Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 11

The idea of Palestinian autonomy within the Israeli state has churned beneath the country’s surface, invisible but present, threatening and suspicious, like a false bottom hiding no one knows what, and it echoes in all discourse between the two peoples. The things that Mohammed Kiwan hinted at during his conversation with Jojo Abutbul on the Ashdod beach gave me no rest. I searched for someone who could clear up the haziness and put it in perspective. So I met with Dr. Sa’id Zeidani, a native of the village of Tamra, in the Galilee.

“The Israelis always ask the wrong question, one I reject,” Dr. Zeidani said. “They ask me, ‘If a Palestinian state comes into being alongside Israel, will you remain in Israel or will you move to the Palestinian state?’ I think that we need to ask a different question: ‘If a Palestinian state is established, how will you, as an Arab in Israel, see your relationship to it?’ This allows a discussion of a much more complex and richer relationship. Of all kinds of mechanisms and arrangements for ties between the Arabs in Israel and those in the Palestinian state. I don’t know if I myself will move there, but I very much want there to be such a country, one that I’ll be part of, or at least that I’ll be on intimate terms with, even if I live within Israel’s boundaries.”

I asked, “What exactly is that ‘intimate relationship’?”

“For instance, if I live in the Galilee and a Palestinian state is established, it should mean something to me, and not just abstractly. It should solve my problems. It should represent the Palestinian experience I am a partner in.”

“How could you be a partner in it if you live in Israel?”

“That’s a difficult problem. There have to be, for instance, open borders between Israel and the Palestinian state. There has to be a certain link, maybe administrative, between the Arabs in Israel and Palestine. There can’t be a situation in which the Palestinian state comes into being after decades of struggle and we here remain indifferent to it, and it to us. This intimate relationship can be like that of the Jews in the Diaspora, in America, to Israel.”

“There’s an ocean separating the Jews in America from the Jews in Israel.”

“That’s right. And here we are talking about territorial continuity between Israel and the Palestinian state. So that we can have even stronger cultural, family, and commercial ties, ties of all types. Maybe a political link between us and them, maybe an administrative one.”

“What you’re actually speaking of is complete autonomy for the Arabs in Israel.”

“The word ‘autonomy’ only partially describes that relation.”

“So please describe it in more detail. When you say ‘political links,’ do you see representatives of the Palestinians in Israel sitting in the parliament of the Palestinian state?”

“If we vote for the Knesset in Israel, then of course we will not vote for the Palestinian parliament. But if the Israeli Arabs are part of the Palestinian state, then they can send representatives to the Palestinian parliament.”

“Do you believe that there can really be a situation in which the Palestinians living in Israel are an integral part of the Palestinian state?”

“What do you mean ‘believe’? Not in the short run, but in the long run. Still, maybe that will remain a dream.”

“Your dreams also interest me, and I’ll tell you why. Today [August 1, 1991], when I was driving to meet you, the American Secretary of State James Baker’s motorcade passed me. He came to hear from Prime Minister Shamir whether Israel is willing to participate in the peace talks. So if there actually is a serious intention of solving the major problems of the Middle East, without leaving any smoldering embers, it’s best for us to know clearly what the aspirations of the parties are.”

“Look, if we’re talking about real peace, about a historic compromise, about nations that truly want to live together, about equality and well-being for all, then it is possible to think of all sorts of political arrangements that the Arabs in Israel will participate in. What I had in mind when I spoke of autonomy is that instead of dividing this territory into two states, Israel and Palestine, maybe there could be one state divided into cantons. Like Switzerland. And one of the cantons would be that of the Arabs in Israel. Jerusalem might be a separate canton. That could solve ethnic problems within Israel, as well as the Palestinian national problem within Israel. That’s all.”

“Could you describe life in such an autonomous entity in Israel?”

“That’s not simple. How can a national minority achieve equality in a society that has a Jewish majority, a country that is defined as a Jewish state, in the absence of a general Israeli nationality? How is that possible? There is discrimination at all levels and in all areas of life. The Arabs here are half-citizens, and the state, for them, is half democratic. They are in the middle — between citizenship and subjection. The doors are only half open to them in all areas of life, and there are areas in which the gaps are getting larger. And all this is after decades of struggle for some kind of integration of the Arabs into Israel. That struggle has not succeeded. So I ask you, What is the message? How should the Arabs in Israel organize themselves as a national minority in order to realize their different ethnic national identity and realize their equal civil rights? The idea of autonomy is intended to provide an answer for both those questions.”

