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

One hot night in July 1991, I visited a summer camp in the Lavie Forest. Israeli boys and girls, Jews and Arabs, were standing and debating the state’s treatment of its Arab citizens, the Arabs’ disregard of Israel’s complex predicament, the way the army fights the intifadah. With righteous wrath and youthful charm they hammered home their arguments, worn from overuse. As I watched them, I could not tell by sight who was Jewish and who was Arab. Their features are similar, their clothes and hair styled by the dictates of the same fashions; even their body language is the same, as is the Hebrew they speak. Only the accent is different. I recalled that I had already participated in such an event — when I was their age, more or less, in a Jewish-Arab summer camp in Acre. Then, more than twenty years ago, we might have been distinguished from each other by our dress, language, and degree of contentiousness during a debate, but what has not changed since then is the sharpness of mutual emotion, the powerful need to have this particular individual understand you and confirm your feelings — and the awkwardness and illusion, because at times he is close by, that individual, and then suddenly he is far away, and how can someone so close to me be so wrong about me; how can someone so distant know me so well?

The circle of disputants opened abruptly. A boy of perhaps fourteen, who stood on the outside, was thrust toward me, and a trail of whispers rose and swooped after him. “He’s the one who ran away,” someone said in an undertone, and the debate instantly died.

“We sat with him all day, three Jews, three Arabs,” a boy named Itai explained. “We talked with him, made him think.”

The boy, M., listened to what was being said about him. He was a somewhat clumsy, pale type, his movements guarded, his gaze older than his age.

“It hurt me that M. ran away,” said Sana, *from Acre. “It was important to me that he stay here, that we change preconceptions together. Because there were two Jewish girls here, right-wing, and they decided to go home…”

Murmurs of agreement, Jewish and Arab, and a slight, common sense of pride. I asked M. why he had come to the camp.

“To have a good time. For a vacation,” he responded, caught up in himself but apparently not at all put off by the interest he was attracting. “I read that it was a camp for Jews and Arabs, but I didn’t realize it was Jews and Arabs together so much. And I — before that, what can I say, being with Arabs really didn’t grab me.” While he spoke the others were silent, drawn by the confession. “So I came, and right away I saw that it’s really together. More than I thought. Them and us together all the time. Even at night. And I started feeling uneasy.”

An Arab boy named Basel asked if he had known Arabs before.

“Yes. I was with Arabs once, but not like this. I was with my grandfather’s laborers. But with them it was different, and here it became clear to me — I didn’t especially like the idea of sleeping together, me and them, in the same tent.”

“It didn’t bother me to sleep together with Jews,” Basel objected.

“I…” M. hesitated. “At night I couldn’t take it anymore…I went behind the tents, until I found a hole in the fence, and I left.”

I thought of the way through the forest to the camp — a steep, narrow road between pine trees, the caves, the jagged rocks.

“We warned him not to leave,” Itai said. “The forest is full of old wells you could fall into at night.”

“It was after nine o’clock,” M. continued in a low voice, in awe of himself, as if only as he spoke did he comprehend what had actually happened. “It was pitch black. No one saw me leave. I went through the fence, hunched over, so they wouldn’t see, into the forest.”

The young people were transfixed by his white face. The strange story stripped them of their youthful cockiness, and for a moment they looked like children. Beyond the small, tight circle, the camp seemed like a far-off memory. Light bulbs weakly illuminated the cots, adolescents walked down the path from the shower; in one of the tents a boy preened in front of a girl, and on the bed right next to them another girl lay on her belly, buried in a book.

“But what exactly were you scared of?” Sana whispered, a lock of hair in her mouth.

“I was scared, you think I know why? That they might rob me. That they’d do something to me…I felt really uneasy about it,” he said, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. “I mean, about the tent, being the only Jew, and everyone around me an Arab. That we have to be together, for real.”

“And did you know where you were going?” asked a voice out of the darkness.

“More or less…not exactly. I walked to where I thought there’d be a main road, and I thought I’d wait until morning and find a bus to go home to Jerusalem.”

“Did you know the way?”

“I knew I had to go down. I got so mixed up.”

“Did you find the road?”

“The police found me by the road.”

“They found him in a total daze, crying,” whispered a girl behind me.

“How long did you wander like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weren’t you scared in the forest?”

“Sure I was scared,” M. said, “but I was more scared in the tent.”

It was morning in the midafeh— the room where guests are received — in the house of Hassan Ali Masalha in Kafr Kara. Passions flared among the men seated on mats; the elder Hassan Masalha was debating with his son. The former was saying, “The Palestinians have only lost and will continue to lose from the intifadah.” His son jumped up, mortified at his father’s words: “What is economic loss? That’s a loss? In the territories they have culture now! There they have principles! There they have no crime! There there are no drugs!” The old man, reclining comfortably on a thin mattress, an embroidered pillow under his forearm, dismissed his son’s words with a single wave of his hand. Another elder, Fahmi Fanaka, leaned over to me and whispered, “The Palestinians will have a state, but for us, the train has already passed us by.” As I wrote this down, the windows in the large, unfurnished room suddenly shook from a sonic boom. An unfamiliar expression passed over the faces of all those present, skipping like a spark from eye to eye. “It’s only an airplane,” I said to the man next to me, reassuring him, as we do each other in Jerusalem when there is a loud explosion. “I know,” the man replied quietly. “It’s probably going to Lebanon.” I wanted to ask him another question, but the commotion resumed, the debate between the old father and his angry son, and I forgot the incident.