Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 5

Asem! Aaaaasem!

With all that my lungs can muster. Hands cupped to my mouth: Aaaasem!

The echo bounces back at me from the mountains all around. The pines nod in commiseration. The car, its maw gaping wide, shoots up a jet of thick vapor. Aaaaasem…

He said he would meet me at nine under the carob tree. Maybe I got the hour wrong. Maybe I got the carob wrong. The directions I received by telephone said that in the forest there is a road to the village. So I drove into the forest, and now I have been wandering around and losing my way for almost an hour. Somewhere in the heart of this wood there is a village that does not exist, and in the village people I was going to visit because they do not exist. Many are the roads that lead to this invisible village, and my Peugeot, which is no longer young, is jolted and thrown from rivulet to pothole, from rock to hard place.

There must be another way. I collapse on a boulder in the forest and try to gather together the senses scattered by the twists and turns. This could not possibly be the road to the village. Because if people live there, even people who do not exist, there has to be one tolerable road for them to come and go by.

Suddenly a voice calls my name. Who’s calling? From where? Is it Asem? Hard to know. The echoes roll in from all sides. Someone heard my cries and he is calling me. Maybe not me? I shout again. Wait a moment, for the echoes to fade out. The man makes a sound. But there can be no real conversation in this seashell of a forest. The words run into each other, I don’t even know what direction they’re coming from. Again I call out, trying to convey also in the brief name Asem my request that they come rescue me, and my anger at the labyrinth and the bad directions, and I consider, between shout and echo, that even in such a small country as Israel it is enough to step off one’s familiar route to be sucked into the absurd.

The other man continues to call me. I have already begun to enjoy the game a bit. Maybe he has, too. Together we were learning to separate the information from its repercussions. I have an opportunity to hear how he hears the overreverberation of my plight, and how our oversized echoes crash and hammer each other so far from either of us. Almost at the same moment we both understand that in order to hear the other, and to succeed in the delicate effort of bringing our positions closer, we must make our shouts much fewer and briefer; then, suddenly, additional voices join in, maybe forest workers laboring on one of the hills between him and me. They see both of us but are themselves unseen. They mediate between us, direct us to each other. I involuntarily recalled the legends I had heard about the people of this village — that they appear suddenly in a house once theirs, that sometimes you open your door unsuspecting and there they sit in the doorway, and when they see you they rise slowly and leave.

After long minutes of mutual echoing, there is a flurry and rustle in the bushes. Someone is running. A boy is running. We meet. He is covered with sweat. He ran two kilometers through the forest to find me. Asem? No, his cousin. He heard me calling, saw the car, and understood I was in distress. And where is Asem? Went to work. Am I a friend of Asem’s? What have I come for? Here, let’s drive to our place in the village, you’ll wait for him there. He’ll be home soon. When is soon? Right now. Noontime. One o’clock.

It is now eleven.

Parched in spirit, I slam shut the Peugeot’s gaping door. The boy — his name is Jaber — indicates a road, but it is so steep, so full of boulders and holes, that the car cannot withstand it. The motor dies time after time. We choose another way. Three times longer and twisting. We twist with it, we triumph, and in a cloud of dust we finally enter the village of Ein Hud.

A tiny village. Thirty-three houses all told. Built on the mountainside, completely hidden by the trees. One hundred and sixty people live here, present absentees.

What follows is a brief legal explanation, for good hikers.

An absentee, according to Absentee Property Law 5710–1950 (1), is every person who was, after the United Nations partition decision in November 1947, a citizen of an enemy country, or who moved into enemy territory, or who was a citizen of the British mandate and left his or her regular place of residence for a location outside Palestine before September 1, 1948, or who left for a “location in the Land of Israel that was controlled at that time by forces that wished to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel, or which fought it after its establishment.” Such a person was considered an absentee from that date, and his or her property and land were transferred to the ownership of the Custodian of Absentee Property.

