Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 15

In January 1986, in an interview with the magazine Politika, Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua said the following: “I say to Anton Shammas — if you want your full identity, if you want to live in a country that has an independent Palestinian personality, that possesses an original Palestinian culture, rise up, take your belongings, and move 100 meters to the east, to the independent Palestinian state that will lie beside Israel.” Shammas is a Palestinian-Israeli poet, translator, and writer in both Arabic and Hebrew, known for trenchant and ironic newspaper articles in which he takes Israeli society to task for its occupation regime. He responded sharply, lumping Yehoshua, known for his liberal views, with “his brothers, the members of the Jewish terror organization.” He also gave notice that if and when the Palestinian state is established, “I do not wish to leave my country and my kindred and my father’s house for the land that he, in this case, A. B. Yehoshua, will show me.” A little tempest blew up, smaller than it should have been, given the subject — the nature of Israeli identity and the Arabs’ place therein. In one corner of this debate over the nature of “Israeliness” was Shammas, who aspired to create a single Israeli nationality common to all those living within the borders of the state, both Jewish and Arab; in the other corner was Yehoshua, for whom Israeli identity is the consummate expression of Jewish identity. Part of the Israeli left was shocked by the position taken by Yehoshua, who is one of the Israeli left’s most prominent and bold spokesmen. There were those who saw his “rise up, take your belongings” as a call for the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, and some annulled his membership in the left. What was interesting was that in the verbal violence that Shammas and Yehoshua kicked up around them it was possible to feel, even in their passionate public attacks on each other, an ever-present thread of mutual amity, a thread that was not broken even after the debate was over.

Six years passed. Shammas in the meantime published his Hebrew-language novel Arabesques. It is a sad and very beautiful work, “a novel disguised as an autobiography,” which begins in Shammas’s Galilean hometown, Fasuta. In recent years Shammas has lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, teaching at the University of Michigan. He has been preparing a collection of articles on the Middle East, written in English, for publication.

Yehoshua, nicknamed “Buli,” has in the interval published two novels, Five Seasonsand Mr. Mani, and is now working on a new novel, a love story.

At the beginning of January 1992, Shammas came home for a short visit, and the three of us met at Yehoshua’s home on Mount Carmel. Shammas entered the house and Buli rushed to meet him. They embraced, looked each other over, embraced again — maybe to ground the electric charge of the meeting. Anton, balding, of delicate manners, wore a blue sweater, round glasses, and a kind of poet’s economy on his face; Buli, fifty-five years old, his mane of hair already gone silver, always tensed and stormy, warm and physical, wore a red flannel shirt with the simple, direct prosaism that is his.

You haven’t been here for four years, I said to Shammas, and he said, “Only four? You could say that for forty-one years, ever since I was born, I haven’t been here…What, have youtwo been here?” And Yehoshua: “I’ve always been here too much…I wish I hadn’t been here a little…”

Shammas: “A line from a poem by Nizar Kabani, the Syrian poet who served his country as a diplomat in Spain, just came to me: ‘In the narrow alleys of Cordoba I would extend my hand and look for the keys to our house in Damascus.’ I don’t feel that way anywhere. There is no real home. You ask if I was ‘here.’ I understand the word ‘here’ in its geographical-Hebrew sense. I was not here in the Arabic sense of ‘here,’ because they have taken the ground out from under me. When you say ‘Galilee,’ what is that word for me? The Galilee is yours; for me it is the Jalil; the change in pronunciation makes all the difference; without it my entire semantic security in my sense of homeland is unsettled.”

Then he recalled an article he had written some years ago, in which he referred to the experience of being “a guest in the language”: “With what might have been destructive cynicism I compared myself to the Harold Pinter type of character who appears suddenly in one’s house, remains for dinner, washes the dishes, and stays the night, and the next morning he is already starting to take over. And I said, But I will try to be well-mannered. I arrive in the house of the Hebrew language under the banner of good manners.”

I asked him if there had been any moment in his life in which he had felt that he had the “key” to a home. He had sensed it, he said, when Arabesquesappeared in Hebrew — the writer Amnon Shamush then published a review of the book, concluding with an allusion to Shammas’s ironical “declaration of good manners”: “One makes up a bed for the guest, Anton my friend, my brother, and one hosts him in the best tradition of good hospitality; but one never gives him the keys to the house, or the deed to it.” Shammas: “Then I understood that Arabesquesis my key. But who knows if they won’t change the lock.”

We sat and spoke, and Yehoshua closed an old account with Shammas: Why had he chosen to call one of the characters in Arabesques, an unpleasant Israeli writer, Yehoshua Bar-On? Shammas laughed and denied any connection between A. B. Yehoshua and the character in question, except for the name, he said; and anyway, the book had been written before the debate. This brought us to the subject of that encounter, of who had supported Yehoshua and who had supported Shammas, and we inevitably changed tracks from literature to politics. Here is the conversation, with necessary condensation:

“The struggle for equality is certainly an important one,” A. B. Yehoshua said, “and we should have begun it immediately, without waiting for the conflict with the Palestinians in the territories to end. But my problem and debate with Anton are not about equality but about identity! Because as a national minority in an Israeli state—”

“What’s an ‘Israeli state’?” Shammas interrupted him, “there’s no such thing!”

