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

“But they really are the enemy!” many Israeli Jews — maybe even the majority — will assert.

Are they the enemy?

How do we decide who is an enemy? According to his secret desires? According to the way we interpret those secrets? According to what we know of human nature? According to our anxieties? According to his deeds?

I tried to obtain from the Israeli police precise details about the involvement of the Arab citizens of Israel in terrorist activity inside the Green Line, but the police (the investigations division) refused to give me information. While they annually publish data on terrorist activity in Israel, the data is presented in a misleading way: the official statistics do not state how many of the attacks were carried out by Arab citizens of Israel and how many by Arabs from the territories. My repeated requests for more accurate information were rejected. For some reason, after my limited experience of recent months, it is hard for me to believe that this fudging of the facts is coincidental.

“During the forty years of Israel’s existence only.4 percent of Israeli Arabs have been accused and convicted of hostile activity against the state. So 99.6 percent have proven their loyalty to the country,” said Shmuel Toledano, formerly the prime minister’s Advisor on Arab Affairs. *

“If you had a choice,” Jews and Arabs were asked in June 1989, in the framework of the first study of its kind on peace proposals, “would you prefer to live your life outside the State of Israel?” Some 80 percent of the Jews and 75 percent of the Arabs responded that they would not want to live outside Israel. Of the Jewish citizens surveyed, 53 percent believed that Jewish-Arab coexistence is possible in Israel. Among the Arabs a majority of 83 percent believed this, and 96 percent of the Arabs supported, according to Dr. Elhaj, one of the researchers, a “two-state solution” (the study was carried out by the Guttmann Institute for Applied Social Research).

Every so often there are surveys that check the attitude of Arab citizens to the country. Some of the figures are disturbing (17.6 percent of the Arabs surveyed in a 1987 study by Professor Sami Smooha rejected Israel’s right to exist). They show that a minority of the Arabs in Israel might be enemies, and might even participate in violent activity against the state and its Jewish inhabitants. Yet the direction of the surveys is clear, and an unscientific but open-minded look at the familiar Israeli reality confirms this. The great majority of Palestinians in Israel have decided in favor of integration into the state, in favor of a struggle for equality in the framework of Israeli law. Out of all the choices and options for action and behavior available to Israeli Arabs, most of them have chosen to accept reality.

“And I already know — even if an Arab prostrates himself twice a day on some rabbi’s grave, even if he eats gefilte fish to break his Ramadan fast, he won’t be equal and won’t be an integral part of Israeli society. It just can’t be!” sighed Majed Elhaj. “So I say to myself, Listen, I’ve come to terms with the existence of the state as a state. But it hasn’t come to terms with my existence as a human being. True, it took the Arabs in Israel ten years before they began to accept Israel, but there are many Jews in Israel who still live in that period of anxiety and disquiet. Something ingrained in them says that an Arab cannot be an Israeli. He must be a potential enemy of Israel. An Israel hater. He won’t think twice if he’s given the opportunity to do harm to Israel. This is incorrect. And it is liable, paradoxically, to push the Arabs into alienation and extremism. I don’t want to repeat that obnoxious sentence: ‘The Arabs have again proven their loyalty to Israel.’ As if they always, at every moment and in every event, have to prove that they are always loyal. ‘What does it mean that we’ve “proven” it? We’re citizens like every other citizen!’ But the new generation, my children, will no longer accept it. We, perhaps, were a kind of intermediate generation, our parents always took us back, we were educated by the generation of the defeat. But our children have been educated by a generation that has political awareness and national pride, and they will not accept everything we accepted.”

“The Arabs should be judged according to what they might do, and not according to what they have done,” said David Ben-Gurion at the beginning of the 1950s, formulating the state’s fundamental attitude to the Arab minority. Yet forty years have passed since then. For how many years will we continue to “convict” the Arabs until their “innocence” is proven? Forty years or more is certainly cruel and unusual punishment.

For the moment they are still waiting for us. Waiting with amazing patience for the country to decide once and for all what it wants from them, and what it sees in them — stowaways? a fifth column? a security burden? an unwanted pregnancy?

It is making no decision. Or, more correctly, Israel has not, since 1948, fundamentally changed its internal judgment of the Arab minority within it, even though today’s circumstances are so different. This judgment — expressed in many ways — prevents Palestinians in Israel who so wish from becoming allies and partners. Israel is liable in the end to doom its Arab citizens to fulfill its fears of them.

How long can a relatively large minority be assumed by the majority to be an enemy without in the end actually turning into one? How long can the state exist as a stable political framework if this is how it treats a sixth of its citizens?

Slowly and steadily, as if slumbering, Israel is missing its chance to rescue itself from a horrible mistake. It is creating for itself the enemy it will run up against after its other enemies have made their peace with it. And war (as the Serbs and Croats teach us today) means war.

How can it be that I knew so little of how the Palestinians in Israel aspire to autonomy? I had, after all, heard of them in the past, but still, I didn’t know. I read about it — but I didn’t know.

Had I put myself in their place, in their circumstances, for even an hour, I would certainly have known. Had I but imagined myself, for example, as a Jew in another land that rejected me, watching and restricting my every move, I would certainly have felt the desire to separate myself from that country.

And why was I unable to arouse within me the sense of primal family ties between the Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line? How could I not have ever exposed myself, until now, to the tangle of emotions and anguish of the Arab who wishes to be part of the Israeli reality yet finds himself endlessly rejected, suspected, detested? And why was I unable to estimate the great comfort and reward that religion gives to a people with a national handicap?

I did not, I knew not, I remembered not, and I thought not.

In all that touches on the Arab minority, the collective Jewish consciousness in Israel is like that of a city obliged to house within it a large institution for criminal rehabilitation.

On the face of it, life goes on as usual. But people learn to avoid the neighborhood where the institution is situated. Good citizens like us can live our whole lives without going near that neighborhood. In our imaginations — if we are forced to think about it — it is a violent, dirty, hostile place. Everyone there dresses the same. They have no individual names, only one collective name; they have no faces, only “characteristic features.” It is important for first-class citizens like us to know that “they” are always under supervision; that they are carefully counted; that with prudence, and in ways that will not disturb our self-image as enlightened persons, their access to the rest of the city is carefully controlled.