Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Afterword to the 2003 Edition

One night in early August 2002, a young Palestinian from the occupied territories arrived in the Arab village of Bi’ane, in Galilee, Israel. He had come on foot from his village in the West Bank, walking across the non-border between Israel and the territories with a large explosive charge and a supply of shrapnel in the form of nuts and screws. In Bi’ane he was the guest of three other young men who were all from a single family and Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. His hosts prepared a place for him to sleep, in the village preschool. At their visitor’s behest, they purchased batteries for the detonator and hid the bomb in the living room of their home. Later that night they conferred with him about possible targets for an effective terror attack, eventually settling on a morning bus from Haifa that usually carried many soldiers among its passengers.

The next morning they drove him along the bus route, searching for a place where security was lax. At a certain point the terrorist got out of the car, bid farewell to his escorts, and set the bomb so that he could trigger it at the appropriate moment. The bus arrived and the young men watched their friend step aboard. Then they sped off to their day job on a Coca-Cola delivery truck in the nearby Jewish town of Karmiel — so that they would have a solid alibi.

The terrorist found a seat on the bus. Near him sat a student on her way to Safed College — Yassera Bakri, also from Bi’ane and from the same hamula(clan) as the young men who had assisted the terrorist. She was talking to a girlfriend in Arabic; nobody knows whether the young man knew Bakri personally or simply understood from overhearing her that she was not a Jew. Nor is it known whether she recognized him — he had visited Bi’ane on a number of occasions. In any case, he leaned over and whispered that she should get off the bus right away because “something bad is about to happen.” She immediately rose and disembarked with her friend. They stood at the stop for a moment, watching the bus drive away. Yassera Bakri had a mobile phone with her. Perhaps she wondered whether or not to report the incident to the police. You could write an entire novel about that moment and what went through her mind. She didn’t call the police. She and her friend hailed a cab and, a few seconds later, saw the bus blow up in the distance. Nine passengers were killed on the spot, ten were mortally wounded, and several dozen received less serious injuries. Among the dead and hurt were soldiers and civilians. The dead included a Druze student, also from Safed College.

The Israeli Jewish population, weary and jaded by bombings, was furious. As usual, rabble-rousers accused the Palestinian citizens of Israel of disloyalty. Others stressed that an entire group of people could not be branded as criminal because of the actions of a few individuals. Leaders of the Israeli Arab public were quick to condemn the attack categorically, and in Bi’ane itself there were Arabs who demanded — in a rather strange display of allegiance to the Jewish state’s penal code — that Israel demolish the homes of the young men who had assisted the terrorist, just as it demolishes the homes of terrorists from the occupied territories.

As for Yassera Bakri — the Israeli-Jewish media and public accused her of treachery, and most of the anger and frustration over the attack was directed at her. She was suspended from Safed College and is, as I write, on trial for failing to prevent a crime.

We cannot know whether Yassera Bakri could have prevented the bombing had she called the police. The terrorist was already on the bus, and his finger was on the detonator. Neither can we know what might have happened differently had she screamed out a warning when he whispered to her on the bus. Maybe she would have been killed as well. It is very difficult to know how anyone else would have behaved in her place. She seems to have acted with the dulled senses that fear can cause, and within a kind of paralysis brought on by stress and by the conflicting loyalties that battled within her for those few seconds. In a certain way, her story illustrates the trap in which all her compatriots who live in Israel find themselves. Any step she might have taken, any movement to one side or the other, would have sealed her fate in the eyes of Israeli Jews on the one side, and of the Palestinians in the territories on the other.

Relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel are now at a nadir. The country’s Palestinian minority has not, as a general rule, copied the violent example of its brethrens’ uprising in the occupied territories. But even its very limited involvement in the Intifada, mostly in the form of passive support, has been perceived as treason by the Jewish majority. The Palestinians in Israel, and those in the territories, have worked hard to keep their causes separate. This is partly so that Israel will have no excuse for treating its Arab minority more aggressively, and partly because the Israeli Arabs do not want to risk losing the gains, partial but real, that they have made over the years. Nevertheless, eight terror cells were uncovered in the Israeli Arab community in 2000, and in 2002 the number was twenty-seven. During the last two years, thirty-two Israeli citizens have been killed in terror attacks committed by Palestinian Israeli citizens. In October 2000, during turbulent demonstrations by Palestinian Israelis, the Israeli police killed thirteen Israeli Arab civilians. The good commercial relations that had prevailed between Jews and Arabs were seriously damaged by these riots. Jews declare that they no longer trust their neighbors, and that they wish to “punish” them for making common and violent cause with the Palestinians in the territories. Government ministries have greatly reduced their funding for the Arab sector. Since October 2000, many Jewish members of the Knesset have adopted the practice of walking out of the chamber each time an Arab member ascends the podium. Right-wing parties work openly to encourage Israel’s Palestinian citizens to emigrate. The minister of National Infrastructures, Efi Eitam, has even termed the country’s Palestinian citizens “a cancer in the body of the state,” and a very popular bumper sticker reads: “No Arabs, No Terrorist Attacks.”

As the Palestinian citizens are excluded from — and exclude themselves from — civil participation, they become more vocal in their demand to be recognized as an autonomous national minority. They also challenge Zionism’s most fundamental principle — that the State of Israel should have an explicitly Jewish character. As the Arabs’ demands have become more vocal, more and more Israeli Jews are calling for the deportation or transfer of the Palestinian population. Each side is treading brazenly on the other side’s sorest point, the other’s wound and nightmare.