“What do you mean there’s no such thing?” Yehoshua said, mystified. He smiled the slightest bit because here it was, beginning again. “For me, ‘Israeli’ is the authentic, complete, and consummate word for the concept ‘Jewish’! Israeliness is the total, perfect, and original Judaism, one that should provide answers in all areas of life. The term ‘Jewish,’ after all, came into being a thousand years after the concept ‘Israeli’ existed in practice, and it was created to describe a fraction, what remained after everything the Israeli lost in the Diaspora, until he turned into a ‘Jew.’ That whole mess has no connection to the Palestinian or Arab issue; even if there were no Arabs here there would still be the problem between the two concepts ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli.’

Anton Shammas shakes his head grimly, and from the twist of his lips it is clear that we have gone back six years. He corrects me: Not six, forty years back.

“You see Israeliness as total Jewishness,” Shammas says, “and I don’t see where you fit me, the Arab, into that Israeliness. Under the rug? In some corner of the kitchen? Maybe you won’t even give me a key to get into the house?”

“But, Anton, think of a Pakistani coming to England today, with a British passport, and telling the British, ‘Let’s create the British nationality together! I want Pakistani, Muslim symbols! Why should the Archbishop of Canterbury preside over the crowning of the Queen? I want there to be Muslim representation as well! Why should we speak English? There are a lot of languages here!’ Think of him coming and making demands! The English tell him, ‘No, my good man! We have no objection to your speaking Urdu, and you may receive — as a minority — schools and mosques, but the country’s identity is English, and you are a minority within that nation!’ ”

Shammas: “Buli, the minute a man like you does not understand the basic difference between the Pakistani who comes to England and the Galilean who has been in Fasuta for untold generations, then what do you want us to talk about?”

“I don’t understand you,” Yehoshua sighed. “If there hadn’t been anti-Semitism in Europe, you wouldn’t even know how to write the word ‘Israel’! Let’s suppose that there hadn’t been a Herzl and that Jews hadn’t come here. You would have had a few Jews in Safed and Hebron, and you would never have heard the word ‘Israel’! You speak of an ‘Israeli nationality’ as if, I don’t know [Yehoshua expands his chest], your life’s wish has arrived! This entire Israel fell out of the sky on you! Why this longing for an Israeli identity?”

“Because you conquered me!” Shammas thunders.

“Okay, so I conquered you, and I imposed Israeli citizenship on you—”

“So you’ve got the responsibility—”

Yehoshua: “My responsibility is that whoever is within the country’s borders must be a citizen, and all obligations and rights apply to him, that’s my responsibility to you.”

Shammas: “And have you lived up to that responsibility? Did anyone even intend to live up to that responsibility?”

“Look,” Yehoshua says, “this new country’s immediate grant of citizenship to its Arab citizens in 1948 was an act of courage and a certain liberality. Just think — the Arabs who remained here had been shooting at us the day before! Yesterday they fought and wanted to kill us, and a month later they’ve already received from us the right to vote for prime minister! Put your claims in proportion! Ask me, did they receive everything? Of course not! There was a military government, there was prejudice, but show me one other country that would give citizenship and social benefits and social security to its sworn enemy a month after a war.”

“I,” Shammas responded, “always said that Zionism’s most serious mistake in 1948 was that it kept the 156,000 Arabs who did not run away and were not expelled. If you really wanted to establish a Jewish state, you should have kicked me out of Fasuta, too. You didn’t do it — so treat me as an equal! As an equal in Israeliness!”

Yehoshua: “But you won’t receive one single right more for belonging to the Israeli nation. On the contrary! I’ll take away your special minority rights! I’ll impose additional duties on you! For instance, you’ll have to study the Bible, just as in France all citizens study Molière and in England Shakespeare!”

“But as a literary text!” Shammas cuts him off, “not as a Jewish text!”

“What do you mean?!” Yehoshua shouts from the depths of his armchair. “We have no Shakespeare or Molière. We have the Bible and Talmud and Jewish history, and you’ll study them, and in Hebrew! Everything will be in Hebrew! You can’t want, on the one hand, your own cultural preserve and on the other hand be part of the nation! What would happen if a school in some wealthy Tel Aviv suburb should say, ‘I want to teach in English! Our children will spend a lot of time overseas, and it’s best for them to learn everything in English!’ The Ministry of Education wouldn’t allow it! And if they should want to teach computers instead of Bible, the Ministry wouldn’t agree! They have to study as part of the Israeli nation, which receives its sewage and health services and education from the state, and that’s the way it will be with you, Anton. If you are part of the nation, you sever part of your culture!”

“If that’s the case,” Shammas responds, “then Judaism also has to be separated from Israeliness, and you’ll oppose that by force of arms.”

“But how is that possible?” A. B. Yehoshua asks almost voicelessly. “Try, for instance, separating France from Frenchness — is that possible?”

Shammas: “France and Frenchness come from the same root, but Judaism and Israeliness is a different matter! That’s why I advocate the de-Judaization and de-Zionization of Israel!”

“And are you willing to de-Palestinize the country that will be created in the territories?”

“I’m all for it! I won’t agree to finding solutions to the Israeli national state in the framework of Jewish religious law, just as I will oppose finding the Palestinian constitution in Islamic religious law!”

Yehoshua: “Then you should also oppose a Palestinian Law of Return for the Palestinian state!”

