Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 4

“I am Anwar Shadfani, twenty years old, from the village of Iksal.”

“I am Suleiman Zuabi, twenty years old, also from Iksal.”

“We’ve been in the same class over the years. I majored in biology.”

“I majored in sciences.”

“I finished high school in ’89, and I’ve been working ever since in home renovation, agriculture, in the fields, non-skilled work.”

“I work in construction. I studied computer science at the Technion, but I dropped out after half a year, because in our sector there’s no demand for computer professionals.”

“Now I live in my parents’ house. We get along well, pretty well — well, not all the time. They argue with me over when I go out, how I come back late at night. I’m always going to Tiberias, Haifa. There are discothèques, places to sit, girls. You can hear music.”

“Me, my dream is to make money and then study philosophy. But you can’t study philosophy because you won’t make any money. On the other hand, philosophy is thinking. That’s the freedom you have, that you can think what you want. And in life — okay, you can also think, just don’t say everything out loud.”

“I’ll go to Germany for five years. I applied to Munich, to study theater. That’s been my hobby for a long time. An Arab here can say something out loud in the theater. I once heard that someone said, Give me theater and I will give you revolution. When you see an Arab actor standing on the stage, it’s an outlet for what you feel. Even if he’s playing a Jew, even if he plays an occupying officer, he shows the Jews, underneath his role, what an officer should be.”

“But here in Israel only the theater is open to us. We don’t make it in anything else.”

“For instance, I would like to be a police investigator. An important one, like Columbo, let’s say. But to be accepted into something like that I need to get more than 600 points out of 800 on the standardized test, and I can’t get that here.”

“The standardized test — we go there, and it’s all very abrupt for us. New. The method, the kind of thinking, the type of test, the time limits on the questions. Like, how are you supposed to divide your time? Lots of questions and a short time.”

“They should have taught us test-taking in school.”

“During the test you have to manage a lot of things at once. Like a pilot. Quick thinking. Maybe we have a little of that, but it has to be developed.”

“For example, they give you a question in general knowledge: Who is Arik Einstein? You know who Albert Einstein is, but you don’t know that Arik is an Israeli singer. Or they ask you in history about the Jews, who you don’t know anything about. Everyone knows that those tests fit the Jewish way of thinking, not ours.”

“Or logic. They think it’s logic, but it’s written in such antique Arabic that no one understands. You need a B.A. in Arabic to understand it! I have an Arab friend who did the test in Hebrew and in Arabic. In Arabic he got a 420, and in Hebrew a 580.”

“And today they give more weight to the test than to your high-school exam scores, because they saw that Arabs fail the standardized test more than Jews.”

“They just didn’t prepare us for that in school.”

“I know that there are Jewish schools where they teach drama, where they teach art. We always asked the teachers, but we also asked for computers, and for more classrooms in the school, a gym, sports equipment, English enrichment, and we didn’t get anything.”

“In the end we collected money among ourselves and we bought a computer and printer.”

“And the teachers, there are some of them who’ve been teaching the same thing for years. That’s an educator? He comes at the beginning of the class, opens the book, doesn’t look at you. There aren’t any new methods. He explains the hard words and that’s all. The lesson is over. A teacher who never encourages original thinking.”

“Guys who finished ten years ago tell us that today we’re studying the same thing they learned then. Sometimes the teacher repeats the same joke for ten years!”

Anwar: “I’ve got Jewish friends, too. From work. From going out. Though I make friends with Arabs easier.”

Suleiman: “Jews — it’s hard to change their opinion of us. They don’t think straight about us.”

“The Jews say about themselves that they’re open, but that’s a joke. They’re always hiding themselves.”

“If you want to be friends with a Jewish guy, it takes a long time.”

“We say what we think. Sometimes we talk too much. You think a Jewish guy is your friend, you tell him everything, and then he acts like he doesn’t know you.”

“I express everything I have inside,” Anwar Shadfani says. He’s a nice-looking boy with a styled haircut and green eyes.

Suleiman: “I lived in the dorms at the Technion. If an Arab and a Jew live in the same room, the Jewish guy will go to the dorm office and ask for it to be changed.”

