Sleeping On A Wire

CHAPTER 3

THEY GATHERED TOGETHER: seven members of the Kabha family. All live in the village of Barta’a. Four in Israeli Barta’a and three in the eastern half of the village, in the intifadah.

The village of Barta’a spans the two banks of a wadi, and all its inhabitants belong to a single hamula, or clan, the Kabha. The Kabha family line twists and stretches back to the eighteenth century, chronicled as a testimony and memorial on parchment. The clan has lived in its village for many years, far from the main road. They married each other and worked their lands until, one day in 1948, on the Greek island of Rhodes, during one of the meetings of the committees that drafted the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Jordan, someone traced a green line through the valley between the two parts of the village. With a sweep of his hand he sundered families, ties of friendship, land, a fabric of life. The whole, complete village turned into two incomplete ones, and the two amputees faced their separate fates.

For eighteen years they longed for each other. For each side, the amputated limb was no less sensible than the remaining one. Israeli and Jordanian soldiers prevented free passage of civilians, and afterward, when incidents between the armies became more frequent, a border fence was erected in the wadi. Despite this, the separation was not complete. Smugglers crossed the frontier and passed on news and greetings; family celebrations were held on a hill overlooking the other side. A narrow canal was built to bring water from the spring, which remained on the Israeli side, to the center of Jordanian Barta’a, and the women in Israel launched paper boats down the canal with cargoes of letters to their friends. The people would shout the family “bulletin board” to each other over the hills—who had been born, who had died. Mostly they would watch each other curiously, as if they were looking in an enchanted mirror with a life of its own that could show them themselves and their other, possible, fate.

In the Six-Day War the Green Line was punctured. The two halves of the whole tottered toward each other, met in the wadi, clove to each other for several hours, and then each individual returned to his village, bewildered.

“We suddenly saw how different they are,” Riad Kabha, the mukhtar—village elder—of the Israeli village told me in 1987. “We had already been living with the Israelis for nineteen years. We were more modern than they, emancipated and open. It was hard for us to get used to them. Their internal rhythm was different … contact with them was awkward and unpleasant. They had lived the whole time under the oppressive Jordanian regime, and their links with the outside world had been extremely limited. The Jordanian soldiers lived among them and imposed a reign of fear. They were always saying, “Yes, sir,” and that affected their entire behavior … With them, a married son continues to live with his father. With us, we already give less weight to a father’s advice, and everyone goes out into the world on his own …”

I took down his words. I wanted to organize a meeting of the two Barta’as. I did not succeed. Both sides refused. For this reason, after the meetings on the Israeli side I went over to the Jordanian side of the village and spent long hours talking with the young people there. Three of the young “east siders” I met with were riled by what the “west siders” said about them: “They suffered more than we did? How many years did they have a military regime in Israel and how many did we? And with us the end still isn’t in sight! They talk about oppression? What do they know about oppression? They say we sold lands? Well, there are those who sell land, and there are those who sell their souls.”

“Look at it this way,” Jawdat Kabha said to me then. “By living here, in the West Bank, I am an international problem. The entire world talks about and mediates for me. No one does that for him. I’m free in spirit, I know that I can say with a clear conscience what I feel about them, about the occupation. He can’t do that. He’s already completely tangled up with them. He can’t even think about it. Better for him not to think.”

Four and a half years have passed since then. With much effort I was able to organize a meeting in Israeli Barta’a. The two halves of the village were not excited about getting together this time, either. Yet after delays and evasions, the meeting took place.

The Israelis waited for me at Sufian Kabha’s house. A house of magnificent beauty, “the lifework of Father, my two brothers, and me.” Actually, many houses on this side of the village look like the projects of a lifetime—huge, rounded, like small seacraft on pillars. The yards are well cared for, containing olive and pomegranate and all kinds of fruit trees. Facing them is eastern Barta’a, poorer to the eye, austere, as if it were stuck to the hill, its unpaved roads kicking up dust and its walls stitched with slogans. Most of its houses are closer to the earth, a kind of architectural steadfastness and devotion—sumud in Arabic. We sat and talked in Sufian Kabha’s house, waiting for the east siders.

