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

I asked whether Jafra would fight for the right of Arab women to live with women.

Jibara blinked. “You mean — lesbians?”

“Lesbians.”

“Look…that’s very complicated…very extreme.”

Her young neck turned pink, and she giggled awkwardly. “If she wants to live that way…fine, she’s free to, I won’t dictate her life-style. But before I gain acceptance for something like that, I have to gain acceptance for simpler things that are matters of life or death for us.”

Then she told of the kilukal . This is actually two words —kil-ukal , say and said, or, in simple translation, gossip. It is one of the most efficient weapons in Arab society, a whip to crack over the heads of light-headed young camels heading astray, and over insolent lambs. An efficient weapon that anyone can wield against anyone — but sometimes it may kill. Shutfut, a Jewish-Arab group that battles against murders committed for sullying family honor, estimates that each year about forty women are killed in Israel for this reason. Kilukal plays a major role in these murders. Women who have left their villages to study at a university in one of the cities find themselves being watched by an unblinking eye. Educated men and women, seemingly enlightened, cooperate with the stalk-and-kill mechanism that begins with a whisper and ends, sometimes, with a sharp blade.

“We in Jafra are so frightened of it,” Jibara says. “With every step we take kilukal into account, because we are small, beginners, and want to change and influence, and even the smallest tempest can destroy everything we want to do.”

“Is there kilukal about you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe yes. The most widespread rumor about me is that they arrested me. That I’m in jail. There are people who are astonished to see me—‘Oh, we thought you’d been arrested!’ ”

“And when you walk around the village dressed like this, in a fairly revealing shirt, it doesn’t attract comment?”

“No. Because when do they talk about the way a girl dresses? When she’s weak. When the only thing she rebels about is how she dresses. When only her difference in dress is her flag. Then they’ll talk about her. But when she’s independent in every way, they can’t say anything about her. After all, I rebelled against everything, not just against the dress code.”

Marwa’s father, Shaker Jibara, fifty, listens to her the whole time, observing her with pride and some wonder. Marwa got her blue eyes from him, and perhaps, once, his glance was as piercing as hers. He had been a member of the Al-Ard Movement, one of the first political organizations established by Israeli Arabs, and spent time in an Israeli jail; previously he had been a teacher. A small, powerfully built man, adorned with a reddish-brown mustache broadening over his smile.

“First I’d like to set up a men’s liberation committee.”

Everyone laughs. Marwa does not even smile.

“My father’s comment is not frivolous. A lot of things hide behind that sentence. Perhaps Father will please explain himself to us.”

“I don’t give you all the rights you want, Marwa?”

“Ah! I’d like to ask you, you really didn’t feel threatened and you didn’t get tense because of the rumors in the village that they were going to arrest me? And isn’t it true that you wanted to restrict my activity because of that?”

Shaker Jibara clears his throat, pulls himself up slightly. “I’m proud of your work for the Palestinian people. I’m proud that you work for good causes, but you’ve got to remember what the limits are and not cross the red li—”

She jumps up from her place: “What is the red line, Father?!”

“The red line — in other words, only to work in an organized, legal way, and also, you know, every community has its morals, and even if I sometimes criticize my tradition, I can’t go out in the street and scream against it. I’ve also got to yield to it, to be rational.”

Marwa Jibara falls silent. Her foot drums on the floor.

Her father turns to me: “That’s A. B, her temperature is always too high. And I tell her, if you want to continue, bring down your temperature a little. Just 150, not 200.”

Marwa, her lips rigid: “Father continues to work in his way and in accordance with his views, but when it comes to me he won’t allow it. He’s scared that I’ll do what I want, because they might arrest me. He’s also heard the kilukal , maybe it’s even the Shin Bet that’s spreading it, to impede our, the new women’s, activity.”

And she left.

Two weeks later, when we met in Tel Aviv, she came, summery and pretty, as usual boiling over about something, fanning her own flames, wanting me to judge between her and someone who had done her an injustice. She got hold of herself, sighed. “It won’t do me any good anyway…You see, I give in, too.” The young waitress offered her orange juice drenched in a heavy Russian accent, and Jibara checked, “Is it fresh-squeezed?” The young Russian looked at her in confusion. “What do this mean…I don’t understand the words…” Marwa gave her a sideways glance, and a wall of alienation and separation momentarily rose between the two young Israelis. “I don’t want from a can,” Marwa pronounced between her teeth. The poor waitress melted away.

“My father,” she told me at that same meeting, “to this day does not grasp that I am already twenty-two years old and that I am something other, outside him. Outside his body. I don’t accept that part about arranging my life for me. I’ll fight back. I have to fight him, too. I rebel against him. He acts like every other father in the world. Keeps an eye out for his little daughter, who will never grow up, who needs to be watched. I want to convince him that I’ve matured. That I’ve grown up. Sometimes I stand by him and tell him, Look, I’m even taller than you.”

I thought of how her father had charged at her when she was a little girl, pulverizing her cake without a word. How violent that deed was, mixing political protest, male aggression, and humiliation of her young womanhood, now so constrained, so clench-fisted.

“But maybe it’s a little hard for him, for your father, even if he’s progressive and liberal, maybe it’s hard for him that you’re so extreme and uncompromising.”

“If so, that’s his problem. Because the way he educated me, it was only natural that I’d turn out this way.”

Then she told of her childhood. Of her mother, who had died of cancer when Marwa was six years old. “I have a very strong memory of Mother. Very very strong. I’d run from her to Father because he was more, you know, forgiving. She was what today they would call a ‘liberated woman.’ Feminist. Many people who knew her, when they see me today, say I’m precisely her. I learned my independence from her without even realizing it. Without her teaching it to me.

“I learned to do everything alone. Even to braid my own hair. At the age of twelve I was already cooking and sewing. A lot of things happen in the world because something is missing, because of the void, and that void also gave me a lot, because I had to fill it all. Today I look back and say, My father really loved her. She was everything to him. So sometimes the thought occurs to me that maybe he, just a little bit, raised me to be like her.”

They gathered together: seven members of the Kabha family. All live in the village of Barta’a. Four in Israeli Barta’a and three in the eastern half of the village, in the intifadah.

The village of Barta’a spans the two banks of a wadi, and all its inhabitants belong to a single hamula , or clan, the Kabha. The Kabha family line twists and stretches back to the eighteenth century, chronicled as a testimony and memorial on parchment. The clan has lived in its village for many years, far from the main road. They married each other and worked their lands until, one day in 1948, on the Greek island of Rhodes, during one of the meetings of the committees that drafted the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Jordan, someone traced a green line through the valley between the two parts of the village. With a sweep of his hand he sundered families, ties of friendship, land, a fabric of life. The whole, complete village turned into two incomplete ones, and the two amputees faced their separate fates.