“I’m in favor of a Law of Return if it’s limited in time,” Shammas specifies. “Only for fifteen years — give an opportunity for all the Jews and the Palestinians in the Diaspora to decide if they want to come to their country, to Israel or Palestine, and then close the gates, and the law turns into a regular immigration law except in cases where it is clear that there is immigration caused by hardship.”

Yehoshua: “And what about the 350,000 Russian Jews who came this year? If there wasn’t a Law of Return, and if I had to ask your permission, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to come here!”

“They’d get in! They’re hardship cases!”

“What hardship? You’d tell me that it’s only economic hardship!”

“Listen, Buli,” Shammas sympathized. “That’s not the problem. The problem is that I’m asking you for a new definition of the word ‘Israeli,’ so that it will include me as well, a definition in territorial terms that you distort, because you’re looking at it from the Jewish point of view! But the minute we determine that the country is an entity that exists in a certain territory, then everyone who is in that territory is an equal part of it, and then an Arab in Jaljulia is Israeli just like A. B. Yehoshua. What you’re telling me is because we called this country ‘Israel,’ we have some debt to that name, and that’s idol worship to me! Don’t put me into that Jewish hairsplitting of yours. If ‘Israeli’ is a symbol of Jewish totality, then Jaljulia can’t be a full partner, because it’s not Jewish, period. It can live here, use your sewage, but on the level above sewage there’s a debate, and you apparently haven’t learned anything in these six years, and I guess I haven’t either.”

“Look what you’re doing,” Yehoshua explains after a short time out. “The name ‘Israel’ is 3,500 years old, and it fell on you suddenly in ’48, and now you’re saying, I want to peel off all its roots and leave only the piece with the Declaration of Independence, which we’ll turn into a constitution, and from that we’ll make ourselves a nation. But leave my name alone!” He suddenly boils over. “You’re pushing your way into the name, too? It’s as if I were to intrude into your Palestinian identity and say, I’m also Palestinian, please revamp it so that I can identify with it, too! [Yehoshua turns to me.] Look how he’s not satisfied with one country and one identity — he wants to be together with me in one people and one nation! He hungers to get me into one common nation with him!”

“It’s not hunger, just pure rationality!” Shammas laughs, hinting to Yehoshua that still, despite the hundreds of debates he’s had on the subject, he can rise like a tidal wave, with all his might, on questions that seem to be “only” about general national identity. “You know what your problem is, Buli? You think that ‘Israel’ is a hungry word…”

For a moment the definition flapped in the air, like the dress of a passing woman, and three writers were entranced by it. Really, I said, maybe for us, the Jews in the country, “Israel” is a somewhat hungry word. It awakens hunger and extremism and possessiveness in us. After all, we refuse to allow the Arabs to participate not only in our internal identity but also in the external manifestations of “Israeliness.” When it comes to the basis of formal citizenship, it is hard for us to be more generous to them, and this poses a delicate question to the Jewish people in Israel: Do we still not understand Israel, in our hearts and in our consciousness, as such a fragile, almost naked, almost wondrous entity, an “essence” or “spark” forged in a fate so unique that no stranger can be appended or taken in? Even just a formal association of citizenship, of equal opportunities, of equal budgets? And another thing, I added, maybe we should take a look at what went wrong with our definition of ourselves as Israelis, and to what extent this definition has been imposed, despite itself, on many others who do not think as Anton does. I related how, from the minute I was exposed to the sense of suffocation Palestinian Israelis feel within the definition of “Israeli,” that family name worn around their necks as in a forced marriage. Israeliness for me also became a little cool to the touch, and was already like a garment, not skin. Who knows, I asked Yehoshua, maybe the fact that Jews in Israel are still unable to create for themselves a clear, harmonic national identity, as you would like, is partially the result of their being forced to apply this identity — even if only because of its official name — to another element, in contact with which the definition is dissonant?

“That really is a problem,” Yehoshua said, “and we have to consider: do the Arabs interfere with defining our identity? It seems to me only in a certain sense, but not in the long run. That is, at first Israeliness as an identity is infringed upon, because we need to apply it to Arabs as well. So when Anton comes, or the Druze, and they say, ‘we’re Israeli, too,’ it complicates matters, and something in that identity becomes foggy. Then it’s easy to retreat immediately into Jewish identity, and that includes the willingness to live in the Diaspora. Yes…at first it impinges on the clarity of the identity, but if you ask me about the Israeli concept of identity as I see it, as a return from Jewish fractionality to the Jewish totality that is Israeliness, then the Arab presence is a meaningful element of it. Just as for the French, Corsicanness and Bretonness are part of the Parisian menu. Yes, the Arab presence is a facet that leads to daily moral obligations, in the attitude of a majority to the minority within it, and it is also a facet that colors the Israeli language with nuances. It is that presence that also gives us the sense of territory — I myself have absolutely no sense of territory here in Israel without the knowledge that the Arab is part of it, and just as one of the components of my territory is the scent of citrus fruit and the special air of Jerusalem, and the goats, and the cactuses, the Arab presence also lives within it.”