“What did we, the Israelis, experience during the intifadah?” responded Rafat Kabha, twenty-nine, a teacher at an Arab school in Jaffa. “The truth is that on this side we didn’t experience anything special. Except for the expansion of our national consciousness. Most of the people here, especially most of the young people, know now that there is a nation. That they belong to that nation, which is struggling for its freedom.”

“So now you feel more Palestinian than you did five years ago?”

“Well, before the intifadah I was hesitant about saying out loud that I’m Palestinian. Now I say it openly. Before, if anyone asked me, I would say that I was, you know, an Israeli Arab. Now I’m proud of being Palestinian, because it does not contradict my citizenship,” he asserted, “nor Israeli law.”

“And how are relations between the two parts of the village now?”

Nasuh Abd Elkader Kabha, thirty-three years old: “Relations are very good! Both now and beforehand, excellent relations!” He clamped his lips shut. He hadn’t made a statement but a declaration, one of those declarations that challenge something hanging in the air. He, Nasuh Kabha, was declaring himself spokesman for the cause. “We’ve always been one family! After all, my uncles live there! Relations have gotten even closer since the intifadah! I really don’t know why you’re asking.”

“Because it seems to me,” I said, “that four years ago no one was speaking so warmly of the other side. Neither here nor there.”

“No, no. One family!”

“Before the intifadah you were one family, too.”

“Now the relations have more—what shall I say?—political significance,” Rafat interrupted defiantly. He is broad-shouldered, quiet, mild-mannered, and Nasuh’s challenge to me was hard for him to take. “You could say that just as the political situation once pulled us apart, the situation now brings us together. For instance, before the intifadah, a man would be careful about giving his daughter to someone from eastern Barta’a. Now, even though we know that their future is perhaps uncertain, and it is impossible to know what will happen with them, we don’t hesitate, because they have pride there.”

“And what do you feel when your relatives pay such a high price and you remain passive?”

“We’re not passive,” Rafat explained temperately. “We give them humanitarian aid and financial aid. We live in Israel, and I’m more or less pleased that I live here. At least I’ve got some kind of definition; I live within certain borders, in a certain country. And that country has laws. Nothing to be done about it.”

“I wasn’t asking about your formal status. Your cousin is cooped up by a curfew and you aren’t. How does that affect your life?”

“I feel tension, that’s clear. Hatred, too. That is,” he quickly adds, “localized hatred, hatred only at that particular time. Listen, today, for instance, something happened on their side. It hurt me so much I couldn’t eat. You can’t have an appetite when you see them peeking out of their windows to see whether there’s a soldier near the house. And there were days when the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] went in there and imposed a curfew, and the soldiers walked the streets, and we here were all on our roofs, watching. You see the soldiers going into your aunt’s house—my two sisters live there—breaking lamps, closets. I could see a soldier shooting at the loudspeaker on the mosque … and when the army goes in there, the feeling of connection actually becomes stronger, all your blood rushes to your head. But I know that I’m subject to the law, and there’s nothing we can do.”

Nasuh: “The intifadah showed me the true face of the Jews. Things I only heard at a distance, and suddenly it was close to me personally. How they go into a house and break things, for the hell of it, and curse, and they include the people from west Barta’a in their curses: dirty Arabs; Arabs, go fuck yourselves—in front of our children, and they even say it in Arabic, to be sure that everyone understands. But what can I do, except help out with money, with food. I’m not willing to give real physical help. I live under the laws of the State of Israel. It hurts me. Listen, on one side are the laws of the country, and on the other the laws of blood!” He falls silent, and suddenly erupts before me again: “But what can I do?! Only envy them, that they are fighting for freedom, and be silent, and tie my own hands, and be furious with myself and silence my inner voice, because there’s nothing to do …”

