Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 16

To what extent are the Arabs themselves responsible for the bad state of affairs between them and the Jewish majority? What is their part in the failure? Are they prepared to examine their own dereliction with a critical eye, or is it easier for them to blame the Jews?

“It is very natural for a minority to have grievances against the majority,” said Rafat Kabha from Barta’a. “If an Israeli Arab comes and you tell him, ‘Here, there’s progress toward equality, there’s an improvement compared with past years,’ I don’t think there would be one Arab in Israel who would tell you, ‘Okay, you’re right, I’m not discriminated against.’ That will never happen. Have you ever seen a minority that didn’t complain?”

The situation itself, the state of being a minority, almost inevitably creates feelings that cannot be assuaged or resolved — resentment and fear, suspicion and bitterness. There is something in the existential status of a minority that is liable to imprison it in a spiral of indignity — that is, an ever-present readiness to be hurt and insulted, followed by exploitation of the insult and wallowing in wretchedness, in a never-ending cycle.

Seniors at the high school in Jat pointedly complained about how they are not allowed to study the poetry of Mohammed Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, in school, and how this encroaches on their national heritage and Palestinian consciousness. This is a familiar and, in my opinion, legitimate complaint, but it was hard not to notice that the boys and girls were voicing their grievance in the very same words and expressions I had heard elsewhere in a similar context. To put it simply, they were repeating something they had learned by rote.

I agreed with them that they should be allowed to study Darwish’s poetry, and Palestinian history and culture in general. Then I asked who among them had tried to study this subject on his or her own. No one responded. I thought that they had not understood the question, so I asked it again: Have any of you tried to find reading material about the Palestinian people? Silence. One student — out of thirty-five — said he had once leafed through the Palestinian Encyclopedia, which is published in Arabic in Israel. The others studied their desks. They giggled. A girl mumbled that she had once read a book called The Palestinian Holocaust. Another had begun reading a book called The Tragedy of a Palestinian Girl. Have you discussed these things that are so important to you with an adult? They exchanged glances, began to guffaw, and turned contentious. It was clear that they had never considered that they themselves could cross the line that had been drawn by the accusation they made against the Jewish establishment. Indignity had become a slogan, producing rationalization instead of rationality.

I told this to Rasem Hama’isi, an urban planner born in Kafr Kana. Today he lives in Ramallah — a dynamic, active man, gravitating toward the future. He was long since sick of such stories, his expression said.

“I’ve had enough of always saying that everything is because of the government. We are also guilty! We’re not so quick to criticize ourselves. I’ll give you an example from my life. My niece, in fifth grade, showed me her geography notebook. I took a look and saw that two answers were wrong, but the teacher had checked them and signed it, as if everything was correct. I went to the teacher and asked him, Why did you do that?

“He said, ‘I don’t correct. I just sign to show that I checked to see that she did her homework.’

“I said, ‘That’s all? Maybe she copied out lyrics to a song by Um Kulthum [a popular Arab singer].’

“He started saying, ‘No…Look, we always do that, that’s the way it is.’

“And that’s a young teacher who should know better, given the system of values he believes in!

“This culture, this avoidance of responsibility, exists among us, and one of the terrible things is that we always have an alibi for it: Because we’re a national minority! Or: External factors don’t allow us to progress!

“So, true, sometimes that’s justified, but a lot of times it’s just rationalization. Once a boy came to me and I examined his notebook and saw that he had copied one exercise. He began reciting this excuse: ‘I want to finish. I want a degree, they don’t let us progress…’ I told him, That’s an excuse. Don’t try to give me that line. You want to be a teacher, right? How can I allow you to teach my children? What will you teach them? What values?

“So if you always limit yourself and say in advance, They won’t let me progress, you enter the destructive process of a people weakening itself and wearing itself out. Maybe there are some who enjoy feeling that way, wretched and insulted all the time. It gives them an excuse for all kinds of personal shortcomings. But I don’t want to educate my children and my society with such concepts.”

