Sleeping On A Wire

“WHEN I MET Rasan,” Irit wrote me, “I, like many Israelis, had preconceptions about Arabs. Before I went to college I didn’t know any Arabs at all. In Tel Aviv, where I lived, I didn’t have anything to do with them. At least not personally, except as laborers who worked in the neighborhood. Actually, I thought of them as objects. Or more accurately, they didn’t exist at all. In my subconscious they were something frightening, threatening, that it wasn’t a good idea to have any kind of contact with.”

“It was really at college that I encountered the human being within the Jew,” Rasan told me at their village house. “All other encounters with Jewish people were racist or exploitative, as far as I could see. At college I discovered something else, other types of people, and I slowly began making my way into that society. At first it was kind of romantic—I discovered some special personalities, I spent most of my time with a group of artists, like a commune, a feeling of being cosmopolitan … But outside that bubble my experiences were very difficult. I lived in the dormitories on Mount Scopus. There was the way they kept guard on us, and the way they scattered us, the Arabs, in the far corners of different dorm buildings, so that if there was an attack we’d be hit first—such absurd stories that you can hardly believe them. And there were also the encounters at the bus station with the border guards every time I traveled to the village and back. You don’t find anywhere the human Jew who suffered, suffered from racism. Where is he? Is he now transferring it to a different victim, looking for someone else to piss on?”

He is forty-one. A research assistant at the university. One of the 14,000 Arab college graduates in Israel. His beard is short and carefully groomed, his glasses round, and he holds a pipe in his hand. He speaks quietly and with self-assurance, but someone humiliated and wounded lurks in the darkness between his ordered words, and the more he talks the more you see he is one great bruise.

She is thirty-nine, born in Tel Aviv to parents who had come to Israel from Iraq. Today she works in education for Jewish-Arab coexistence through drama. A very pretty ivory-skinned woman with black hair and green eyes. They have three children, two boys and a girl, a nice but modest house at the edge of their village, two dogs, and a litter of newborn kittens. We sit in their yard in the late afternoon. The table holds a bowl of grapes and peeled sabras—cactus fruit—straight from the supermarket. The two of them vacillate for a long time before agreeing to talk; he is willing to talk openly, she is apprehensive, for personal reasons, and in the end they agree to talk on condition that their identity be kept confidential. They chose the pseudonyms themselves.

“I suppose I was very naïve when I lived in Tel Aviv,” Irit began. “Israel was something holy for me. I was very patriotic. Then suddenly it all became questionable. I met Rasan and I witnessed things I couldn’t believe were happening here. I began to be frightened. I discovered all kinds of things I hadn’t known about the Jewish people, my people. The world changed before my eyes. I was afraid for my life and that of my partner. I thought, One day they’ll come and bang on the door and take us away, and no one will lift a finger.

“Afterward, very slowly, I began to realize that this was reality for people like Rasan, that there is even a kind of routine to it. A routine of discrimination and ostracism. Even with regard to me. When people hear I’m married to an Arab … Here, a year ago I took a course at Bar Ilan University, and when they found out I was married to an Arab everyone got tense. It was a fairly long course, and people got close to one another, but they stayed away from me. One woman told me straight out, ‘It’s very hard for me with you. You’re a very nice and smart girl, and if we had met without this thing of yours, I’m sure we would have become friendly. But it’s hard for me to swallow it.’

“Or, for instance, a year before I met Rasan I went overseas. I went through airport security normally: you go, you fly, you return. A year later I traveled with him, and then, all at once—the search through the suitcases. They undressed us. They took my hair dryer completely apart. I told them, Wait a minute, last year I traveled with the same hair dryer and it wasn’t dangerous then! I was pregnant. They stripped me down to my underwear. The guard came with an electric instrument. I told her, I’m asking you please, I’m pregnant, don’t check me with that instrument. Check me with your hands, do whatever you want. She wouldn’t agree. She said, I’ll only check you from behind. I said, But I’m pregnant! Do you know anything about the way a woman is built? What difference does it make to a pregnant woman if it’s in front or behind? It didn’t help. I don’t understand, I told her, I’m a student like you, I’m Israeli like you. She looked at me funny and said, I have orders and I carry them out. Those were my first steps as an ‘Arab.’”

