Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

Chapter 7

In the month of May 1991, at an air force base in the center of the country, some 13,000 Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel in the space of twenty-four hours. Their dark, bare feet felt their way down the plane’s metal stairway. Their first glance around was cautious, bashful — not a look that dares to demand possession of its new surroundings. All was suffused with silence. The nobility of the newcomers invested also those who had come to greet them. We saw an entire culture uprooted before our eyes from its habitation come to resurrect itself in Israel. Lofty Kaisim, Ethiopian Jewry’s religious leadership, swung the chira, made of hair from a horse’s tail, the emblem of eminence. And almond and olive boys, and little queens of Sheba, and teenagers who don’t, really don’t, have that bold American look of our own adolescents. And wrinkled, angular, coal-black old men and women, their eyes living embers. A scorched Judaism that strayed for 2,500 years in the snarls of history, rose and declined; and what remained from all these metamorphoses was, perhaps, the thing that we search for in that eternal question Who is a Jew? Because maybe it is precisely they who, in their indigence and their longings, bring to us the unadulterated answer, the Jewish ore itself.

Forty airplanes came and went, for an entire day and a night. On one of the flights, before landing, they were spoken to by a member of their community, Eliezer Rahamim, who came to live in Israel twenty years ago and who had flown to Ethiopia to bring his kinsmen to Israel. “Our dream of 2,500 years is being realized,” he told them as the plane circled over Jerusalem. “This we have prayed and longed for, and now we have won the right to achieve it; all thanks to the government of Israel, because, blessed be God, we have a country, and we have a home.”

On the night after that same emotional Sabbath, when I saw the immigrants who had just come sitting in a Jerusalem hotel and watching the evening news on television, I asked myself if, when I say “I am Israeli,” this definition from now on includes them as well, these new and different ones?

This question obviously did not concern only the technical, formal act of granting Israeli identity cards and citizenship to the newcomers. It related to a kind of effort of the spirit and of consciousness, to a kind of mental extension of that invisible cloak that, by its coverage, defines whom we include and whom we exclude from our nation. Every citizen stretches such a cloak unconsciously over his country (if he has a spiritual attachment to it). At times I examine the boundaries of my private cloak. In my internal experience, does it cover Neturei Karta and the rest of the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox groups? Does it still take under its (the chauvinistic brood hen’s) wings the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have preferred for many years to live in other countries? And what about their children, whose concrete links with Israel are even fewer?

In the face of the tidal wave of Ethiopian immigrants, or of the new immigrants from Russia that I meet each day in the large immigrant absorption center near my house, I feel the effort of will, not a simple one, to “make a little room” under the common cloak. Not that there is any lack of room under this abstract cloak, but there is certainly something around me and in me that will be changing in the coming years. New tastes and aromas are now being stirred in abundance into the Israeli stew, and they will change it profoundly. Also, in the new stew my portion will be smaller; my aspirations and my values will encounter — and perhaps collide with — a different world. Despite this, I am happy at the change, curious about it, and ready to endure for its sake the pain of mutual adjustment. In some ways it is a spiritual pain, equal perhaps to the not unpleasant physical growing pains of adolescence.

And there is a question.

“No, I don’t want to be hypocritical. When I say that I’m Israeli, I don’t include in it that woman from Kafr Kassem or that man from Jaljulia.”

Writer Sami Michael:

“When Israeli Arab movements rise and say “We are Zionists,” I consider them hypocritical and dishonest. Because this is a Jewish state. That’s the way I feel. That’s not what I want, but that’s the way I feel. It may be that I should, somewhere, broaden the ‘umbrella’ of this definition, but I’m talking now not about rational judgment but about emotional judgment. They instilled in my mind, my heart, that this is a Jewishstate, and for better or worse I feel that this umbrella covers only the Jews. Not the Arabs. I remember my first jolt with regard to this identity. When I came from Iraq at the end of 1949 and enlisted in the Israeli Army, we had shooting practice, and instead of saying, ‘The enemy is coming at you,’ they said, ‘The Arabs are coming at you!’ What? What did that mean? I was shocked — after all, I was an Arab, too! In Iraq it was understood that I was a Jewish Arab! So little by little, through dozens of such incidents that happened to me here, the Arab apparently left the cover of that umbrella—‘He is the enemy.’ Understand that I don’t see him as an enemy when he is under the umbrella, but I see that anyone who argues that the umbrella includes him too is confused, asinine, and dishonest. I have not seen that any of them — except for a few very special people, like Anton Shammas — consciously want, with all their hearts, to be under the umbrella.”