Nasuh Kabha is a nature teacher. He studied at a teachers college in Haifa. He has five children. Gaunt and sinewy, he speaks bitterly and very quietly. His emotions are revealed largely by the way he sculpts his words: “I belong to the State of Israel only in the geographical sense. According to an agreement they imposed on me. I am an employee of the Ministry of Education. Receive a salary. Live here. But in the spirit, in the soul, I belong to the Palestinian people. So you tell me how I can educate children in these circumstances. A simple example—I’ve run into a lot of pupils here who draw, let’s say, a Palestinian flag. Now, I’ve got to tell the pupil that this is forbidden. But the pupil will consider me a traitor. And maybe I’ll also feel that I’m a traitor. But if I show any approval of his picture, maybe they’ll fire me, or summon me for an investigation. So what do I do? I don’t tell him anything. I pretend that I don’t notice.

“How is it possible in such a situation to teach young people values, honesty, courage?”

But then the conversation was cut short; I received no answer for the moment. Three young men from eastern Barta’a strode into the room. “Strode” is the wrong word; they swaggered. Three men of twenty or more, apparently from among the intifadah leaders in eastern Barta’a. You could sense how a very slight timidity had suddenly settled over the Arabs from the Israeli side. Not fear, but lowered spirits. After the discussion, when I asked one of the westerners if they still dismissively referred to the easterners as dafawim, West Bankers, he took a quick look around him. “You only call them that if you want to die,” he said.

The three easterners interrogated me for a few minutes, their eyes trained on me expressionlessly. In the end they consented to talk, calling themselves by false names. I will refer to them below by letters, in accordance with their relative ranks, which were quite evident. First I asked about the changes that had occurred in eastern Barta’a since the outbreak of the intifadah.

A: “Sure, of course there have been changes. Our solidarity and cooperation have developed considerably. And there is also organized resistance to the army. There are youth groups responsible for organizing the struggle against the army. How to defend the village when the army attacks by day, how to defend it at night, and all this in the framework of a contingency plan. Obviously, because of our struggle, we have economic difficulties and social problems, and the organizations work to solve all these problems, and work for solidarity, and they also assist poor and hungry families.”

He reached the end of what sounded like a fixed recitation. Afterward he pointed a finger at me. “Write: The ’48 are part of us. We share ties of blood and Palestinian identity. The intifadah did not create this link. It only exposed it to some of the people. Most of the people of the ’48 had discovered it long before.”

I looked at the ’48—those Palestinians, like Riad Kabha, Sufian Kabha, Nasuh, and Rafat, who came under Israeli rule after Israel won its independence in 1948—complex people, unraveled people, already tied to Israeli existence by many branching filaments, some of pain, some of hope. Maybe because of this, every time during the conversation that one of the easterners threw out the term “’48” like a lasso to tie them to the pole of their common flag, you could feel something in them twitching, for an instant in discomfort, with a trace of discerning reservation, like the flitting of the pupil in the eye of someone who has been called by the wrong name.

I turned to them and recalled the harsh things I had heard about them during my previous visit here, from their relatives in eastern Barta’a.

“I know the people who told you that,” Sufian Kabha responded. “I don’t think that whoever said that to you has more national pride than I do. I only know that I’ve gotten over the whole dilemma of my identity as a Palestinian in Israel. You can’t say I’m ‘dormant.’ On the contrary, I’ve invested thought in it, perhaps no less than he has. I had to explain to myself circumstances more complicated than his—how to live in an Israeli state and also fight for my people. I don’t have a dual identity nor do I have a blurred identity, and I certainly don’t have a dormant identity. I’ve learned to fit my Israeli citizenship and Palestinian identity together, and it is now a single identity, only more complex.”

The easterners listened to him attentively. Afterward A opened: “With regard to the book The Yellow Wind—that is, with regard to what you wrote about Barta’a—it wasn’t objective. The criticism you heard about our brothers in the west, and also what they supposedly said against us, came from people who now stand against the intifadah or who do not assist it. Such people have no right to determine who has understanding and who doesn’t, who has national consciousness and who is a Palestinian.”

