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

It is not necessary to be a political or psychological genius to know that the continually constricting helplessness of the Palestinians in Israel will take its toll. The cost will be insult and discrimination, Israel’s use of its superior force, its military guile, against Arabs in the territories. In particular, Israel will have to pay eventually for its ability to ignore the Palestinians’ private and collective pain, for the selective blindness it has assumed. It will all be tallied up. Were we to read of the accumulation of these facts in a different context, in a country far from us, we would all be oracles — sometimes a person, or an entire nation, understands what he needs and what was hard for him to bear only when he suddenly breaks his bonds with hideous force.

Can we believe, may we demand of the Israeli Jew, whose life is surviving from one war to the next, that he act in opposition to what seem to be his basic survival instincts, instincts that have proven themselves in so many battles? That he try to formulate a common identity with those who are part of the family of his enemies? Such a resolute reversal requires enormous, almost superhuman strength (and perhaps this is the source of the despair and the doubts — that sometimes, in order to be a human being, one needs to counteract human nature). Will Israel succeed in mobilizing that strength? Or better said, do we clearly understand the significance of failure?

We are certainly not guests in the Middle East. Neither do we need — nor have we received — the explicit permission or agreement of the Arab countries to be here. But in the things I have heard and have quoted in these pages, in the lowered gazes, one may clearly make out some of the invisible webs we are liable to tear in our haste, or indelicacy, or apathy. The wisdom demanded to improve our situation, to improve our relations in the region, and, finally, to be part of it is very great. Not the wisdom of the engineer who builds the fighter jet, or that of the computer whiz — we have those in abundance. Instead, we need wisdom of the heart, the wisdom to know how to behave toward these people, even if they are still our enemies.

Once. when we were weak and dependent on the capriciousness of forceful others, we had no choice but to learn this lesson, and because we had no choice, it had the sour aftertaste of humiliation. Afterward, in the years of our independence, we threw it off, along with other signs of humiliation. But (shouting): “then” is over now.

I cannot conclude without relating something that many Israeli Jews might not know, something that to my mind illuminates in a painful and cruel way the relations this book describes.

“There is not one Arab who does not think to himself about how they will transfer him, nor am I free of that fear,” Dr. Nazir Yunes, the surgeon from the Hillel Yafeh Hospital, told me, and added, “It’s always on my mind. Either they’ll passively press us to the wall and I’ll have nothing to do here, or they’ll do it physically: bring me to the border, on foot, in a truck, and say, Go! Why are you so surprised?”

“What are you talking about?” I said in anger and shock. “How can you believe that such a thing is at all possible? Who will allow such a thing to happen? Both outside and inside Israel people will fight any such attempt!”

Yunes smiled sorrowfully, nodding his head. “The people who advocate it have enough experience…They’ve already tried such methods on us, and they’ve succeeded.”

I thought he was exaggerating, that he was expressing a totally personal and private fear; I was even insulted to hear such things from Yunes, who is in my eyes living proof that it is possible to realize the idea of a common Israeli citizenship. But afterward, in many other meetings I had, with common people and educated people, with old people and children, the threat of transfer continued to echo, and I felt the living fear. It was amazing and depressing to realize how familiar my interlocutors were with the technical terms and practical details — how they would be taken, where they would be led, in what they would be transported. Many were convinced, for instance, that a peace agreement would include an exchange — the Arabs would be expelled from Israel to the Palestinian state that would be established, and their villages and homes in the Galilee and Wadi Ara and the Negev would be inhabited by the Jewish settlers who would be evacuated from the “territories.” One man, who asked to remain anonymous, an astute and impressive person, told me that for years, in a compulsive way, he has examined a certain kind of military truck on Israel’s roads in order to estimate “how many of them there are already in Israel, and if there are enough.”

I have been thinking about it ever since. People I know, citizens like me, live in the terror of that nightmare. Today, after the fact, I am no longer sure whether the anger I expressed at Dr. Nazir Yunes when he spoke to me about his fear of transfer was not a little overstated and meant to hide (from myself) the fact that somewhere, deep inside me, I knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Who knows what warped use many of us make of this fear to ensure that the problem of the Palestinians in Israel will never be the subject of an open and critical discussion.

When that anonymous man told me about the trucks he counts, I thought to myself, In the book I am now writing, there is the desire, which I do not always know how to realize (but which now, at least, I am confident of), to make room for you here. I sense that this is the opposite of the idea of transfer; that is, an attempt to internalize, finally, the Arabs in Israel, into Israeli life. To bring you to the place set aside for you with us, the Jews in Israel, the place imposed on all of us forty-four years ago and which has remained since then hard and twisted, like scar tissue on a bone that was broken and badly set and every careless movement threatens to break it again, and the entire body learns to move without using it. The place in which, only when we reside there together, we will be able to have our first conversation about all we have distorted and hidden for more than forty years. This, in my eyes, is the reason for this book: it is an invitation, in Hebrew, to enter and begin.

One night in early August 2002, a young Palestinian from the occupied territories arrived in the Arab village of Bi’ane, in Galilee, Israel. He had come on foot from his village in the West Bank, walking across the non-border between Israel and the territories with a large explosive charge and a supply of shrapnel in the form of nuts and screws. In Bi’ane he was the guest of three other young men who were all from a single family and Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. His hosts prepared a place for him to sleep, in the village preschool. At their visitor’s behest, they purchased batteries for the detonator and hid the bomb in the living room of their home. Later that night they conferred with him about possible targets for an effective terror attack, eventually settling on a morning bus from Haifa that usually carried many soldiers among its passengers.

The next morning they drove him along the bus route, searching for a place where security was lax. At a certain point the terrorist got out of the car, bid farewell to his escorts, and set the bomb so that he could trigger it at the appropriate moment. The bus arrived and the young men watched their friend step aboard. Then they sped off to their day job on a Coca-Cola delivery truck in the nearby Jewish town of Karmiel — so that they would have a solid alibi.