“The children already define themselves,” Rasan corrected her. “And it happens to them exactly the same way it happened to Irit. People always used to ask me if she feels like a Jew or an Arab, and I never told her anything about it. I didn’t ask. But the first time, at our first roadblock, when we left the village and the border guard policeman didn’t tell her, ‘You’re Jewish, get out of the car and wait until I examine your husband,’ but treated her the same way he treated me, that’s the moment the change in her began. That is, the Jews pushed her to belong to me.”

“The roadblocks …” She smiled helplessly. “Look, that’s already happened hundreds of times, so it doesn’t bother me anymore. Isn’t it a horrible thing when you become accustomed to the absurd? Whenever they stop us I calm Rasan down. I remind him, You know how they are, there’s no way of avoiding it, so let’s try to take it easy. I try to calm him down, but it hurts Rasan so much that as soon as I see them in the distance I get all nervous.”

Rasan: “The same thing happened with the children. When our son was five years old they stopped us near Kfar Saba. The boy asked, What did the policemen want from us, why did they ask if you’re an Arab, why did they take your identity card, why didn’t they stop other cars? That way, automatically, and it makes no difference whether I want it or not, whether I teach it to him or not, he’s already defined as belonging to the Arabs, but in the negative sense.”

“My son was born in Jerusalem,” Irit wrote me after our meeting, “and two years after he was born we moved to the village, and that was because in Jerusalem I was the one who had to sign the apartment rental lease. We knew that if the landlord knew that Rasan was an Arab he wouldn’t rent us the apartment. I’d sign the lease as if I were the only tenant, and then he would move in with me. Living a pretense and a lie put a lot of pressure on us and we felt uncomfortable and frustrated. Then we thought, What about the children? Will they also have to conceal their Arab father? I wasn’t willing to live that lie. My children have to know the facts and learn to live with them. In the end, that will be the reality of their lives, and they have to know how to live with it honorably. Here, in the village, unlike in the city, everyone knows that their mother is Jewish. They don’t need to hide that fact from anyone. I’d say that they manage it pretty well. Until they were ten years old I’d read them a story in Hebrew each night, and they speak both Hebrew and Arabic as mother tongues. They watch all the Hebrew television programs and are at home with everything that’s connected with cultural life in Israel. On the other hand, they study in the village school and live in an Arab society. Not only does no one bother them about it, there’s sometimes even a feeling that they are the subjects of positive discrimination. After all, in the consciousness of the village society their mother belongs to the majority group, the ruling group, the elite.”

At her house in the village I asked her whether, deep inside, she didn’t want her children in the end to cast their lot with “her side.”

“They’ll make their own choice, just as I did. I never even thought of asking them what they felt about themselves—more Jewish or more Arab. It’s not a pertinent question as far as I’m concerned. The main thing is that they be good people, with a good education, with a universal outlook. True, in each person’s unconscious there is the identity with which she was born and educated, and it is very hard to free yourself from it. But little by little something is happening. To me also. It’s harder and harder for me here. A lot of times I’m shocked by what I see around me. When an Arab child is hurt, no one knows who he is, what his name is, who his parents are. He doesn’t exist. He’s inconsequential. But when a Jewish child is hurt, they make a whole spectacle of it: they show him on television, give his biography, who his grandfather and grandmother are. Not long ago, two weeks ago, two Arab boys from my village were kidnapped by a Jewish bus driver. Did you hear about it? Two children were kidnapped and beaten, one eleven years old and one thirteen years old, wonderful Israeli kids who speak fluent Hebrew. They know who the assailant is. He wasn’t even arrested and there was no investigation. You don’t know about it, but such stories reach me every day.

“And I, who was born here, who was part of … Oh, I remember, as a girl, when the prisoners of war came back from Syria, I was so shocked. How could there possibly be a nation that could do such things? And to think that my country, in its own prisons and interrogation rooms, does the same thing … It’s hard for me to cope with that. I don’t know how other Israelis deal with it and remain silent. Maybe it doesn’t matter to them because it doesn’t touch them. Maybe they actually think it’s good. I’m not prepared to accept it, but on the other hand I don’t know what I can do.” She speaks with great composure, without raising her voice. “I remember that once, on Land Day, we sat here weeding our lawn, and I asked Rasan what we should do. Demonstrate? Be more violent? And Rasan said that he is not a violent person, is not able to pick up a stone and throw it. He’s not the only one I’ve heard that from: We’re citizens, the country has laws, what can we do?”

