Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

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Poet Saul Tchernikovsky sang of Otrok, an exile from his country who rules, happy and wealthy, “over the land of Avhazim.” His brother, who remained in the homeland, sent a messenger to him — Or, the poet with the violin, who calls on Otrok to return to his country. The wayward Otrok refuses to return. “He forgot his land on his ivory bed.” He also refuses to be tempted by the song of longing to the forgotten native land sung to him by Or. Then Or the poet returns his harp to its case and takes from his pocket a bunch of yemshan, an herb that contains within the aroma of the south Russian homeland, and throws it in Otrok’s face.

Gray distances…the day has just lit…

The horses’ hooves are cautious…

Otrok comes, the bunched herb in his hand,

Smells and smells again — freedom

And tears stream down his cheeks.

On the road that leads from Teibe to Jajulia, in the southern Triangle, I was suddenly filled with a yemshan happiness. A joy at this bare-topped, constricted countryside. On the side of one of the roads, one from which no village could be seen, neither Jewish nor Arab, I stopped and began to wander between the olive trees and boulders and unplowed fields. The sky and a few crooked branches spread over me, and I had a strange urge to peel this land of its names and designations and descriptions and dates, Israel, Palestine, Zion, 1897, 1929, 1936, 1948, 1967, 1987, the Jewish state, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, the Land of Splendor, the Zionist Entity, Palestine. I kept peeling — with a slight twinge of the heart — the paved roads and wide boulevards, the green lawns of the kibbutzim, the parking lots and traffic lights and road signs, the luxurious neighborhoods that look as if they had been written by a copywriter, the water parks and fountains and swimming pools, the synagogues, the mosques, and the churches, the envy-inducing mansions in the villages, the shopping centers and American shopping malls in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Jewish National Fund forests, the green European illusion we have conjured up here to cover the cracks in the skin of an angry and resentful land, a thin, desiccated membrane with one small lake and a thirsty river. A country, Tchernikovsky wrote, in which “one must soften every inch of land, battle every boulder.” And Salim Jubran responded, “As a mother loves her malformed child, so I love you, my homeland.” There, between two anonymous hills, the forgotten primeval visions returned so clearly to me, that special shade of Israel, brown and rocky, the biblical, pre-Zionist land that the Zionist fathers longed for and beautified in their dreams and poetry, and which they afterward confined and repainted with their deeds.

It was here, in an area crowded with Arab villages, in a place where Zionism has a kind of bare spot in the map of its consciousness, a triangular birthmark, where the tense bowstrings of the definition of Israeliness momentarily slacken in confusion, that I could again sense the simple and mysterious love of the land — that is, of the land itself, prior to any name or title — of this strip of the planet that fate has burdened us with, with its colors and aromas and land and trees and changing seasons. Who knows whether he really loves his land, or if he is doomed to love it because he is made in its mold.

Once or twice during this summer it happened that I glanced at my Arab interlocutors as they stretched their hands out to the view, or rubbed a fragrant sage leaf, the local yemshan, and held it out to me to smell. In doing this, something was conveyed between us — a gift, and a pain with no outlet, and confusion, of the type that can be caused only by another whose life is a kind of alternate possibility to yours.