“Still,” I reminded him, “there are clear trends toward the Israelization of the Arab minority.”

“Of course! There are such trends! That’s the steamroller of daily life, forcing it on them, as they force it on themselves. Listen to a story. I was with my wife in Cairo, and we were walking across Al-Tahrir Square, and suddenly we heard Hebrew being spoken at a shout, fearlessly! It was strange for us to meet Israeli youngsters speaking Hebrew provocatively and proudly in the very heart of an Arab country. We approached them and we saw that they were Israeli Arabs! They were sitting there on the fence showing off their Israeliness. Hebrew wasn’t then for them the language of the Jewish people but the language of Israelis. I addressed them in Arabic, and they answered me in Hebrew! Do you understand? They were in the heart of Cairo, where it’s crowded, filthy, poor, what they call Third World, and what it awakens in them — something characteristic of Arabs in general — is the idea that Israel is not only Satan; it is strength. It is a power. Development. And they brag about it!”

It is nighttime, and I am in Sami Michael’s house in Ma’alot, at the edge of town, looking out over the mountains of the upper Galilee. I asked him to explain something he had said previously.

“It really was that way! To the Jewish generation that raised me in Iraq, it was clear, as it was to me, that I was an Arab. With regard to values, with regard to culture — I was an Arab!In addition to that, I was Jewish, just as a French Jew is French and a Turkish Jew, Turkish, That is the origin and the crux of the whole matter. I was a Jewish-Arab-Iraqi, and I couldn’t identify with Iraq’s aspirations, with Islam, with the official anti-Jewish policy, with the anti-Semitism that grew during the Second World War. I, with my whole struggle against those trends, came to Israel.

“My first refuge was when I settled in Jaffa. Jaffa was then a kind of ghetto of Bulgarian immigrants and Arabs. I had a room in the house of an Arab family, and I felt good there. It felt like my natural place. Afterward, in Haifa, I also lived with the Arab population, in Wadi Nisnas, and after that I worked on the Communist Party’s Arab newspaper, Al-Itihad, to the point where the Arabs often forgot that I was Jewish and they’d talk to me about ‘those Jews,’ just as my mother-in-law used to forget that I was Sephardi and would talk about them in front of me. So I know these things from the inside. When it comes to the whole web of relations between the two peoples, I know it as a Jew, as an Israeli, and also as a man who until the age of twenty saw himself as an Arab, who was suckled on Arab culture, and whose first friends in Israel were Arabs.

“The Arabs, in the early days of the state, did not call us Sephardim. They called us ‘Ibn Arab.’ That’s an honor, ‘the son of the Arabs.’ But remember what happened afterward. Who was the state’s representative among the Arabs? Who was the implement used to impose the military regime, persecutions, and arrests? It was the Jews from the Arab countries, mostly Iraqi and Egyptian Jews. The policeman. And the Shin Bet agent, the interrogator, and the jailer. That created hostility to the Sephardim among the Arabs, hostility they have trouble freeing themselves of. The negative, daily, traumatic contact was with them. The teacher sent to them by the state to teach them Arabic with a grammar different from theirs, and who failed them in that different grammar — and maybe he himself didn’t even know how to write a letter in Arabic, the teacher who taught them Zionist history and Arabic literature. Then the border guard, which is almost completely made up of Jews from Arab countries, and the military governors; there was always an attitude of disdain and hatred of the Arab population.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “you can hear Sephardim making fun of the Ashkenazim, especially the ones from the peace movements, telling them, ‘You don’t know how to talk to the Arabs. You don’t understand the Arab mentality.’ ”

“I’m afraid,” he responded, “that that’s a form of racism. As if the Arabs are a certain breed of dog or mouse and you have to talk in their special language. What makes the difference here is not howto talk to the Arab, because he’s an intelligent person and however you talk to him he’ll understand it. The important question is whatyou really say to him. What your declared policy is, and what you carry out in the field. That’s not a communication problem. Even if you’re the best Arabist in the world, it won’t make you a man of peace.