There are, however, absentees who are, like it or not, present; their land and property were taken, but they themselves live with us, in our country, and the legal and existential category of “present absentees” was created especially for them.

For instance, the Arabs of the Little Triangle — a patch of territory between Jerusalem and Haifa, including the Wadi Ara road connecting the coast with the Jezreel Valley — were annexed to Israel as part of the Rhodes armistice agreements of 1949. Ever since, they have been citizens, but their land and property that remained in Israel after November 1948 had already been confiscated by the state and they themselves became present absentees. The same with Arabs, such as the people of Ein Hud, who abandoned their houses during battles and were not found there on the date that the general census was held. They, too, instantaneously became present absentees. (Every time I write that pair of words I can’t help imagining the shiver of delight that must have run through the entrails of the bureaucratic octopus when the term was first ejaculated in clerical ink. Interesting — who coined that combination? Did he act alone, or did an entire company of chalky perukes sit in intense deliberation until this dicotyledon suddenly spawned?)

No one really knows for sure how many present absentees there are in Israel. In 1949 they numbered 81,000 individuals among the approximately 160,000 Arab residents of Israel. They included Muslims, Christians, and Bedouin. Many of them found new places to live, not on their own land, and there they receive the services that the state grants its citizens — that is, they are considered absentee with regard to their property and present with regard to their citizenship.

An enormous amount of property is involved — almost 400 abandoned villages, with their houses and land (more than 3 million dunams, some 750,000 acres); more than 25,000 homes in urban centers, close to 11,000 stores and workshops, as well as movable property, bank deposits, art objects, and stock shares. All these were “absentized” by the law.

But from this low point, from the caste of present absentees, one can descend to even lower levels.

Because Ein Hud here, the village I arrived at, had bad luck in pincers. Not only are its people present absentees, but Ein Hud is one of fifty-one settlements that the State of Israel does not recognize at all.

Their residents have been granted identity cards by the state, but outside this unavoidable act it refuses to recognize them, to provide them with services, to relate to them in any way — except when it is interested in evicting them from their homes. They have been living with us for more than forty years — that is, somewhere around us, on the lowest deck of the ship, in constant fear of being expelled even from the miserable places they hold on to. They build houses without licenses, since no one will grant them one, lurking in invisible villages, where they bring forth unrecognized children who bear, like a genetic birth defect, their present absenteeism.

It was morning and most of the men were at work; mostly women were in the village. For this reason I was not invited to enter any of the houses. In fact, faces turned angry and suspicious in a way I had not encountered in Arab villages up until then. But after a short while a woman brought out a chair for me and suggested I rest in the shadow of her house. Another chair came in its wake, holding a tray of fruit and a small cup of coffee.

A few minutes later all the children gathered around me.

Mustafa came to sit with me. He is a friendly young man, with a carefully trimmed blond beard. He earns his living shuttling the teachers at the local school to the village and back. He brings them in, then returns them. In the four hours between the two trips, he sits and waits. What can he do, he smiles apologetically — it’s not worth it for him to go home. You saw the road.

He related that he had had this job for several years. Last year the village council had decided to ask for other bids on the contract and a taxi company in Haifa had won. A week later the owner of the company came and pleaded to be released from his commitment — who was crazy enough to travel that road? Mustafa won the job back.

Then, walking heavily and sitting with a sigh, Ayad came. Twenty-two, epileptic. His entire body shook as he sat with us. A few years ago he had come home from school, it had been a very hot day, and it suddenly began, along the way. He fell down and fainted. He has stayed in the village ever since. Never leaves. Most of the day he sleeps. He has considered taking an accounting course outside the village, but who would take him out and bring him back along that road?

We chatted. I learn that Abu Elheija is a huge hamula, with almost 65,000 members in Israel. The name means “father of the wars,” a title the founder of the line had won as one of the senior commanders under Salah ad-Din Ayyubi, the Saladin who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine in the twelfth century. The woman brought out more cups of coffee. Time passed. Nothing urgent. Asem would come any minute. In an hour, maybe two. A hot wind blew dust along the goat paths between the houses. Across from me were bountiful fruit trees — pomegranates, grapevines, figs. Next to each house was a flower-filled garden.