“Maybe we’ve gotten into a vicious circle here,” I said. “On the one hand, the Jewish people have not been successful in fully forming Israeliness, because they have ‘partners’; on the other hand, as long as they don’t succeed in formulating a strong definition of Israeliness that will also relate to the Arabs here, they are doomed to remain more Jewish. Look how hard it is for us to feel like a sovereign majority here. We face the minority as if we are a minority in our land — in the struggle for survival that we still wage in our hearts against it, in the battle for all kinds of ‘territories’ in the country, in the difficulty in being generous and sure of ourselves.”

“You’re right,” Buli responded. “But even if there were no Arabs in the land of Israel I would still have serious problems with this Israeliness of mine, because the major front in my struggle for my identity is not with Anton but with you, David, because of your sweeping legitimization of the concept ‘Jewish,’ which in my eyes is a fractional concept, and because of your desire to make that fractionality a permanent element of Israeliness. As a result, you never leave out the word ‘Jewish’ when you speak of Israeli.”

I answered him with a line from his novel Mr. Mani—not the obvious one about how the Arabs are “Jews who have forgotten that they are Jewish,” but the one about the “Jews who cannot forget that they are Jews.” But since this was not the subject of our conversation (and it may well be that there is no way of resolving the ongoing debate on the relationship between “Jewish” and “Israeli” without first resolving the question of the relation between the Israeli Jew and the Israeli Arab, the question of “who is an Israeli”), I asked Shammas what he thought of the definition that was proposed to and rejected by the Knesset in 1985, according to which Israel is a “Jewish state and the country of all its citizens.”

“If it is a Jewish state because the majority is Jewish, and it puts more emphasis on the Jewish part, I have no problem. I have no objection to the educational system reflecting the makeup of the population. These are legitimate political power struggles as part of the game of democracy. But the minute you tell me that not only is the country’s ambience Jewish but also its very character as a national state; the minute the law faculty at Tel Aviv University drafts a constitution for Israel that opens with the sentence ‘Israel is the eternal state of the Jewish people’; the minute the Knesset inserts a racist definition into its amendment of the Knesset Basic Law, as it did in 1985, then I’ve got a problem with you, because you exclude me from that definition.”

“I’m not excluding you.” Yehoshua leaned over him. “My Israeliness includes you and all the Israeli Arabs as partners in the fabric of life here. Partners in that you vote for the Knesset, in the creation of Israeli citizenship as a whole—”

“I don’t vote for the Knesset!” Shammas raised a finger. “You want me to vote for the Knesset so that you can show off your democracy to the enlightened world. I am not willing to be a party to that. I know that all I can do here is vote for the Knesset, and nothing more. I know that my mother was never able to see me become Israel’s Minister of Education.”

“If your mother had voted for the Knesset instead of picking olives on election day…” A. B. Yehoshua sighed. “Oh, I’ll never forget how we sat and did figures during the ’88 elections; you could have put thirteen members in and changed the whole political map. Oh, I’ll never let you forget that olive harvest…”

On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in 1991, Shammas published an article in the Jerusalem local weekly newspaper, Kol Ha’ir, in which he announced that he was “weary of and disgusted by” the never-ending debate over “the Israeli nationality,” “an idea that (on a good day) maybe thirty righteous Jews believe in, along with even fewer (if any) righteous Arab citizens of the State of Israel.” “It is the best prescription for killing time and raising the blood pressure. And since life really is short, it is better to spend it making one’s garden grow.” He added: “I know today that ‘Israeli citizenship,’ as recorded on the first page of my passport, is all that the Jewish occupation state wants to and can give me. It is even more than I want. As for Israeli nationality — I am no longer interested. From this day forth, in the interests of all relevant parties, I adopt the national definition — I am a second-class citizen, a Palestinian without the nationhood of the Jewish State of Israel.” And here today, four months after he slammed his passport on us and retired like Candide to his garden, he is again making a no less determined charge on Israeli nationhood.

Shammas shrugged. “What I wrote there was, of course, a kind of tactical maneuver…Of course I’m not weary, it’s a life-or-death case for me.” I asked him why he had stayed away from Israel for so long, and what he meant to express by this absence throughout the entire intifadah, the climax of the Palestinian struggle for definition and identity. “I suppose that in my defense (I’ve got a list of charges against myself, as well) I would say that in Ann Arbor I am closer to the intifadah and can follow it through the media better than what the Israeli media would allow me to know from my house at 7 Menorah Street in Jerusalem. So, with the exception of going out into the field, as you did in The Yellow Wind—something I’d never in my life do—” “Why not, actually?” I asked, and he responded, “Look, I once tried to live there. I lived for a year in the territories, in Beit Jalla.”

Yehoshua, listening in silence, went taut. “Really, Anton? I didn’t know…What, you went to live in the territories? When was that?”

All three of us thought about that “rise up, take your belongings, and move 100 meters to the east.”

Shammas: “In 1978 the rents in Jerusalem jumped, I didn’t have money, so I looked for an apartment in Beit Jalla. I lived next to an olive press there. That experience was enough for me. After that year I know with absolute certainty that I will never live in the West Bank, as that man,” he said, pointing at Yehoshua, “wants me to do.”