A spoke Arabic and I, who knew that he and his comrades spoke Hebrew, suggested that we now speak that language. He shot a long glance at me and sputtered contemptuously, “I know only Arabic!”

This was one of the few times during these interviews that people spoke to me in Arabic. The rest of the conversations reported in this book took place in Hebrew, unless otherwise stated. This, of course, is one of the ironies of the situation—when I met Palestinians in the territories they spoke to me in Arabic, made accusations against me in Arabic, hurt and laughed in Arabic. It was very clear where their world and mine were. Things had different names. Even the intonations were those of another language; that internal melody conveys something that words cannot. When I translated what had been said to me from Arabic to Hebrew, it was sometimes fascinating to see the points of contact and similarity between the two sister languages. The Arabic word for “war,” for instance, is harb, which to my Jewish ears sounded sharp and immediate, yet also ancient, since its root appears in the Hebrew word for sword—and in the Hebrew word for catastrophic destruction, as in hurban habayit, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. When things were said to me in Arabic, by Arabs, they always had a more definite, unambiguous, and sharper quality.

Now I was speaking to Israeli Palestinians in my own language, in Hebrew, with its special slang and literary references and protocol, and this was confusing. Even Yiddish creeps in, as when a member of the Islamic Movement tells me that his interest in the Israeli government is purely financial—“It’s just gelt, understand? Gelt!” The everyday conversation of Palestinian Israelis sparkles with expressions from the Bible and the Talmud, from Bialik and Rabbi Yehuda Halevy and Agnon. Poet Naim Araideh effuses: “Do you know what it means to me to write in Hebrew? Do you know what it’s like to write in the language in which the world was created?” When all this is said to me in Hebrew, something gets irretrievably tangled, knotted up in itself.

Language brings out certain nuances of consciousness. It has a temperament and libido of its own. Even one who is unaware of all the mysteries and secrets of the language he uses comes to know instinctively, non-verbally, the huge reservoir of codes that act on different levels and offer ways of addressing reality. One of the marks of the enemy is that he makes use of other names, opposed to mine, in order to describe me and my world. From this point of view, the Palestinians in Israel can certainly also be enemies. They no longer, however, have the doubtful privilege of being only an enemy. Anyone who has assumed a language the way they have assumed Hebrew has also become subsumed in it.

And when they attack or despise me in Hebrew, there is something confusing and implausible about it. Sometimes the threat is augmented by the similarity of the language, but sometimes the very use of Hebrew moderates the declared alienation. When Sa’id Zeidani promises me that if Israel does not grant him and his children equal rights “I’ll try to make your lives bitter,” his words make me shiver from the depths of my Hebrew consciousness, which remembers how in Egypt “they made their lives bitter with hard bondage.” When, however, Zuhir Yehia explains how Palestinians in Israel must take care not to have any contact with the Shin Bet and concludes with the rabbinical maxim “Beware the authorities,” I know that we speak not only the same language but the same code.

I don’t know if there have ever been so many non-Jews speaking Hebrew. I’ve heard an estimation that today more Arabs than American Jews speak Hebrew. One thing is clear—the Arabs and Jews in Israel have a common language, with all that this implies. There was a period—about a thousand years ago—when Arabic was the literary language of Jews all over the Arab empire. Maimonides wrote many of his works in Arabic, among them The Book of Commandments and The Eight Chapters; Yehuda Ibn Tibun, the greatest translator of Arabic works into Hebrew, testified in the introduction to his translation of an important work of philosophy and mysticism, Obligations of the Heart, that most Jewish community leaders in Mesopotamia, Persia, and Palestine spoke Arabic, and that the Bible, the Mishna, and the Talmud all had Arabic commentaries written on them, “because all the people understood that language.”