“Still,” I commented, “you’re ignoring the fact that over the years there has been improvement. Only twenty-five years ago there was a military government here, and today there’s more openness and consciousness of the problem, and the Arabs in Israel can express their opinions and demand their rights—”

“That’s precisely the illusion!” Rasan interrupted me angrily. “That’s a fiction. And anyway, what we’re doing here is, if you’ll excuse me, masturbation! Because what good will it do me if I tell you that I’m discriminated against? That I feel bad living in my own country? Will that improve my life? After all, the system is built so that it allows some exceptional people, like me for example, to advance, and it exploits those exceptions to say, ‘Hey, look how this man expresses himself, and we don’t cut off his head.’ But practically, check it out and you’ll see how the system blocks me in all directions.”

“The absurd thing is that the discrimination is especially sharp in our situation,” Irit said. “The law says that an Israeli couple can get a mortgage from the Ministry of Housing if both of them are citizens and one served in the army. Okay. We meet all the criteria. We’re Israelis, I served in the army, we have the right to a mortgage. But they got around it and said, ‘Aha! Since you’re building a house in an Arab village, you get only what the residents of that region get!’”

“Look how much democracy here is an illusion,” Rasan added. “The ultra-Orthodox are also a minority here, a smaller minority than the Arabs, a minority that has declared itself non-Zionist, and look how they dictate your life for you. Look how much money they get. But in 1990, when there was the big political crisis here, and Peres thought of making a coalition with the Arabs, everyone had a fit. ‘How can you do that? With non-Zionist Arabs!’ As if the ultra-Orthodox are Zionists! As if they serve in the army! We’re a priori outside the game. Politics, the media, and the economy.”

“I understand,” I asked him, “that you would like the manifest Jewish character of the state to disappear?”

“A country with a majority of Jewish residents—I have no problem living with that. Even if the country tries by all sorts of legal means to preserve the Jewish majority, I have no problem, on condition that it be determined with the agreement of the minority.”

“Israel can be a country with a Jewish majority but shouldn’t define itself as a Jewish state. When its symbols include me as well, I’ll have something to say and even more to give to such a country.”

“You didn’t explain what you mean by ‘legal means … determined with the agreement of the minority.’”

Rasan sucked on his pipe for a long moment. “If Israel says, I want to be a normal, democratic state with a separation of church and state, where every person will have the right of self-fulfillment, then we can sit down and agree that the president and prime minister always be Jewish, according to the constitution. And we’ll also write a constitution that will ensure the citizen’s fundamental rights, his basic freedoms. (And that’s one of the reasons, by the way, that you have no constitution.) There will be a constitution. There will be a Jewish majority. But its laws will protect my rights as well. They’ll allow me, not some Jewish official in the education ministry, to decide what my son learns in school. Under those conditions it wouldn’t bother me that the majority is Jewish.”

“It doesn’t bother me that the flag is blue and white,” Lutfi Mashour, editor of As-Sinara, told me with regard to the same issue. “It’s not important to me and I don’t care if they call it Israel or Shmisrael or the Jewish state. The decorations don’t bother me, the essence of it bothers me. Am I equal to you or aren’t I? In practice, do I or don’t I have rights? I’ve even given up on getting a Law of Return for Arabs. I’ve already made my peace with the fact that the Jews have a place to return to and that the Palestinians can’t return here. I hope that the Palestinian state that will be established will be “Jewish” in this sense. But all that is secondary. The main thing is your attitude to me as a human being. You bring in a huge wave of immigration—very nice. But a year from now the Jewish immigrant will be a master. We’ll remain the slaves. So I say, Fine, let it be a Jewish state. But give us the same opportunities you have! Let it be as in India—a Muslim as the head of state. You can make agreements like that!” He thought for a minute and began to chuckle. “It’s true, if you were to tell me now that the president’s chair is open to Arabs—I’d kill you! Because who would we put there today? What Arab can be such a leader? I prefer living another thousand years without an Arab president to putting any of the people I know into that position!”

“The president’s chair is open to Arabs.” In Israel will there ever be a reality in which that sentence comes true? There are those for whom the idea is a nightmare, and the very writing of the words, in Hebrew, rubs their nerves raw. But maybe there are others for whom such a thought—even if it is not practical for now—may massage a pulled muscle in their consciousness and create a surprising sense of relief—“Why not, after all?” Really, why not? Why shouldn’t Israel have an Arab Minister of Justice, an Arab State Controller, an Arab as director of the water company or the telephone company, as director of the social-security system, all of them Arab citizens of Israel? Or a Minister of Agriculture and a Minister of Finance and head of the water supply, and director general of the Histadrut Labor Federation and editor of Ha’aretz and heads of the boards of directors of national companies and chairmen of Knesset committees? Why not? There, in Irit and Rasan’s yard, I knew how little all of us, Jews and Arabs, allow our imaginations free rein with regard to the possible joint future. It’s as if the paralysis and lack of willpower that control us with regard to our relations in the present restrict our gaze, so that there is no power to hope, and within this empty space our traumatic past still rises endlessly, perpetuating and preserving the pattern of our relations.

