Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel - Softcover

It was morning in the midafeh--%the room where guests are received--in the house of Hassan Ali Masalha in Kafr Kara. Passions flared among the men seated on mats; the elder Hassan Masalha was debating with his son. The former was saying, "The Palestinians have only lost and will continue to lose from the intifadah." His son jumped up, mortified at his father's words: "What is economic loss? That's a loss? In the territories they have culture now! There% they have principles! There% they have no crime! There% there are no drugs!" The old man, reclining comfortably on a thin mattress, an embroidered pillow under his forearm, dismissed his son's words with a single wave of his hand. Another elder, Fahmi Fanaka, leaned over to me and whispered, "The Palestinians will have a state, but for us, the train has already passed us by." As I wrote this down, the windows in the large, unfurnished room suddenly shook from a sonic boom. An unfamiliar expression passed over the faces of all those present, skipping like a spark from eye to eye. "It's only an airplane," I said to the man next to me, reassuring him, as we do each other in Jerusalem when there is a loud explosion. "I know," the man replied quietly. "It's probably going to Lebanon." I wanted to ask him another question, but the commotion resumed, the debate between the old father and his angry son, and I forgot the incident.

In Beit Hanina, to the north of Jerusalem, in a small apartment full of burgeoning plants, Adel Mana--who was born in the Galilee village of Majd el-Krum--told me the story of his childhood, and then I remembered.

A long, harsh story. The village resisted the Israeli Army in 1948, and after it was overcome, the army gathered all its inhabitants in the central square. According to Adel Mana, the soldiers shot four of those who had participated in the fighting. Afterward they put several hundred of the villagers on buses and took them to Wadi Ara, where they let them off at some unknown point in the middle of the night and said, Eastward, and whoever returns gets shot. Mana himself was then a one-year-old baby. He wandered with his parents to Nablus, to Jordan, to Syria, and to Lebanon. His first memories are from there, how other members of the family joined them in the refugee camp, how his father would steal into Israel to get money from his grandmother and sisters who had remained in Majd el-Krum, or sometimes to help them press the olives or harvest wheat in the summer.

"At the beginning of '51 we 'made aliya%,' " he related. "We did what you call 'illegal immigration.' We came in a boat from Sidon to Acre with a few other families from the village. My uncle, Father's brother, was uncertain whether to join us. Of course, he wanted to return to the village, but he was afraid of what they would do to him here. He was also afraid because many were killed when they tried to cross the border. When we set off, he stayed there, in Ein el-Hilweh."

"And then what happened?"

"He married, and he has a family there. We twice submitted requests to the army to allow him to visit us. They were approved and he came. The last time was in '82. After that they didn't allow it anymore. Now we are almost unable to maintain contact with him. If we can, we send him letters. That's all. If we hear that the air force bombed Lebanon, obviously the first thing we think is, What about him, what about his children?"

It was then, some weeks later, that I caught the glances of the men in the midafeh%.

In Nazareth I spoke to Lutfi Mashour, editor of the weekly newspaper As-Sinara:% "My wife is from Bethlehem. She is the spoils I brought home from the Six-Day War, so you see that something good also came out of the occupation. My daughters have a grandfather there, my wife's father. Once the grandfather went to the civil administration to request that they renew his driver's license. He is eighty-five, but his health is excellent and he wants to continue to drive. He came to the administration's headquarters and saw Arabs kneeling down. Not on two knees, only on one. A soldier told him, Kneel like them. Grandfather said, 'I'm already eighty-five years old, and you can shoot me, but I won't kneel down.' The soldier let him be, but said, 'Because of that you'll go to everyone and collect their identity cards.' There were about three hundred people there. Grandfather, eighty-five years old, had to be insulted like that, to have a young soldier use him as an errand boy, and to take the cards from his kneeling brothers. He told the soldier, 'You have power and I'll do it, but why are you forcing them to kneel?' The soldier said, 'How else could I keep an eye on them all?' 'Bring an empty barrel and stand on it.' 'I% should go to all that effort for them?' The soldier laughed.