“But we actually want to be friends with them. If I were friends with a Jewish girl, she’d change her mind about Arabs, and I think she’d like me a lot.”

“It’s easier to convince a girl than a guy…”

“But you need time, and she doesn’t give you the time, as soon as she hears that you’re—”

“But a Jewish girl can love you; the power of love will persuade her.”

“In the end it’s impossible, however, because the word ‘Arab’ still means something to her. She says ‘Arab’ and puts together the Arab from the West Bank and me, and then there’s already something bad between us.”

“Someone who would just give me the time, I’d convince her in the end.”

“Yes, if she just knew him, she’d love him.”

“I’d say to her, ‘How long will we fight like this?’ I’d be willing to marry her, too. If there’s love, it’s okay. My uncle is married to a Jewish woman. Not an Ashkenazi. A Moroccan. I always actually dreamed of convincing an Ashkenazi. From Tel Aviv. And if I succeed in that — I’ve really got something.”

Anwar: “Sure we’re jealous of the Jewish guys who go into the army.”

Suleiman: “Every boy dreams of being a soldier.”

“To hold an Uzi, for instance. You bet I’d like to. I watch Stallone films. I want to do that, too. But you know how it is. Even if they forced me to go, I wouldn’t. But I dream. Imagine myself like that. Rambo.”

“If we just did training, that would be okay. But not fight.”

“If there is a war between us and Syria, should I have to shoot at Arabs?”

“But you didn’t ask the main thing: What army do I want to serve in? That’s what you should have asked first!”

Suleiman Zuabi: “But we give them a lot of support in our minds.”

Anwar: “If you support them a little too much, you’re a PLO agent and a racist. That’s what Jews think of you. You have to give the Jews a good impression. That’s what we’re working on. So they’ll like us. Then they’ll give us rights. It’s also kind of like theater. Living in a play.”

Suleiman: “But I’ve also got thoughts inside. You can’t tell everyone what you think of him.”

“So we hide things.”

“I’ve learned things from Jews. Where there are a lot of Jews, I can’t go overboard in supporting the Palestinians, for instance. I have to lie a little. But the whole world behaves like that! Everywhere people act the way I do. In America, for instance, they don’t like black people. But the Secretary of the Interior there can’t come out and say he’s against the blacks. In other words, he lies. You say that’s a lie? That’s politics. We’re already here, what kind of choice do we have?”

Later that same day, in Iksal, I met Ahmed Musa, seventy-two, who wears glasses and a robe of pure white. He told of his life with the Jews. For twenty years he was the village’s mukhtar; afterward he was mayor. Today, retired, he arranges when necessary a sulha, a meeting of reconciliation, between two clans, generally after a member of one has murdered a member of the other. He is full of praise for Israel and can tell many stories from the good old days. “Once, it was in ’52, the police chief, Segev, told me to bring six horses to Daburia, because we had visitors there. I went. We waited a little. I saw the old man, Ben-Gurion, coming with the chief and with his whole party. B.G. said, ‘In ’40 I climbed Mount Tabor on a mule, and today I am riding the noble mare of Ahmed Musa!’ Okay. We went up to the monastery there, and B.G. was to eat at 1:30. That was his habit. I brought food from home for him. That’s what the police told me, to bring a turkey and a sheep. I told him, Enjoy! He said, No, only if you eat my food. He gave us his sandwiches, and he ate our food.

“The father of Raful, you know, Rafael Eitan, the one who was Army Chief of Staff, he was a very good friend of ours. I remember Raful as boy. Working on the combine. He was harvesting. One day I rode next to him on the seat of the combine. He didn’t talk much even as a boy. Afterward, when he was northern area commander, one day there was a police celebration in Nazareth. He saw me there and said, ‘Guys, do you get along with Ahmed Musa? Ahmed Musa is a great neighbor!’

“To this day we’re okay with the authorities. Ask the Jews. Every time there’s a wedding in the village, Jewish people come; you should see how we receive them, how we honor them. When I married off my son I slaughtered forty sheep for them. There were three hundred Jewish guests here. Each one someone important. Even Shimon Peres’s brother. Gandhi ^*brought him to me. And Gandhi — every holiday he would come here with his wife, with the generals; he even brought Moshe-and-a-Half, ^*the Chief of Staff.”

