Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

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Early morning in Faradis, on the old Hadera-Haifa road.

The coffeehouse sits right on the street. When I come and sit there, the conversation of the men dies out. They examine me carefully. Then they disappear. Around the square the stores open with a yawn. The large village awakens slowly. It lives with the road, just as another village might live with a river — small children sit on its edge and gaze longingly at the other side; boys careen with their bicycles between the waves of traffic and navigate them boldly; a shepherd crosses with three goats and two cabbages…

Afterward an old woman fords the roaring flow, erect, balancing a tall bucket on her head. A wonder of concentration and direction. Her hands lie at the sides of her body, holding her dress around her thighs, and the bucket does not move. She looks right, looks left, strides swiftly, and the bucket does not move. Hundreds of generations of the oppression of women have, one might say, molded her and her burden together. I drink a first cup of coffee, the sweetest of all, and eavesdrop on the conversation of the men behind me. There were once two sages, Rabbi Haya the Great and Rabbi Shimon Ben Halafta, who “forgot words of the Targum”—the Aramaic translation of the Bible — and “went to the Arab market to learn from them.” There they eavesdropped on the people until they recalled the meanings of the forgotten words. In Faradis, even an Israeli who knows no Arabic would be able to puzzle out the conversation:“Al me—ruh from department to department, jib me a red form…” “Wahada mush a primitivezalameh, you know, azalameh in modern dress.” “Ana ahadit from him twenty cartons of tomatoes, daf’at him a down payment…” “And theyfi idhum an arrest warrant, wa-ana shaef, mafish a judge’s signature!” “An-nas amalu in two days, all the concrete and all the electricity…” And this is how they talk among themselves.

I listened. I made a mental note of the Hebrew words — VAT, income tax, down payment, bank guarantee, social security, license, fines — an instrumental Hebrew screwed onto Arabic like a metal joint or, more often, like a clamp.

I thought of the rich, sensitive Hebrew I hear from people when they speak to me. The words of Zuhir Yehia of Kafr Kara came to mind: “Our soul is not here. Maybe our soul has gone dormant here with you. Our soul is there, with the Palestinians in the territories. All our soul is there, and our body is here. I try — in order to preserve the body — to kill the soul. Or to push it aside. I don’t know when it will awaken. I don’t want to endanger the body. Maybe one day it will awaken.”

When? I asked.

“Listen, today I’m more accepting of the fact that Kafr Kara will not be in the Palestinian state. But even if I’m not there, it’s okay. It will make it much easier for me if there is a country like that. My soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian state.”

“And in the meantime?”

“According to legend, on a scale the soul weighs heavier than the body. But with us the body is heavier. There is a soul, but in the meantime it is waiting. It’s as if you are in love with someone — maybe this is not a modern example, but it could happen with us — and suddenly the family decides that you have to marry someone else. Even if it’s brutal, you accept it and say, It tastes all right. You can’t go on saying that it doesn’t taste good.”

A few weeks later I read an article by Emmanuel Kopelevitch, formerly the Director of Arab Education, about how spoken Arabic in Israel has borrowed Hebrew words. According to Kopelevitch, there are some three thousand different Hebrew words in regular use in Arabic. Sometimes those using these words are not even aware that they are borrowed from Hebrew.

The article contains a list of “the sixty-two most common Hebrew words in the Arabic of the State of Israel.” Here are some of them: health fund, cab, traffic light, computer, appliance, permit, mail, cold cuts, vacation, VAT, station, report, form, office, membership card, director, theory (the written part of the driver’s license examination), pay slip, driving test.

The list goes on. It includes the names of tools, automobile accessories, kinds of foods. Taxes. Forms. Appliances. Objects. Legal processes. Punishments. Various government functions. These are the impressions left on the language by this long association — which is still only a material one. A physical one.

I was the only Jew in the little coffeehouse. I was a minority. Each of us is a minority in at least one context in his life, and we all know how it feels to be the exception in a given situation, so there is no need to waste words on it. But there was one moment when the buzz of conversation around me suddenly swelled, and someone by chance bumped into my chair, and a passing motorcyclist revved up his bike too close to me, and there was the sound of choked laughter behind me. None of these, apparently, was directed at me, but something welled within me, and in my distress I bent down to my briefcase to take out my notebook (maybe I just wanted to hold on to a pen so as to draw security from it), and suddenly I understood how I would look — sitting in an Arab coffeehouse, my eyes behind dark sunglasses, recording the background conversations. I knew that if I were to take out my pen I would frighten them. They would be scared, there would be a silence, a few hearts would stop for a moment, and people would hastily reconstruct what they had said, to check if they had said something that might be misinterpreted. For a long moment I had the malicious itch to pay them back for the previous annoyances. The temptation was very strong, and from within that temptation I also realized with certainty how many times each of those sitting around me had been the victim of such simple, cheap, opportunistic malice, when within one of “us”—as within me at that moment — the domination gland secretes a single drop into the bloodstream.