When he said that, I meditated on the extent to which offense is an emotion that — more than any other, perhaps — returns us to childhood. When we are angry, for instance, we do not revert to being children. Nor when we are bitter or sad. But when we are insulted, we are children again. Something vulnerable and helpless, burning and self-righteous rises from the depths of our memory and chokes us. So permanent indignity is liable to keep a person — or a group — in a kind of petrified childishness. It was, in fact, this very tone — childish, helpless, even spoiled — that was in the voices of the high-school students and in the voices of certain adults I met who lamented indiscriminately on the injustice Israel was doing them. It was depressing to encounter it among older people, older than I am, people with families, some of them teachers of young children. They were childish in the negative sense of the word, unable to take responsibility for their personal destiny, obediently adapting themselves to definitions dictated to them from outside, passively accepting grownup obsessions.

This is how the Palestinians in the occupied territories were for years. The sovereign states around them, the “grownups,” determined their destiny for them. They were given no right of self-determination, most of them were not allowed to carry a passport, most do not even have citizenship in any country — they are refugees with no home to call their own. Everyone treated them like children or minors, and never conceived they could suddenly become belligerents who would stand their ground. For many years they internalized this attitude. The intifadah was an act of self-deliverance — of a return to their chronological age and of linking up with adulthood’s sources of strength, the full integration of their national personality. Just as the Six-Day War had been a kind of collective Israeli “coming-of-age ceremony,” nineteen years after the country was founded, so was the intifadah, twenty years after the occupation, the “coming-of-age” of the Palestinian people in the territories. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it was the young people, the boys and girls, who made the revolution in Palestinian consciousness. Sometimes, meeting them, one can sense the extent to which they have managed to blend the energies of adolescence with those of nationalism, and how much each has served the others.

Rasem Hama’isi is the first Palestinian in Israel to win a competition for planning a major urban center, and today he does strategic planning for cities, including Arab cities. He is short of stature and slightly balding, his eyes full of life under a jutting, convex forehead. He is sharp-tongued and expansive, and you feel right away that time flows through his veins.

“Listen, we’re way behind…The gap between the sophisticated tools today available to mankind and the values and knowledge our children receive is very large. This gap creates something terrible —that you don’t live the time in which you live!What I mean is that, when it comes down to it, you live only half a life! What a waste! Today you have a telephone in your car, a fax machine at home, there’s a computer that can connect you to anywhere in the world, but the big question is how do you translate that into your own thought processes. How can I translate that? Because time will not wait for me!” (Arab, Jew — when he said that, we were just two people fighting the only fit enemy, the real enemy.)

“Our internal ability to adapt to these things, to the conceptual world they create, is very limited. We still do not ask ourselves the important questions about our responsibility to society — for how many generations onward are you responsible, can you see only the end of your own nose? Are you responsible for the future of your children? Do you want to do something that will have an effect on your children’s children as well?”

Rasem Hama’isi.

I asked others as well. Again and again I asked how it could be that the state’s attitude of rejection could so paralyze the Arab minority. Why did the Arabs in Israel not react differently to this rejection? Other minorities in the world, in similar circumstances, react with an ambitious foray into the majority society’s centers of power and influence, into its elite. They are rejected but charge again, until they impose their presence on the majority. They transform the natural bitterness that every minority feels as a result of its circumstances — the “minority toxic syndrome”—into a powerful fuel, into an enzyme that magnifies their competitiveness and drive to excel, until they force the majority to attend to them. The Jewish and Japanese minorities have done this in the United States. So has the Chinese minority in East Asia. So have the Palestinians themselves in the Arab countries. Here are some of the answers I received.

Nabih Kasem, fifty-one, teacher and writer, Rama.

“I say to my students, First of all you have to be the vanguard. Be a good student. But know your limitations. There are things that you can never be in Israel. Not a member of the cabinet or director general of a ministry or a pilot, nothing that is really important to Israeli society. This is what I say to them, This is what you should know. Dream up to this point and not beyond. If you dream too much, you’ll ruin your future.”

“How can you tell a sixteen-year-old, Dream up to this point? After all, that’s the age of dreams.”

“Listen, he has to face reality. If he goes out without facing reality, in the end he’ll destroy himself. He has to know that he must achieve his rights, but he must also know that he cannot reach a key position. Why are you looking at me that way?…Dreams! I didn’t dream too much either.”