Both of them laughed, and Shammas continued, “Not that I have a trace of feeling superior to the people in the territories. It’s only a sense that it’s not my geography there. Not my cognitive, spiritual, or mental map. I work according to other codes, my head, my imagination, my emotions.” I asked him to explain what had been difficult for him there. “If we return to the house metaphor, it begins with the process of looking for an apartment, the negotiation, and signing the contract. And the interpretation that the idiosyncratic landlady gave to that contract. What bothered me more than anything else in Beit Jalla was the gradual discovery that my neighbor spoke Arabic but not the same Arabic I did. An invisible but most palpable semantic Green Line ran between us. I suppose it’s as if a Hebrew Macintosh program were fed into your IBM word processor. I would guess that the neighbor had the same feeling — that here was a 1948 Arab speaking, really, a foreign language. Aside from that, the daily commute to work in the shuttle cabs running the Hebron-Nablus Gate line, and the commute back in a bus full of Jewish settlers going to Hebron, and the times that the driver refused to allow an Arab to board the bus and I didn’t say anything, I just sat inside and let it build up in me, gritting my teeth—”

You didn’t say anything? I asked.

“I didn’t say anything. And I felt that on the most primitive level, without any fine points of ethics, I would expect the Arab to pull out a pistol and shoot the driver. I really felt that way.”

And you sat and said nothing? I said in surprise. If Buli or I had been in the bus and had said nothing in the face of such abuse, you would attack us rabidly in the newspaper!

“I wasn’t silent,” Shammas responded, mocking himself. “I wrote an article! I wrote a piece describing a similar incident. Listen, I have no knife, and even if I had one I wouldn’t use it. I have words.”

That’s a defense strategy, I said.

“What’s the charge? That I don’t feel all that much a part of it, of the intifadah. Not that I repudiate it, I’m an enthusiastic supporter; on the contrary, it should be escalated! But it’s not my intifadah. It never was and it never will be. Were I a refugee in Deheishe, a writer, I don’t know what I’d do…It’s all hypothetical, I didn’t grow up there, I’m not a refugee or the son of a refugee, I don’t have the basic psychological makeup of refugee suffering that grows and grows and makes you explode. But if I were there? I wouldn’t wish on myself to be forty-one in the Deheishe refugee camp, that’s the last thing I’d wish on myself. I’d do something desperate…I’d steer a Tel Aviv-Jerusalem bus over a cliff.”

I reminded him that in that same Rosh Hashanah article he advised an Arab from Nablus whose picture album had been confiscated by the Shin Bet and then gotten lost to set out on a spree of violent revenge. I asked what action he would advise the Palestinians in Israel to take in an ongoing situation of discrimination.

“My real ideological war will come the morning after the establishment of the Palestinian state. Only then will I have the absolute moral right to demand complete social and political equal rights from Buli, as was promised me in the Declaration of Independence. In the meantime, I wait patiently for the big conflict to end, and then my conflict will begin. Then I’ll open my mouth. I’ll shout for a year, two years, and if it’s not solved, I’ll make an intifadah.”

I asked whether, among the Israeli Palestinians he was meeting as a guest passing through, he sensed the fervor and the commitment necessary for such an uprising.

“In the villages I feel the frenzy. I know that deliverance will not come from the Arabs of Haifa and Jaffa. Nor from people like me who live in Ann Arbor, or who sell candy, the corrupt bourgeoisie of Nazareth. But in the villages there are still people who lived through the Arab revolt of 1936–39, the people who live in Fasuta, and fifteen years from now, when they discover that they’ve been methodically screwed since 1948 and that they are going to keep on getting screwed, they will rise up and they will burn tires and they will think about bearing arms.”

“Will you return from Ann Arbor to participate in it,” I asked, “or will you follow it from there?”

Shammas: “I think I will return. I will return to participate, first in the ideological war, but when all other ways are exhausted, I’ll join”—his transparent voice rises momentarily—“the rebels in the caves in the mountain by Fasuta! And I will write their marching song!”

Yehoshua listened to the conversation, his writer’s eye wandering over Shammas’s face.

Afterward, after a brief lull, we returned — like someone who keeps touching a wound — to the question of identity. Yehoshua said, “The Israeliness of the Arabs here is big and strong, but part of it has been severed. I, for instance, am linked to my sources and history, and from them I construct my identity. Let’s take, for example, the question of how a prison should be built in Israel, how to treat jailed drug addicts, and so on. Now, I ask myself what the general theory of a Jewish prison should be, what the purpose of such a prison is.” “Interesting that you chose prisons of all things,” Shammas interjected in parentheses, and Yehoshua continued, “Should I give the prisoners vacations, what is Jewish punishment, and for that I have to go to my sources, to the sources of Jewish law and to the experience of the past, in order to construct a tradition of a Jewish system of justice and punishment. And here, if Anton were to ask, ‘Where am I in all this?’—in other words, can Anton take Muslim or Christian judicial systems and insert them as codes within the Jewish philosophy of punishment and justice? — he can’t! In other words, at this point he is no longer a partner. That’s the difference between my identity and his. But when, in the Palestinian state, he has to construct a judicial system for himself, they will have to give it their own nuances there, in contrast with, for instance, Saudi or Libyan or Egyptian justice.”

Shammas asks, “So what am I here, if not a partner?”

“You are a national minority! God Almighty, is it so hard for you to accept that? There are dozens of national minorities all over the world!” Yehoshua flashed. “Do you know what your problem is, Anton? That the Arabs were never a minority! You’re actually shouting your non-minorityness at us. Where in the world were the Arabs ever a minority? Listen to me, Anton, minorities have special rights, and they are also frustrated that they are not majorities. But the Palestinians will have a state where they will be the majority, and there you’ll have a place where you can experience your full identity — but here you will remain a minority!”