At two o’clock Asem Abu Elheija, one of the village leaders, came and recounted: “I was three years old in 1948, when the Israel Defense Forces surrounded our village, the old Ein Hud, and everyone fled. They had no choice but to flee. They feared a slaughter, because before the army reached Ein Hud they heard that there had been some cases in the area, at Tantura, where there was a massacre, so they were scared, too, because they would set out from Ein Hud during the war to attack Jewish convoys and they thought the Jews had come to settle accounts with them, so they fled.

“Our family came here. We hadn’t had time to take anything from our homes. Here there was a piece of land that belonged to Grandfather, and his goats and cattle were here. Since there are wells here, he preferred to stay near his goats and cows, on his land, and we lived together with them, in the shepherds’ huts. Look over there, at the picture — that’s Grandfather, Mohammed Mahmud Abu Elheija.”

Grandfather gazes directly at the viewer from over his patriarchal beard. In every house I visited in the village I saw his picture in a place of honor.

“We would look from there down on our Ein Hud, and we didn’t want to believe that we would not return. We felt that we would return soon. Grandfather would always go down to his land there, plow it and sow it, so he would not die. He would sow hundreds of dunams, wheat and barley and chick peas, and he would pick the fruit from the trees. The whole area you see here was full of fruit trees.

“In the meantime, other people started living in our place. In ’48 they put Oriental Jews into our houses, but they didn’t last long. They believe in all kinds of superstitions, and they used to tell how at night they would see eyes looking down at them from the mountains, or stones falling on them from the sky, or all kinds of ghosts, or the land cried to them, or they saw the people of the village returning to take their houses back. So they didn’t last, and they left. I myself — what can I tell you — don’t believe those stories. When they left, the artists came in; it became an artists’ village and they called it Ein Hod.

“At that time the family began to grow. By ’64 we had fifteen houses here. They didn’t destroy them, but they threatened to all the time. They wanted Grandfather to give up all the land he had below in Ein Hod. They wanted us to give up the land there and buy here. But when we tried to buy, it turned out that it was all a bluff — there’s a law of the Jewish National Fund, the JNF, the agency that oversees land purchases, that it’s forbidden to sell land to non-Jews. When they saw it was no use, in ’64 they confiscated his land for good. They also came and fenced in the land on all sides around us, and then we began to understand that we would never return, that it was impossible to return.

“That didn’t satisfy them, the barbed-wire fence. They wanted to make another fence, and they put in those big cypresses, more pressure on us. And among the cypresses I showed you, wherever he had fruit trees, olive trees, figs, he had every kind of tree you could ever want there, they confiscated the land, and ever since no one works that land and no one benefits from it. It’s just fallow land.

“We still didn’t leave, because when you’ve already become a refugee, as we did in ’48, to become a refugee again from what you founded and built with your own sweat, that was very hard for us to accept. So.

“Ever since we’ve been closed in by barbed wire, and another fence of cypresses, and around us, on our land, they made a huge park, and a firing range for the soldiers — sometimes I would sit in front of the house and suddenly pssst—over my head — and they also put a gate at the end of the road that you have to close and open with a key, the gate to Nir Etsion, the Jewish village built on our land, and in some corner of your heart you ask, What does that mean, you’ve been put in jail?

“After they fenced us in, they again began pressuring Grandfather to give up the land in the old Ein Hud, and the houses, and in exchange they would give us the land here. Grandfather would not agree to that under any circumstances. Because, he reasoned, there, in Ein Hod, it’s my land, and it’s registered in my name, so I should give up my land in exchange for my land? Not I.