And an Arab newspaper editor as a member of the sensitive Editors Committee, which serves as liaison between the press and the army censor? Yes. And an Arab El Al pilot? Certainly. An Arab general to head the Civil Defense Force? Of course. And an Arab police chief? Yes … but here I feel a little hesitation. Have I reached the boundary of my own private racism? Or the boundary of the dream at the present stage?

So even before we are privileged to see, let’s say, an Arab commander of the Rear Defense Command, there are simpler and more vital endeavors that have still not been realized, facts that are hard to face. Twice as many Arab babies die soon after birth as Jewish babies. And 92 percent of Arab wage earners are on the bottom half of the social scale. There has not yet been an Arab member of an Israeli cabinet; the highest political position an Arab has reached is Deputy Minister of Health. In 1989, out of the 1,310 senior positions in the government ministries and their associated bodies, only seventeen were Arabs. Among the 200 boards of directors of government-owned companies, with more than 4,000 politically and economically influential members, there is only one Arab director. Of the doctors employed by the Histadrut’s huge health fund, only 2 percent are Arabs. This year every second Arab in Israel lived under the poverty line. Six out of ten Arab children (as opposed to one out of ten Jewish children) live in poverty.

How much luck does an Arab child—as talented as he may be—need to live “just” the life he deserves? To not waste his mind and abilities under the high-jump bar? Are all these exaggerated hopes? Dreams? Visions of a storyteller?

Then what about an Arab member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee? No, not yet. What about an Arab deputy prime minister, who will fill in for the prime minister whenever necessary? Yes … why not? An Arab commander of an air force squadron? What about it? Just theoretically, when there’s peace? Ah, I need to think, to mull that one over …

During such moments of doubt I could understand that there was also something misleading about the immediate connection made between me and the Palestinians I met in the occupied territories before the intifadah. In one, obvious sense they and I had a common interest—to disconnect ourselves from each other. In other words, the aspiration to separate united us. But here, perhaps, in Israel, we, Jews and Arabs, must overcome the residues left by enmity and suspicion in order to come together under one definition, as Israelis, in the framework of a single general civil identity, and this “compression” demands of the two “partners” a huge emotional effort, no less difficult, perhaps, than the withdrawal from territory.

“You speak of national identity,” Irit sighed when we spoke of the difficulty of “compression” and on the internal concession it demands. “I can tell you about much more private problems, about my family in Tel Aviv, for instance, about my father, who cut off all contact with me, entirely, yes, the minute he realized that I was going out with an Arab. I haven’t seen or spoken to him for fifteen years. And that’s my father, who was so attached to me, as only a father can be attached to his youngest daughter. In the army they used to laugh at me, at all the things he used to buy me, always the best and the most expensive—and now he doesn’t know his grandchildren, he doesn’t know me. He’s losing something and I’m losing something. Once we received a videotape of a family wedding and my children saw my father, and my younger son said, ‘Wow, Grandpa looks so young, he’s really good-looking.’ The worst part was a few years ago, when my sister was dying of cancer; just before she died she spoke with my father and asked him to forgive me, to take me back. He went into hysterics. He wasn’t willing to consider it. She died, and I didn’t go to the funeral or to the shiva. My father said, ‘Okay, I’m sitting shiva on both my daughters together.’ Do you understand? He sat shiva for me, like for Chava, who married a goy in Fiddler on the Roof.”

She goes silent for a minute, getting control of herself. Then: “I have a close relative, very close, who married a Christian. She lives with him in Switzerland. But when she goes home, the whole family receives her with so much love. They fight over who will host her, they make pilgrimages to come bid her goodbye. That sharpened the matter for me, that our problem is not religious. It’s political. A European or Swiss is not on the same level as an Arab. The opposite—she actually became a model of success, a Swiss!”

