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

“The lesson is supposed to be what he and I work out and formulate together! But it’s hard, it’s a challenge to the teacher! The teacher will have to prepare himself, learn the material, think what unexpected questions the children might ask, and that threatens him. Why should he do it? Since there’s no supervision, and since no one ever asks him how he’s teaching, he prefers the old method. And if he fails with that, too, he makes slogans against the authorities, puts them into the children’s heads, to excuse his own failure. So a kid reaches his senior year and he’s afraid to give you an answer. He searches your eyes for what answer will please you.

“Another part of the problem is the woman’s place in our society and her role in education. Because even though we teach the women, the girls, they finish high school, and a teachers college or B.A., but her character doesn’t change. She only knows more. Then, when she becomes a teacher herself, she gives the children her character, not her knowledge.

“So I look ahead, to my grandchildren’s generation, and I’m telling you that not much will change with them, either. How can it change? Who can educate them otherwise? Can a woman give her sons a character other than hers? And her daughters, what will they have to give? We’re in a vicious circle.

“So if there’s a change it will come very slowly. Not in a revolutionary way. And the gap between us and Jewish society will remain, will even grow. A long time. That’s reality, and we have to recognize it. There are advanced societies, and there are less advanced societies. We need a general revolution, of ideas and action. And the state can’t help us with that. I can’t put the blame on that, not on the Jews and not on the government. What happened, for instance, in Turkey? When Kemal Atatürk wanted to change society, he took the babies, kept them away from their parents from birth, so they wouldn’t receive their parents’ character, and educated them the way he wanted. Redesigned them. Now, you can’t do that kind of thing here. And we have to start coming to terms with what we are. That’s the way we are. That’s our character. We weren’t educated to know how to help ourselves, and it looks as if we’re unable to do it on our own.”

These are the voices. Years of cautious and deliberate existence, the living memory of the trauma of 1948, and the sight of their brothers rotting in the refugee camps have taught the Palestinians in Israel not to go to extremes — in anything — and not to take any irreversible position. Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learned something even more difficult — to stand still on the wire. To abstain, for years, from any hasty movement. To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will.

Thus, for many long years, has the Palestinian acrobat in Israel stood in place on a high wire — one foot in the air, never set down. He glances out of the corner of his eye to the audience below, which never stops shouting its warnings and its anger. Jewish shouts, Arab shouts — he dares not make a false move.

So he stands still on the tightrope. He has come to terms with Israel’s existence but still does not feel part of it. His identity is Palestinian, but he is too cautious to demand minimum national rights. Yes, he is a Palestinian, but he refrains from taking part in his brothers’ struggle, the struggle of those who are one flesh with him. Officially he is Israeli, but he is afraid to demand for himself, with full force, as is customary in Israeli pressure politics, legitimate rights as an Israeli. Were he to dare to demand civil rights forcefully, he would immediately be accused of nationalist extremism. If he demands nothing and wishes for nothing, he will be accused of alienation and separatism.

So it has been for decades, for hundreds of thousands of acrobats. Sleeping on the wire, in midstep.

In such a situation it is so easy to engage in “self-suspension,” a reduction of the “surface area.” It is so tempting to shut oneself off from a complex external reality, whether apathetic or hostile.

There is no glorious past to long for. The past is linked with a difficult defeat, with being disconnected from the rest of the nation, with a sense of guilt for having learned to live with Jews. There is not too much hope when it comes to anything touching on full self-realization in the future, as Israelis and Palestinians. So, sprawling between their demands, suspicions, and their contempt for and anger at all the camps that follow their movements, many of the Palestinians in Israel stick with the existing and the immediate.

“We have more material things than those in the territories,” Zuhir Yehia of Kafr Kara said to me. “More money, more property, nicer houses, savings in the bank. But material things cannot support a consciousness. If you’ve got material things, maybe you look different, prettier, better dressed, you wear glasses; our water is sweeter, but that’s not depth. The Palestinians in the territories are now more concerned with content. We have only the body; there they have the soul.”

Many of them are attached to those material things with all their beings, out of what sometimes looks like despair, despair that has become a habit (an odd but appropriate expression here). They are inclined to opportunism, pragmatism at any price, materialism, and utilitarianism (expressed, for example, in the fact that 42 percent of them voted in the last elections for Zionist parties, including right-wing ones). They outwardly imitate Jewish manners, they foster provincialism (something that can be seen, for example, in the Arabic newspapers published in Israel, which give almost no attention to world events, or even to events in “Jewish” Israel, being almost exclusively concerned with events within the four walls of Palestinian-Israeli society). One looking in from the outside would think that many, very many, of the Palestinians in Israel create for themselves a narrow present, constricted and escapist, a kind of sumud (endurance) of the moment.

In one of the early chapters I told the story of the “present absentees” among the Palestinians in Israel. One may also say, without any risk of grave error, that the Jewish majority in Israel treats all its Palestinian citizens as absent presences. This is how they are conceived, and how they are depicted in the media — as a collective absence, as a group that exists but is faceless and nameless, of uniform traits, most of them negative. If in 1948 the Palestinians in Israel were “those that are not but actually are,” they have over the years turned into “those who are but actually are not.”

Now, in these past months, I have had a growing feeling that in some subtle and complex way this attitude has been internalized by the Palestinians in Israel themselves, and has even in some turned into a sophisticated defense mechanism against the disappointments with which the state has surrounded them. Yes, sometimes it seems to me that there are those among them who find their absent presence useful. They cloak themselves in it, to shield themselves from the face that the state presents to them — a clenched face that pursues them always, the face of a stingy and suspicious hotel proprietor.

What is so depressing, so ingrained in the relations between us, the Jews in Israel, and them? Maybe it’s that the state of the Palestinians in Israel is so convenient for us Jews. It is convenient for us, pure and simple. It is easier for us to operate in such a complex situation when “our” minority is so passive. It is easy for us to postpone any real and penetrating confrontation with ourselves when there is such a partner. “What an ideal minority!” sociologist Majed Elhaj sneered bitterly. “The quietest minority in the world.”