“In the meantime, the artists were already in our houses. I’m one of those who spent almost all my time there. The truth is, I don’t really like what they did to our Ein Hud. They made everything ugly. They changed a lot of the character of the area. But I had a lot of friends there, in the village. Jews. They became so friendly with me that they would come sleep with me here at night, in Ein Hud. I had a friend who lived in my aunt’s house — my aunt herself lives here with us. At night I would sit with them there. The truth is, you don’t feel good about it. But on the other hand, if something like that happens to you, maybe it’s better that your friend lives in the house and not a stranger.

“Even today, go into the houses in Ein Hod, you’ll still see a lot of things they found in our houses — pots, pans, plows, urns — that they hold on to to this day, but for decoration.”

“In the house I was born in lives a girl, Z. She’s my friend [he laughs], even though she’s afraid when we meet. I haven’t seen her in a long time. I went home with her a few times, and she photographed me in the house, and — okay, I explain it this way, they’re scared, too. When they see that our people live near them, come to Ein Hod, they are afraid.

“And despite that I say, That’s reality, that’s reality! There was a war, the village was lost. Now I’ve built myself a new village here. All I want is for the government to recognize me, and all I want from the neighbors living in my house is that they support my struggle for recognition.

“But they don’t support us. There are some among them who help, contribute, and we have an open invitation to go there, come whenever you want, come into the galleries, but the majority doesn’t support it. They claim that they’re afraid. If we support your struggle, they’ll recognize you as a village and tomorrow you’ll start asking for the houses there and make all kinds of demands. On one hand”—he suddenly raises his voice, forgetting the acquired caution of the refugee, which guides his steps—“on one hand, they wanted me to be, you know, their friend, but on the other hand, they say, We’ll trample you down, you and your honor and your feelings, and don’t open your mouth!”

He halts. Actually clamps his jaws down over the words.

“Nir Etsion,” he resumes, “is also situated on our land. My father works there, for them, on land that was his. A man like Father, who had hundreds of dunams, with farming in his blood, has reached a time when he works his own land for $400 a month, after working for them for thirty-five years. And I had an uncle here, he’s dead already, he had thousands of dunams. Not hundreds, thousands. All this was his. And he also worked for them as a simple laborer, for pennies. More than that — they would remind him, Mahmud, do you remember who this land belongs to? They’d make fun of him, because they knew it was his land. Every time they told him that, he would say to them, Today it’s yours. Get it? Today. But it would eat at him inside.

“Okay, not important…” He waved his arm heavily. “The main thing is that recently we’ve really wanted to improve our relations with the people at Ein Hod. We had meetings with their town council, we invited them to meetings here in the village, and they came, and we really turned over a new leaf with them.

“The first problem is that they made our mosque into a restaurant and discotheque; that’s the source of our difficulty with them. But an even greater problem is that they desecrated our cemetery. They destroyed the graves. Now, it could be, I’m saying it could be, if I didn’t know who was buried there, it could be that it wouldn’t hurt me. But if you know that that’s your uncle’s grave, and your grandfather’s, your father’s and your mother’s, and among all those graves an artist came and buried his dog — that’s not right.

“So our first condition is that they no longer walk over our cemetery and not make it into a garbage dump. They have garbage bins in the cemetery itself. So at least move the garbage. Up until now they haven’t done it. One thing they did in accordance with what we agreed on is that we want them to put up a sign there, temporarily, until we receive permission to fence in the place, to write there MUSLIM CEMETERY, HOLY SITE, LITTERING FORBIDDEN.

“They really did take that initiative. But it was a little hard. They didn’t want it to say MUSLIM CEMETERY, HOLY SITE. So we reached a compromise — that temporarily it say DO NOT LITTER ON THIS SITE. We’re currently in the middle of the struggle to get that sign. It’s being held up in some office. We don’t know what’s causing the delay.”