I was impressed at his knowledge of our ministers’ and generals’ nicknames.

“Know them all! Here there’s good relations between the authorities and the people. This village is the best one in the whole area. The intifadah doesn’t affect anything, either. There couldn’t be any intifadah here. You won’t find anyone putting up Palestinian flags or painting slogans. We want our children to go to college. That’s the most important thing. You can’t drink from a well and throw a stone in it, right?”

I asked him what he would do if Gandhi — who was elected to the Knesset in 1988 on a platform advocating the transfer of Arabs to Arab countries — came to visit him today.

“Welcome him. Our house is open to everyone. That’s the Arab custom.”

“But he wants to eject Arabs from here.”

“I’ll receive him. What do I know…maybe he talks about transfer because he wants to be in the Knesset? I don’t know what happened to him. When I hear statements like that from people who were guests of Arabs, whom the Arabs served, I don’t understand where their heads went. But Gandhi, I can’t say anything bad about him.”

“?”

“No, no. Gandhi is a government minister. I was in his house. I ate his food. I can’t talk about him.”

He enveloped himself in a robe of silence, and listened to my conversation with his fourteen-year-old grandson, Amjad, and his friend, eleven-year-old Usama.

“The land of Israel,” Usama said, “belongs to two nations, but the Jews left here two thousand years ago and returned with the help of the British, so they have no rights here, and it’s an Arab land. But they’re already here, so we have to find a way to live with them. As for the Russians who are coming, that’s a big problem, because the Israelis want to transfer us and bring the Russians in our places, and that’s bad, if we don’t get equality here like…”

His grandfather let out a snort of anger and the boy swallowed his words. We talked for a few more minutes, drank coffee, and before parting I asked the boys what they wanted to be when they grew up.

“I want to be a doctor,” said Usama, looking warily at the old man. “To treat Arabs, and Jews, too. I won’t make any distinction between them. But I won’t treat Jews like Gandhi!” he spit out all at once.

“What are you talking about?!” his grandfather shouted, glancing anxiously at my tape recorder. “Gandhi is a very good friend of ours!”

In his wonderful novel The Opsimist, Emile Habibi describes a boy, an Arab in Israel, the protagonist’s son, who flees from the army and hides in a cave on the beach. His mother calls for him to come out of the narrow, close cave lest he suffocate there. But he says, “Suffocate?…I came to this cave to breathe freely. To breathe freely for once! You smothered my cries in the cradle, and when I grew and listened to you, I heard nothing but whispers. In school you warned me: ‘Watch your tongue!’ I told you that my teacher was my friend, and you whispered: ‘Maybe he is reporting on you!’…I called my friends together to declare a strike, and they too told me: ‘Watch your tongue!’ And in the morning Mother told me: ‘You are talking in your sleep. Watch your tongue in your sleep!’ I hummed in the bathtub, and Father scolded me: ‘Change that melody! The walls have ears, watch your tongue!’ Watch your tongue! Watch your tongue! I want just for once not to watch my tongue! I can’t breathe! True, the cave is narrow, but it is broader than your lives! True, the cave is blocked, but it is the way out!” [Translated from Anton Shammas’s Hebrew translation of the Arabic original]

“A member of a minority group, the Oriental Jew, the Arab, always speaks two languages at least,” said writer Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Jew who until about the age of twenty considered himself — in his culture and values — an Arab. “First, the language you speak with the authorities, with the hostile regime, and the regime was always hostile, from the dawn of history, always intending to harm you, or to take something, or confiscate something, or to take a bribe, or to spy. So you have to be careful. From this come all the conversations that sound empty and simply polite — How are you, how are you feeling, how are things going, may Allah bless your mouth, alhamdu-lilah; to a stranger it sounds idiotic and useless, but in the meantime he’s giving you a psychological test. To see exactly who you are. To appraise you. Forever, as much as you prove that you’re a friend, you’ll remain a foreigner. You can join a Bedouin tribe and stay with them for sixty years and they’ll still call you ‘the foreigner.’ That’s the first language. They have to use it in order to dissemble, to please, to mislead.

