Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 9

“Sure I want to be part of the country,” says Rima Othman, twenty-three, from Beit Safafa, a village nestled between Jerusalem’s old and new southern neighborhoods. “And I want to feel a little as if I belong here, but they don’t give me a chance. Even if there’s no law that’s overtly discriminatory, they always push you away here. Close the door in your face. Ask me why I so much want to get through that door they keep closing on me. The truth is that I don’t want to go all the way in. I don’t want to cast off all my culture and society, I don’t want to assimilate. But I want to get ahead like you. I’m not saying really compete…”

“Why not?”

“Okay, why not. The truth is that competition makes for quality. And I think that Israeli society brings us quality and progress. If I weren’t an Israeli Arab woman, if I were a Jewish woman, I’m sure I wouldn’t be studying speech disorders. I’d be a secretary. But our society imposes on us a responsibility to advance, to improve ourselves. Because we need doctors, lawyers, social workers. We have to move forward.

“As a Jewish woman I’d study. What would I study?” Her eyes float through space as she smiles to herself. “Maybe I’d study business, have a briefcase, meetings, telephones, long-winded talk. But I’d be learning something useful. The truth is that I wanted to do a master’s in speech disorders between different nations, but that seems too abstract to me. And we don’t have the luxury of occupying ourselves for no purpose with useless things. Not only that — curing international speech disorders is too discouraging. I’ve stopped believing in it.”

She pauses for a moment. Begins to say something. Laughs at herself. “Because I still believe. Or hope. I fool myself. You see, I’m always changing my mind…unstable…you know, in that I envy the Arabs in the occupied territories, everything’s much clearer to them. They know that they are there, and know whom they are fighting against and whom they should hate. They don’t have to go to a clinic and be treated by a Jewish doctor, who’s nice to you and helps you, and yet maybe he’s a Kahane supporter. But if I lived in Ramallah, would it bother me to hate Jews in general? What contact would I have with Jews? Only through repression. Sometimes I get upset about something and say, I hate Jews. Two minutes later I think, But I can’t hate. Noa, my friend, is Jewish. And my friend Miriam is Jewish, and religious. When I studied at Tel Aviv University I was the only Arab among forty Jewish women, and it was important for them to make me feel that I was accepted. They were all so nice to me, I’d be hurt if they told me that they hate Arabs.

“The same is true in the opposite direction. Jews who don’t know Arabs — it’s easier for them to hate us. They know the Arab laborer, the terrorist, the Arab with a kaffiyehand a knife. That’s why I, when I was an Arab woman in Tel Aviv, maybe I went out of the way to be very nice to the women in my class, to show them that I’m an Arab and you can get along with me, and if you can do it with me, there are many more like me.”

She is a tall young woman, well dressed and made up. Her hair is chestnut and falls to her shoulders. She is soon to marry a man from Teibe. For the time being she lives with her parents on the edge of Beit Safafa, almost on the tracks, in a neighborhood where the walls tremble when the train, the village’s timekeeper, passes by. A woman I once met told me that “Jerusalem is every place from which you hear the train whistle.” Beit Safafa, by that criterion, is in the center of town.

Like Barta’a, Beit Safafa was also cut in two by the Rhodes armistice agreements. By night smugglers spirited tomatoes and potatoes across the border from Israel to Jordan, and spices and pine nuts and almonds in the opposite direction. Rima’s parents were married a month before the war that united the village, and they conducted the wedding procession right along the border, so her father’s sister could participate in the celebration. The village school has “Jordanian” and “Israeli” classes in adjacent rooms. When she was seventeen Rima passed the Israeli high-school graduation exam, while friends of hers took the test devised by the Jordanian Ministry of Education. She studied Bible, Hebrew literature, and Jewish history. They studied Arabic, Koran, and Arab history.

