Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 2

Unfolding below the balcony of Tagrid and Abed Yunes’s attractive house in the village of Arara are olive groves and fields of wheat. Beyond them is the Wadi Ara road — or, officially, in Hebrew, the Nahal Iron road — and after it low hills, golden in the afternoon sunlight. A burgeoning grapevine stretches over the trellis at the threshold, and inside the house Majd and Sumu—“splendor” and “glory,” he two years old, she one — waddle about in their Pampers, whooping at me Hebrew words they have learned —b’seder, kadima(“okay,” “get going”) — and climbing all over Mommy Tagrid. Impossible to have a conversation this way — who will take the children to Grandma? Tagrid will.

“I met Tagrid at her house.” Abed recounts their history as we relax on the balcony, looking out over the fields. “I had seen her once before, and I heard good things about her, but introductions — only at her parents’ house. I came with a friend who mediated. We went and sat with her father. Her mother, at most, brought refreshments. It was fine. It’s a liberal, open family. My family — let’s say there’s a difference.

“Two days later she went overseas with a delegation, and every week I would visit them, ask what was new with Tagrid, if she had written, if she had called, had expressed any interest.

“When she finally came back, I drove to the airport to greet her. She didn’t understand what I was doing there. I thought she would drive back with me, in my car, to the village, but she sent her suitcases with me instead.

“The next morning I let her sleep until eleven and then I called her: How are you, Tagrid? How did you sleep? How was it over there? May I come visit you?

“I came over and we sat alone together. What does alone mean? Every two minutes someone came to take something, to arrange something, and all the doors were open.

“So we began talking. She made inquiries about me in the village, asked if I would permit her to continue her studies. She wanted me to be an electrical engineer, but I didn’t want to — being a technician was enough for me. But I promised her she wouldn’t have to stop her studies. Even then I saw that her independence was very, very important to her.”

“What have you been saying about me?” Tagrid returns, pours juice, brings fruit. Her laughter rings through the house. Her face is sharply outlined and illuminated by a whole range of expressions. Energetic and impetuous. Abed, in contrast, is very careful — part of the hidden tug-of-war of marriage — to keep to a single expression, sober and deliberate. But it is hard to be that way faced with her charm and her bustle, so there is always the shadow of a smile on his lips.

“She didn’t stop talking to me about her independence and her freedom, and I promised. Of course.” He nods to her, and she to him. “And when I married her, it was a little hard for me. You know, from the very beginning she wanted to do things that I’d never even thought of—‘Come on, Abed, let’s have breakfast together.’ Breakfast together?! And she would say, ‘Just stand beside me, Abed, be with me.’ And I, when I was still living at home, I would get up in the morning and my mother would have prepared everything. I would come home in the middle of the night with friends, at one in the morning, and wake up Mom: We’re hungry, and she would get up and cook a meal for everyone.”

“Those days are gone.” Tagrid laughs. “I explained to Abed what marriage meant for me; it’s for emotional support, so that you have a partner like yourself, right?”

“Okay, little by little I began to understand her. Today it’s enough for me to stand beside her, and that’s help for her. I stand. Talk with her while she cooks. I’ve gotten used to it,” he says heavily, as if reciting to himself, “because we’re both working people. We’re both teachers. Fairness tells me that this is my wife, and it won’t help me if I’m rude and I say that I don’t want to help. She’s tired, too. I don’t know how to cook, but I can help. Straighten things up a little.”

I ask, “Change the kids’ diapers?”

“No. Not that.”

“Why not, really? They’re disposable, after all. It’s easy.”

“No, um, it’s not for me. What am I…No. Stop it! We already had an argument about that!”

“I really don’t like him to change diapers,” she says.

And he: “Bathing them, too. I can’t do it alone. Together — yes. Stand with her — yes.”

“And feeding a child? What about that, Abed?” She’s provoking him.

“Not that. Only a mother knows how to do that. I lose patience with the kids after a few minutes.”

She: “That’s an easy out, Abed.”

He: “Even when a woman asks you to help her, she doesn’t want you to do everything. What’s a man who does everything? A man who cooks?”

And she, patiently: “I’m not asking you to change Sumu’s diaper. But help me wash the dishes? Why not? That I’m willing to have you do.”

“Thanks very much.” He brings the exchange to an end and smiles. The crease between his eyes deepens for a minute and goes into shadow.