"This is what my daughters have to hear. These are girls who were born in the State of Israel, and every day they hear a new story from Grandfather, from their uncles, and they're fed up. I should tell you that we have decided to send them overseas to study, because if they stay here, I don't know what will happen to them. They've been through the seven circles of hell since they were small, through insults and curses, through substandard schools, through searches and roadblocks at the airport, and now these stories about their grandfather. I'm telling you that if they stayed here a little longer, we would lose control of them. Had I been in their position, I would have lost control long ago, and I don't know what will happen to them in the future. Don't you know, there's a new generation here. A generation that did not experience our fears, that isn't intimidated by you."

At such moments, almost incidentally, a full, three-dimensional picture took shape as if it were crystallizing in a glass. I really should have recognized it. After all, like everyone else I knew that the Arabs who live in Israel have extensive links with the Palestinians in the territories and in the Arab countries. I knew the historical background, that about 160,000 Arabs remained here after the 1948 war and almost 600,000 of their relatives fled or were expelled. I remembered well the longings of the refugees in the camps for the cities and villages from which they were uprooted, and for their relatives there. But only at the sound of those slight, involuntary sighs, or at the sight of the faces of the men around me draining of blood when an airplane passed overhead, could I for the first time feel it within myself, without putting up any defenses. Those moments were repeated again and again--like the story of the cousin who disappeared in Nablus, arrested by the army for interrogation; for an entire week his whereabouts were unknown. An entire family, in Israel and in Nablus, went mad with worry. And the aunt, in whose house the search was conducted, from whom the entire family's picture albums, all those precious moments, were confiscated. And how you almost die before you find out exactly what names are behind the laconic news on the radio of dead and wounded in "disturbances" in Jenin or in Ramallah, or what goes through your head when the newscaster reports that "all our planes have returned safely."

"My Palestinian brother there," said Hassan Ali Masalah from Kafr Kara, the old man, paunchy and smiling, "is not against my country; he is only against your regime there. He wants to live. They shouldn't kill my brother. They should respect him, and I will respect them. Blood is not water." "How is it that you Jews don't understand such a thing," a young leader of the intifadah in Barta'a said to me. "You, because of blood ties, are willing to fly to Africa and bring 15,000 Ethiopians in a single day, simply because two thousand years ago they were your relatives. And if they kill a Jew in Brooklyn or in Belgium, all of you immediately shout and cry."

When the realization finally penetrates, through all the functional layers of protection, how much the Palestinians in Israel and in the territories are in many ways a single living body, a single organic tissue, one wonders at the powers of forbearance needed by the Arabs in Israel in order to continue to exercise self-restraint. And one wonders, Do they consider what this restraint implies for themselves, and the significance of their collaboration in Israel's daily routine? How do they excuse the fact that their taxes finance that plane, and the bombs hanging from it, and the soldier in Bethlehem who laughs at Grandfather: "I% should go to all that effort for them?"

"No, I'm not at all comfortable with the response of Israeli Arabs to the intifadah," said Azmi Bishara, born in Nazareth, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. "It is not the same struggle. Certainly not the same price. It's not even a struggle parallel to the struggle in the territories. Jenin is under curfew, starving, and Nazareth, twenty minutes away, is living normally. But what? We have solidarity% with them.

"It makes me feel horrible. It makes me feel sick. Because I think that somewhere between Palestinian nationalism and the pitiful opportunism of the Arab mayors there is a path that can guide us as citizens in the State of Israel. Citizens who allow ourselves a little more 'solidarity' with the inhabitants of the territories. So I start behaving a little more like the Israeli left--what's wrong with that? So I won't be ashamed to march 50,000 Arabs through Tel Aviv. Just like Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn't ashamed of 50,000 blacks in Washington. I have no problem with them calling me a nationalist. I'm not a nationalist. These slogans are not nationalism. They are in every respect the slogans of good citizens. If the Tempo soft-drink factory lays off all its Arab workers, I will call on the Arab population of Israel to boycott it completely! If they don't want me, why should I drink their Maccabee beer?"

"You mean an internal Arab boycott?"