Architect Giora Ben-Dov lives in Ein Hod with his wife, Mara, a sculptress, and their three children. They bought their house, adjacent to the graveyard, from an American woman who had lived there until 1974. The Ben-Dovs are among the residents of Ein Hod who have supported Ein Hud’s struggle to receive recognition and services from the state. Ben-Dov has even drafted a plan that would make the people of Ein Hud rangers in the national park surrounding them, responsible for its up-keep. In 1985 Giora and Mara took part in a large Jewish-Arab demonstration calling for a solution to the problem of Ein Hud. But at that same demonstration they decided to wash their hands of the whole affair. “The minute that the people from Ein Hud started making extreme demands,” Giora BenDov said, “the minute their politicians started talking about ‘the holy land of Ein Hud,’ and Ron Cohen, the Knesset member from the Citizens Rights Movement, said, ‘Ein Hud will not fall again,’ even those of us who always supported them, even the professional agonizers, went cold and packed up. Listen, I didn’t capture the village from them, and I didn’t evict old people from their houses with clubs. I came and bought a house, and if we go backward, we’ll never finish the conflict, because maybe they’re right if we go back to ’48, but if we go back to the Crusaders, some Polish graf will come to me and want my house, and there’s no end to it. The guys in Ein Hud suddenly began to feel like the representatives of the whole Palestinian problem. No matter that none of them was born here, among us, they’ve developed such an exile’s longing for this place…”

I asked, “Why do you care about fencing their cemetery and putting up a sign? What are they endangering with that?”

Ben-Dov: “To the best of my knowledge, the Arabs don’t have the concept of the holiness of the dead. With them, after twenty-five years, if the Muslim judge, the qadi, gives permission, they come with a tractor and turn the land over, and that’s it. But they come and told us, No, we buried an aunt here two years ago. You understand? They started all kinds of attempts to gain a foothold here in our village. Our impression is that they want to gain recognition in the village up there as a first stage in returning to Ein Hod. So, if you give them a toehold here among us, you immediately recognize some, I don’t know, injustice, and turn them into poor people who were expelled from their land. That’s passing judgment on the entire War of Independence of the Jewish people, and we’re already robbing land and exploiting people, and I’m not sure that it really was that way. There was a war. It’s over, and now there is a status quo. This status quo involves a measure of separation, and this separation allows each of the sides to develop within its culture, to live a normal life.”

“A normal life? Have you seen how they live there?”

“I have no argument with you that their conditions have to be improved. But first they have to renounce their demands to get a single meter here. Any new toehold will challenge our right and our status here. If you give any kind of recognition to what existed before ’48, you’re actually toppling the foundation on which the whole deal is trying to come together.”

“The whole deal, Giora?”

“The wholedeal, the whole country!”

“We now get water from the water company, via the water of Nir Etsion,” Asem Abu Elheija goes on. “At first there was a problem. They didn’t want to give water. So until ’62 we drank rainwater. Once there was a spring in the area, but the JNF did some work in the area and they buried the spring and it was gone. Sometimes, in the summer, when there was no rain, we had to take water from the Nir Etsion sewer, but actually, then we didn’t know it was sewage, we saw water and we drank it.

“As for electricity, we took our own money and put in a solar system — we’re the only solar-powered town in the country — but the system is not sufficient. For instance, in this house there are two panels, and that can operate a small, 12-volt television and lights. There’s not one electric heater in the entire village and no electric appliances. We bought our village council a television and VCR and computer, but we can’t operate them all at the same time. If you turn on the computer, you have to turn off the television, and so on. You’re always running from appliance to appliance. There can’t be any street lighting at night, either. But it’s better than the way it was five years ago, when there wasn’t electricity at all. At night we’d light alcohol lamps. A child can’t read for long by an alcohol lamp. We’ve just put in a light at the school. Up until now there was no light at the school and we wanted one. We brought a cellular telephone to the village, so in case of emergency we can call for help. We try to improve things bit by bit.”

