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

When we good citizens meet them outside, in our territory, we treat them suspiciously, as if they were a mobile enemy enclave. We display a sense of civic concern — can they really be trusted? Will some primal instinct not suddenly overcome them? To what extent are their relatives in the criminal world (that is, the Palestinians from the territories and the Arab world) liable to influence them? Will they, when put to the test, prove their loyalty to Israel?

Yes, I know — over the last decades real friendships, relationships of deep and symmetrical fraternity, have been established between Jews and Arabs in Israel. But these are exceptional. In general, “good citizens” have but a functional, restricted contact with Arabs. “My Arab” is, generally, the mechanic, the gardener, the plumber; the metal worker or construction laborer or the tile layer, and sometimes, the student at the university. “My Arab,” working where we good citizens live, is no more than an inmate of that institution permitted to work outside (for wages lower than what we would normally pay). Generally, he has only a first name, like a child. There is food for thought in the difficulty Israeli Jews have with Arab names, so common in life in the East. (It is hard here to overcome the temptation to ask whether the Israeli reader can remember even three of the names that appeared in this book? Two? One full name?) “My Arab” ’s good features are, for his Jewish friend, startlingly exceptional in the society from which he comes (His Hebrew is amazing! He’s so sensitive! So clean! And honest!), and his negative characteristics confirm everything the good citizen always knew.

It is not only individual names that the Arabs in Israel lack — the Hebrew language also lacks a correct general term to indicate our complex relations with the Arabs in Israel. Our problematic relations with the Palestinians in the occupied territories already have a plethora of names. Some we have counterfeited, and some have been imposed on us. We say: the problem of the territories, the question of the territories, the Palestinian problem, the intifadah, the occupation. In each of these smolders a sense of disquiet, even unrest.

When is the last time that someone in Israel explicitly referred to “the Palestinian problem within Israel”? Or “the national aspirations of the Arabs in Israel”? Or even just “the Palestinian national minority in Israel”?

They all exist.

The people themselves are alluded to in Hebrew as “Israeli Arabs,” a name that is in no way innocent (even if some of the Arabs themselves use it, maybe out of linguistic absent-mindedness, just as the Palestinians in the occupied territories sometimes call themselves, when speaking Hebrew, “the Arabs of Judea and Samaria”). A more widespread term is “minorities,” which is at first glance a factual label. Its greatest distinction is, however, that it is “clean”—it avoids the word “Arab,” and whoever it was that coined it toward the end of the 1940s also knew well how it sounds to the Arabs themselves — it is a standing reminder of their humiliation. (By the way, in the country’s official statistics, the term used for the Palestinians in Israel is “non-Jews.”)

The most commonly used term is “the Arab sector,” another seemingly neutral delimiter. Still, for some reason it rings in my ears as a description of something that has a dotted line showing where it is to be cut out.

At most, people will say “the minority problem” or “the Israeli-Arab problem.” In general, the speaker does not mean the whole range of the relationship but rather only the narrow security issues involved.

There are no correct names — there are only a few terms created by the military, the bureaucracy, and the legal system, sterile forceps with which to grasp what the hand dares not touch.

Only four years ago, at the outbreak of the intifadah, we discovered the price of this self-delusion. From 1967 onward we had gradually ceased to find new words to describe our rule over the Arabs in the occupied territories. As the situation worsened, we stopped telling what was happening there; our power to find new words, words charged with heat and vitality, words that would describe the situation as it is, was sapped. We called it all by fictitious names, using laundered words.

Since we lost our ability to use words to describe reality there correctly, we woke up one day to a reality that was hard to describe. Israel had become so good at fooling itself that the army did not even have contingency plans for confronting mass demonstrations; in the intifadah’s early days its agents rushed out to the most questionable markets to buy net throwers and rubber bullets and gravel blowers and other nasty toys.

After all, any country that conquers and represses another people ought to be prepared for large demonstrations. Israel wasn’t ready, because it did not know it was a conqueror, did not think it was being repressive, did not believe that there was a people there. This was a lesson for us — if you do not continually ask yourself the new questions that problematic reality imposes on your cowed, lazy, noncommittal consciousness, that reality will vanish from your mind. But only from there.

Moshe Arens, the Likud Minister of Defense, said, “There is no correlation between the time the cabinet has devoted to discussing the subject of the Israeli Arabs — perhaps a thousandth of its meetings or even less — and its importance. Neither have Israeli governments had a firm general conception of a policy regarding the Israeli Arabs. This derives from a mixture of lack of understanding, lack of interest, and lack of desire.”

The Nazareth poet Michel Hadad once wrote that after the 1967 war the Arabs in Israel discovered that they had been “living with a single lung.” This painful image applies to Israel as well — in abdicating its Arabs it seems like a country breathing with one lung, leaving the other collapsed. Nearly a fifth of the Israeli organism is in suspended animation, “lying on the shelf.” When you get close to that Arab society you discover what ought to be obvious — it is a world unto itself. There is a special pleasure in meeting people who are, largely, a collective foreign entity, a sealed package, bound undoubtedly in preconceptions, stereotypes, and suspicion, and here it is unbound before you, and there are faces, voices, body movements, weaknesses, pains. I met myself also, not always happily — the bounds of my tolerance of the stranger, the other; my own deceptions and twisted anxieties. The temptation to say “we” when you cannot bring yourself to admit that it is actually “I.”

And mostly on this journey (and sometimes it really was a journey to an unknown land) I met my country — people, Palestinian men and women, whom I would like to see everywhere in Israel. In the cabinet. And the army. (The previous Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens, was already initiating such integration with the Christian Arabs, and aspired to the voluntary enlistment of Muslims as well.) In the cabinet? In the army? You’re not afraid of that? Yes, I’m afraid. Like the fear you have before setting out on a long hike. Like before beginning the composition of a new book.

I met people with whom one can build a country. People from whom Israel could benefit if they were to contribute their abilities and minds and talents, as well as the special cultural nuance they could bring to our Western, technocratic lives. A country as meagerly endowed with natural resources as Israel is cannot afford to give up a large part of its human ore. Why should it keep Rima Othman, Tagrid Yunes, and Sa’id Zeidani from the center of activity — not only within the narrow bounds of their community, but in the entire range of activity in Israel? Of course, the Arab population, like the Jewish, contains those who are not “constructive citizens,” and sometimes these are even a burden. But the country carries that burden anyway. Why should it not benefit from the good the others can — and wish to — offer?