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

“At that time I also began to read — by myself, not at school — about Land Day, what days were important to the Palestinians, who were the Palestinians, what was the Palestinian problem, what were we before. I read and devoured and learned everything.”

I could see her, a small girl with the ardor that was still apparent in her, and the tenacity, the world opening before her and creating her anew. Because I remembered myself that way, at the age of eight or nine, passionately reading the stories of Sholem Aleichem, stories for children and adults, understanding and not understanding, what is a pogrom, who are the Gentiles, what is exile, vaguely grasping that this was my father’s childhood, from which he had been evicted when he was my age; that the people I was reading of had a mysterious link to me, that they were I, but another I. He is very much alive in me, to this day, that child who finished reading Tevye the Milkman and accompanied Tevye and his daughters and wife when they were expelled from their home in Anatevka, and who realized suddenly inside, with a wail that broke out and shook him through and through, how hard it was to be a Jew, and more than that understood, for the first time understood and knew, that he himself was Jewish.

“During the Lebanon War I was thirteen, and I began to go to the hospitals in Israel where the army brought wounded Palestinians from Lebanon. For me it was a chance to talk with real Palestinians, the most Palestinian Palestinians there are. People from the refugee camps. I would go to Tel Hashomer, to Beilinson, stay there three or four days. Sometimes a week. Mostly I would talk to the children there. One boy’s entire house had been destroyed, his whole family had been killed, he was the only one to get there, and without a leg. One year and three months old, and every woman he saw he would call Mommy. I spent a long time there; I was thirteen and he would call me Mommy. We even thought of adopting him, my father and I. Then it turned out that his grandfather was alive, and he came and took him.

“So every time I say to myself, Enough. I want to stop it all, I want to live like all the other girls in Teibe, to study and get married to someone in a good financial position, I remember all those pictures, and I have someone who pushes me inside. You have to go on, for all of them, and for yourself, too.

“After the Lebanon War came the intifadah. Those are not just any people in the territories. They are my uncles, because my mother was born in Nablus, and friends, and children that I’ve known ever since I was born. And here, suddenly, it’s our struggle together, so how can I not?”

“So you participated in the intifadah?”

She hesitates for a moment. Her hand is on the smoothness of her neck.

“Okay,” she finally says. “It’s true.”

And she told the story in a single rush of words, almost without breathing.

“Ever since the intifadah began, I felt that I had to be there. On television I saw the Palestinian women demonstrating and facing your soldiers, and I was jealous. I wanted only not to be here. I wanted to take part in the war against the occupier. Whenever I could I went. I had to see everything, to hear, to talk with the people. I even ended up being in Nablus when your units killed the Black Panthers [one of the armed Palestinian groups], and I went to the mother of the barber in whose shop they hid and she showed me everything, where they came in and the bullet holes. There was an eight-year-old boy there who saw it, and hid under the table when they came in and started shooting; he saw it all and wasn’t hit. You can imagine what it is to hear it all straight from people who were there and who took part, and not just to read about it or see it on television.

“Or, for instance, we’re always hearing about the murder of collaborators. Once, when I was at my aunt’s house in Nablus, at three in the morning someone came by and shouted to turn off all the lights, and the whole street turned off the lights. And the guys went into the Almasri Building and brought out a boy they wanted to interrogate. They were in the building’s garage, and my cousin and I peeked out from the window; we heard the voices, and every time they saw us they shouted at us to get back inside. I couldn’t sit in silence and not watch it, because when they were interrogating him I said, Hey, good thing they’re interrogating, but then the army suddenly came to the alley, and then the interrogators suspected that the boy’s parents had called the soldiers, so they took out a dagger and struck the boy. I was horrified when I saw it — they didn’t hit him because they’d found him guilty, only because the army had come, you know; they didn’t really interrogate him, and they ran away.

“I was there during a curfew. I can’t describe it to you. On the one hand, I felt like I was in jail. I felt I was nothing. Zero. That there were people playing with my fate and deciding for me when to go out and when to be imprisoned. But on the other hand, what happened in the house during the curfew! Once there was an eight-day curfew, in the casbah. There was no more milk for the babies. They gave them only water. Afterward the water ran out. People began helping each other. To take care of the babies and the old people. And the hope — it’s hard to explain. Now maybe it’s changed a little, but when we sat there eating breakfast, the last word at the end of the meal was inshalla binnisr, inshalla biddawlah , may we [meet] at the victory, may we [meet] in our country. And when I was invited to a friend’s, at the end of the visit I would say, The next time I come to you may it be under Palestinian rule.”

Her face metamorphoses across from me; she is transported to Nablus. This is how the people in the refugee camps looked when they told me years ago about the spring in the village from which they had been uprooted, about the orange groves they had lost.

“In my house, in Teibe, when I heard on the radio the names of the fallen, it hurt me, yes, but it was not like actually entering a house and seeing the mother and family of—”

She chokes.

“Excuse me, it’s a little emotional for me. When I entered the house of a fallen fighter, it was as if I was entering a mosque. All the pictures of him hanging on the walls all around, and the leaflets, and the letters from all the organizations — all that shows the unity of everyone at this moment, because all share in the grief.

“I would leave and come back to my village in Israel, and here everything is like it always is, life, business, whatever interests the people, and I go on with my life but remain there, watching, and thinking, I don’t want to live the way you here live. Even if I’m here, I want to live like they do there. It’s true that I don’t suffer from hunger like they do. But every time I eat something — okay, not every time, but a lot — I look at the food and think, Now I’m eating. I am full now. I have everything. And there are others that have nothing. And I stop the meal. I was mad at myself, as if I have things that others lack. Father and I, neither of us has that thing called ‘me.’ The me does not exist for us. Father would give his entire salary to people in Tulkarm so that they could buy food. Now there isn’t anyone who can make up his bank overdraft. But he can’t stop. And I’m the same way.”

“And in Nablus,” I asked, “did they appreciate what you did? How did they relate to you?”

“Well, how do you think,” she responded with a lilt, her lips crinkling. “Like an Israeli Arab.” She spit out the word “Israeli.” Silence, and an unasked question. Marwa is tense again. “What kind of label is that, ‘Israeli Arab’? I don’t know any group by that name. I’m not Made in Israel. You, for example, have a sense of belonging to the State of Israel, right? I don’t. That’s the difference. I’ve been living in Israel for twenty-two years, and I have absolutely no feeling that I am Israeli! I just have an Israeli ID card. And I won’t have any connection to it as long as Israeli soldiers shoot at my cousins in Nablus.”