“In my parents’ generation,” Tagrid relates, scurrying to the kitchen, pouring coffee, bringing cookies, “the division of male and female roles was not open to question. My mother did not even ask for help. The circumstances dictated she put everything she had into the home. Father worked hard. When he came home, he’d sit down in front of the television, and when he wanted the channel switched he’d tell us to do it. We liked to help him. Mother had no social life. Her relationships were only within the family. Outside the family was forbidden. And no hobbies. No aspirations. No self-fulfillment, other than raising children.”

“And what is her attitude toward your way of life?”

“Ever since I’ve been on my own, Mother has had less and less to say to me. Her advice isn’t relevant for me. It’s for a different type of woman, a more traditional woman — be acquiescent, always agree with your husband, don’t stand your ground. Mother always says, ‘It’s woman’s nature to be weaker and to forgive, and not to argue all the time.’ And she always says, ‘Don’t be so principled,’ and in that my mother is really no different from many women my age.

“But don’t misunderstand me, I have no complaints about her. Mother is a wonderful woman, she gave to us with all her heart. She gave us all of her. If I could only have her natural wisdom. You have to understand Mother within her generation — they lived their lives without my conflicts. There was no consciousness of repression. There was nothing to spur them to rebel, not even to criticism. You’ll think it’s funny, but I envy them for that, because they received solid values and forms of thought and behavior at home. They were not exposed to other elements that presented them with the opposite, with the temptation. They had security and serenity, and I—” She chuckles. “And don’t think that Mother has no gripes about us. Our way of life is perhaps not what she wanted. And she always complained that she had no daughters at home, because we studied and then went to work and married right away and had careers…Because just as I miss having a mother who is a friend, she misses having a daughter who is a friend. Things I do hurt her, and I remember that when I wanted to go for my master’s degree she yelled at me: Stop! That’s enough! You’re already twenty-two, get married! What will become of you! And every time I refused someone who came to ask for my hand, she would scream at me.”

“She’s just saying that so you’ll think a lot of guys wanted to marry her,” Abed interjects, straight-faced.

“My grandmother once tallied it up for Abed. It came to thirty.”

“Maybe they were all bused in together?”

“And what happened in the end?” Tagrid smiles. “I had to battle society, I suffered and argued, and afterward my sisters had it easy. Now I have a sister who’s two years younger than me, twenty-seven, and they don’t pressure her to marry at all.”

I quoted what I’d heard from Rima Othman of Beit Safafa. She said that in London she had met “Arabs that are completely outside.” “A boy and girl from the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon. They originally come from Acre. The girl told me, It’s not good that you Israeli Arab women have identified with the intifadah to the point that you’re putting off marriage. You have to have a lot of weddings, make a lot of children. They said that if someone from their refugee camp is killed, they immediately hold a wedding on his grave, and the dead person’s mother dances.”

“As regards the children”—Abed clears his throat—“that is, how many we’ll have — we have a dispute about that.”

“What dispute?” Tagrid asks. “How many did you want?”

“Not a lot, but as many as possible.”

“I’d actually be satisfied with as few as possible.”

Abed: “Me too. Six. Okay, five.”

“Abed!”

“What are you shouting about? We’ve already got 50 percent, almost.”

“If the next time I have a boy, you’re out of luck.”

He gags. “But children grow and leave home…”

Tagrid turns slowly to him, with all the resplendence of a sunflower. “When I have you, Abed, I don’t need the children!”

We all laugh. We even laugh too much. And I laugh, too, as if it all was the warm laziness of the afternoon and honeyed stings between the young man and woman. As if a Jew and two Arabs in Israel can have a friendly laugh over a joke relating to the “demographic threat.”

“We have no desire to have more children ‘for the homeland’ and at the expense of our own lives,” Tagrid says. “I’m not selfish, but I think that if I have three children I’ll be able to educate them better and bring them up properly; they’ll contribute to society much more than nine that won’t receive a good education, that we won’t be able to support.”

“May our holy womb be blessed!” I quote a headline that was printed, until just a few years ago, in the Israeli-Arab press. “Victory will come not on the battlefield but in the delivery rooms!”

Tagrid listens attentively. She meditates. “No. I want very much to have a small family, so I can devote time to things that are important to me. It is important to me to have a career. It is important to me to be a sociologist. It is important to me to work for Israeli-Arab society. If I have a lot of children, I’ll be stuck at home. My ambitions will die.”

“If I were hearing that for the first time, I’d get mad,” Abed sighs. “But I’ve gotten used to it.”

“Admit that it was no surprise to you! Admit that before our wedding we spoke about it explicitly!”

“I talked about that when you weren’t here,” he says, his face somewhat forlorn.

“You’re so fair!”