“In other words,” I put the echo into words, “you are again saying to Anton that if the reality you are proposing is not to his liking, let him take his belongings and move 100 meters to the east.”

“ If!” Yehoshua called loudly, “ ifhe wants his full Palestinianness! But he doesn’t want it! You heard it yourself — in Beit Jalla he feels awful! There he had really deep Palestinianness, close to the land, to the fabric of life, right? There everyone spoke Arabic, and all the memories are there, and the united family…but he doesn’t want that! He wants to live on Menorah Street in Jerusalem! And I say fine! I’m very happy he’s here! He gives me a lot of happiness and joy by being here! But if he wants his full identity…”

He didn’t finish the sentence — he had already said it scores of times, as Anton had, and it was all in writing and in memory. Like another debate this book presents, the one between Jojo Abutbul and Mohammed Kiwan, the two of them continue to circle within a circular wall, unable to find the proper distance from which they can relate to each other, one to the identity-in-formation of the other, bewildering each other like magnetic poles, since the creation of an identity is a process of emphasizing the unique and the distinctive, of differentiation from another identity, and here, still, everything is itself blurred and confused — Israeli identity, Jewish identity, Palestinian identity, Palestinian-Israeli identity — and each of them must crystallize out of some painful contraction of its territory in favor of another, opposing identity.

“He’s a strange animal.” Yehoshua chuckled, gazing at Anton fondly, with fatherly bewilderment. “He pierces like a laser beam and discovers the problematic of every system…that’s to his credit. But most Israeli Arabs support what I say; you know, after all, that you are almost a lone voice among the Palestinians. For them, what I say is absolutely clear and natural and just. They don’t want to be part of the Israeli people or nationality! Or look at the members of the Islamic Movement, with their clear and different identity; they don’t want to be integrated into the Israeli nationality either! The Arabs here want to have equal rights, but they want the status of a minority! While you, Anton, you want to take my Israeliness, which is an ancient concept, and be a full partner in it! And I say no! You are a minority. So let’s write down in a big book what the rights of a minority are, over and above the rights of a citizen—”

“I have no problem with that,” Shammas replied. “But on condition that you declare that Israel is an enlightened apartheid state.”

“Why apartheid?” Yehoshua was wounded. “You’re a minority just like the Basque minority in Spain!”

“No no no!” Shammas howls. “The Basque in Spain is offered the possibility of being a Spaniard, of being part of the Spanish nationality!” The word “nationality” he said in English, and Yehoshua followed suit: “You also have Israeli nationality!”

“Good God!” Shammas lets loose. “For six years I’ve been trying to explain to you, Buli, that citizenship is not nationality! That’s the major problem between us!” He clarified it for us slowly and painstakingly: “The minute we carry out our conversation in Hebrew, it imposes certain semantic usages on us that bind us. When I debate with you over what it is to be Israeli, both of us are victims of the fact that the Hebrew word le’omdoes not translate into the term ‘nationality.’ ‘Nationality’ has no translation in Hebrew, because the Zionist founding fathers thought of a nation-state only from the point of view of the Jewish, Hebrew nation and not in terms of the European concept of nationality at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. ^*The term has no translation in Arabic, either, since Arabic was not, like other languages, exposed to the reality of the nation-state. For instance, a Corsican’s passport states ‘Nationality: French.’ But in our passports it says ‘Citizenship: Israeli’!”'

Yehoshua: “But a state grants citizenship, not nationality!”

Shammas: “But Israel defines itself as a nation-state, and a nation-state has to give me nationality! That’s the root of our debate! Take out your identity card and look at it for once!”

We all took out our identity cards, and Shammas took his passport out of his suitcase, and we examined them. The young faces that looked out at us asked, “You’re still having that same argument?” Yehoshua was about to call the French embassy to ask what was written in French passports, but it was Sunday and the embassy was closed. The more Yehoshua refused to accept Shammas’s demand for a “nationality” in its English sense, something superior to mere citizenship, at least to what Israel offers its Arab citizens, the more upset Shammas got, and it was obvious that within him, as within Yehoshua, this “external” debate, seemingly over nationality, was setting off an internal tempest that was being carefully steered, just as with Yehoshua, into a semantic, linguistic, abstract channel. I admit that I am a bit suspicious of this channel. For whatever reason it seems to me that debates over semantic precision are not always really concerned with calling something by the right, true name but are intended, rather, as a defense from it, while the most important thing remains unsaid. Perhaps for Anton Shammas the main thing is concealed in that “Israeli hunger” of which he accuses Yehoshua; or maybe it is hidden in the epigraph that Shammas chose for the first chapter of Arabesques, from G. B. Shaw: “You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks and forgets its own…Well, I am a child in your country…” From those three dots at the end one can divine, as with ants, one can follow the riddle of the internal confrontation with Israeliness, the apparent enemy that is also the source of abundance and stimulation. Perhaps it is actually this two-facedness that may awaken the pressing need to rub up against, to be cut to the point of pain and ecstasy on this barbed wire that divides the identity; and perhaps reality as offered in the Hebrew, foreign translation sharpens and clarifies the original for him. I am a child in your country…

It was finally agreed that Yehoshua would call the French and Belgian embassies the next day, and if it was true that these enlightened nations write the word “nationality” in the passports of their citizens, Yehoshua would “agree” that in Shammas’s passport a similar definition should appear—“Nationality: Israeli,” and peace came to the land.