“All of us here were horribly frightened of the gas, the first night was a real nightmare, my son cried because he thought that the mask wasn’t sealed properly, and he didn’t eat for two days, and I had the additional burden of being far from my family, from all my relatives in Tel Aviv. Imagine how I felt. I hurt so much for my Tel Aviv. I cried when I thought of my city destroyed. And there was no one around me in my situation. No one with whom I could share that anguish. After each alert I would call my sister in Ramat Gan to ask where the missile fell. Twice the call was disconnected, and Rasan shouted, why are you asking her questions like that on the telephone? Don’t you realize that you live in an Arab village? Don’t you know that they’re listening to us?”

“First of all, and most important, they didn’t dance on the rooftops, like the Jews said. In my village, and in other villages I know, they didn’t dance! Almost everyone here has Jewish friends, and we live right next to Jewish settlements, we’re all in the same boat. True, there were Arabs who told me, You don’t care when Palestinians are killed, now you’ll learn how hard it is. That I understand. Real celebration of distress—I didn’t see any.”

Rasan: “If you ask the Arabs in Israel if they want to see Israel destroyed, my bet is that you won’t find 10 percent that want that. People already accept Israel. They accept that the country exists but want it to change its character. So that a man like me, a citizen, can say, It’s mine. But if the government’s policy doesn’t go in this direction, our demand in the future will be for some kind of autonomy here, or some kind of recognition as a minority. And it looks to me like that’s where we’re heading. After all, Israel doesn’t intend to change in the coming decade, and I won’t undergo auto-castration, suddenly turn into a kind of Zionist Arab, a good little Jew.”

“It’s interesting,” I said to Irit, “that during our entire conversation your disappointment and hostility is directed only at the Jewish side. Don’t you have any criticism of the Arab society in Israel?”

“The Jewish side is the strong and controlling side,” she said. “It’s easier for me to understand the Arabs. They’re so pressured by Israeli society, you have no conception. Only someone who lives here can understand it. And I, at least, have an advantage over other Arabs—I have another identity I can hide behind whenever I choose. You understand. My fluent Hebrew and the whole Jewish side of my identity allow me, really, to go from one side to the other whenever I want. Others don’t have that privilege. Yes, the feeling of being an Arab among Jews is so hard that when there’s the possibility of fleeing, it’s a good feeling.”

“There are moments,” Rasan said, “when, despite all the harassment and the way the situation closes in on you, you still believe in something. You look for the corner in which there’s a bit of light, to tell you that it’s still worth trying. At least for the little bubble you live in and bring up your children in and for your friends around you—it’s still worth making an effort. Then, on the other hand, you run into cases when you start asking questions. What does my activity here mean? What is the significance of all my efforts for that human robot who stops me at the roadblock? What does my citizenship mean? Income tax and VAT? Stopping at a red light? Eating food produced by Israeli companies like Osem and Telma? Studying in the Israeli educational system, one I did not choose? After all, really, if I’m honest with myself, my citizenship here means no more than having an identity card which isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Tell me what collective elements are here that I as a man can feel any connection to. Why can you, theoretically, be the director of the government television station when I could never be? What, I can’t be just as professional as you? I’m not as reliable as you are? That is, for me being Israeli is what keeps me from self-realization! It is a system that prevents me from deciding my fate! I live my entire life in an existential system of foreignness. Do you understand what it is for a man like me to be a priori outside the cultural, political, and economic game? Even the Israeli left, which I know wants to make things better for me—when there’s a demonstration in Teibe, the left stands there and the right faces off with them—what does the left do? Their leader tells them, I’d better fucking hear you singing ‘Hatikva’ louder than they do! So with all their might they sing the line from the national anthem: ‘A Jewish soul yearns’! So I’m always ‘out’ in these battles! When I go to Tel Aviv—the heart of your Israeliness, right?—I feel foreign there. Suspicious. Ask my wife. I get nervous and tense. I go there only when I have to.”

“And is there a place you feel more comfortable? How do you feel in Ramallah?”

“Nature,” Rasan said in the end. “Only nature. We go on a lot of trips. To the north, to the Galilee or to the Negev, to the craters. I cultivate my private relationship with nature.” He smiled bitterly. “There it’s still a little free of meaning.”

“Still,” I insisted, “there’s a whole country here, such a complex and multidimensional whole. People, opinions, art …”

“There’s some reason that you’re staying here. You are people with free professions, you could manage elsewhere also, and you’ve chosen to live here.”

“It’s actually because of pressure from the children,” she said. “They don’t want to be here.”

“For a few years, no more,” he added. “The kids are sick of the tension here, of this whole struggle.”