"Not a boycott as Arabs! Not a boycott as Palestinians! As Israelis! And as an Israeli I won't be ashamed to have a black crowd march through Tel Aviv and upset the city. The inhabitants of the territories can't do it, but we can. I should have and could have organized marches at the beginning of the intifadah. There was enough anger then for a step like that. But our leadership died of fear. Our leadership is afraid that all those nice Jews who are responsible for the 'sector' [he spits that word out the same way he did "solidarity"] will smile at us and say in a nice voice, 'You want to be like they are in the territories? Go on, do something, and then we will treat you just like we treat them. And remember not to take anything for granted in our attitude toward you, Israeli Arabs. When it comes down to it, you are tolerated guests here. And guests can be shown the door.' "

He is thirty-five years old, black-haired, with a dark face and a thick mustache. At age sixteen he founded the National Committee of Arab High School Students in Israel, the first nationwide organization of Arab youth. In the mornings, instead of going to school, the young Bishara grabbed his satchel and set out on "working tours" of the villages in Wadi Ara and the southern Triangle, organizing high-school students to fight for equality in education. "We closed down the schools a few times, a very militant story. We could decide just like that to shut down a school, no problem. Remember that it wasn't an easy time--in '74 we went around with kaffiyehs%. That was when Arafat addressed the United Nations and the Egyptian Army crossed the Suez Canal. We had a lot of Palestinian sensibility.

"Today? Today there's a difference between us and the Palestinians in the territories. Our experience is different from theirs. The sensibility is different, too. They can conduct a violent struggle against you. We can't anymore. Not because of the Shin Bet [the internal security service], but because we ourselves are no longer able to see this as a possibility. It is already contrary to the temperament of our population, which has lived with you for decades and is already part of the economy and the way of life and a million other things. The Arabs here are an integral part of your story, even if you haven't fathomed this yet. When the intifadah began, we had to make a quick and clear decision: are we part of it or not part of it? Period. And we discovered that our aspirations branched off at this point from the aspirations of the Palestinians in the territories.

"But in one thing there is no distinction: as far as you're concerned, both we and they are strangers here. Unwanted here. Rejected. And for this reason I say that the old way that Israeli Arabs think about Israel is bankrupt. It can't be allowed to go on. Precisely because of the alienation that you impose on me, precisely because I am frightened, precisely because in your opinion nothing can be taken for granted in your attitude toward us, so I'm also allowed not to have my attitude toward you taken for granted.

"When Martin Luther King put together his movement for equal rights in America in the sixties, he called for total equality, period. Equality that would go as far as positive discrimination in favor of the blacks, in order to correct the injustice of decades. Together with that he had no problem shouting, 'I am proud to be an American,' in other words, as a black man, the country was his, too. The flag was also his. The blacks emphasized that they were no less American than others. Now I ask myself if the American Indians could do such a thing. Can an Indian shout with all his heart, 'I am proud to be an American'?"

"And you, in this metaphor, are the Indian?"

"I think so. From that point of view I am like the Palestinian in the territories. Neither of us is wanted here. Both of us are ignored. And on top of that I'm caught in the perfect paradox--I have to be a loyal citizen of a country that declares itself not to be my country but rather the country of the Jewish people."

Vehement in expression, emotional, a dissenter from birth, his movements untempered, Bishara looks as if a struggle is always going on within him. He lives in Nazareth, in Jerusalem, in Bir Zeit. He likes big cities and divided people. "The most dangerous people are healthy people at one with themselves, people without contradictions--I'm wary of them. I also liked Berlin when it was divided. Now I can't set foot in it. It disappointed me. It became normal."

"And do you feel a link to the land here, to the country?" I asked. "A link to nature? To the view? Is there any place in the country that you especially like?"

He let out a long laugh, a laugh to himself. "You want me to feel something for Karmiel? For Afula? Nothing is as gray as those places. However you look at them. Or Migdal Haemek. Would I take a tour of Migdal Ha-emek? You'll find that resistance stronger in me than in Israeli Arabs who have already assimilated the situation and their experience, who have married here, who have children, who go for weekends at the beach. I don't go for weekends at the beach. I don't recognize the beaches in this country. I hate the Israeli beach bum. He reeks of insolence and violence and swagger, and I can't stand it. I feel very foreign among Israelis. It's not just that I have white spots on the map where the Jewish settlements are; I've also got a great emptiness of nature. They always talk about the Palestinians' links with nature and the land. I have no link with nature, not to woods, not to mountains; I don't know the names of the plants and trees as even my Israeli friends do. In Arabic poetry in Israel the names of all the plants appear, the za'atar% and the rihan%, but I don't know them, can't tell them apart, and I don't care a...