“If only you had patience,” Yehoshua grumbled, “If you would wait until we finished with the Palestinian problem and we established here a majority-minority covenant for fifty years, a common identity would slowly take form, and then you would see Arab cabinet ministers, and intermarriages, and we might even return to the situation of the First Temple period, when Jewish religious identity was not at all a necessary element of Israeli identity. After all, King Solomon, builder of the Temple, did evil in the sight of the Lord and married foreign women, and an Israeli king worshipped Baal — that is, he didn’t act only in accordance with Jewish religious codes. He had another culture, and was even linked to a different religious system, and that worked for a thousand years, and not so badly, it would seem. In the end, if we do this, if we return to the situation in which those who reside in the country become the framework for national identity, and along with it larger frameworks come into being around us, like the European community or a regional community here, this nationalism that so bothers us today will be much more moderate and subdued. Then there will be cultural symbiosis, and a flow of identities, because the common Israeli identity will be natural and will come up from the grass roots rather than being imposed. We will arrive at it gradually, in stages, through an attitude of respect between minority and majority and not by a sudden shock. Then maybe we will reach the point where you, Anton, will feel yourself so much a majority here that you will long for the time you were a minority.”

Shammas’s response was: “In the long run there may be a congruence of our visions, Buli, but we have vast differences in our understanding of the present and past, and especially on the steps leading to realization of the vision. I think that when we begin something in error, we will never reach anything, and for me the root of the problem is that Israel does not define itself as the country of its citizens.”

“Israel as the country of all its citizens is the definition of my Zionism!” Yehoshua decreed.

Shammas: “Do you really believe that the State of Israel ever felt the desire to be my country, too?”

Yehoshua: “Yes, I think so. Look at what it was created from and you will understand its difficulties. Look at France, whose identity was crystallized like a diamond. Today, when it has three million non-French citizens, look how it’s squirming. And you take this country of Jews who came from Holocaust and war, and had to find common ground between Yemenite and German Jews, without a common language, and with the Arabs on the border and the Arabs inside. With all that, you expect some kind of omnipotence from us? Don’t you have any historical perspective? You come to me with demands from within your private little hurt, and you forget—”

“Little? Why is it little? Don’t you measure my pain for me!”

“It is little compared with the horrible pain, yes, compared to, first of all, the pain of those people from your own Fasuta who were uprooted from here and ended up in refugee camps! Compared with the pain of Jews who were at the ovens and came here! You stayed on your land, you weren’t uprooted, they didn’t force you to take up arms to fight your brothers — we defended you in that — they did not strip you of your identity, of the Koran, of the church — you’re spoiled!..Anton is a spoiled boy, spoiled at home. His mother spoiled him too much! I say that it is our honor that such a spoiled boy has risen to flog us, and we’re all amazed by him and read his Arabesqueswith such an appetite!”

Shammas: “The minute you start talking on a large scale, my pain is obviously small. My pain, and that of the Palestinian in the refugee camps, will never be heard, because it always has to pass through the filter of the Holocaust. But I am continually trying to draw you out from your pathos, from your pathos of tormented Judaism, to say to you that it makes no difference what the magnitude of my pain is. What is important is the reality we define for ourselves together, so that our grandchildren will not have to continue coping with the mess being created today. I am telling you that your dream of creating a minority that will find its ethnocultural, even linguistic place here, such a framework is unacceptable to me, because your entire view of reality is Jewish, Buli, Jewish! You see only yourself and forget the other components. How can you want to make me a partner in an Israeli identity, if Israel is the totality of Judaism?”

“You know what?” A. B. Yehoshua sighed. “Let us suppose that I am ready to give you this ‘nationality’ that you want, an Israeli nationality. From here on out you can become integrated into my identity, just as a French Jew integrates into France.”

“No! No!” Shammas cried. “Because there is a French nationality but there is still no Israeli nationality!”

Yehoshua: “A French Jew has many French values, some of which are Christian and some traceable to the French Revolution, to Napoleon, and to Louis XIV. He internalizes it, and that is his Frenchness.”

Shammas: “That’s a false equation, because the French Jew’s passport says that he’s French, and only after that can he define himself as a Jew!”

“So I’ll give you that!” Yehoshua erupted. “Done! You will receive ‘nationality’ from me! You came here at 10:30 and you’re leaving at 2 p.m. with nationality! But Israeli identity you won’t receive. You won’t receive it from me! Why do you need my identity anyway?” He was inflamed. “You have Palestinian identity! You can’t have five identities! Wait a minute — will you give up your Palestinian identity?”

Shammas: “Yes, I am prepared to give up my Palestinian identity in the sense of ‘nation,’ as in ‘nation-state.’ In other words, I am ready to give up being a national of the Palestinian state that will be established. I am prepared for my Palestinian identity to be an ethnic identity, the same as your Jewish identity.”

“Oh, really, really,” Yehoshua said dismissively, his hands spread over his head, pointing ten points of incredulity and contention at Shammas. “Suddenly you’re bringing in ethnicity, American concepts that are valid only in a small part of the world. I don’t need that folklorist ethnology. What interests me is whether your identity teaches you how to run public transportation. How, for instance, do you make a Palestinian traffic light?”