That attitude was addressed by Dr. Majed Elhaj, a sociologist at Haifa University. A young man, very eloquent, who some see as the future leader of the Arabs in Israel.

“The Arabs do not have to concede anything,” he said. “They are 18 percent of the population, and the state does not exploit their potential in all fields! It’s a huge loss! How can the Jews not understand what that means? More and more the country is losing a part of itself, because the Arab elite finds doors closed to it, and there is no employment, and first preference is given to immigrants and to Jews. So the gap grows, and with it alienation and bitterness.”

Elhaj himself was underprivileged in childhood. His mother was widowed, and he often had to stay home from school to help her sell vegetables in the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood of Haifa. He returned to his studies only because his teachers pressured him. He received his doctorate at the Hebrew University. He did postdoctorate work at Brown University, in the United States.

“I don’t think that the Arabs have to acquiesce in that. I think that there’s a mutual interest in having the Arabs fight to achieve in all fields. So I’m now addressing the subject of fostering excellence among the Arabs in Israel. Without developing a superior elite among the Arab minority, it is doubtful whether the Arabs will ever be able to take a place in Israeli society. The average Arab today has no chance of being absorbed into the Jewish sector. Only an Arab who excels, who can make a really unique contribution — as has happened in the theater, as has happened in sports with Zahi Armali [a Palestinian-Israeli soccer star] — succeeds in breaking through.

“So one of the messages I take today to my society is how to develop excellence. The fact that most of the population in Israel lives under the illusion that it can ignore you shouldn’t make you surrender and disappear. Because I think this tendency of the Arab minority in Israel to isolate itself, to be insular, is suicide.

“It may well be that this will not please several Arab leaders in Israel,” Elhaj says, “but I feel a duty to say it objectively: We, the Arab population, have a part in this failure. We did not invest enough in the individual. In our schools education is not geared toward excellence. There is no education toward making this generation a part of our struggle to open up society. Education is geared toward achievement, not excellence. Neither excellence as individuals nor excellence as a group. We need to create an intensive educational program for this. We need to choose the gifted students in school from preschool age. To foster the young leadership.

“This is a great challenge for us. We need to overcome a great despair, especially among educated Arabs. Because even if you are the very best, there is always a boundary to your dreams. There is a ceiling you will not be able to pass. So why excel?”

Naim Araideh, a poet and literary scholar, said: “It’s not really the Arabs’ lack of desire to be involved. It’s a great apprehension. It’s fear. Because here we’re talking about two entirely different cultures, and real exposure to another culture completely changes all the channels of thought and of the soul. On one hand, you do not want to assimilate. On the other hand, you want to be like them. The Jewish and Arab establishments really do not encourage such mutual involvement. In almost every country in the world where there is a majority and minority, the minority wants to outpace the majority. Here — no. Here it’s only in the technical things, the external materialistic things, that the minority wants to overtake the majority. So this one wants to build his own house, and that one wants a VCR and a car, but nothing more than that.”

Araideh, forty-one, is a member of the Druze community, born in the village of Mghar. He has published books of poetry in Hebrew and in Arabic, and is writing his Ph.D. thesis on the fiery nationalist Zionist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg (“No, I can’t say I haven’t been upset by some of the things in his poetry. His nationalism. Yes, it upsets me, but I regard him as a genius whose poetry is great, extraordinary, a flood of genius, who is allowed to make a slip of the tongue every so often”). He once spent six months in jail in the 1970s because he knew about but did not report the Syrian spy ring led by Israeli radical Udi Adiv.

“Take Jewish society and take Arab society and compare — in your society there is a tradition of self-criticism. If you read the Bible, the first thing that stands out is that there is no idealization of reality or of characters. There are false prophets, and there are the horrible sins of King David, and Abraham lies to the King of Egypt and tells him that Sarah is only his sister. That’s nice. It expresses the most human conflicts, doesn’t paper over anything. And when one of your prophets feels he is burning to pronounce his prophecy, he fears no one, because he has heaven behind him, ‘Because my Lord has spoken!’ It’s already rooted in your consciousness, it’s an integral part of you.