A few days later I woke up in the village of Iksal, near Nazareth, between Mount Tabor and the Nazareth heights. I wandered the streets — a village of no beauty, cubical cement houses and potholed roads, with electric poles running down the middle. But the yards are thick with apricot and guava trees, palms, figs, and pomegranates. Bare-legged women doused their houses with jugs of water, scrubbed the steps, and beat out rugs. A young woman sent out a clean and polished boy, smoothly combed, and half hid behind her door, leaning on a straw broom, watching him until he was swallowed up by a band of boisterous children. I walked after him, partly for her, partly to test myself — when exactly would the moment come when I no longer remembered her kiss on his cheek and he turned, for me, into shabab, a faceless young Arab.

In this very village, a month before, a young woman was murdered. Her brothers and father are suspected of burning her alive because, they claim, she became pregnant by a strange man. When I asked people about her their features slammed shut. “You know our culture,” said Leila D. “The Arabs cannot tolerate a disgrace like that…they had to kill her…” “Still,” dared a girl sipping morning coffee with three older women, “they could have taken her to the hospital in Afula to have an abortion, no?” The three women bowed their heads, did not respond.

“Had she obeyed the laws of Islam, it would not have happened,” I was told by Muhammed Saliman, Iksal’s baker and a member of the Islamic Movement. “According to that law, if an unmarried girl has sinned, she is to receive eighty lashes with a whip. If she’s married, she is to be stoned until she dies.” Something in my expression, in my secular skepticism, maddened him; his hands beat down the dough. “But Islam is very careful. You have to prove the act of adultery or sexual contact between her and a strange man. You have to bring four witnesses who saw her in the actual act, four! What do you think?”

Today there is a machine that makes the kanafeh. You mix flour and water, a little oil and milk, and add salt. The dough is then poured into a big funnel, from which it drizzles in filaments onto the circular brown wooden platter that slowly clangs on its axis. While the baker itemized with odd pleasure the laws of adultery and the types of stoning, his apprentice, a deaf-mute boy, gathered up the long golden locks and carried them carefully in his outstretched arms to the cooling rack.

The baker is about thirty-five years old. His beard is floury, his T-shirt soiled with egg and oil stains, and his sleeves swollen with muscles. Pictures of Islamic holy sites, the Kaaba in Mecca and the al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem, hang over his head next to his business license and his VAT certificate. He has three daughters. “I have never struck my daughters,” he said, and even though I had no doubts about it, he swore twice in the Prophet’s name. The boy behind us filled the braids of dough with soft cheese, and rolled them up with a quick movement. “If, God forbid,” I asked him, my eyes on the little kanafehrolling and swelling behind the baker’s back, “one of them commits adultery?” With a sigh he placed his sturdy arms on the table in front of him and directed his gaze at me. “We’ll — put — her — in — a—circle”—he chopped his words—“and everyone will stand around her. And everyone will hold a stone in his hand, and they will stone her to death. That’s how it should be. There is no choice. I have pity on her, but whoever makes a mistake,” he explained severely, his face producing a deliberate stoniness, an outer crust of faith for me, “has to be treated in accordance with our law. The law is wise; whoever believes in it will go to paradise, and if you do not believe in it, you will go to hell, to the fire. The same with the girl in Iksal, the one who was burnt.”

“They burned her,” I corrected him.

“Burned, burnt. She died.”

“Arab girls are burned daily,” Marwa Jibara told me in her house in Teibe. “Not physically burned. When I am burned spiritually, when I hear that they have murdered another young girl like me, I cry out. I cannot be silent. I see what happened in the intifadah. How the women there began to liberate themselves, and then the men got frightened. And at the same time, the occupation authorities helped the religious movements grow, and in the name of religion men again began oppressing women. But they oppress us not because the Koran tells them to but because they choose from the Koran the verses that are convenient for them. Here, my father tells me all sorts of things that maybe in some way he wants to tell me himself, but it’s easier for him to say, Our religion, our tradition. He also takes advantage of this pressure. But actually Islam has things that women can exploit for their own good. For example, a woman can give a divorce decree, a talak, and not the husband, did you know that?

“So I, when I get married, I want to write in our marriage contract that I am the one that has the right of talak. There are already those who have put that in their betrothal contracts. In Teibe alone there are three girls who did.

“Or there are such simple things, like the bride’s father always comes and gives her, you know, to her husband. But according to Islam, the father only gives her away if she is under the age of seventeen, and after seventeen she’s exempt from that. Despite that, the father always gives away his daughter. What kind of thing is that? Is she some sort of object? Or has she no will of her own and he can market her?”