He is forty years old, and studied philosophy and English as an undergraduate at Haifa University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His major fields of interest are aesthetics and ethics. Today he is a member of the Philosophy Department at Bir Zeit University. Zeidani, like other Arab intellectuals born in Israel, has moved to the territories — he lives in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina with his wife and two daughters. “It is not an ideological decision that I should be — you know — participating in the struggle and educating my daughters from within the intifadah. To say it is ideological is good for making speeches. What was important to me and my wife was to live in a Palestinian community, a normal community for us, one that does not discriminate against us. In which I have respectable work. I simply can no longer stand a situation of discrimination. When a policeman says that you’ve made a mistake on the road, be careful and don’t do it again, okay and thank you, and I go, and then he calls me back and asks to see my identity card, and you know from that moment on you’re done for. So you look at that policeman, and show him how much contempt you have for him. But inside it’s not just contempt. It’s so painful it kills you.”

“Explain to me how he knows that you’re Arab.” I stray for a moment (or perhaps not) from the main subject of our discussion. “You yourself told me before that you ‘don’t look Arab.’ Your Hebrew is perfect and you speak without an accent.”

“Maybe it’s something in my eyes. Maybe in my insecurity…I guess the uneasiness is evident. Maybe the way I walk, maybe the suspicion I feel envelops me. Maybe”—he laughs—“maybe it’s really an aesthetic problem.”

I asked whether his presence in the territories during the intifadah had led him to formulate his idea of autonomy.

“Only in the tactical sense. I mean, they say there should be autonomy in the territories, and I say that this is the wrong place to have autonomy. Autonomy is what you do with a national minority within a country, not in an occupied territory. But that’s not the thing. What we see is that the model of integration, involvement, of coexistence that most Arab political groups have championed has failed. I argue that even were there not a state of war, it would not be possible to overcome your attitude toward us and the discrimination. So we need to look for another model. That could be the model of separation. That is, we will separate from the Jewish state and be part of Palestine, for instance. Or we’ll want self-determination. An independent country.”

“What they call the ‘Galilean state’?”

“I think that a ‘Galilean state’ is not realistic. So I propose an intermediate model — that we be part of the state, but that there be both separation and integration. Look at the experiences of other countries, Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and Eastern European countries, and you see that all along the way the integration model did not work. In Belgium they’re now talking of a federative structure; in Switzerland there’s division into cantons according to ethnic affiliation — Italians, French, Germans — and it works. In Canada it’s working, but it’s harder.”

These ideas of his have already aroused anger at him, largely from the Arab establishment in Israel. In several private conversations I heard, however — mostly off the record — favorable comments about autonomy, which they see as the only realistic solution. Sa’id Zeidani himself voices his views in a quiet and serene voice. He is a slender man of intellectual appearance, his face delicate and expressive. With each statement he dives inside himself and disappears for a moment before surfacing with the word he wants. As he speaks, quiet but firm, discerning and somewhat distant, he seems at moments detached, strange to that clay of emotions and anxieties, the mortar from which the politics of the region are kneaded. Yet at the same time I felt that his philosophical attitude, hanging in the time-lessness in which anything is possible, was what really threatened me.

“I told the Arab leadership here, You are chasing after an illusion. There will be no integration here. There will be no real cooperation with the Jews. So we need to change direction. To search for another framework. And when I speak of significant and full autonomy, I am also speaking, of course, of the territorial aspect.”

“But it’s not realistic — Israel has no region that is only Arab.”

“The border does not have to be a straight line.”