“The second language is the one which they speak among themselves when they’re alone, and that needs no explanation.

“The third language is an intermediate one, between those two languages — for instance, when you leave the incubator of your family and go outside, to study or work, then you need to find a language in which you can cope with the teacher or manager who is foreign and perhaps an enemy, but you also have to be yourself.

“Other than that there is, of course, the language that every person has for himself: the internal, individual language. When you’re a minority in danger, you sometimes can speak truth only to yourself. You can’t trust anyone else. Consider what it’s like to live with four languages, four simultaneous ways of thinking. You turn into an actor. That’s the perpetual theater.”

On my trip back from Iksal, after the meeting with the elderly Ahmed Musa, I meditated on how many of the Arab men and women I had met during these weeks had soft handshakes. I wondered at this dialect of body language, this agreed-upon social sign. Because the soft handshakes had been a surprise. Not weak — soft. Warm. Not the crushing thrust of an Israeli-Jewish hand declaring, “This is the hand of a proud, self-assured Israeli who has nothing to hide, and who, should that be necessary, can grind more than just your fingers into a pulp.” No, the hands that I shook were not held out to me in order to say anything about themselves — on the contrary, they were to serve as a kind of passive testing pad for the imprint of my own hand. To take measure of its “voice.” I continued to go astray with such questionable thoughts, on the edge of being gross stereotypes, and I tried to remember the hand strength of the Egyptians I had met, and the Lebanese, and there are other nations in the region who still don’t put out their hands to us…I thought of ploys and camouflage, on how the two partners in Israeli citizenship turn their lying side to each other, and that from such a point of contact no true partnership could possibly grow. How could it grow if Rima Othman, whom I met in Beit Safafa, already knows that she will have to silence her children (who have not yet been born) so that they won’t speak Arabic in the presence of Jews, just as her mother silenced her? I considered that the Palestinian minority in Israel — like other minorities in the world — stands out and excels most in the field of theater, and wondered whether there was a special reason. I also recalled the secret languages Jews had developed in their various exiles, with words taken from ancient Hebrew, with the addition of suffixes and declinations from the local language, so that the Jews could speak freely in the presence of those who were not members of the covenant. I also recalled what Primo Levi wrote about the special idiom of the Jews of the Piedmont: “Even a hasty examination points to its dissimulative and underground function, a crafty language meant to be employed when speaking about goyimin the presence of goyim; or also, to reply boldly with insults and curses that are not to be understood, against the regime of restriction and oppression which they (the goyim) had established.” It was already autumn, and the cotton plants were turning the fields white, there were wild lilies and herons, and I traveled slowly among them, trying to find my way along the snaking path leading from lie (even if white) to deception, and from that — to what Ghazal Hamid Abu Ria of Sakhnin described to me as “our psychology, that of the oppressed — if they repress 70 percent of your personality, you yourself repress the remaining 30 percent, until in the end, even if they no longer repress you, you continue to repress yourself.” The road went on from there, to the question of whether, because of this repression that the Arabs in Israel impose on themselves, it is so easy for Jews not to hear them and not to see them, and if this has not opened the way to Jewish self-deception.

My thoughts kept turning to the old man in the white robe. What right had I to criticize him? From what experience could I judge him, and what hand did I — as part of the Jewish majority — extend to him to prove that he can now be free of his caution and his artifice? After all, it is again, always, the same strong, warning hand.

The Jezreel Valley, which the Arabs call Marj Ibn Amer, stretched out from both sides of the road. These are Iksal’s fields, which now belong to the Jewish village of Tel Adashim and which the old man worked in his youth. He passes by them every day and sees others working them now. Everything has changed before his eyes, the view is no longer his, the names are no longer his; his homeland has been translated. I put myself in his place, as a young man standing between the defeat of his nation and the new Israelis, and afterward, as mukhtar, between his villagers and the military governor; and now, faced with the intifadah, faced with extremists, faced with the piercing eyes of his grandson, facing the old age that weighs on his shoulders. All the while between the two lines of the gauntlet.