Twenty-two years old — her eyes are blue and her forehead gleams, her young and affable face bunching up momentarily like a fist, hard and bitter, and her speech is rapid and dense. There is so much to do, to accomplish, to catch up to. “Sometimes I say, if I were Marwa born in France, I would now have at least a master’s degree, maybe I’d be preparing for a Ph.D., and my life would be more in order. I would learn more, read more, go to plays, develop. And I–I still don’t have my B.A. When I even think about relations with a boy I realize that a relationship would probably demand a lot of energy from me, and I need my energy for places that are more important to me. Or sometimes I think, I’ll live without those things. Afterward I think, No…impossible. If I don’t have the ability to think of myself, how can I have the ability to think of others? It can’t be. Without love I stop being human. Without love, what humanity do I have within me? None.”

She founded “Jafra,” the Palestinian women’s movement in Israel, whose motto is “Both social and political change.” From the house sitting on the peak of Teibe’s hill she pulled strings, made connections. The movement already has a general staff, and there are women’s organizations that support her, Jewish and Italian and German women. They have public discussions on the status of women, on sex separation in the schools, on improving the lot of Arab divorcees, and on sex education — which does not exist at all in Arab schools. “Because of that just look, the biological track is always the biggest one at Arab schools, and that’s not because everyone suddenly loves biology; it’s because they at least explain about the body and about sex. There’s no chance of an Arab girl getting sex education in any other way. I used to sit with the older women, I’d listen to them — that’s sex education? They talk nonsense, they can’t speak openly, every second word is ’ eib, shame, the whole time ’ eib, ’eib, everything’s shameful, everything’s bad bad bad. So on the one hand they give us no explanation, and on the other hand they expect us to be, you know, sexy, to attract boys, to get married fast…”

When Jibara was six years old her mother died. Almost from that time on she has managed her own life as she sees fit. As a young girl she opened her own store, where she sewed dresses. She paid for a journalism course out of her own pocket so that she would not have to take money from her father. Father Jibara was willing to give her money, but according to Marwa, “I believe that independence begins with financial independence. As long as I keep taking money from my father, I can’t talk about equality. Right?”

She told a story:

“When I was in second grade, the teacher told the class — I still hate her for this—‘Tomorrow we will celebrate our Independence Day, when the Jews came and liberated our land from the British.’ Whenever there was a party I would ask my aunt to bake a cake. She baked me one this time, too. The next morning I took the cake like this, such a pretty cake”—for a solitary moment her voice is in rapture—“and I was about to leave the house, when Father came and smashed and pulverized the cake with his fingers. I didn’t understand why he was doing it, and he didn’t explain anything. He just destroyed it and left. I cried, I took it to school crying, and I told them that my father had done it and that I didn’t know why. I was so naïve.

“Afterward it was Land Day. In Teibe, this man was killed, and I was there and saw him killed. That began to open my eyes. A year later I participated in the first demonstration; only a few people came, because then they were afraid, and I remember walking in the first row, holding the wreath tightly. I was nine years old, and about then I began going everywhere with Father, to the symposiums, the meetings, and the whole time I was the youngest one there, and the only girl.

“At that time I also began to read — by myself, not at school — about Land Day, what days were important to the Palestinians, who were the Palestinians, what was the Palestinian problem, what were we before. I read and devoured and learned everything.”

I could see her, a small girl with the ardor that was still apparent in her, and the tenacity, the world opening before her and creating her anew. Because I remembered myself that way, at the age of eight or nine, passionately reading the stories of Sholem Aleichem, stories for children and adults, understanding and not understanding, what is a pogrom, who are the Gentiles, what is exile, vaguely grasping that this was my father’s childhood, from which he had been evicted when he was my age; that the people I was reading of had a mysterious link to me, that they were I, but another I. He is very much alive in me, to this day, that child who finished reading Tevye the Milkmanand accompanied Tevye and his daughters and wife when they were expelled from their home in Anatevka, and who realized suddenly inside, with a wail that broke out and shook him through and through, how hard it was to be a Jew, and more than that understood, for the first time understood and knew, that he himself was Jewish.

“During the Lebanon War I was thirteen, and I began to go to the hospitals in Israel where the army brought wounded Palestinians from Lebanon. For me it was a chance to talk with real Palestinians, the most Palestinian Palestinians there are. People from the refugee camps. I would go to Tel Hashomer, to Beilinson, stay there three or four days. Sometimes a week. Mostly I would talk to the children there. One boy’s entire house had been destroyed, his whole family had been killed, he was the only one to get there, and without a leg. One year and three months old, and every woman he saw he would call Mommy. I spent a long time there; I was thirteen and he would call me Mommy. We even thought of adopting him, my father and I. Then it turned out that his grandfather was alive, and he came and took him.