“But the big problem is that in the ‘what’ we deceive each other, with deceitful words and intentions, so it is a dialogue of deaf people. Sometimes when I see meetings of Israelis and Arabs, I could burst out laughing. They say the same word and mean something entirely different! The word ‘peace,’ for example. The simplest of words. For the average Arab, from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, ‘peace’ means that this country will be destroyed, will disappear along with all its institutions, with all its tradition, with all it brought here, and then there will be real peace. That all the refugees will return to their houses, that their land will be returned, that there will be an Arab majority here again, and then there will be either a PLO state or one based on the Koran.

“The average Israeli Arab — if there really is such a person — his hope is a kind of thing whose realization is hard to conceive. A kind of mad dream of waking up in the morning with the same High Court of Justice, the same efficient police force, the same nice buildings, the same democracy, and the same social-security system — but what? Without Jews. That would be paradise. It means that I, the Israeli Arab, will be a first-class citizen here, with all the values that exist in the country today but without the Jews. Not, God forbid, that they should be thrown into the sea — I am, after all, an advanced humanist liberal — but that some nice spaceship will swoop down and take them away, and each of them will return of his own free will to his place in the world, and we’ll meet every fifty years or so on a hike, to share memories.”

“No…no! I’m sorry!” fumed Dr. Majed Elhaj, whom I met the next day in Shfaram. “Maybe that represents what an average Jewishperson secretly wants deep down inside — to wake up one morning and not find Arabs here. I think that the Arabs here, over time, have learned to distinguish between dreams and reality. The Israeli Arab is a realist. Otherwise he might slip into some other orientation to the state. But it’s no secret that there are a lot of conditions in Israel that encourage extremism rather than the adoption of an attitude of coexistence. Despite that, I’d define the Arab minority as the quietest minority in the world, relative to its solidarity and political awareness. I think”—Elhaj smiled at me, or maybe to himself—“that it’s really an ideal minority.”

“But there’s one thing that the Israeli Arab has not and will not come to terms with,” Sami Michael continued, “and that’s that he is a minority. ‘True,’ he would say, ‘I’m a minority here, on this little island, but look behind you and you’ll see a whole oceanof Arabs.’ Because in international terms, the Arab world is a great power — economically, numerically, in the number of countries, the number of votes at the U.N. And the Israeli Arabs still have a living memory of the way things were fifty years ago. ‘We turned into a minority only because of a temporary malfunction. We look to the future. We, with our birth rate, will again be a majority here. And you, the Jews, are in crisis, both economic and moral. You are failing. The day will come, and with one good battle it will all change.’ That’s still in the back of their minds. ‘So why,’ the same Arab asks, ‘should I wear the suit you’ve sewn for me, the suit of a minority? I’ll just wait.’ ”

What a combination, I thought — a majority that doesn’t feel like a majority and a minority that doesn’t feel like a minority.

Sami Michael: “And don’t think that they aren’t scared of that future! Because either Israel will exist forever and they’ll always remain second-class citizens, or Mohammed will come with his scimitar and I, the Israeli Arab, will have to flee from the houses I’ve built and from the money I’ve made under Israeli rule, and all those people from the refugee camps will flow in here, to my house, to my store, and I’ll have to pay the price of all those years of plenty I had here. Because you should know that the Arabs outside hate those who are inside. For instance, until 1964, when it was necessary to establish pan-Arab solidarity, Syrian Communists would refuse to meet Arab Communists from Israel. I remember that very well — when they met they would spit in the face of the Israelis. I saw it in Prague: ‘You are traitors! You stay there! You benefit from the Zionists and serve Zionism! You don’t take up weapons, you don’t fight, and you even work for the enemy army and police, and there are Arab teachers and Arab court clerks, and you open profitable restaurants that the Jews come stuff themselves in, and what are you doing sitting in the Knesset? To promote the big lie of Zionist democracy? You are already Zionists yourselves!’ That’s what they told them. I heard it.”