One might suppose that today’s Hebrew speakers would better understand how the Arabs experience life in Israel if they knew Arabic and could be sensitive to the worldview and nuances of Arabic and its culture. In a country like Canada, where there is a large French minority, civil servants must be able to speak both English and French. In Israel, where Arabic is an official language, there was a decision in 1988 by the then Minister of Education, Yitzhak Navon, to require all Jewish students to study Arabic at school. That decision has still not been fully implemented—the target date is the year 2000. I am not convinced that these students will be able, by the end of their studies, to read a book, or even a newspaper, in Arabic. They might, however, be able to engage in everyday, practical dialogue with Arabs.

The men of eastern Barta’a speak Arabic clearly.

A: “We want to talk first of all about the subject of the liquidations, which in Israel they totally distort. The constitution of the intifadah states that not every Israeli agent should be murdered. A collaborator will be murdered if that accords with his crime. If his crime caused death, they will kill him. But if it caused only damage and not death, he will not be killed. They will only give him twenty-three lashes and send him on his way. That’s all. But you people don’t understand that! You should know that with us an action like that has all kinds of stages and procedures! We have an investigatory body. Like your intelligence agency. We have files on suspects. They catch him, interrogate, try to understand him; if he killed, he’ll be killed. And there’s a committee of seven or eight people who decide what to do with him. They don’t just come out of nowhere and cut off his head, what do you think.”

Riad Kabha, the mukhtar of western Barta’a, listens silently to this explication. When I ask him what he thinks, he shrugs his shoulders, hesitates for a moment, adjusts his glasses, and decides to speak in Hebrew. “Well, these murders are apparently part of the intifadah … and you should know that they check out every person very well before they kill him, warn him …”

“And do you accept that? Do you see it as something worthy of your support?”

“Look, I also criticize it. I say that it’s not good, but if after a long period the person keeps on doing it …”

“It’s an internal Palestinian matter!” interjected A. “You are forbidden to interfere!”

For a moment I was unsure at whom he had directed his order—only at me, the foreigner?

“Maybe it’s possible to say,” I asked the Israeli citizens, “that in your case, over the last forty years your thinking patterns and even national character have developed differently from those of the Palestinians in the territories?”

Rafat laughs. “The difference between us and them is mostly that we’re under more pressure than they are … making a living, loans from the banks, our responsibilities, our overdrafts.”

A taunts him, intentionally switching to Hebrew: “You’ve taken out a mortgage, eh?”

“I don’t think that a different national character has been created among us,” responds Sufian Kabha, soft-featured, slightly stooped, as if overburdened by troubles. “What happened to us is that, until ’67, we were isolated from the sources of the nation, both geographically and culturally, and that delayed the development of our Palestinian national identity. And if you ask why there was no violent resistance to the regime among us, as there is with them, I think that it’s because the PLO conceded the Israeli Arabs. The PLO, in the mid-seventies, said that it was developing a diplomatic rather than a military strategy. So it always demanded that the Arabs in Israel, as part of the Jewish state, conduct a purely political struggle. It did not ask them to make an intifadah in Israel. The Israeli Arabs accepted this, because they saw it was in their own best interests.”

“And you don’t feel that they in fact betrayed you? Gave you up to the Israelis?”

“They did not betray us.” He shook his head. “If a Palestinian state is established in the territories, I’ll feel that it is being established for my brother in the other Barta’a. If Arafat says that I’m part of Israel, I accept that just as I have to obey the head of an Arab family, as if Father divided his land between his sons. I’m prepared to accept that, even if my brother’s portion is better.”

I asked the people of the other Barta’a what changes, in their opinion, the intifadah had made in their brothers in Israel.

“Now the ’48 know who they are,” C asserted, “because there were among the ’48 some, not many, who became so much a part of Israel that their consciousness went into hibernation. They got some rights, got a certain education that wanted to make them into citizens, to make them Israelis, and that of course had some effect on a few people who lacked consciousness. Not everyone, you know, has consciousness.”

“And did you expect that your relatives in the Israeli Barta’a would behave differently, or provide a different kind of support for your struggle?”

A is the primary speaker. His comrades speak only with his approval. Every gesture and expression of his exudes scorn and arrogance. “It was decided prior to the intifadah that the Arabs of ’48 did not belong to the framework of the intifadah. That they would provide only political, moral, and economic assistance.”