“So every time I say to myself, Enough. I want to stop it all, I want to live like all the other girls in Teibe, to study and get married to someone in a good financial position, I remember all those pictures, and I have someone who pushes me inside. You have to go on, for all of them, and for yourself, too.

“After the Lebanon War came the intifadah. Those are not just any people in the territories. They are my uncles, because my mother was born in Nablus, and friends, and children that I’ve known ever since I was born. And here, suddenly, it’s our struggle together, so how can I not?”

“So you participated in the intifadah?”

She hesitates for a moment. Her hand is on the smoothness of her neck.

“Okay,” she finally says. “It’s true.”

And she told the story in a single rush of words, almost without breathing.

“Ever since the intifadah began, I felt that I had to be there. On television I saw the Palestinian women demonstrating and facing your soldiers, and I was jealous. I wanted only not to be here. I wanted to take part in the war against the occupier. Whenever I could I went. I had to see everything, to hear, to talk with the people. I even ended up being in Nablus when your units killed the Black Panthers [one of the armed Palestinian groups], and I went to the mother of the barber in whose shop they hid and she showed me everything, where they came in and the bullet holes. There was an eight-year-old boy there who saw it, and hid under the table when they came in and started shooting; he saw it all and wasn’t hit. You can imagine what it is to hear it all straight from people who were there and who took part, and not just to read about it or see it on television.

“Or, for instance, we’re always hearing about the murder of collaborators. Once, when I was at my aunt’s house in Nablus, at three in the morning someone came by and shouted to turn off all the lights, and the whole street turned off the lights. And the guys went into the Almasri Building and brought out a boy they wanted to interrogate. They were in the building’s garage, and my cousin and I peeked out from the window; we heard the voices, and every time they saw us they shouted at us to get back inside. I couldn’t sit in silence and not watch it, because when they were interrogating him I said, Hey, good thing they’re interrogating, but then the army suddenly came to the alley, and then the interrogators suspected that the boy’s parents had called the soldiers, so they took out a dagger and struck the boy. I was horrified when I saw it — they didn’t hit him because they’d found him guilty, only because the army had come, you know; they didn’t really interrogate him, and they ran away.

“I was there during a curfew. I can’t describe it to you. On the one hand, I felt like I was in jail. I felt I was nothing. Zero. That there were people playing with my fate and deciding for me when to go out and when to be imprisoned. But on the other hand, what happened in the house during the curfew! Once there was an eight-day curfew, in the casbah. There was no more milk for the babies. They gave them only water. Afterward the water ran out. People began helping each other. To take care of the babies and the old people. And the hope — it’s hard to explain. Now maybe it’s changed a little, but when we sat there eating breakfast, the last word at the end of the meal was inshalla binnisr, inshalla biddawlah, may we [meet] at the victory, may we [meet] in our country. And when I was invited to a friend’s, at the end of the visit I would say, The next time I come to you may it be under Palestinian rule.”

Her face metamorphoses across from me; she is transported to Nablus. This is how the people in the refugee camps looked when they told me years ago about the spring in the village from which they had been uprooted, about the orange groves they had lost.

“In my house, in Teibe, when I heard on the radio the names of the fallen, it hurt me, yes, but it was not like actually entering a house and seeing the mother and family of—”

She chokes.

“Excuse me, it’s a little emotional for me. When I entered the house of a fallen fighter, it was as if I was entering a mosque. All the pictures of him hanging on the walls all around, and the leaflets, and the letters from all the organizations — all that shows the unity of everyone at this moment, because all share in the grief.

“I would leave and come back to my village in Israel, and here everything is like it always is, life, business, whatever interests the people, and I go on with my life but remain there, watching, and thinking, I don’t want to live the way you here live. Even if I’m here, I want to live like they do there. It’s true that I don’t suffer from hunger like they do. But every time I eat something — okay, not every time, but a lot — I look at the food and think, Now I’m eating. I am full now. I have everything. And there are others that have nothing. And I stop the meal. I was mad at myself, as if I have things that others lack. Father and I, neither of us has that thing called ‘me.’ The me does not exist for us. Father would give his entire salary to people in Tulkarm so that they could buy food. Now there isn’t anyone who can make up his bank overdraft. But he can’t stop. And I’m the same way.”