Asem Abu Elheija reports all this in an even tone, in a quiet voice, not in sorrow and not in accusation. His clothes, hair, and face are still coated with dust from the trip home. A pretty girl and boy, his brother’s children, play peek-a-boo with me from behind his back, their cheeks red as peaches and their eyes alive, as if they had not yet set foot in their fate.

“There’s no normal access road to this place. Even though we’ve been pleading with them for years to allow one. We’ll do it ourselves. We don’t want money from the government or from anyone. We’ll go down to the road and ask for contributions. That’s how we built the minaret on the mosque. We’ll do the road the same way. There are a lot of people willing to contribute. Anyone who has driven here is willing to give. Imagine what it’s like in the winter. And think of how it is if someone is suddenly ill or has a heart attack. Or a woman in labor on that road. We already had one case of a baby dying along the way during birth.

“Without a permit we can’t pave a road. If you do, they’ll come the next day and plow it under, like they did in Elariyan — people paved 700 meters of road and they came and plowed it under. So I don’t know what to tell you. We don’t even have a sign that says EIN HUD. Every time we make one, they throw it away. So in the end we gave in and didn’t put up the sign. If you write us a letter and address it “Ein Hud,” they’ll return it to you and stamp it ADDRESS UNKNOWN. If you write “Nir Etsion,” they’ll bring it to us. That’s how it is when you live in a house without a permit which they can demolish at any time — you don’t belong to anything; we’re not included on any of the official maps of the country, only on the maps of the army and the nature reserve. You know, we’re terrorists, or animals.”

Three days later I returned. I felt something that belongs, perhaps, to that individual private balance between fullness and emptiness, between physicality and absence. A feeling that grew ever stronger. So I returned and met with another member of the village, Mohammed Abu Elheija, who had been born in the displaced Ein Hud. I waited for him in the central square of the artists’ village at Ein Hod. Around me were slight plaster figures, like stone silhouettes, headless. The figure of a featureless man sunk to his knees in the ground; one leg and one crutch. I’d seen all of them here before, but ever since I was in Ein Hud, Ein Hod echoes back to me.

“When I was young I didn’t know Israel,” Mohammed Abu Elheija told me. “True, we’re in the center of the country, but I didn’t know anything. My village was my country. When I went to Haifa to study at the Arab high school, I was like a boy alone. A boy on the side of the road. One day, in ninth grade — I remember it very well because it hurt — there was a sewage pipe in the school that descended from the third floor, and apparently they flushed up there, and I stood by it, and what did I know about sewage, we used to go in the field, so I put my ear to the pipe to listen, and a group of children there laughed at me. I heard a lot of water…

“And what do you think there is today? Here the same degeneracy remains. Here in Ein Hud the school has two rooms. That’s the whole school, two rooms! In one room all the children in first, second, third, and fourth grades study, and in the second room are the children in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades; don’t even ask about the quality. What kind of generation can you produce under such conditions? We’re always behind in the race. I won’t even mention films or theater. My son, thirteen years old, has never been to a movie.”

Facts: Only four out of the fifty-one unrecognized villages in Israel have an elementary school. Only one has a kindergarten. In the rest, the children must walk ten to fourteen kilometers a day to the closest recognized village. Since most of the villages have no paved access roads, the children have to walk through forests and over dirt roads, in all kinds of weather. As a result, children under the age of seven have no educational framework at all, and girls of all ages are kept from school by their families, lest they be harassed and the family’s honor tainted. These circumstances ensure that only 20 percent of the children in these villages reach high school. The illiteracy rate reaches, in some cases, 34 percent. ^*

We went for a brief walk around the artists’ colony. Abu Elheija related that buried somewhere under the village is a church from the twelfth century. Salah ad-Din’s victorious armies covered it with earth and built a house over it. I thought of the mosque and sheikh’s grave that had been turned into a restaurant. I asked him if he knew that the people of Nir Etsion are the children of the surviving Jews from Gush Etsion, people who became refugees in the same war that turned his parents into refugees. “They are refugees,” he said distantly, “yes…but I was not the one who made them flee.”