“That’s not an answer,” I pointed out. “That’s a press release. I’m asking about your feelings.”

“I don’t think about what he does or doesn’t do for me!” A fumed. “When you’re under curfew, when the army surrounds you and knocks on the door, do you have time to think about someone else? I save all my thinking power for resisting the occupation! To keep going!”

“But you still made attempts to drag them into the violent struggle.”

A calmed himself down and thawed out a smile. “That was only for propaganda purposes. We knew that if we did something in eastern Barta’a, no one would pay any attention to us, because we’re far off the road. But if we were to do it in the Israeli Barta’a, everyone would come. Newspapers and television. It was just a ploy. Tactics.”

A few days later I met a young Israeli Palestinian, about thirty years old, from Israeli Barta’a, who had not taken part in our conversation. From him I learned a few things that I had no chance of hearing at that encounter. He said that the people of his village were very anxious about the struggle the easterners had begun to conduct on their western land. It included raising PLO flags over houses despite the objections of their owners. One homeowner who dared remove such a flag had been severely beaten. It also included painting anti-Israeli slogans on walls and setting fires in the forests near the village. The leaders of Israeli Barta’a sent a delegation to the other Barta’a and petitioned the intifadah leaders to consider their position. During these talks the people of Israeli Barta’a were subject to a harsh indictment: “We’re fighting for you, making a country that you’ll be able to live in, too, while you go on with your lives as usual. They’re killing us and you give only money, not blood,” they told them. Also: “What kind of common fate is it when you live like that with the Israelis who torment us?” But in the end, after receiving instructions from “outside,” both boundaries and expectations were defined. Even so, there is still tension, even outbreaks of anger. “This week, for example,” the Palestinian Israeli told me, “there was a wedding in the village, and a Palestinian had just been killed in Jenin. The groom’s mother wanted music. Some young people from eastern Barta’a came to her and told her that if she put up the loudspeakers they would send four or five masked intifadah fighters to break up the wedding. She gave in.” I asked him if my impression was correct that the people of his village were afraid of their brothers in the east. “Of course, there’s fear. If you take down one of their flags, it’s as if you’re against the whole intifadah. There’s a lot of violence in them now. They’re wilder. Their entire family structure has been destroyed. The adults have no control over them, and the police won’t come here every day to save me from them. Even if I brown-nose the police and the authorities, I always have to remember that I live in Barta’a and have to keep up good relations with the easterners.”

Riad Kabha from Israeli Barta’a: “During their curfews, there are people on our side who warn them. We’re closer to the main road, and if someone sees the army coming along the road, he can give a warning. On the telephone, or by whistling, or … [a quick exchange of glances] … never mind. The main thing is that we try to notify them. And during the curfew a lot of young people from the other Barta’a who run away from the army come to us, and there are those among us who open their doors to them … and we go visit their wounded in the hospitals, and we look after the families of their prisoners, and we put out press statements if they’re hurt.”

I suddenly had a feeling that I was not all that expendable there. That perhaps, without intending it, I had given the Palestinians living in Israel a rare opportunity to say a few clear things to their brothers in the other Barta’a.

“… and that’s not all,” Riad Kabha continued. “The Israel Lands Authority suddenly gave us fifty plots in the Build Your Own Home program for young couples. And we need land like the air we breathe. But what should we do—the Authority chose a tract that belongs to someone from eastern Barta’a, one that the Authority considers abandoned land, that it can hand out as it sees fit. So no one from our side agreed to build there.”

Sufian Kabha: “After the army completes its mission [Sufian the Israeli said without noticing, “completes its mission”; A, describing the same kind of action, said, “When the army attacks the village”], you immediately see a caravan of cars and people running from western Barta’a eastward. They’re running to see what happened, who was hurt. True, it’s a symbolic act, but it shows them that we care about what happens there. That we don’t close the door to them. We can’t do more than that. What do you want? If I, for instance, were to go there when the army was there, the soldiers would say I was working with the masked fighters. So it’s better for me to keep myself safe, and my feelings to myself. I can feel them without actually being there.”