“And in Nablus,” I asked, “did they appreciate what you did? How did they relate to you?”

“Well, how do you think,” she responded with a lilt, her lips crinkling. “Like an Israeli Arab.” She spit out the word “Israeli.” Silence, and an unasked question. Marwa is tense again. “What kind of label is that, ‘Israeli Arab’? I don’t know any group by that name. I’m not Made in Israel. You, for example, have a sense of belonging to the State of Israel, right? I don’t. That’s the difference. I’ve been living in Israel for twenty-two years, and I have absolutely no feeling that I am Israeli! I just have an Israeli ID card. And I won’t have any connection to it as long as Israeli soldiers shoot at my cousins in Nablus.”

“But Israel isn’t just soldiers shooting,” I interrupt her flood of speech. “Aren’t there other things in Israel you feel a connection to?”

“I can tell you that the children in the territories don’t have any idea what Israelis are. For them, an Israeli is a soldier.”

“But you’re not from the territories.”

“True. But there’s a part of me that keeps me from accepting Israeli society as a whole. Because of it I have to reject everything.”

“Still, try to tell me in what sense you feel Israeli.”

She slammed shut. Her head moved from left to right in a gesture of resolute negation. Silence.

“In what sense I’m Israeli…?” Again a long silence. It was possible to feel to what extent the struggle for freedom really enslaves and expropriates parts of her. “There’s nothing I can say…Really nothing,” she eventually blurted out. “It’s hard for me to find anything Israeli in me.” She has worked as a reporter for the popular afternoon newspaper, Yediot Aharonot; she works at the Givat Haviva teachers college, where there is an emphasis on Jewish-Arab cooperation; she organized a women’s demonstration in Teibe, the first of its kind, in the style of the vigils held by the Israeli protest group Women in Black; she speaks fluent Hebrew. “I’m a stranger in Israel. I’m a stranger in Teibe, too. Still, Teibe is my home. I belong to this place…Once I thought I would surely marry someone from the territories and move there. When I was sixteen I swore to myself, I will never marry anyone from here. There are no real men here. Only there. Those who struggle are men. The ones here are…never mind…but today I am sure that, even if a Palestinian state comes into being, I won’t move there, because I’ve started something here, the struggle for the rights of the Palestinian woman in Israel, which I want to complete. Were I to live in Nablus, or in Palestine when it comes to be, I would be making life easy for me. That is, I would be where it was more convenient for me to be.”

“But you felt like a stranger there, too.”

“That’s true…they’re remote…I even heard that they call us Arab shamenet, Arabs who’ve gotten used to the cream.” She snorted bitterly, shrugging her lips. “What do you want me to tell you? That’s the way it is for us…I don’t delude myself — there’s no one who really wants us to belong to them. Even when Arafat made his declaration in Algiers, he didn’t speak of us. At the peace conference they won’t mention us either. So who will take my part?”

Her hands, spread in inquiry, seemed for an instant to be straining at that invisible net that hangs between the Palestinians there and here, the mutual resentment, the jealousy, the accusations they hurl at each other — We remained here, repressed and humiliated, to defend the land that was left in our trust; you ran away, you abandoned the homeland. No, you stayed on to serve the enemy, like a woman who, raped by a man, agrees to be his mistress, while we are preserving, suffering and fighting, the true spark of the nation. But you have turned even the heroic struggle for freedom into a string of murders, you haven’t learned a thing since ’36. What have youlearned? Only to talk pretty…A bundle of guilt feelings, of charges and counter-charges, a deep sense of betrayal gnaws away at both sides. Betrayal of the land, betrayal of freedom, betrayal of duty to fate — that is, as always, the duty to suffer — betrayal in the very fact that you are different from me; betrayals that no one is guilty of, but still someone must be guilty, because there will always remain some indivisible grain of anger and hurt that is directed against Israel.

I had ascended to the home of Marwa Jibara and her father via the paved roads of Teibe. The sidewalks of the main street are set with olive trees and French streetlights; ostentatious multistory apartment buildings stand there, like housing projects in the nearby Jewish town of Kfar Saba, and in the yard — a tractor or a hay-munching donkey or three goats with their front legs propped up meditatively against a fruit tree. As one mounts ever higher in the direction of the house on the top of the hill, the streets become narrow, gray, heaped with cement, but at Marwa’s house, in the little, well-kept yard, there is a wonderful lemon tree, and the house is warm and inviting, buzzing with guests and neighbors and children. People are constantly coming and going.

