Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Notes

^*Out of consideration for the reader who does not know Arabic, names and terms from that language are not transliterated “scientifically.”

^*An annual day of protest by Palestinian Israelis against Israeli government confiscation of Arab land.

^*Rehavam Ze’evi, head of the extreme right-wing Moledet Party. When he was in the Palmach, in the late forties, he was very gaunt and wore round, wireless glasses.

^*Moshe Levi, the unusually tall former chief of staff.

^*Data taken from Majed Elhaj, Social Education and Change among the Arabs in Israel(English) (International Center for Peace in the Middle East, 1991).

^*Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement and is tied to Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Arab world. Their purpose is to establish religious regimes throughout the Arab world. The Islamic Brotherhood is the oldest modern fundamentalist Islamic movement, established in Egypt before World War II; it now has branches all over the Arab world. Al-Azhar is a prestigious Islamic university in Cairo, established in the Middle Ages.

^*Plan D was the first strategic plan of the IDF in 1948 to occupy towns and villages populated by Arabs, in lands assigned by the UN partition to the Jewish state.

^*Even though the two disputants here are, perhaps, the two most fluent spokesmen in this debate, and even though this was not the first time they trudged through it, it was fascinating to realize that they still have not succeeded in reaching a set of common definitions and clear concepts from which the discussion could move forward. This impasse is even more interesting to me than the semantic polemic itself, and it points out an authentic and emotional problem of the overlap of concepts in the Hebrew language and Israeli existence. Concepts such as “people,” “nation,” “citizenship,” and even “Jew” and “Israeli” still suffer from heavy psychological obscurity and subjective interpretation.

The force and truth of Shammas’s comment about the problem raised by the lack of a Hebrew equivalent of the term “nationality” became plain to me when A. B. Yehoshua, after reading the transcript of the conversation, explained that he had used the term “Israeli nation” (le’om Yisraeli) only in a moment of absentmindedness, when the traditional use in Hebrew would be the “Israeli people” (am Yisrael) or “Jewish people” (am Yehudi). Yehoshua asked to insert this change retroactively, inserting “people” wherever he had said “nation.” To his mind, he said, this would represent “the clear nature of the total expression of Jewish identity as I see it in the concept ‘Israeli.’ ” I note this change with the consent of both participants.

^*Radio interview, Voice of Israel, second channel, March 21, 1988.