“You know the Arabic proverb that the one who counts the blows is not at all like the one who receives them,” I said. “Have you in the Israeli Barta’a, during this entire time, done anything, even symbolic, to identify with the hardships and suffering of your relatives? To demonstrate for your children—as an educational act—your common fate?”

Hesitation. They glance at each other. For a while they had refrained from holding wedding celebrations, like their West Bank brothers. Yes, but now the celebrations had resumed. What could they do? Whom will it help if we suffer, too? And we suffered a lot … The roadblock at the entrance to the village doesn’t distinguish us from them. They humiliate all of us there …

Really, I thought, why am I nagging them? After all, I know the answers, which are of human dimensions. What, in any case, did I expect when I asked to meet with the two parts of Barta’a? Did I hope that I would find some kind of common fate in life and death? A heroic covenant of blood?

Maybe I read too many books when I was young. Any hope we have lies in the cautious and troubled prudence of the Palestinians. And anyone who, like me, is the scion of a nation of expert survivors can well understand this shared common sense, as well as its price. They had decided not to participate in the intifadah, and so had been separated by a clear line from the Palestinian struggle (and they—in their internal code—understand better than anyone else the meaning of that separation). They support the struggle financially and morally, and for that reason had been propelled into the margins of Israeli society, losing social advantages and the precarious legitimacy they had gained after much labor. They judiciously looked after their security, and they lost a great deal. There, in the expansive home of Sufian Kabha, over coffee and baklava, when my eyes wandered between the two groups, between the two sets of countenances, that of the exclamation point and that of the elision, it became very clear and concrete to me. Israel may well magnify the feeling of a common fate that Israeli Palestinians feel with their brothers—in the negative, hostile, and tragic sense. The more it represses their brothers, the more Israeli Palestinians will be forced to amplify their own Palestinian nationalism, and the more it will chain them to automatically making themselves into representatives of the other side—something that is not always to their liking. When any of them made a “declaration” to me, it was clear from his expression that he realized how empty his voice sounded. They sat there, cowering a bit, apologetic, guarding both their flanks, soberly observing the nationalist fervor of their other cousins, the militant flush that set them off every few minutes. Facing each other, the two sides looked like two sides of the same rug, and one’s heart was actually drawn to the confused, hesitant ones, who implore us to be discerning and generous enough to get them out of here already.

“They gave you a little show,” that same Israeli Palestinian, from the same hamula, told me when I met him a week later and described the encounter to him. “There’s no real connection between the Barta’as. They only unite when there’s trouble. But normally—it’s like neighbors. If there’s a wedding in the other Barta’a, the immediate family goes and that’s all. And they don’t come to us. We actually tried to organize something, joint soccer games, but there was only one game. At first, our young people were jealous of theirs, who were fighting and being heroes, so they hung up some flags, too, or maybe they didn’t [Note: After the massacre on the Temple Mount, PLO flags were flown in eastern Barta’a, but in western Barta’a there were only black flags], or burned Israeli flags, or maybe they didn’t. Eighteen of our young people were arrested for a few months. They received harsher sentences than on the other side. But after they saw how much money the lawyer and trial cost their parents, they stopped it. Enough. Barta’a has proven that the Green Line exists.”

Toward the end of the meeting I asked the people of Barta’a if when, Allah willing, the peace talks began, they did not want to request that the strange circumstance of divided Barta’a be remedied. Just as an uncaring hand had cut the village apart, it could now, if the opportunity came, reunite it—heal it.

Riad Kabha: “It was our fathers’ mistake that they accepted quietly what had been decided about them. We today will not accept another such decision. We will not agree.”

“I don’t want there to be two Barta’as,” A responded, “I want there to be one. Under Palestinian rule.”

Sufian Kabha, the Israeli: “I … what can I say … Look, it would be nice if the Palestinian state grew by about two or three kilometers and I and my land were included in it. I don’t care where I am.”