In the corner of the room is a “sculpture” she has erected, made of tear-gas canisters shot by the police and pieces of wall from houses destroyed by the security forces on “House Day” in Teibe. Ribbons of red, black, and green — the colors of the Palestinian national flag — adorn the pieces of iron and stone. Above her head is a painting of a young man towing landward a boat containing a miniature Mosque of Omar. Around the windows, as around the windows in all the Palestinian houses I visited, is etched — like a kind of ironic frame to the story as a whole — the familiar rectangle of peeled paint, left by the adhesive tape that was used to seal the windows against chemical attack during the Gulf War. Marwa herself is short, yet seems tall; her back is very straight, and her bearing is that of a princess. When one of those present in the room, her father or one of his friends, contradicts her, she cuts through them with a single glance, and I can imagine her, small and brave, striding like a chick, with its feathers standing on end, into the hall in which the Arab political parties convened last year on Land Day. Three hundred men sat there while Marwa Jibara demanded to know why there were no women present. “It was Ramadan then, and the assembly was after the iftar, the feast breaking the day’s fast. The men had come, you know, to listen and debate. I told them, I want to hear why your women aren’t here. I guess you left them behind to wash the dishes and cook for tomorrow. Or is the symposium part only for you and they have to stay at home?”

“And how did they react?”

“Some laughed. One said, ‘You know, it occurred to me only yesterday that we didn’t invite any women!’ He laughed, too. Understand that we are triply oppressed — first political oppression, together with the men; and the men are oppressed, so they oppress us — it’s natural, so if we succeed in our political struggle and the general oppression lessens, our oppression within our society will lessen, too. And there’s a third oppression, our oppression of ourselves. We still have trouble convincing the Arab woman that she is oppressed.

“It’s also because we’re all so young. When you look at what we intend to do in Arab society, and then you look at us, there’s sort of a discrepancy. There’s always got to be a man who will do all those things. Someone strong, with a paunch, who will sit on a chair, and then our plan will pass. Girls on diets, apparently that’s harder…”

Jafra is not the only women’s organization that has become active recently in the Arab community in Israel. Maybe the appearance of these organizations, and the fresh breeze they’ve brought with them, caused the murder of the young woman from Iksal to send such reverberations through Arab society and to fracture accepted mores, to the point of directing open criticism and demonstrations against this cruel custom. A stranger has difficulty imagining what walls had to be breached by the new women’s organizations. In some ways they leaped over hundreds of years in an instant. The bloody law of the tribe on the one side and progressive feminism on the other. A colorful bird fluttering out of an urn carried on the head.

“We’ve also got the matter of the hymen. To this day a girl is valued by her hymen, and that devastates me. Because there are lots of girls who do what they want with whomever they want, and a few days before the wedding they have a little operation that…In other words, they put it back on; they go to a Jewish doctor, of course a Jew, and everything’s fine! Here, my neighbor is about to be divorced because she got married; she was a virgin, but there wasn’t any blood. Maybe she didn’t have a hymen from birth. And now two months after the wedding she’s being divorced, and they don’t get it into their heads, it’s so primitive.”

I asked whether Jafra would fight for the right of Arab women to live with women.

Jibara blinked. “You mean — lesbians?”

“Lesbians.”

“Look…that’s very complicated…very extreme.”

Her young neck turned pink, and she giggled awkwardly. “If she wants to live that way…fine, she’s free to, I won’t dictate her life-style. But before I gain acceptance for something like that, I have to gain acceptance for simpler things that are matters of life or death for us.”

Then she told of the kilukal. This is actually two words —kil-ukal, say and said, or, in simple translation, gossip. It is one of the most efficient weapons in Arab society, a whip to crack over the heads of light-headed young camels heading astray, and over insolent lambs. An efficient weapon that anyone can wield against anyone — but sometimes it may kill. Shutfut, a Jewish-Arab group that battles against murders committed for sullying family honor, estimates that each year about forty women are killed in Israel for this reason. Kilukalplays a major role in these murders. Women who have left their villages to study at a university in one of the cities find themselves being watched by an unblinking eye. Educated men and women, seemingly enlightened, cooperate with the stalk-and-kill mechanism that begins with a whisper and ends, sometimes, with a sharp blade.

“We in Jafra are so frightened of it,” Jibara says. “With every step we take kilukalinto account, because we are small, beginners, and want to change and influence, and even the smallest tempest can destroy everything we want to do.”

“Is there kilukalabout you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe yes. The most widespread rumor about me is that they arrested me. That I’m in jail. There are people who are astonished to see me—‘Oh, we thought you’d been arrested!’ ”

“And when you walk around the village dressed like this, in a fairly revealing shirt, it doesn’t attract comment?”