I asked whether, in his opinion, there could ever be among the Arabs of the Middle East true acceptance, the kind that is internalized deep in the unconscious, of the existence of Israel in the region.

“It’s doubtful. Let me tell you something: If today some Arab tells you he accepts that in Madrid and Spain there is a Christian, European state, don’t believe him. When I was in school in Iraq the teachers taught me about Spain. How my heart ached that I, an Arab, had been defeated in Spain! I didn’t even know that we, the Jews, had also been in Spain. They didn’t teach me that, neither my parents nor my teachers. To this day every Arab feels the pain of the loss of Andalusia, and when was that — seven hundred years ago? Is that an answer?”

He’s over sixty. When he was born in Iraq his name was Samir Mared, and his books deal with the duality, or the split personality, of Jews and Arabs trying to live together, in Iraq and in Israel. He is a man of imposing, dignified appearance, with a long, dark face. Very private, austere. His voice is deep, muted, and each of his words is suffused with his Iraqi pronunciation, accentuating the kinship of the languages. As he speaks, he continually displays the speech of “the other,” and then his eyes suddenly return to life, and a dialogue is woven between his long hands.

“Listen, we have a big problem here. I’ve already been breaking my head over it for years. For me, the intifadah did not change the major thing that awaits us. With regard to what’s happening in the West Bank, the solution is already on the horizon. Whether we want it or not, whether we bend our backs or walk erect, the solution is there. The Palestinian state will come in the end. Remaining then will be the difficult and complex and most dangerous question of the Israeli Arabs. And no one is really conscious of that, not Peace Now, or the Jewish liberals in Israel, or the intellectuals who are willing to meet any Arab in Paris but not here. These people do not know the Arabs’ secret longings. They don’t know the differences between the language they speak with a stranger and their internal language. That is the greatest problem we have here, and I, as a Jew, how will I solve it?”

“?”

“My dream goes like this: There will be a Palestinian state. That’s already an established fact. And I’d leave them the damn settlements we have there. Let those settlements stay there, if they don’t slaughter them. I’ll give them all Israeli passports. They’ll have the right to vote for the municipal authorities there, but they won’t vote for the Palestinian parliament. The same way I dream that the Arabs here in Israel will vote for their municipal authorities, but with a Palestinian passport! Let them finally have a flag of their own, for God’s sake, they’ll belong to something; let them vote for the parliament there, and if they want, let them serve in the Palestinian Army.”

“Do you foresee a situation in which someone from Horfish or Tarshiha, your neighbors here, will serve in the Palestinian Army?”

“Oh, they won’t go.” He chuckles, not contemptuously, but out of appreciation of the survivor’s cleverness. “Trust them not to go to the army. But I think it will be like this: There will be a Palestinian state, and we’ll have relations with it, a kind of federation and strong ties, because, despite everything I told you up until now, the Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Arab are the two most similar nations in this region, and the most different from the others. In their energy, their vitality, in having the mentality of immigrants, the Palestinians are all immigrants as well, like us, and I can’t describe to you how different a Palestinian villager is from an Egyptian villager or a Syrian or Iraqi villager. Worlds apart. Here, let me tell you a story about an Egyptian and a Palestinian.

“Before they built the Aswan Dam, the Nile would bring with each flooding the alluvium that fertilized the ground. When the dam was erected they held back the water, the alluvium did not come and the land became less fertile. The government began supplying the fellahin, the peasants, and the agricultural cooperatives with fertilizers, for next to no money. Heaps of fertilizer, thousands of sacks of fertilizer, are still rotting in the warehouses today, and the farmer descends with his donkey and two baskets, goes kilometers to seek out the Nile, and takes a little mud to spread on his land. Now I’ll give you another picture: After the Six-Day War I worked in the Ministry of Agriculture, and they gave me an assignment to do a survey of water sources in the West Bank, of the wells. This was two or three weeks after the battles. Disabled tanks were still scattered all over. So in some desolate village, a hellhole with no paved road, I saw a well with a put-put sprinkler or, rather, with a pipe coming out of it and a sprinkler at work at the end. I was astounded — a mirage! A sprinkler! I asked the fellahwhere he had gotten a sprinkler. Oho! He knows Abu Yosef, a Jew, and Abu Yosef knows Abu Yehuda, a long chain of names, and he brought him a pipe and fixed him up a modern sprinkler. That’s the difference.”