She: “The truth is that I’m actually the one who wants to leave more. More than Rasan. I look around and I know that I’m no longer at peace with the fact that I live here. I’ll join a Hebrew book club—what’s so surprising about that? You asked before how it is that I have no criticism of Arab society. Of course I do, after all I live here and see horrible things here, too: see a petrified society, see educated people who find it easy to criticize but don’t do anything to change it, and an educational system in which the teachers stand in front of the class and curse the children. ‘You’re failures, you’re asses and blockheads.’ To this day teachers hit students, my son was hit more than once. I have lots of complaints. Maybe I don’t dare criticize them in public because I’m a foreign implant, I’ll always be a foreign body to them, but I expect more of Jewish society, in all areas. It could be that I’ll see discrimination in the U.S., too. It exists in every society. Maybe I’ll feel that it’s not my home there. But I have many more expectations from my home than from other places, and here I’ve already seen too much, and I can’t go on.”

Siham Daoud, poet, a delicate young woman of thirty, from Haifa:

“During the war, I heard that there were Arabs who were happy that Saddam was firing Scuds at Israel. I, I have so many friends and people I care about, both Jewish and Arab, so joy never passed through my head, not even for a second. On the contrary. I remember, during the war, a missile fell here near my house. I was horribly afraid. All the neighbors left, the Jews and the Arabs who live in the housing project here. I went down and the guy across the way was sitting in his garden. He had to stay home because he was on emergency duty, he’s a nurse at the hospital. An Arab, right? He sat like this, as if all the world’s problems were on his shoulders, and said to me, ‘I’m very, very worried.’

“I asked him what he was worried about, and he says he is worried because for two days he hasn’t sent a thing. No Scuds.

“When I read about it in the papers I didn’t get upset. But when it happened to me? Do you understand? Here a man was sitting, a missile had fallen a kilometer from him, and instead of worrying about himself, instead of—okay, don’t worry for the Jews, worry for the Arabs here! We’re all in the same boat … and he’s worried why for two days he hasn’t sent anything!

“I was speechless.

“That same day I had moved in with my friend, a Jewish woman. And most of the days of the war, I was with her. The whole thing, that because of his missiles I couldn’t stay at home, really made me mad, and I remember that once I lost my cool; it was the day that there were some four false alarms, and each time we went into the sealed room and came out, my friend and I and two more friends, all of us together, and then at one point I took off the gas mask and said—you know how I cursed him!—Son of a bitch! [She laughs.] And I never curse, so everyone broke out laughing, because it was clear who I was saying son of a bitch about.”

Question: “During the alerts did you sit in the sealed room?”

S.A. (a woman of about twenty, who asked to remain anonymous): “Yes.”

“Were you afraid?”

“I was very afraid. My sealed room could have told you how afraid I was. I sealed it outside, I sealed it inside, twice, and between the plastic and the glass I also sealed it with silicone, and I sat with the gas mask on, and I was so scared, and I was happy he was shooting the missiles.”

“You mean you were happy that they were firing missiles at you?”

“Let’s say, not real happiness, just … yes, despite it all, I was happy that you, too, a little … because a lot of times, when I saw the world’s reactions, their support of Israel, when you destroyed our houses in the occupied territories and you imprisoned my family there during the curfew and shot us with bullets containing all kinds of materials and all kinds of gas, that whole time, twenty-four years already, no one in the world did anything to stop it, and I cried when I saw how cheap our blood, the Palestinians’ blood, is …”

Zuhir Yehia, forty, Kafr Kara:

“During the Saddam period my thoughts were divided. I was cut in two. Should I invite friends from Tel Aviv? Invite them here? Because if I invite them it’s an invitation for them to run away from the responsibility that the Jewish people imposed on them. In the end I invited them; they came to visit, but not to stay.”

I asked what he thought about those who left Tel Aviv during the war.

“As an Arab, were the positions reversed, I think that I wouldn’t run away and I wouldn’t leave.”

“In ’48 most of the Arabs fled.”

“They didn’t flee. They were forced to flee. The Arab countries tempted them to come, promised they would return. We’ve learned a lesson since then. We won’t move anymore. The Jews left Tel Aviv out of fear. Maybe correctly, I don’t know. Maybe they don’t have the nerves for this tension. Arabs already have stronger nerves. We’ve had a lot of disasters here. Maybe we’re more spoiled than the people in the territories, but less than the Jews. You’ve already gotten used to things being nice.”