He rushed through the streets of Ein Hod. “There are people who have not come here since ’48. My grandfather never came. To the day he died, in ’82, he believed that he would return for good. For us, the young people, Ein Hod was something theoretical, a place where the old people once were, and it was there and wasn’t there. Only in ’76, when I was twenty-two, did I come here to work for the first time. Renovations. I renovated old houses. You know what ‘old’ means. Even when I went in, I didn’t feel any emotion. To this day I don’t feel anything about what was here. Why don’t I? I can’t tell you. Here’s an example: I never in my life mentioned Ein Hod to my children, never said it was once ours. They never heard it from me. Why? I don’t know. Let the analysts analyze it.”

He is thirty-seven, father of seven, with a degree as an engineering technician from the Technion, thin and introverted. His speech is even and a bit ironic. We pass his grandfather’s house. A two-story stone building. A small staircase. Nice yard. The door bears an odd sign: CHILDREN MAY ENTER ONLY IF ACCOMPANIED BY ADULTS. I peeked out of the corner of my eye at his stony face and considered how much strength it demanded not to tell the story of the old Ein Hud to his children. True, he himself had not been born here, but his father had been evicted. His whole family had been evicted. For a moment I made an attempt to walk through the village of my father’s childhood, in another country, with his memories. I tried to be there when the house was taken, when the whole town was taken. And when a strange but apparently friendly woman appears on the balcony of the house that was yours…

But he was no longer there to see her. He strode in haste onward, waving his hands in the negative, to erase something. “It’s not pleasant for me to be here…it’s sufficient that I know it from the outside. I’m not curious to see it on the inside. On the contrary, when I have to pass by here, I do it at a distance. I have inside, I guess, something that keeps me away.”

It’s the Sukkot holiday and the village paths are full of visitors. A young couple asks Abu Elheija where the gallery is, and he explains politely. Afterward he takes me to the village’s small amphitheater. On Friday nights he hears the best Israeli pop music coming from here live. I recalled concerts I had heard there, and something twisted in me at the thought of the notes crossing the wadi in joy, up to the ears of the present absentees. Returning to me like an echo, in a slightly different context, came the words of Azmi Bishara: “Once, at night, in the summer, I passed by the watermelon stands in east Jerusalem, by Herod’s Gate. I could not believe what was happening there — the eastern city was quiet. Night. Darkness. Only the Israelis danced. Shouted. Went crazy. I could not grasp the contrast. There were no people in the streets, but there were Israelis dancing, and a strong light, and music, and the city was gray, gray.”

“Do you know Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities?” Giora Ben-Dov asked as we stood looking out over the beautiful view, the Atlit fortress and the sea reflecting through the small sabra cactuses on his lawn. “It tells of a city where all the people are connected to their relatives by string, and each kind of relation has a string of a different color, for commercial relations, blood relations, etc. Now, the problem there is that too many strings collect in the street and it’s impossible to walk, so they go out and build a new city. The same thing happens there. If they go on being stubborn about the ties they have to the cemetery, and we continue being stubborn about our ties to the Patriarchs’ grave in Hebron — in the end we’ll all suffocate in our own ties, and I say the time has come for us to go to the new city.”

