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

“But Israel isn’t just soldiers shooting,” I interrupt her flood of speech. “Aren’t there other things in Israel you feel a connection to?”

“I can tell you that the children in the territories don’t have any idea what Israelis are. For them, an Israeli is a soldier.”

“But you’re not from the territories.”

“True. But there’s a part of me that keeps me from accepting Israeli society as a whole. Because of it I have to reject everything.”

“Still, try to tell me in what sense you feel Israeli.”

She slammed shut. Her head moved from left to right in a gesture of resolute negation. Silence.

“In what sense I’m Israeli…?” Again a long silence. It was possible to feel to what extent the struggle for freedom really enslaves and expropriates parts of her. “There’s nothing I can say…Really nothing,” she eventually blurted out. “It’s hard for me to find anything Israeli in me.” She has worked as a reporter for the popular afternoon newspaper, Yediot Aharonot ; she works at the Givat Haviva teachers college, where there is an emphasis on Jewish-Arab cooperation; she organized a women’s demonstration in Teibe, the first of its kind, in the style of the vigils held by the Israeli protest group Women in Black; she speaks fluent Hebrew. “I’m a stranger in Israel. I’m a stranger in Teibe, too. Still, Teibe is my home. I belong to this place…Once I thought I would surely marry someone from the territories and move there. When I was sixteen I swore to myself, I will never marry anyone from here. There are no real men here. Only there. Those who struggle are men. The ones here are…never mind…but today I am sure that, even if a Palestinian state comes into being, I won’t move there, because I’ve started something here, the struggle for the rights of the Palestinian woman in Israel, which I want to complete. Were I to live in Nablus, or in Palestine when it comes to be, I would be making life easy for me. That is, I would be where it was more convenient for me to be.”

“But you felt like a stranger there, too.”

“That’s true…they’re remote…I even heard that they call us Arab shamenet , Arabs who’ve gotten used to the cream.” She snorted bitterly, shrugging her lips. “What do you want me to tell you? That’s the way it is for us…I don’t delude myself — there’s no one who really wants us to belong to them. Even when Arafat made his declaration in Algiers, he didn’t speak of us. At the peace conference they won’t mention us either. So who will take my part?”

Her hands, spread in inquiry, seemed for an instant to be straining at that invisible net that hangs between the Palestinians there and here, the mutual resentment, the jealousy, the accusations they hurl at each other — We remained here, repressed and humiliated, to defend the land that was left in our trust; you ran away, you abandoned the homeland. No, you stayed on to serve the enemy, like a woman who, raped by a man, agrees to be his mistress, while we are preserving, suffering and fighting, the true spark of the nation. But you have turned even the heroic struggle for freedom into a string of murders, you haven’t learned a thing since ’36. What have you learned? Only to talk pretty…A bundle of guilt feelings, of charges and counter-charges, a deep sense of betrayal gnaws away at both sides. Betrayal of the land, betrayal of freedom, betrayal of duty to fate — that is, as always, the duty to suffer — betrayal in the very fact that you are different from me; betrayals that no one is guilty of, but still someone must be guilty, because there will always remain some indivisible grain of anger and hurt that is directed against Israel.

I had ascended to the home of Marwa Jibara and her father via the paved roads of Teibe. The sidewalks of the main street are set with olive trees and French streetlights; ostentatious multistory apartment buildings stand there, like housing projects in the nearby Jewish town of Kfar Saba, and in the yard — a tractor or a hay-munching donkey or three goats with their front legs propped up meditatively against a fruit tree. As one mounts ever higher in the direction of the house on the top of the hill, the streets become narrow, gray, heaped with cement, but at Marwa’s house, in the little, well-kept yard, there is a wonderful lemon tree, and the house is warm and inviting, buzzing with guests and neighbors and children. People are constantly coming and going.

In the corner of the room is a “sculpture” she has erected, made of tear-gas canisters shot by the police and pieces of wall from houses destroyed by the security forces on “House Day” in Teibe. Ribbons of red, black, and green — the colors of the Palestinian national flag — adorn the pieces of iron and stone. Above her head is a painting of a young man towing landward a boat containing a miniature Mosque of Omar. Around the windows, as around the windows in all the Palestinian houses I visited, is etched — like a kind of ironic frame to the story as a whole — the familiar rectangle of peeled paint, left by the adhesive tape that was used to seal the windows against chemical attack during the Gulf War. Marwa herself is short, yet seems tall; her back is very straight, and her bearing is that of a princess. When one of those present in the room, her father or one of his friends, contradicts her, she cuts through them with a single glance, and I can imagine her, small and brave, striding like a chick, with its feathers standing on end, into the hall in which the Arab political parties convened last year on Land Day. Three hundred men sat there while Marwa Jibara demanded to know why there were no women present. “It was Ramadan then, and the assembly was after the iftar , the feast breaking the day’s fast. The men had come, you know, to listen and debate. I told them, I want to hear why your women aren’t here. I guess you left them behind to wash the dishes and cook for tomorrow. Or is the symposium part only for you and they have to stay at home?”

“And how did they react?”

“Some laughed. One said, ‘You know, it occurred to me only yesterday that we didn’t invite any women!’ He laughed, too. Understand that we are triply oppressed — first political oppression, together with the men; and the men are oppressed, so they oppress us — it’s natural, so if we succeed in our political struggle and the general oppression lessens, our oppression within our society will lessen, too. And there’s a third oppression, our oppression of ourselves. We still have trouble convincing the Arab woman that she is oppressed.

“It’s also because we’re all so young. When you look at what we intend to do in Arab society, and then you look at us, there’s sort of a discrepancy. There’s always got to be a man who will do all those things. Someone strong, with a paunch, who will sit on a chair, and then our plan will pass. Girls on diets, apparently that’s harder…”

Jafra is not the only women’s organization that has become active recently in the Arab community in Israel. Maybe the appearance of these organizations, and the fresh breeze they’ve brought with them, caused the murder of the young woman from Iksal to send such reverberations through Arab society and to fracture accepted mores, to the point of directing open criticism and demonstrations against this cruel custom. A stranger has difficulty imagining what walls had to be breached by the new women’s organizations. In some ways they leaped over hundreds of years in an instant. The bloody law of the tribe on the one side and progressive feminism on the other. A colorful bird fluttering out of an urn carried on the head.

“We’ve also got the matter of the hymen. To this day a girl is valued by her hymen, and that devastates me. Because there are lots of girls who do what they want with whomever they want, and a few days before the wedding they have a little operation that…In other words, they put it back on; they go to a Jewish doctor, of course a Jew, and everything’s fine! Here, my neighbor is about to be divorced because she got married; she was a virgin, but there wasn’t any blood. Maybe she didn’t have a hymen from birth. And now two months after the wedding she’s being divorced, and they don’t get it into their heads, it’s so primitive.”