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

As I’ve noted, one cannot ignore the objective reasons that have created this special situation. But for several years now new conditions have prevailed in the country and the region — reality invites us, Jews and Arabs, to make use of their potential — and we are still prisoners of old conceptions. Our strength is gone.

In many ways, overt and covert, Israel puts the minority within it on hold and blocks its chances — and ours — for integration, for mutual resuscitation. If, for instance, out of the 5,100 full-time university faculty members in Israel only twelve are Arabs; if out of 13,000 employees in the eight most important government ministries only 5 percent are Arab; if among the 400 prosecutors in the Ministry of Justice there is not a single Arab; if the Department for Muslim Affairs in the Ministry of Religious Affairs is headed, still, by a Jew; if there is not a single Arab on the managing committee of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, meaning the Arabs have no influence on broadcast policy; if the director of the government’s Arabic-language radio station is a Jew; if 44.9 percent of all citizens in the bottom tenth income level are Arabs; if according to the standards of the social-security system, a Jewish child in a large family is “worth” two Arab children — if all this happens here, what will happen here?

Does Israel act this way because it is sure that this is the correct way to realize its goals or simply because it does not have the strength to search for another way, and because it knows no such way? Sometimes it seems as if Israeli-Jewish DNA, after being modified by long generations of oppression and pogroms and blood libels and mass extermination, contains no gene for any other attitude toward people who might also be dangerous, even if their deeds, for almost half a century, prove the exact opposite. Professor Arnon Sofer says, “Their [the Arabs in Israel] loyalty to the country depends precisely on the distance of the Syrian tanks from the border!” I met too many Arabs during the last few months to be able to second such a sweeping statement. In any case, the distance of Syrian tanks from the border is the army’s responsibility. The border is the legitimate and necessary arena of the instinct for aggression and survival. For this reason the country has an army to defend it. But as for the citizens within the country, citizens who have performed their duties for forty-three years — Israel cannot continue to relate to them according to the laws of the struggle for survival only. These citizens are not enemies.

Understandably Israel, cramped within such narrow borders, feels that it is all border, that it is in a state of permanent siege, that “the whole nation is an army,” but we may, finally, rise up against this way of thinking. Precisely because such large parts of our lives are so close to the border in every sense of the word, because they are omnipresent, we must struggle so that in the little space free from the border we will make a real life for ourselves that contains spiritual space and expansive thinking and a place for us to discard some of our rusty armor. It must be a life in which — unlike on a border — one may stray from the main road and try others; in which it is possible to err and be of errant imagination; in which it is possible to be generous to and tolerant of the differences of the other, differences that do not have to be hostile.

I write these lines on December 1, 1991. Twenty-five years ago today, the military regime that the Arabs in Israel lived under from 1948 onward was dismantled. Under the military regime, the country had been divided into regions, and the Arabs in each region were the subjects of a military governor of almost unlimited powers. The governors could order deportations, the confiscation of property and belongings, curfews, the destruction of houses, arrests, and restrictions on movement. To go from Ramla to Tel Aviv — a fifteen-minute drive — an Arab had to obtain a special permit that was given, or not given, according to the whim of the regional governor. When it was given, payment was demanded — in the form of “goodwill” on the part of the recipient. Obtaining a driver’s license, a construction license, or a teaching permit involved proving one’s loyalty to the regime — that is, to the Shin Bet. It is hard today to believe that it was only in 1962 that the Druze were allowed to move freely within Israel, and that it was only in 1963 that Arabs were allowed to spend the night in areas where they had previously been allowed only during the day.

How much fear, how much suspicion and hatred were poured into those who supported the continuation of this regime, which provided complete, tyrannical control of every moment and every action and every word in the lives of the Arabs in Israel. Then the military government was abolished, and none of the dark prophecies of espionage and terrorism came true. On the contrary, the elimination of close supervision released pressures within both population groups and drained off some bad feelings. I am sure that many of us today would rather forget the position they took then in the endless debates over whether Israel could allow itself to abolish the military government.

In recent months I have incessantly heard from Israeli Jews that whining sentence: “No way.” “We’ll give the territories to the Palestinians, there will be a Palestinian state, and even if Israel behaves as fairly and as equally as it can to its Arabs, they’ll still, after a time, want to live their life in a framework that does not restrict them because they are not Jews. Here, within Israel, a new uprising will explode, demanding autonomy. And if that is our doom, why should Israel try so hard, go to such great lengths, in order to improve the living conditions of its potential enemies?”

This question has to be taken seriously. Yes, it is natural for man and natural for a nation to aspire to the greatest possible control of their own affairs. All over the world national minorities are now demanding the right to govern themselves. Even if the Palestinians in Israel are, for various reasons, still outside that “spring of nations,” the day may well come when they will ask to live as an autonomous national minority.

First, it should be noted that the voices calling for this today are few and far between. Maybe that is but an interim position, but it certainly may also be seen as an expression of the judicious acceptance by the Palestinians in Israel of the fact that their lives will be lived in the State of Israel, within which they will fight for equality.

But even if we examine the worst possibility — and no one can evade it — there will be a fundamental difference if Israel’s stand against Palestinian separatism derives from a solid sense of justice. Today, with Israel ruling over 2.5 million Arabs on both sides of the Green Line, and with its leaders denying that line’s existence yet discriminating against its minority in almost every sphere, what can we say to the Arabs among us who see themselves less and less as citizens and more and more as plundered of their rights? Can there be any wonder that they want to cut themselves free?

Israel’s position will be decisively different if it faces an Arab minority with many rights, with varied channels of expression and self-fulfillment, integrated into all the country’s elites, taking part in determining the country’s character and responsible for its decisions — yet despite all this demanding to go its separate way.

You haven’t convinced me, my interlocutor will say. Look at Yugoslavia. Its various communities were reasonably balanced. There were tensions, but each group had its channels of expression, there was equality for all (or inequality for all), and there was osmosis between the elites. Yet look what is happening there. And here, where we are—