The problem, of course, is not the cemetery but the Israeli state’s attitude to the lives of the unrecognized. Not only does it not allow them to leave for a “new city”; it also sometimes tries to eject them from their old places. At this writing there is a struggle over the displacement of the unrecognized Bedouin village Ramia, in order to make room for the construction of a neighborhood for new immigrants in Karmiel, a Jewish town in the Galilee. “What will happen, what will happen,” Abu Elheija murmurs, and tells of the great overcrowding in his village, where it is forbidden to add even a room, and there are large families, and married children have no space to move and no space to breathe. It reached the point that the village council assembled and planned to divide family houses with walls. Once a month, on Thursday, a helicopter passes overhead and photographs the village, to check whether any walls or rooms have been added. “And if someone from Nir Etsion hears a tractor running in the village, he immediately telephones whomever he has to and they come in an instant.” The government established a special patrol, the Gray Patrol, he said, with a helicopter, twenty jeeps, and eighteen inspectors with guns and dogs, and once every two weeks they come to the village and check. (Now I understood why they were suspicious of me when I arrived.) “The state does not recognize us,” Abu Elheija says, “but I still hope we’ll find our place here. I continue to try to live here as an Arab. To try to tie myself to this administration. Here the government is in the meantime building up hatred that is…irreversible. In the end everything depends on the government. If it wants us to reach the state the territories reached, it will decide. Not me.”

“And what will happen if they try to evacuate you from there, as they are trying to do with the people of Ramia?”

Abu Elheija turns his eyes away from me. “If they try to evict us again, I won’t stay here. I will leave the place to you. Take everything. I’m not willing to live that way. I won’t force myself on you. Stay by yourselves.”

This, in brief, is the story of the struggle of the present absentees against their fate. They have long been asking the State of Israel to let them, finally, start to be. In the 1948 war, Israel’s War of Independence, there was cruelty on both sides. The acts committed by the Arabs and the soldiers of Jordan’s Arab Legion against the besieged Jews at Gush Etsion were no less horrible than the acts committed by Jewish soldiers against the innocent civilian Arab population. There was a war. People I know spent nights in ambushes alongside paths leading to Arab villages and shot people, women and children, who wanted to return to the houses they had been expelled from. That time has gone. Two and a half years ago I heard a very defense ministerish government official say, at an officers’ school graduation ceremony, “We are still fighting for our independence.” This means that, according to the way this minister feels, Israeli Jews have still not begun really to be. In fact, since I set out on this trip, a feeling gnaws away at me that maybe we have not yet been “liberated.” It may well be that as long as we do not end our War of Independence we will never truly be a free nation in our land. “How many more years will you sing the line in your anthem, ‘Hatikva,’ that goes ‘Our hope is not yet lost’?” Lutfi Mashour scoffed. “Stop hoping already and start understanding!” And Abd Ellatif Yunes from the village of Ara told me at the beginning of the summer: “My and your fate is to live together. It would be an error if you ignored me, because whether you want it or not, I’m staying. But I think that Israel would be a better place if a man like me could also feel that he wants to live here, and I don’t think Israel can really be a nice place as long as 20 percent of its population lags behind and is not accorded basic human respect.”

In the empty parking lot, which is also the garbage pickup point for the Ein Hod artists’ colony, which is also the old cemetery of Ein Hud, over a broken plastic sign rolling in the dirt, NO LITTERING ON THIS SITE, Mohammed Abu Elheija says, speaking for the people of his village, “There is no one in our village who still dreams of getting back the old place. What more can we do so that you believe us? A new reality has been created. The new village. If you suggest that we buy or even lease the land on which we live today — even if it is already our property and is registered in our name — we’ll accept the proposal. Just make it.”

Sometimes a familiar reality — like a familiar text — is handed to us in “translation,” revealing to our eyes slender threads we did not see in the “original.” For several days I looked at Israel through the eyes of the present absentees, and I knew how much this merciful country of mine, which sends medicine and blankets to every Kurdish refugee and every earthquake survivor in Armenia, how well it also knows how to put on a stone face. From within the denied Ein Hud I could see how that stone mask gets thicker and begins over the years to grow inward, how it molds mind and soul and petrifies the language, until it produces tongue clots like that miserable pair of words.

“At the age of forty everyone has the face he deserves,” my grandmother used to say, and we have been here forty-four years. On Bertolt Brecht’s wall hung a Japanese woodcut, a mask of evil imagination covered with gold lacquer:

With compassion I gaze

Into the swollen arteries on his forehead

A hint

How tiring it is to be evil.