I recalled the summer evening when I drove from Nazareth to Mghar by an entirely “Arab” route — through the villages of Rayna, Kafr Kana, Turan, and Ilabun — brown stony hills, shepherds with herds of black, scrawny goats, brown hens pecking along the roadside, a veiled woman picking figs, pages from Arabic newspapers impaled on thorn bushes. Later I went through the streets of Sakhnin — in the courtyards of small neighborhoods women and girls stood sifting rice, or kneeling and slicing watermelons. A green, pencil-thin minaret suddenly shot up through the long twilight, as did the jubilant voice of a boy singing a prayer duet with the muezzin. I drove slowly, immersed in the odd sensation of being able to watch without being seen. Present and absent. A pair of neighbors in undershirts played backgammon, and a boy served them coffee. A group of youths strutted down the street, hair greased back, eyeing a gaggle of girls out of the corners of their eyes. It reminded me of how I had encountered an identical scene in the Lebanese village of Mimas during the war in 1982. It had been this same languid summer evening hour; the boys and girls met on the village’s single main road, looking, giggling, and taking measure of each other at a distance, bold and demure. The war would end sometime, after all, things would change, and you have to live those moments now, for there will be no more like them. For a moment it was possible to imagine that Sakhnin was located in the Shouf Mountains of southern Lebanon, or in Jordan, or near Nablus — the neon signs were in Arabic, the music coming from the cars was Arabic, and the atmosphere had the self-assured tranquillity of the masters of their own homes. The way people walked, their body language, was different, freer and more relaxed than what they showed when they were in Israel’s “Jewish” regions. More than once this summer I noticed what happened to people when, after sitting with them in their homes, we went outside. Even one’s natural environment can be foreign. Their faces immediately took on a foreign expression in order to pass our scrutiny. They unwittingly adjust themselves to our surveillance and become attenuated or, paradoxically, more blatant. But that evening in Sakhnin they were among their own. The Jews were not present, and one could even argue that the “situation” was no situation. I also had a sudden sense of relief (when I write this now, in Jerusalem, I begin to doubt myself — did I really? No fear or threat from that freedom “they allow themselves there”? No. On the contrary). An unexpected, refreshing sense of relief; after all, a burden gets taken off my shoulders that way.

“Just a minute!” The internal security officer sets off his siren within me. “Where did you get those pretty words? Don’t you know that three weeks before your enchanted evening in Sakhnin we uncovered in that very village a cell that planned to blow up the Rafael military industries building, a real gang of terrorists?” You know what, I answer him, maybe not even a single group like that would have risen there had we been smarter and bolder. If the people of Sakhnin felt relaxed and free in Tel Aviv as well. Have you ever tried that line of thought?

The idea of autonomy for the Arabs of Israel celebrated its sixtieth birthday not long ago. In 1931 it was proposed by a Zionist leader: “We conceive of the regime in Jewish Israel in the following way: the majority of the population will be Jewish, but the equal rights of the Arab citizens will not only be ensured — they will be realized. Both languages and all three religions will have equal privileges, and each nation will receive the right of cultural self-determination.” The speaker is Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist leader whose ideological heirs in Israel today are Yitzhak Shamir and the Likud Party, and the words come from his article “Round Table with the Arabs,” included in a book with the ironic title of On the Road to Statehood.

Jabotinsky went into even greater detail in “The Revisionist Manifesto”: “Absolute equality of rights for the two races, the two languages, and for all religions will prevail in the future Hebrew state. National self-government for each of the races in the land — in matters of community, education, culture, and political representation — must be implemented to the fullest measure” (from On the Road to Statehood).

On January 26, 1990, Sa’id Zeidani published his plan in the newspaper El-Arabi:

I conceive of an autonomous regime for the Arabs of the Triangle and the Galilee, including an independent elected administration that has the widest possible authority.

a. The establishment of one or more Arabic universities in Israel.

b. Making Arabic the official language in the zones belonging to the autonomous regime.

c. Decision-making authority regarding construction, development, health, and environment.

d. Decision-making authority on the issue of non-military national service.

e. The establishment of a local police system, responsible for internal security in the given area.

f. Decision-making authority in questions of education, and the establishment of the goals and contents of the educational system.

The autonomous areas will have federal links with the State of Israel. Their administrations will have a free hand in creating and strengthening ties with the rest of the Palestinian people and the Arab nation, both before and after the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The autonomous authority will not infringe on full and equal citizenship.

“Territorial autonomy,” I asked Dr. Zeidani, “is generally a stage preceding total separation from the mother state. Who can ensure that after the Palestinians in Israel have autonomy they will not want to adhere to the Palestinian state?”