“You, the Israelis, are more similar to the Palestinians,” a young Egyptian, Mohammed Ayin, once wisecracked to me near the pyramids. “You and they are just the same — short-tempered, worked-up, insecure. One minute you feel like big heroes, and the next like the most miserable wretches in the world. You’re always sure someone’s trying to cheat you. And you are greedy. You love money. What you won’t do for money and power! We’re not like that. We won’t lift a finger for anything. That’s why we look the way we do.” He laughed, waving his hand over the desert shimmering in the heat.

I’d add — apologizing for the generalization — a few more similarities between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. There is an attraction to the imaginary and illusion, a delight in words and mesmerization by them, and an exaggerated confidence in their strength. There’s also excitability, and a talent for stirring up emotions to the point of impairing the sense of balance reality requires. Then there’s our type of humor, somewhat bitter. And self-irony. And curiosity and vigilance. A kind of strange attraction to self-destruction. Diligence. Great suspicion of foreigners. Excessive pride, and self-pity, and an eagerness to be insulted, and an inclination to self-hatred. And great ambition, I would emphasize, with regard to the Palestinians outsideIsrael’s borders —Yahud al-Arab, “the Jews of the Arab world,” as the Arabs call the Palestinians, a label that evinces acute envy of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have made their way into the social, economic, cultural, and political elite of the Arab countries, where they play the same role that the Jews did in the lands of their exile — a catalyzing, galvanizing, generative, and not much loved force. This ambition is by now hard to detect among the Palestinians living in Israel — neither the drive to excel nor the strength that motivates so many of the world’s minorities to stand out and force their way upward into the majority’s elite. As if they are still walking gingerly under a low roof — the fiddler’s new roof.

“And don’t forget that our elites are hard to penetrate,” Sami Michael notes. “ Veryhard to penetrate. I learned that the hard way when I came here in 1949. We are willing to open up only in a superficial way. It’s interesting that the farther down you go on the ladder there’s more and more cooperation. For instance, in the underworld — gamblers, drugs, prostitution. There’s real cooperation there. Racism — to contradict conventional wisdom — is farther up. The members of their elite are dying to gain entry to ours. They’re itching to be part of us. But they’re not interested in meeting your common Buhbut and Boskila. They want to meet the parallel stratum in Israeli society. And the Israelis are unwilling.”

“But maybe your comment brings us to the question of Israel’s integration into the Middle East. If Israel is at all interested in that.”

He laughed. “Look, Israel wants to be part of Europe, and the leading force in Israel in all fields, in economics, politics, sport, culture, like it or not, is the Western-minded. What’s that line? ‘My heart is in the East…’? Where do you see my heart in the East?! My heart remains entirely in the West! No one here wants to be part of the East. And what complicates the whole business is that the East itself is pulling westward.”

“In the East,” I said, “you actually meet many Arabs — in the Egyptian intelligentsia, for instance — who have developed their own way of taking a lot from the West but without giving up Arab culture. They don’t indiscriminately internalize all the West offers.”

“Don’t forget that they didn’t come from Europe and settle in the Middle East! They were born in the East and have lived there for five thousand years. So maybe they’re not ready for huge leaps, as we are. But step by step they are turning to the West, and the ones who are remaining authentically Eastern in Arab countries today are primarily the Islamic movements — Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Al-Azhar University.” ^*

“So, in your opinion, Arab culture as you know it cannot serve as an attractive challenge to Israel?”