“In our civics lessons I saw that there is no such thing as a pure democracy. I saw how much you could play with the law. Still, there’s nothing like democracy! During the Gulf War I was on a trip to London. In Hyde Park I argued with Kuwaitis and Egyptians — even Israel is better than you are, I told them. There was a Jordanian there who got me so mad! He told me that he blamed the Arab leadership for the Arab nation’s problems. I shouted at him, And I accuse the people of acquiescing in such leaders. Because if we, the Arabs, were a courageous people we would get rid of all our leaders! You should have thrown King Hussein out a long time ago! And I told him how in the intifadah there had been a lot of excesses by the Israeli Army, and they caught the soldiers who did the excesses and put them on trial, and they wrote about it in the newspaper. In what Arab country could that happen? Suddenly I felt I was defending Israel. How did that happen to me? But I was just making a comparison.

“For us, the Arabs, it was hard to get used to democracy. We don’t have any talent for it. I’ll give my children a democratic education, but in school they won’t see it. You need a special character for democracy, and we’ve become accustomed to there always being someone over us telling us what to do. We’ve gotten used to dictatorship. Everything with us is hierarchy and family authority. I, for instance, work with both Jews and Arabs. In staff meetings, if there’s a Jewish chairman, everyone is bold, even the Arabs; everyone expresses opinions, criticizes. But if by chance there’s an Arab chairman, the Arabs will submit to everything he says. So I think that if there’s a Palestinian state, it will be a dictatorship at the beginning. Maybe that’s what has to be in order to make things work there. Oh, we’ve got a lot more to do. Many long years will pass before we become real people.

“That’s the way we are. From history. We never went with our feelings and with what we believe and want. Ever since the Turks, the British, the Jordanians, our nation has had no say in its own affairs. They always told us what to say. We are not a brave nation. We are afraid of every ruler, of every strong man. Take a small experience I had. We were sitting in a restaurant in the Galilee, in Turan. A young Israeli man sat next to us with a bunch of tourists; he was talking politics with them. Loudly, you know, so everyone would hear. There was an Arab waiter there, a boy in eleventh or twelfth grade. He spilled a glass of water on the table. It could happen anywhere. The Israeli yelled at him at the top of his lungs, Bring me the manager! And when the boy went to call him, the Israeli stood up in front of all of us and shouted, He spilled water on me and still dares look me in the eye! How dare he look me in the eye, that Arab! That’s what they really think about us. We’re not allowed to look anyone in the eye. We grew up with that. That’s with Arabs everywhere, but here in particular. And you see how all our talk about honor and bravery and manliness, with Arabs — all those exist only with regard to equals. Not when it comes to anyone bigger or stronger than you.

“I really feel the lack of that courage. I also work in the Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem and there I see how they talk with superiors, how the face goes red and the heart pounds. When I worked at Tel Hashomer Hospital in Tel Aviv, I had to speak with my advisor every morning, and for three years I didn’t dare ask a question. All the education in democracy and boldness I received was still not enough for me to have courage in Israeli society.

“I just hope,” she says, “I just hope that we’ll know how to use what we’ve learned from you. But the problem is that we don’t actually do anything. I’m envious of anyone who lives at one with himself, like you, an Israeli Jew…Sometimes I imagine myself living as a girl from Tel Aviv, going to shows, going out, Yehuda Poliker concerts; I like him.”

“Have you been to one of his concerts?”

“I really wanted to, but I didn’t go.”

“Why not?”

The look she gave me…half the articles I read on the identity dilemma of the Arabs in Israel try to explain that look.

“If I were to go I’d spend the whole time thinking, What am I doing here? I’m an Arab. I’d feel that I was playing someone else’s part. I’d get upset and argue with myself. But I like him! But maybe they’ll notice I’m an Arab? So when I’m alone I put on one of his cassettes…” I ask, and she hums the song “Less, But It Hurts,” and giggles awkwardly. “That’s our quandary, our split personality. When Israel went on daylight time, I worked until eleven in Jerusalem at the hospital for deaf and mute children, and then I’d go to the Augusta Victoria, where they work according to Jordanian time, and set my clock back. Because if anyone in the bus asks you what time it is and you give them the Israeli time, they make a big ruckus about it.”

That’s so different from my experience, I thought, when four years ago I went to the West Bank to talk with Palestinians. There, it was hard to find a young woman of Rima’s age who wasn’t tied — even bound — by a rope of passion to a single, unambiguous stake. The “pathos” Azmi Bishara talks of was in the air.