“What are you talking about, there’s no such thing!”

“There is such a thing! The French have a little traffic light at eye level that you don’t have to strain to see. That’s why their traffic flows and doesn’t get backed up like in England. That’s the greatness of the French, that their identity is expressed even in a little traffic light.”

Shammas: “I bet some Algerian invented it, there is no such thing as a French traffic light, Buli.”

“Sure there is. A French traffic light and a French police force and a French place for a French policeman to carry his pistol, and French cooking and French foreign policy, just as there are Scandinavian ways to fight unemployment and Dutch ways of treating drug addicts. All those things, Anton, believe me, are important. They are significant. And they are constructed and cultivated from the past. They are life, and that is the meaning of life within an identity. I don’t want my identity to be nothing more than my going once a week to see a Jewish show at Beit Ha’am. Identity is not a bookcase, Anton! I want to get out of the bookcase, and bring the bookcase into my life!”

Shammas: “If you want to share all those things with me, give me a feeling that Independence Day is my holiday, too. Okay, Passover and Hanukkah are religious holidays, but make some civil holidays, so that I’ll want to go out on Tu Bi-Shvat and plant a tree!”

“I want that very much,” Yehoshua said simply, but immediately shook himself. “But Passover is not just a religious holiday for me! It is a holiday that defines me in relation to freedom, it gives me important moral values! It’s not only eating ethnic matzah! For an American Jew, Passover is an ethnic holiday, but for me; in Israel, it is a holiday that also should be establishing my relation to you. That’s how my identity is constructed.” “In which I have no part,” Anton said. “In which you have no part,” Yehoshua said.

“So we’re back to square one,” Anton said.

Gentlemen, I said, it is time to sum up. What has changed in these six years and three and a half hours?

A. B. Yehoshua: “Anton speaks about some great, far-off future; Anton is a kind of bird that has come here from some period fifty years hence…a soul born too early that passed by us on its way. It could be that what he’s saying now will then be much more relevant and comprehensible to us, and I’ll seem outdated, living in the past. I can only hope it will be so. But then they will say that we got through those fifty years thanks to my precise position, which also saw the evolution but didn’t allow it to make the kinds of jumps that would destroy the entire country. Because if we don’t formulate the concept of Israeliness most carefully, we will remain forever with two fundamental concepts, Jewish and Arab, which will ensure the permanence of the conflict. Yes, that is my summing up — Anton is the man of the future, and I protect the present for that future.”

Shammas listened with a smile and said, “I would add only that Yehoshua is a nostalgic man, and I am a utopian man.”

“I haven’t got a trace of nostalgia,” Yehoshua protested. “Check all my works — not a drop of nostalgia! But I want to tell you, Anton, that in the reality of Israel, if you’ve got an ally deep down — deep down! — it’s me. More than David, even. Because he, with all his liberalism and The Yellow Wind, with all that, I’m more your ally, because my conception is Israeliness, while he still sees himself as Jewish in a partial way, tied by obsession to some Yiddish ghosts from Poland which you’ll never be able to share, they’ll drive you crazy…”

The next day A. B. Yehoshua called the French embassy and was informed that French passports indeed contain the classification “Nationality: French”; similarly, the passports issued by the Belgian government state “Nationality: Belgian.”

“Anton wants ‘Nationality: Israeli,’ and I’ll give it to him,” Yehoshua said, a bit surprised at the results of his research. “But without identity! Identity, no!”

I asked, If so, what does such nationality mean to you, if it has no component of identity? A kind of advanced-level citizenship?

“Precisely,” Yehoshua said. “Advanced-level nationality is precisely it. It satisfies Anton’s need to receive something that is more than just the paper certification of citizenship. It seems to me that nationality is a concept that Anton has built specially for the bubble in which he, and maybe not just he, lives. A kind of framework in which he can be an Arab who lives together with Jews, an Arab who writes in Hebrew and lives in Hebrew, so he’s made this definition for himself. It’s hardly a coincidence that there is no equivalent word in Hebrew or in Arabic — that, apparently, is the comfortable position for him. Even so, the debate achieved something, some sort of movement. It advanced the matter of nationality, which is something I was unable to ‘give’ Anton up until now. It contains a certain advance toward the component of identity in the definition of the Israeli.”

I then called Shammas and informed him that he’d “won” his Israeli “nationality.”

“You have no idea how happy I am,” he said, really sounding happy. “I’ve been asking Buli to do that for six years.”

I noted, bringing him down, that in my opinion Yehoshua had made only a small change in his position. He was still unwilling to bring the Arabs under the wing of the concepts of “the people of Israel” and “the nation of Israel,” as he, Yehoshua, understood them, nor under “nationalism” of the type that Shammas dreamed of. He was willing to grant only nationality, something Yehoshua saw as vague and somewhat hollow, a kind of honorary title.

“It’s not important, it’s not important!” Shammas responded elatedly (I was sorry I could not see his face at that moment). “I am a great believer in the power of words, and from my point of view the debate was very important, because it forced Yehoshua to see the problematic nature of the concepts we use in our discussion, and you’ll see that that ‘nationality’ will be a self-fulfilling prophecy!”