“Absolutely not. Because it itself is seeking a different way today. Look at this search for roots that has begun among the Oriental Jews here. In my opinion it is meaningless. Those roots have grown obsolete even in the Arab countries. No one misses them any longer. On the other hand, take a country like Iraq or Syria. The minute they buy weapons from Europe, a plane and a missile and a French or German or Russian tank, they are buying an aspiration to be more efficient, like the West. Accurate like the West. Purposeful like them. You can’t chant an Arab folk song for five hours and race around on a modern tractor. That was good in the period of the plow and the camel. Today?”

It was already almost midnight, and jackals yowled outside the house in Ma’alot. They keened so loudly that it seemed as if they were in the room with us. It turned out that they were not far off — they were standing by the wall of the house, munching on the vegetables in the garden, emitting their heartrending, beguiling, and repellent cries.

“What are we going to do here?” Sami Michael sighed. “I really bang my head over it. My ideal would be to reach some kind of joint state, but I don’t think that either we or they are ripe for that. And we’d be a minority very quickly — their natural increase has always been larger than ours. Ten years from now, fifty years from now, they’ll be the majority and they’ll make the decisions. And I, if I’ve got to be a minority, I’d rather not live in this region. I’m willing to be a minority in the U.S., in Australia. But not in this region, so intolerant of minorities. Look at the Kurds in Iraq, the Shiites in southern Iraq, the Christians in Lebanon, in Sudan, and in Egypt — I wouldn’t want to be like them. Not that I’m a big fan of Zionist ideology, I never was, but I’m Zionist enough in that regard, in that I don’t want to be a minority in Israel. I’m not willing.”

I asked Dr. Ami Elad-Buskila, a scholar and translator of Arabic literature, to comment on Sami Michael’s analysis of Arabic culture.

“Arabic culture contains horrible things and wonderful things,” he said. “You can’t reject it entirely. Anyone who rejects and castrates an entire culture will pay the price. To this day in Israel there is a tendency to make Arabic culture foreign and hateful to the general population, and this creates an anomaly. After all, a majority of Israel’s population is a child of that culture. The Israeli Arabs, together with the Oriental Jews, are a decisive majority of Israeli citizens, and hostility to the culture they are rooted in will one day create a cultural and social earthquake.

“I agree completely with some of the things Sami Michael said. But his opinions are correct with regard to what happened in Arabic culture until the end of the 1950s. If we consider literature — it has taken a giant step since then. In the wake of events in Arab society — changes of regime, changes of ideology, changes in the status of women, changes with regard to individualism — there is also a huge transformation in literature, especially in the Arabic short story and novel.

“I’ve just finished translating a novel by Abd Alhakim Kassem, The Seven Days of Man, published in 1969. It’s true that if a modern Westerner reads it, against the background of Proust and Hamsun, he’ll say, ‘Hey, this book isn’t very sophisticated. It’s very nice, deals with the clash between modernization and tradition, but from my point of view it’s passé.’ But I, perhaps because of my personal background, the fact that my family came from Morocco, from a similar world, because I spent my childhood in Jaffa with Arabs, I feel that this novel gives me — I won’t say an escape — but definitely something to hold on to and to remain in, to take refuge in from the world that is sometimes too intense, achievement-oriented, technological, and threatening for me.

“Here in Israel there’s a narrowness to the horizons of knowledge among the local enlightened class. For the Jewish-Israeli intelligentsia, pluralism in literature, for instance, means being open to literature from France, Russia, Germany, South America. But pluralism should also be an enjoyment of Tamil poetry and of Kleist, and also, for instance, of the Sudanese writer Elteib Saleh. Maybe someone who lives in Norway can easily ignore Arabic culture. We have no choice. And this culture really does have something to offer. But what does the average educated Israeli know about stream of consciousness in Arabic literature, about its absurdism and fantasy? About the elements of Sufi mysticism? About the reverberations of the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre in Arabic philosophy? How many literature programs have you heard on Israeli radio about Egyptian, Syrian, or even Persian and Indian writers? How many people are even capable of reading Arabic literature? We think it worthwhile to learn French, English, even Spanish, Italian, and German, but not Arabic. How many people on the Israeli left know Arabic? How many of them are able to conduct a real dialogue with an Arab?”