“No. Because when do they talk about the way a girl dresses? When she’s weak. When the only thing she rebels about is how she dresses. When only her difference in dress is her flag. Then they’ll talk about her. But when she’s independent in every way, they can’t say anything about her. After all, I rebelled against everything, not just against the dress code.”

Marwa’s father, Shaker Jibara, fifty, listens to her the whole time, observing her with pride and some wonder. Marwa got her blue eyes from him, and perhaps, once, his glance was as piercing as hers. He had been a member of the Al-Ard Movement, one of the first political organizations established by Israeli Arabs, and spent time in an Israeli jail; previously he had been a teacher. A small, powerfully built man, adorned with a reddish-brown mustache broadening over his smile.

“First I’d like to set up a men’s liberation committee.”

Everyone laughs. Marwa does not even smile.

“My father’s comment is not frivolous. A lot of things hide behind that sentence. Perhaps Father will please explain himself to us.”

“I don’t give you all the rights you want, Marwa?”

“Ah! I’d like to ask you, you really didn’t feel threatened and you didn’t get tense because of the rumors in the village that they were going to arrest me? And isn’t it true that you wanted to restrict my activity because of that?”

Shaker Jibara clears his throat, pulls himself up slightly. “I’m proud of your work for the Palestinian people. I’m proud that you work for good causes, but you’ve got to remember what the limits are and not cross the red li—”

She jumps up from her place: “What is the red line, Father?!”

“The red line — in other words, only to work in an organized, legal way, and also, you know, every community has its morals, and even if I sometimes criticize my tradition, I can’t go out in the street and scream against it. I’ve also got to yield to it, to be rational.”

Marwa Jibara falls silent. Her foot drums on the floor.

Her father turns to me: “That’s A. B, her temperature is always too high. And I tell her, if you want to continue, bring down your temperature a little. Just 150, not 200.”

Marwa, her lips rigid: “Father continues to work in his way and in accordance with his views, but when it comes to me he won’t allow it. He’s scared that I’ll do what I want, because they might arrest me. He’s also heard the kilukal, maybe it’s even the Shin Bet that’s spreading it, to impede our, the new women’s, activity.”

And she left.

Two weeks later, when we met in Tel Aviv, she came, summery and pretty, as usual boiling over about something, fanning her own flames, wanting me to judge between her and someone who had done her an injustice. She got hold of herself, sighed. “It won’t do me any good anyway…You see, I give in, too.” The young waitress offered her orange juice drenched in a heavy Russian accent, and Jibara checked, “Is it fresh-squeezed?” The young Russian looked at her in confusion. “What do this mean…I don’t understand the words…” Marwa gave her a sideways glance, and a wall of alienation and separation momentarily rose between the two young Israelis. “I don’t want from a can,” Marwa pronounced between her teeth. The poor waitress melted away.

“My father,” she told me at that same meeting, “to this day does not grasp that I am already twenty-two years old and that I am something other, outside him. Outside his body. I don’t accept that part about arranging my life for me. I’ll fight back. I have to fight him, too. I rebel against him. He acts like every other father in the world. Keeps an eye out for his little daughter, who will never grow up, who needs to be watched. I want to convince him that I’ve matured. That I’ve grown up. Sometimes I stand by him and tell him, Look, I’m even taller than you.”

I thought of how her father had charged at her when she was a little girl, pulverizing her cake without a word. How violent that deed was, mixing political protest, male aggression, and humiliation of her young womanhood, now so constrained, so clench-fisted.

“But maybe it’s a little hard for him, for your father, even if he’s progressive and liberal, maybe it’s hard for him that you’re so extreme and uncompromising.”

“If so, that’s his problem. Because the way he educated me, it was only natural that I’d turn out this way.”

Then she told of her childhood. Of her mother, who had died of cancer when Marwa was six years old. “I have a very strong memory of Mother. Very very strong. I’d run from her to Father because he was more, you know, forgiving. She was what today they would call a ‘liberated woman.’ Feminist. Many people who knew her, when they see me today, say I’m precisely her. I learned my independence from her without even realizing it. Without her teaching it to me.

“I learned to do everything alone. Even to braid my own hair. At the age of twelve I was already cooking and sewing. A lot of things happen in the world because something is missing, because of the void, and that void also gave me a lot, because I had to fill it all. Today I look back and say, My father really loved her. She was everything to him. So sometimes the thought occurs to me that maybe he, just a little bit, raised me to be like her.”