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

I write this again, to check. In Israel there live almost a million citizens, men, women, and children, whose suspended animation is convenient for us, the Jewish majority.

I should have imposed quotation marks on “convenient,” but in the war room of our consciousness, the consciousness of the survivor, there is no room for such fine points, there is no space for a look that will see beyond the current moment. The little security officer in all of us likes the reports he receives from there.

If they are quiet — it is convenient. If they do not take part in national affairs — that is convenient. If we see to it that they have minimal rights, and they are careful not to demand additional rights that legally they should have — it is convenient for us. If they let out their frustrations by satisfying material desires, or with religion — that’s their business. If they are prepared to continue to cooperate with injustice and prejudice and do not force us to change anything — it is very convenient. If they, by their own testimony, do not find among themselves the necessary strength to break out of the fossilized framework of their past, do we have an obligation to help them do that?

“There is something interesting in this story of the Arabs in Israel,” said Azmi Bishara. “Our failure to struggle against discrimination and humiliation does not necessarily derive from fear. Yes, from fear also, but mostly it derives from the feeling that this is not our country. We are strangers to it. So what should we protest about? Who has any expectations of this country? Who says that it will ever grant us equality?”

If that is the situation, senior figures snort with collective vapidity, why should we awaken in them the need to shake themselves out of it, to redefine themselves, to be an equal part? We have enough problems as it is. It is very convenient.

Is this guilt, or just failure? A temptation that a nation in our circumstances found it difficult not to give in to?

It seems to me that the Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian failures have met, and that this was one of the most potent and exhilarating contacts that has ever occurred between the two peoples in Israel.

Of this doubtful coupling twin guilts were born. Dr. Sa’id Zeidani, among the bravest and most open people I have met, described them: “The condition of the Arabs in Israel does not awaken one’s respect. The self-castration. They don’t educate the Arab in Israel to be proud of himself. There is no self-assurance, or any sense of duty or consciousness that the injustice should be opposed in a determined way. They say that power corrupts, but so does lack of power, and weakness, maybe more than power does. We are not creating human beings who take their duties seriously. Education has created people who see no social challenges for which they would be willing to fight. They leave the fight to the parties, to the political forces. I think that what Israel did, connived to do, was to rule in this way — to intentionally create an Arab society that would be quiet, that would not rise up. They did not educate it the way you educate free and thinking people.”

Yes, it is a “convenient” minority that lives among us. It generally speaks to us in very cautious language. But that does not release us from the obligation to face honestly up to Sa’id Zeidani’s blunt words, to what sounds like a quiet, defeated lament rising from among many of the words in this book.

Has Israel indeed made the Palestinian minority “quiet,” obedient, dormant? Has the state, through its apparatus, worked to neutralize expressions of vitality, of force, identity, and ambition? To create a deliberate dullness? It is hard to believe that this was an intentional policy. That people sat down somewhere and drafted a plan to bring it about.

Then the Koenig Report comes to mind. This secret document — later published — was written in 1976 by Yisrael Koenig, the chief of the Ministry of the Interior in the northern district, along with three Jewish mayors. Was it unique? The report proposed to the government a set of policies regarding the Arabs in Israel:

Central institutions should give preference to the employment of Jews instead of Arabs.

In order to take from the Communist Party the leading role in the national struggle and the representation of the Israeli Arabs, and to provide an outlet for “fence-sitters,” a sister party to the Labor Party should be established that will put an emphasis on ideas of equality, humanism, culture, and language, social struggle and the pursuit of peace in the region. [Governing] institutions should organize to establish an invisible presence in and control of this party.

…a special task force (Shin Bet) should be appointed to investigate the personal habits of Communist leaders and other negative figures, and to bring the findings to the attention of the voting public.

Proper arrangements should be made with the directors of industries operating under the Capital Investment Act in critical areas [the country’s north] so that the number of Arab employees will not rise above 20 percent.

We should reach an arrangement with the central marketing groups of various goods to neutralize and hinder Arab dealers, especially in the north, in order to prevent the dependence of the Jewish population on these dealers, especially in times of emergency.

The government must find a way to neutralize grants to large families among the Arab population, whether by linking [this benefit] to economic status or by removing these grants from the purvey of the social security agency and handing them over to the Jewish Agency or Zionist Organization, so that they will be directed at Jews only.

But why bother with Koenig’s recommendations? Reality plants itself in front of our faces in a much more blunt way. Who recommended a policy that causes 55 percent of the families under the poverty line (in 1991) to be Arabs? Or one that ensures that Arab villages receive 6 percent of the development funds available to non-urban local authorities, even though they represent 30 percent of the population living in such settlements? Or that the budget per person in these local authorities is only a quarter of that in Jewish settlements? Or that fifteen of the largest Arab municipalities have not yet had their zoning plans approved by the central government, causing delays in granting business licenses, preventing investments, and forcing the inhabitants to build illegally? Furthermore, the zoning plan for Nazareth, the largest Arab settlement in the country, was last reviewed and approved in 1942. Who are the people who constructed a reality in which the water allocated for Arab agriculture is only 2.4 percent of the water available to Israeli agriculture, even though Arab farmers cultivate 17 percent of the agricultural land? The water allocation for an agricultural unit belonging to a Jew is 14,000 cubic meters of water, while a unit belonging to an Arab gets only 1,500 cubic meters. How can it be that the Ministry of Labor and Welfare has established only one institution for mentally retarded children for the entire Arab population? That in the Ministry of Justice only 3 out of 1,000 employees are Arabs? That there has never been an Arab among the Supreme Court’s twelve justices? That there is only one social worker for every 5,000 Arabs, but one for every 1,800 Jews? That in Sakhnin, a town of 18,000 residents, there is no social services office? That of all institutional places available for handicapped children in Israel, only 4 percent are set aside for Arabs — who make up 24 percent of the children in the country?

The Arab educational problems cited in the last chapter were certainly known to government officials, experts, and policymakers. True, the compulsory education law applies to Arabs just as it applies to Jews, and there is a high literacy rate among Arab high-school graduates in Israel—93 percent among men and 78 percent among women (as compared with, in Jordan, 80 percent among men and 63 percent among women, according to the Israel Statistical Yearbook , 1990). True, there were only 7,000 Arab children in school on the day the state was founded, while in 1991 there were more than 220,000. Then there were 170 Arab teachers, and today there are about 10,000. A large number of schools have been established in Arab communities (in 1949 there were 45 Arab elementary schools and one high school; forty years later there are 410 schools — this according to data from the Central Statistical Bureau). But this impressive growth is misleading — the need is much greater than the supply. According to the report of the Director General’s Committee on Arab Education, submitted to the Ministry of Education in 1985, if the conditions in Arab schools were equalized with those prevailing in the Jewish schools, the former would need 50 percent more teachers. A field study carried out by Dr. Majed Elhaj reports that, in 1989, Arab students lacked 1,231 classrooms. An internal Ministry of Education report revealed (in May 1987) that 77 percent of the rooms rented as classrooms (which almost always fail to meet the standards set by the ministry) were being used by Arab students, because of the lack of any organized plan to erect school buildings in Arab communities.