The dizzy spiral continues. As the rift widens, the individual and general condition of the Israeli Arabs worsens. They become more profoundly alienated from the state and their economic well-being declines. The unemployment rates in Arab villages, towns, and cities are the highest in Israel; half of the children living below the poverty line are Arab. Perhaps as a result of this, out of despair and a sense that they have nothing to lose, the sleepers on a wire are awakening. They are making their voices heard. They are present, and are breaking with growing force out of the state of suspended animation they have lived in for decades. Israel’s homegrown fundamentalist Islamic groups are gaining strength and intensifying their rhetoric against the Jewish state. The same is true of the Arab members of the Knesset. They present Israeli democracy with challenges that other countries, with deeper and older democratic traditions than Israel’s, would have difficulty facing. Knesset member Azmi Bishara, for example, made a visit to Syria, and in a speech there expressed understanding for the actions of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia, which from its bases in southern Lebanon fires missiles at Israeli army outposts and civilian settlements. Another Arab member of the Knesset sent a letter to the president of Syria and called for “Arab unity in order to put an end to Israel’s criminal actions.” Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, one of the most prominent Arab politicians, served for years (including during the current Intifada) as a personal adviser to Yassir Arafat. (This is comparable to a member of the United States House of Representatives serving as a personal adviser to Saddam Hussein at the same time that President Bush is preparing to go to war with Iraq.)

Many of Israel’s inhabitants believe that the country is now fighting for its life. Under these circumstances, it is far from easy for Israel to handle its complex relations with its Palestinian minority. About a month ago, during the campaign leading up to the January 28, 2003, elections, the Central Elections Commission decided to disqualify Tibi and Bishara from seeking reelection, and to disqualify Bishara’s party as a whole. The decision, which expressed great alarm and vulnerability, as well as a desire to silence a whole community, won huge support among the Jewish population. The Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the disqualifications was a defense not only of the Arab population, but also of Israel’s democratic character.

The future of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel does not look promising. Admittedly there is still the hope that a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the occupied territories will help tensions subside, and create the conditions for equality and mutual acceptance between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Ranged against this modest hope are harsh realities, the conflict’s “facts of life”—the deep, longstanding mistrust between the Palestinians and Jews, and the memory of the injustices and crimes they have committed against each other over several generations. There is also the profound fear that any peace agreement will produce new terrorist movements that will seek to protest, with blood and fire, the concessions and compromises that made the agreement possible. There are other realities as well — the unchanging bitterness of a minority who feels that its land has been stolen, and whose national, religious, social, and even cultural aspirations are perceived to be dire threats to the same aspirations held by the majority. And there is also the Israeli Jews’ sense that their Palestinian co-citizens are taking advantage of the democratic system to malign the country or, at the very least, to call into question its Jewish nature. The Jews suspect that the Palestinians accept Israel’s existence only tactically, for the time being, and that when the right opportunity presents itself, they will not hesitate to join the country’s enemies.

There are huge questions as to what the future will look like after the peace agreement has been reached, perhaps, with the State of Palestine. Can we look forward to a time when, finally, a process of mutual conciliation and acceptance will begin within Israel? Will the end of the conflict be internalized in people’s hearts, or will Israel’s Palestinian citizens then renew, with redoubled force, their national demands, which have still not been discussed publicly and openly? How will Israel respond?

It is difficult to imagine that Israel will, after withdrawing from the occupied territories — a withdrawal that is liable to produce a trauma when Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are evacuated, creating a deep and violent rift in the Israeli social fabric — find within itself the necessary strength, and generosity, and sense of security, to grant its Palestinian minority equal rights, and even some of its national demands. This being the case, the country must prepare for some harsh prospects, including lengthy and violent confrontations between Jews and Arabs withinIsrael. This tension might well be aggravated deliberately by Palestine and other Arab countries. If internal strife leads Israel to take severe measures against its Palestinian citizens, the government of Palestine could decide to nullify the peace agreement.

There can be no doubt that both sides will have to make an enormous effort to overcome both the temptation of revenge, and their anxieties, in order to gradually reap the benefits of stability. For this to happen, the Israeli Palestinians will have to find the “golden mean” between their understandable identification with Palestine, and their integration into Israel as citizens of equal rights and obligations. The Jewish majority will have to make no less of an effort to understand that “democracy” does not simply mean majority rule. It also must mean that the majority has an obligation to defend the minority in its midst, and to allow it equality and freedom of action, and a sense of self-worth.

This book was written twelve years ago, and the reality it describes seems to have become more acute since then, taking on a harsher and more disturbing hue. Many of the potential dangers and threats that were outlined in the conversations and interviews I conducted then have become real. Many — Jews and Palestinians — no longer bother to hide either their hostility or their despair at being chained together like prisoners. Looking out from the conflagration raging around us, it is difficult to believe that these two groups will do what is necessary to create and reinforce a foundation for a productive civil partnership, or a well-grounded and mature civil culture.

It is very easy to severely criticize the behavior and actions of each side towards the other, but it would, at this time, be unfair and even self-righteous to pass judgment. We are discussing a situation of unparalleled tragedy, intricacy, and cruelty. Each is mortally afraid of the other. In many respects, they do not enjoy internal freedom of movement, nor the mental ability to overcome the severe handicaps inflicted on them by their separate and joint histories, and by the geopolitical conditions in which they are trapped. Both sides have become paralyzed with misery during their decades together, and are now doomed to make their mistakes and crash into obstacles of their own making. The Jews and Arabs living in a single country no longer have the fortitude to rise above their fears. Those fears now seem to be the only thing that connects them.

In my view, this is less a political story than a human one. Nothing but an almost superhuman effort from all sides can prevent the story of each and every one of us here in Israel from ending in tragedy.

— David Grossman

28 January 2003