he often had to stay home from school to help her sell vegetables in the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood of Haifa. He returned to his studies only because his teachers pressured him. He received his doctorate at the Hebrew University. He did postdoctorate work at Brown University, in the United States.

“I don’t think that the Arabs have to acquiesce in that. I think that there’s a mutual interest in having the Arabs fight to achieve in all fields. So I’m now addressing the subject of fostering excellence among the Arabs in Israel. Without developing a superior elite among the Arab minority, it is doubtful whether the Arabs will ever be able to take a place in Israeli society. The average Arab today has no chance of being absorbed into the Jewish sector. Only an Arab who excels, who can make a really unique contribution — as has happened in the theater, as has happened in sports with Zahi Armali [a Palestinian-Israeli soccer star] — succeeds in breaking through.

“So one of the messages I take today to my society is how to develop excellence. The fact that most of the population in Israel lives under the illusion that it can ignore you shouldn’t make you surrender and disappear. Because I think this tendency of the Arab minority in Israel to isolate itself, to be insular, is suicide.

“It may well be that this will not please several Arab leaders in Israel,” Elhaj says, “but I feel a duty to say it objectively: We, the Arab population, have a part in this failure. We did not invest enough in the individual. In our schools education is not geared toward excellence. There is no education toward making this generation a part of our struggle to open up society. Education is geared toward achievement, not excellence. Neither excellence as individuals nor excellence as a group. We need to create an intensive educational program for this. We need to choose the gifted students in school from preschool age. To foster the young leadership.

“This is a great challenge for us. We need to overcome a great despair, especially among educated Arabs. Because even if you are the very best, there is always a boundary to your dreams. There is a ceiling you will not be able to pass. So why excel?”

Naim Araideh, a poet and literary scholar, said: “It’s not really the Arabs’ lack of desire to be involved. It’s a great apprehension. It’s fear. Because here we’re talking about two entirely different cultures, and real exposure to another culture completely changes all the channels of thought and of the soul. On one hand, you do not want to assimilate. On the other hand, you want to be like them. The Jewish and Arab establishments really do not encourage such mutual involvement. In almost every country in the world where there is a majority and minority, the minority wants to outpace the majority. Here — no. Here it’s only in the technical things, the external materialistic things, that the minority wants to overtake the majority. So this one wants to build his own house, and that one wants a VCR and a car, but nothing more than that.”

Araideh, forty-one, is a member of the Druze community, born in the village of Mghar. He has published books of poetry in Hebrew and in Arabic, and is writing his Ph.D. thesis on the fiery nationalist Zionist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg (“No, I can’t say I haven’t been upset by some of the things in his poetry. His nationalism. Yes, it upsets me, but I regard him as a genius whose poetry is great, extraordinary, a flood of genius, who is allowed to make a slip of the tongue every so often”). He once spent six months in jail in the 1970s because he knew about but did not report the Syrian spy ring led by Israeli radical Udi Adiv.

“Take Jewish society and take Arab society and compare — in your society there is a tradition of self-criticism. If you read the Bible, the first thing that stands out is that there is no idealization of reality or of characters. There are false prophets, and there are the horrible sins of King David, and Abraham lies to the King of Egypt and tells him that Sarah is only his sister. That’s nice. It expresses the most human conflicts, doesn’t paper over anything. And when one of your prophets feels he is burning to pronounce his prophecy, he fears no one, because he has heaven behind him, ‘Because my Lord has spoken!’ It’s already rooted in your consciousness, it’s an integral part of you.