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

The future of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel does not look promising. Admittedly there is still the hope that a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the occupied territories will help tensions subside, and create the conditions for equality and mutual acceptance between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Ranged against this modest hope are harsh realities, the conflict’s “facts of life”—the deep, longstanding mistrust between the Palestinians and Jews, and the memory of the injustices and crimes they have committed against each other over several generations. There is also the profound fear that any peace agreement will produce new terrorist movements that will seek to protest, with blood and fire, the concessions and compromises that made the agreement possible. There are other realities as well — the unchanging bitterness of a minority who feels that its land has been stolen, and whose national, religious, social, and even cultural aspirations are perceived to be dire threats to the same aspirations held by the majority. And there is also the Israeli Jews’ sense that their Palestinian co-citizens are taking advantage of the democratic system to malign the country or, at the very least, to call into question its Jewish nature. The Jews suspect that the Palestinians accept Israel’s existence only tactically, for the time being, and that when the right opportunity presents itself, they will not hesitate to join the country’s enemies.

There are huge questions as to what the future will look like after the peace agreement has been reached, perhaps, with the State of Palestine. Can we look forward to a time when, finally, a process of mutual conciliation and acceptance will begin within Israel? Will the end of the conflict be internalized in people’s hearts, or will Israel’s Palestinian citizens then renew, with redoubled force, their national demands, which have still not been discussed publicly and openly? How will Israel respond?

It is difficult to imagine that Israel will, after withdrawing from the occupied territories — a withdrawal that is liable to produce a trauma when Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are evacuated, creating a deep and violent rift in the Israeli social fabric — find within itself the necessary strength, and generosity, and sense of security, to grant its Palestinian minority equal rights, and even some of its national demands. This being the case, the country must prepare for some harsh prospects, including lengthy and violent confrontations between Jews and Arabs within Israel. This tension might well be aggravated deliberately by Palestine and other Arab countries. If internal strife leads Israel to take severe measures against its Palestinian citizens, the government of Palestine could decide to nullify the peace agreement.

There can be no doubt that both sides will have to make an enormous effort to overcome both the temptation of revenge, and their anxieties, in order to gradually reap the benefits of stability. For this to happen, the Israeli Palestinians will have to find the “golden mean” between their understandable identification with Palestine, and their integration into Israel as citizens of equal rights and obligations. The Jewish majority will have to make no less of an effort to understand that “democracy” does not simply mean majority rule. It also must mean that the majority has an obligation to defend the minority in its midst, and to allow it equality and freedom of action, and a sense of self-worth.

This book was written twelve years ago, and the reality it describes seems to have become more acute since then, taking on a harsher and more disturbing hue. Many of the potential dangers and threats that were outlined in the conversations and interviews I conducted then have become real. Many — Jews and Palestinians — no longer bother to hide either their hostility or their despair at being chained together like prisoners. Looking out from the conflagration raging around us, it is difficult to believe that these two groups will do what is necessary to create and reinforce a foundation for a productive civil partnership, or a well-grounded and mature civil culture.

It is very easy to severely criticize the behavior and actions of each side towards the other, but it would, at this time, be unfair and even self-righteous to pass judgment. We are discussing a situation of unparalleled tragedy, intricacy, and cruelty. Each is mortally afraid of the other. In many respects, they do not enjoy internal freedom of movement, nor the mental ability to overcome the severe handicaps inflicted on them by their separate and joint histories, and by the geopolitical conditions in which they are trapped. Both sides have become paralyzed with misery during their decades together, and are now doomed to make their mistakes and crash into obstacles of their own making. The Jews and Arabs living in a single country no longer have the fortitude to rise above their fears. Those fears now seem to be the only thing that connects them.

In my view, this is less a political story than a human one. Nothing but an almost superhuman effort from all sides can prevent the story of each and every one of us here in Israel from ending in tragedy.

— David Grossman

28 January 2003

During the process of writing this book I met the few who fight the war for integration. Organizations like Sikui, Forum, the New Israel Fund, and the Institute for Arab Studies of the Givat Haviva — Hakibbutz Ha’artzi College, where I stayed for a number of days and where I could appreciate and wonder at the great amount of work done there. Jews and Arabs work together in all these organizations. Their work and their daily lives demonstrate how possible that goal is.

It is a special pleasure for me to thank Mrs. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, the research coordinator at Givat Haviva, who guided me during the writing of this book by giving advice, making contacts, setting up meetings, and, especially, by her dedication to relations between the nations. She has for years woven a dialogue with the Arabs in Israel — not out of paternalism, not out of sanctimoniousness, but with internal honesty, enlightenment, and a critical and sober outlook. I would like to dedicate this book to her and to all those who fight for all of us and persist in their dream. May their dream become reality.

*Out of consideration for the reader who does not know Arabic, names and terms from that language are not transliterated “scientifically.”

*An annual day of protest by Palestinian Israelis against Israeli government confiscation of Arab land.

*Rehavam Ze’evi, head of the extreme right-wing Moledet Party. When he was in the Palmach, in the late forties, he was very gaunt and wore round, wireless glasses.

*Moshe Levi, the unusually tall former chief of staff.

*Data taken from Majed Elhaj, Social Education and Change among the Arabs in Israel (English) (International Center for Peace in the Middle East, 1991).

*Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement and is tied to Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Arab world. Their purpose is to establish religious regimes throughout the Arab world. The Islamic Brotherhood is the oldest modern fundamentalist Islamic movement, established in Egypt before World War II; it now has branches all over the Arab world. Al-Azhar is a prestigious Islamic university in Cairo, established in the Middle Ages.

*Plan D was the first strategic plan of the IDF in 1948 to occupy towns and villages populated by Arabs, in lands assigned by the UN partition to the Jewish state.

*Even though the two disputants here are, perhaps, the two most fluent spokesmen in this debate, and even though this was not the first time they trudged through it, it was fascinating to realize that they still have not succeeded in reaching a set of common definitions and clear concepts from which the discussion could move forward. This impasse is even more interesting to me than the semantic polemic itself, and it points out an authentic and emotional problem of the overlap of concepts in the Hebrew language and Israeli existence. Concepts such as “people,” “nation,” “citizenship,” and even “Jew” and “Israeli” still suffer from heavy psychological obscurity and subjective interpretation.