Is it really absent, as Bishara claims (with such pathos)? Can one reach any unambiguous conclusion about the current state of the Arabs in Israel? Almost every person I meet illuminates the tangle in a different light; instead of fervor and slogans there are doubts, internal contradictions, and, especially, man’s empty-handedness in the face of complex circumstances. “It would be such fun if I were a Jewish woman in this country.” Rima blushed, putting a fluttering hand on her mouth, shocked at what had come out of it — yet she added, “It could be really fun to live here. I told my boyfriend, There’s no more ideal place on earth when it comes to quality of life, work, entertainment, view, relations between people, independence…if we were only Jews here.”

To my credit I remained silent.

“And my boyfriend said, This isn’t our country. That was when I said that our way of enjoying ourselves is different from theirs, from yours. For us, going out means going to a restaurant, shopping, but enjoying yourself can also be a nature hike in the Negev, in the Galilee. He said to me, ‘Rima, if this were our country, everything would be different.’ Because, for instance, there are a lot of places I’ve never been, canyons I’d like to see with my own eyes, not on the map. Only once in my life was I in the Negev. Or, for instance, overseas I’ve been in a lot of museums, and here in Israel I’ve only been one time, in fourth grade! I see, for example, a new immigrant from Russia, and I know that I belong here more than she does, when it comes to language, the land, heritage, in any real way, but they don’t give me the feeling of belonging. There’s not the peace and the security that it’s mine.

“So you understand what that means, day by day? Look how I’m talking. How I jump from one thought to another. No stability of thought, of nerves. Always confused. No serenity inside. And that you’ll see especially among us — we have no self-confidence. We’re too unsure of ourselves. Afraid of every sip we take from the cup. I remember when I was little there was a terrorist attack in Jerusalem and we were going home on the bus. My mother told me, ‘Shhh! Don’t talk in Arabic!’ Something like that always stays with you. When I have my own children, I already know I’ll be afraid to go into town with them, to a movie, say. I’m not the type to silence my kids so they won’t talk in Arabic, and I already know that a time will come when I’ll do that.

“Or at Tel Aviv University, when I studied there and they assigned us dorm rooms. They didn’t know I was an Arab, maybe I don’t look like one, and one of the girls came up to me and said, ‘Gee, your roommate’s here, and she’s an Arab!’ On the other hand, when at work, in East Jerusalem, someone discovers that I studied at the university with Jews, he understands: ‘Ah! You’re from ’48! And I get treated differently from then on, the face changes. I try to convince them that I’m like them—”

“Whom do you try to convince?”

“The…I try to convince the Arabs that with us we’ve also hardly been having weddings since the intifadah, and my uncle was arrested for a year, and I catch myself: Hey, you’re really trying to persuade them, to prove something to them. And they don’t want to hear…

“Or, during the war, when I went to Augusta Victoria in Arab Jerusalem. I had a gas mask and they didn’t — in the West Bank they didn’t get gas masks. Wow, what will I do with the mask there? I was always hiding it, packing and wrapping it up in something. Luckily there was no alert when I was there. Every time there was an attack on Tel Aviv I’d think, Who were the people who got hit this time? I hope no one was killed, maybe a friend of mine. Should I call? What could I say to her? But I didn’t call, don’t ask me why, maybe I was nervous, maybe because it was a very sensitive period and every word I said could be misinterpreted, even though during that period I felt very much a part of Israeli society, my room was the sealed room, and we listened to the civil alert broadcasts along with everyone. Joy never entered my head. No one in Beit Safafa danced on the rooftops, but still I thought that maybe it would make the Jews wake up and think what it’s like when they blow up a house in the West Bank because a boy who lives there threw a stone. That’s the dilemma and that’s the hard part — you live in this country, and someone attacks you, and you think that maybe someone will come to the rescue, but maybe not, maybe not.

“My children, when I have them”—she sighs—“will not speak in generalizations, that’s certain.” Her lips purse. “And I can’t take anything all the way. What little I’ve seen of Israel I can’t love all the way. Today, when I leave Jerusalem, for instance, and see the mountains, I think, Oh, how much you’ve been through, mountains. And I think, If the sea could talk, if the mountains could speak. Who dwelt on you? Who built on you? Who lived here? Who will live here? Are you mine? Whose? And all the questions start up again.”