“Such a risk exists, of course,” he responded sedately, “but, on the other hand, Israel has done everything to ensure that such a possibility will not come up for discussion. With regard to its population-dispersion policy. The Jewish border settlements, the kibbutzim, the locations of absorption centers…Adherence to the Palestinian state is not realistic.”

“Who will control the external security of the autonomous region?”

“Israel. But in all other matters — I’m the boss. The judicial system will also be separate. With regard to elections to the Knesset, the existing state of affairs can continue. Or the canton could send ten or twenty Knesset members, in proportion to its population.”

“In Switzerland, for example,” I noted, “the citizens of the various cantons send their sons to the country’s army.”

“Autonomy is a solution to the army problem as well. So far, the Arabs in Israel have not been required and have not asked to serve in the army. But in territorial autonomy, which has its own police force and its own national guard, it is possible to speak of national service. They can compel, or ask, every boy of a certain age to serve a year or two or three in public service of the autonomous region. In other words, Israel will not require national service for its own ends. Instead, the boys will serve their own society. They could work in public institutions, serve in the national guard, in the hospitals, in the police force.”

“Describe your ambitions in the field of education.”

“That’s what we want autonomy for, isn’t it?”

“Why, if that’s the case, don’t you limit yourself to a demand for cultural autonomy?”

“What’s cultural autonomy? Where in the world has that worked? I want an Arab university where I’m the boss, but as part of my control of my entire society. A Jewish man will not be the boss where I live. Today, say I’m interested in nuclear physics. Can I study that in Israel? And if, hypothetically, they were to allow me to study that, what work could I get afterward? In construction? You can’t separate the functioning of the educational system from what you do after you graduate. You can’t detach education from the economic life of the entire population. I want, after all, to direct my own education so that it will answer the needs of my society, as Isee them, and not as the Ministry of Education in Jerusalem determines for me. What are our graduates when they finish their studies? Teachers teachers teachers. They aren’t taken in accordance with their abilities. Not into the universities, or the Israeli civil service, or the foreign service. They aren’t given places on committees; they are not directors, or deputy directors, or senior officials, or ministers. We have no place here. I want a society I have a place in. In which there’s something I can relate to and where I’m my own boss. I’ll decide who my supervisor is, and according to what abilities, and there won’t be anyone who will put a ceiling on my ambitions.”

Were I to speak with such a man in another country, I thought to myself, with a Basque in Spain, for instance, how easy and simple it would be to feel sympathy for him. Here is a man who dares to express radical opinions, to confront a hostile regime and, more important, his own society. People like him are models of courage, self-respect, and utter intellectual honesty. And when I recalled some of the interviews I had conducted these past months — the evasiveness, the pandering, the off-the-record courage — I could not but feel a certain relief in the presence of Zeidani’s openness and his egregious stand before me, before us.

“You certainly know,” I told him, “that your idea of autonomy puts you straight into the Israeli nightmare, one that wakes up the dreamer to tell him, ‘It is no dream.’ ”

“Listen. Israeli nightmares don’t interest me, if they’re at my expense.”

“So why should your ambitions interest me, if they are at my expense?”

“I want you to feel that you have a problem with me. And that problem will explode at some point in the future. I won’t go on being your obedient subject. There is a new generation of Arabs in Israel. A new potential. Ambitions open to the world. I won’t let the country treat me the way it treated my father. That has to be clear. I’m a proud, modern, educated man with a sense of pride. I, to speak in Darwinian terms, am already a different species than my father was. I want to be an equal citizen, without waiting for a hundred years! I want my daughter to be an equal citizen just like your son. And if you don’t want me to be your equal, go to hell.”

“And if circumstances don’t change to your liking?”

“Then I’ll try to make your life miserable,” he said simply. “If you have thousands of Arabs with Ph.D.s who can’t find work, it will blow up on you. If you have tens of thousands who have no place to work in this country, and if you have more than 50 percent of the Arabs under the poverty line, even though we’re barely 18 percent of the population, you can certainly expect an explosion. Listen, I’m not describing anything apocalyptic here — there are lots of problems we’ve waited decades to solve, and we don’t see that in the foreseeable future, with the current form of struggle, we’ll have a solution. So do you want me to live in a state of inferiority for the rest of my life? And the future I make for my children will be that way, too? I don’t want that. I think every political theory justifies the use of different means — civil resistance, even violence — in order to achieve one’s goal.”