“With us — and allow me to limit myself now to my field of study, Arab literature and poetry — the Arab poet or writer cannot criticize his society. Nor is he expected to do so, because his traditional role is to support society. If society lies, the writer is supposed to promote the lie, and then everyone forgets that they themselves created it and they begin to believe it. There are some exceptions among us, important authors unique in their generation — Mohammed Darwish, Emile Habibi — but the others? Court poets. Rhymers. Real social criticism, or a real challenge to society, will not come from them.”

Here are the words of a woman of about twenty who asked to remain anonymous. She is the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Arab father, and when I commented that she could be a classic example of coexistence and that she is the person, perhaps, who can unwaveringly say, “I am Israeli,” she laughed. “I’m not all that sure. I have so much pain with regard to Israel…everything that happens to me happens to me because of that. And I’m always feeling guilty. If something happens, they immediately accuse me — as a Jew, as a Palestinian…Maybe I really can say that I am Israeli, but only from the point of view of being messed up. But maybe that’s what it means to be Israeli.”

She, my momentary ambassador to the fault line, has black hair, very blue eyes, thick eyebrows like two soft bows over her beautiful, red-cheeked face. Her speech is muted with the bashfulness of a young girl. “Sometimes I am the only one among my Jewish and Arab friends who can see how much the preconceptions of both sides are similar, how each side uses exactly the same kinds of preconceptions and stereotypes with regard to the other, and I am always careful not to take sides. It’s very difficult, especially in this situation, when everyone has to identify with a side, because otherwise you barely exist.”

By profession she is a graphic artist, and she says that her graphics are Western. The same is true of the music she likes; the literature she likes is written in Hebrew and English. Arabic literature is, for her tastes, too caught up in what is happening here, the struggle, daily life; it is too polemical. She prefers to express herself in Hebrew. From within the internal contradiction of her situation she has developed her own identity, not Jewish and not Muslim. “Ever since I was little, I have always thought that I was all those things together, that they are inside me. Not that I’m part of them. Because they always tried to affiliate me with one side or another, and I didn’t want to belong but to make them mine. To make them all part of me.”

She has harsh and severe things to say about Arab society in Israel. “The Arabs here, in my opinion, are in a bad state,” she says. “What by now can be important to them? After all, they don’t have an identity of ‘I myself,’ they have no clear idea of who they are. What they really want. What they are allowed to aspire to. So either you compensate yourself by crystallizing a certain identity as an individual, distancing yourself from what is important to society, and thinking only of yourself, or you realize yourself materially: ‘I have a house, I have a car, beautiful children, we go overseas from time to time, my cousin is a doctor, he is a lawyer’—all that materialism is just compensation for the emptiness you made.”

“You’re ignoring,” I stopped her, surprised at how judgmental she was, “that in Arab society in Israel there is, for instance, a great appreciation of education. I’ve met illiterate parents, destitute, who would not think of giving up their child’s education and private lessons. And every family tries to send at least one child to college.”

“That’s very nice,” she responded, composed but resolute, “but again, that education is a college education and no more. It’s not internal education. Not intellectual in the full sense of the word. There is no spiritual richness. There is no real curiosity. In the end, that also is a part of the struggle for survival. They prefer not to think a lot, only to live. Only to get through this situation in one piece. Because to contend with difficulties such as they have in the territories — I don’t know any person here who would be willing to put up with those conditions. People here just want to live well. They want to survive. They want to go on living, no matter under what conditions, no matter what the cost. They’ll say what they’re told to say in order to continue to live here, to build their house, to send their children to college. And the result of all that is assimilation. You assimilate into another society that is not yours. You lose your identity. You’re just a body, you’re not a person on the inside, just a creature who lives according to what others define for you. They tell you what is good and what isn’t good, what is allowed and what isn’t, and, most important, what’s easy. You don’t fight. Don’t demand. You don’t say what’s in your head. You don’t say what you are. You no longer knowwhat you are.”

In conclusion, I wish to present the words of Ahmed Abu Esba of Jat, a graduate of the Kadouri agricultural school, a former teacher and former mayor, and today manager of an iron factory he built.