“Still,” I persisted, “there would be a big change in your life, you’d live under Palestinian rule.”

Sufian: “If it helps bring peace … fine.”

“That’s a nice sound bite, but I’m asking you, Sufian, where would you like to live?”

He laughs. “Ask Nasuh first.”

Nasuh also smiles to himself. Refuses to answer. Refers me back to Sufian. The other Israelis avoid my gaze.

“I’m asking this because here there’s no problem of uprooting people from one place to another, or of being separated from your land. But the border itself could move, such that your particular problem would be solved. The question is only where you would like it solved: under Israeli rule or in some kind of Palestinian entity?”

“Then I want to move there …” Sufian concludes faintly.

“You want to be part of the Palestinian state?”

“Look, I still don’t know what there will be there, I’m not sure what kind of government will be there …”

“A democratic government!” A from eastern Barta’a lashes out. “What else would there be?!”

Silence. Something swift, unnamed, passes through the four Israelis.

Rafat cannot stand the silence. “I’d be very happy if there was a Palestinian state,” he said sullenly, “but I’ll be even happier when I can live in Israel and be the Palestinian state’s ambassador here. Just like American Jews—they live in the U.S. but belong to Israel.”

C, the easterner, says, “I don’t care. Under Israeli rule or under Abu Amar’s [Arafat’s] rule. The main thing is to be with my land.”

His words surprised me. I asked him to repeat them, and he did so and added, “If there is a Palestinian state, I am ready for them to unite Barta’a even under Israeli rule. The main thing is that we not be divided.”

A and B seconded him, and explained, “The main thing is that they not cut apart the lands again.” For a moment it sounded like an interesting version of Solomon’s justice—the baby itself asked to stay with the strange mother, so as not to be cut in two. On second thought, it was an expression of a characteristic pattern of behavior among Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line—the supreme loyalty is not to country or to nation; loyalty is, first and foremost, to land and family. A future agreement on the unification of the village—even under Israeli rule—may return the people of eastern Barta’a to the large tracts of their land that remained in Israel and which are now administered by the Israel Lands Authority or even by their Israeli brothers. “Every Arab has two mothers.” Nasuh laughed at my astonishment. “First, father’s wife, and the second mother is the land. The land tells us where to live.”

“If they unite us, then only in Israel,” the anonymous resident of the Israeli Barta’a told me. “I can’t even conceive of living in a Palestinian state. It will be a new country in which there will certainly be civil war. And there won’t be work. And there will be a government of young people, violent and unbending; even their children have changed, they haven’t gone to school for four years, everyone is outside the structure; and I still don’t know how they will treat us, because we were in Israel. I’ve already gotten used to living here.”

“That’s a compliment to Israel,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said.

“You wouldn’t have said things like that forty-three years ago, or even twenty years ago,” I said.

“Life has a power of its own,” he said.

At the end of the meeting with the residents of both Barta’as, when he walked me to my car, Riad Kabha told me a story. I had heard it once before, but this time something was added: “We are here, in this very house, thanks to the guys from eastern Barta’a,” he said. “In ’72, when the army wanted to put up a fence around the village and make a firing range next to us, in Israeli Barta’a they wanted to meet with the Minister of Defense, to write letters to all the important people, and the people from eastern Barta’a came and said, What do you mean you’re going to talk, to go to court?! They came and sat under the bulldozers and didn’t let the army by. That’s how we liberated that land,” he exclaimed, and I could see that he was privately enjoying the very use of those heroic words, so much a part of Palestinian rhetoric: “We liberated that land.”

Then he raised his head and looked me in the eye, Riad Kabha, whose hair had gone silver in the four years that had passed, Riad who puts all his time and strength into Givat Haviva, an educational institution that works for coexistence and tolerance between Jews and Arabs, who has spent his whole life running around devotedly, almost hopelessly, between the two rival sides. He looked at me, and his eyes, behind the lenses of his thick glasses, began slowly to smile in resignation and self-irony. “Okay, okay, so they liberated the land for us.”