“We have a basic defect that makes us into people lacking initiative and self-assurance. It begins at home, where the parents’ desires are imposed on the child, not allowing him to develop his own personality. That’s a general Arab problem — from the time they’re small, we don’t encourage our children to take initiative, to create by themselves. What comes out is a person who always depends on others. A parasite. A person who requests only an answer or order from his parents, or from whoever is responsible for him.”

We sat and talked in a shack by his factory in Jat. Abu Esba’s voice is warm, hoarse, full of power. He is fifty-six, strong and solid, sure of himself. Unlike many others, he does not stand helpless before the Israeli establishment. For example, when the mayor of Teibe is requested to prepare a comprehensive development plan for his city, he instead writes, on a single sheet of paper, a list of all his demands from the Ministry of the Interior for the next five years. Abu Esba stands out as one who has quickly adjusted to the rules of the Israeli bureaucracy. “Ariel Sharon, when he was Minister of Commerce and Industry, told us that he was different from the other ministers! With him an orderly request was sufficient, and he would immediately go out in the field and get things moving! I said, Sir! Let’s see you do it. Let’s try an experiment. The next day I dashed off a letter to him: ‘Mr. Minister, we have an approved industrial zone, and I need infrastructure, and I request that for a brief period of four years you grant us the status of a development area, class A, in order to draw in entrepreneurs.’ I prepared detailed material together with an engineering and planning consulting firm, an organized plan, with figures on road construction, electricity, sewage — everything. He immediately sent me his aide, who came, looked. I even gave him a Jat flag.” He swallows a smile. “He went over all my plans and said, ‘Hey, you’re really ready to go!’ I told him, ‘My friend, I’m serious about my business. I don’t like to sit around and gossip.’ ”

Unfortunately, the end of the story is very familiar: “That was five years ago. I haven’t seen him since. And Sharon? He’s building settlements in the territories now, he doesn’t have time for old problems. He only has time to make new problems.”

But we were talking about impotence.

“Look what’s happening with us at our school,” Abu Esba added. “The school is new, modern, and it has to encourage the child’s initiative, his creative thought, his ability to express himself, but with us, since the teachers were educated that way, they prefer to continue with the same old methods. Instead of giving a lesson with a discussion and thought and conclusions, they give dictation: ‘Listen to me and write down what I say!’

“The lesson is supposed to be what he and I work out and formulate together! But it’s hard, it’s a challenge to the teacher! The teacher will have to prepare himself, learn the material, think what unexpected questions the children might ask, and that threatens him. Why should he do it? Since there’s no supervision, and since no one ever asks him how he’s teaching, he prefers the old method. And if he fails with that, too, he makes slogans against the authorities, puts them into the children’s heads, to excuse his own failure. So a kid reaches his senior year and he’s afraid to give you an answer. He searches your eyes for what answer will please you.

“Another part of the problem is the woman’s place in our society and her role in education. Because even though we teach the women, the girls, they finish high school, and a teachers college or B.A., but her character doesn’t change. She only knows more. Then, when she becomes a teacher herself, she gives the children her character, not her knowledge.

“So I look ahead, to my grandchildren’s generation, and I’m telling you that not much will change with them, either. How can it change? Who can educate them otherwise? Can a woman give her sons a character other than hers? And her daughters, what will they have to give? We’re in a vicious circle.

“So if there’s a change it will come very slowly. Not in a revolutionary way. And the gap between us and Jewish society will remain, will even grow. A long time. That’s reality, and we have to recognize it. There are advanced societies, and there are less advanced societies. We need a general revolution, of ideas and action. And the state can’t help us with that. I can’t put the blame on that, not on the Jews and not on the government. What happened, for instance, in Turkey? When Kemal Atatürk wanted to change society, he took the babies, kept them away from their parents from birth, so they wouldn’t receive their parents’ character, and educated them the way he wanted. Redesigned them. Now, you can’t do that kind of thing here. And we have to start coming to terms with what we are. That’s the way we are. That’s our character. We weren’t educated to know how to help ourselves, and it looks as if we’re unable to do it on our own.”