CHAPTER 8
“YOU SEE THE wall there, by the bank?” Mohammed Kiwan swings his swivel chair around and points. “There they wrote, in big letters, ‘Death to the Arabs.’ And next to it, ‘A good Arab is a dead Arab.’ And that in the heart of the fair city of Hadera, straight across from my office window. Fine, so the day they wrote it I call the Hadera municipality and tell them, Hey, guys, right across from my nice little office they’re hanging me! So please, come clean it up. Ten days passed and they didn’t come to wash it off. The graffiti pricks me in the back. When did they come? When we brought the press into it; within a day the mayor had ordered the graffiti cleaned up.”
He is an attorney, lives in Um Elfahm, works in Hadera. At the beginning of the 1960s he had been a teacher—“an educator,” he corrects me—and was fired because of his political activity. At the time Kiwan was active in the Nasserist nationalist movement Al-Ard. In 1965, after Al-Ard was outlawed, he was among the founders of Sons of the Village, a radical Palestinian movement whose aim was to fight for an improvement in the status of the Arabs in Israel. “We called it Abna el-Balad, because balad means both ‘village’ and ‘homeland.’ It’s the unfortunate villager as opposed to the snobbish rich. It’s the common man, Voltaire’s Candide. I always look for that man. Among you and among us. I’d like to get to the Candides among you, too. But your communications media are blocked to us. How many times have they interviewed an Arab on a television talk show? Despite the fact that we’re nearly 20 percent of the population and talk, God knows, just like you. Where’s equality of opportunity? We’re always shouting, but no one hears. They don’t allow us to reach you. Here, two months ago I saw this guy Jojo from Ashdod on television, the one on the beach. What a wise and simple man! What common sense and humanity! I wrote him an open letter, for the newspaper, and called to him: ‘I, Mohammed, am searching for Jojo from Ashdod.’ The paper, of course, would not print it. So I’m still looking for those Jojos.”
“It’s not that complicated,” I told him. “Let’s drive down to see him.”
It wasn’t all that simple, either. Jojo Abutbul lives in Ashdod, Mohammed Kiwan in Um Elfahm. Who should go to whom? “Tell him we’ll meet halfway,” Kiwan suggested. “What do you mean halfway?” Abutbul grumbled. “I’ve got to be in my restaurant on the beach every day, tell him to come here.” I mediated, shuttle diplomacy by telephone, one day, another day, until Kiwan finally gave in; after all, he wanted to talk to Jojo, and if Jojo won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the beach.
On a hot summer’s day, at Jojo’s café-restaurant, The West Coast, under the palm branches spread over the roof, the two sat facing each other. The restaurant loudspeakers played American music, the beach slumbered beyond. Jojo took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Mohammed took out his pack. They lit their own, relaxed, and Jojo, the host, began.
“When we lived in Morocco, my mother had an Arab housemaid. She nursed me. That is, I grew up with her. I drank her milk. Let’s say that when you go to sleep your life is a kind of box that you have to deposit with someone for safekeeping. That’s an allegory. My mother would have had no problem handing that box, my life, over to her Arab neighbor. What I mean is that even when it was really a matter of life itself, the trust was so great that it was possible to place my life in her hands.
“So I—I don’t have any preconceptions about you. An Arab is a human being. An Arab has a soul. I once talked about the pain. Fifteen get killed in the territories and they put it in small print in the newspaper. A Jew gets killed in an attack and it’s on the front page! Why do they make distinctions when it comes to pain? If today I take my cigarette and put it out on Mohammed’s hand, and take a cigarette and put it out on my hand, you’ll measure the same force and feel exactly the same pain. Emotion. Love. Concern. Your son. These are things that weren’t given to us by the Likud or the Labor Party. Not by Judaism or Islam. I lost a son. I know what pain is. And that woman in Ramallah or Nablus, and don’t think I’m justifying in any way their stone-throwing, but he’s dead. She feels the same pain I felt when my son drowned in the sea. Pain can’t be divided; its force can’t be measured, because of its relation to a particular person.
“So I ask you, Mohammed, where do we want to get to? Are you satisfied with your plate, your bed, your house, or are you satisfied only with my plate, my bed, my wife, and my children? On the other hand, when a Jewish guy tells me he wants security here, you know? Security has no bounds! You can put a ground-to-air missile on every square meter. Will that give you security? Tomorrow some Ahmed won’t come and knife you? So where’s my security and where’s Mohammed’s security? So that’s what we have to talk about today, me and you—what are we willing to give each other? And I’m certain that if the two of us sit down and talk, we can finish off all the problems in two minutes.”
Mohammed listened quietly, nodding all the while. When Jojo finished talking, he said, “First I want to tell you that I’m glad I came to meet you. We don’t know each other. I saw you one time on television and I had the impression that you are a person with healthy natural instincts and a love of life, and I felt that this person is really looking for a way to live together. I’m happy that the minute we met you said that we can solve all the problems straight off in two minutes. So the only question is, What work will that leave you, Grossman?”
We laughed, and drank our first cup of coffee. The beach was still empty—only a few new immigrants from Russia cooking in the sun.
“Before we solve all the problems in two minutes,” I said, “maybe we could clarify the most basic concepts, so that we’ll know if we’re talking about the same thing. What do you, Mohammed, call this country, the one Jojo calls Israel?”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Mohammed said, “it’s always Palestine. I don’t care if Jojo calls it Israel. Jojo has the right to live here as an individual and as a nation, and my right as a Palestinian is to live in Palestine, as an individual and as a nation, with the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. That’s the basic principle, and I’m convinced Jojo will agree with me.”
“I agree 100 percent,” Jojo confirmed, “but you accept that this is also the Jewish state, right?”
“As far as I’m concerned, Israel can call itself whatever it wants.” Mohammed smiled. “If it’s just a semantic problem, I don’t care. But if it means—like now—that it’s a Jewish state with all the privileges and laws that discriminate in favor of the Jews, then other questions arise that I don’t agree with.”
Jojo stiffened. “Let’s get this straight. I, as a Jew, have no country other than Israel. I have to have one country that will be mine. I, Jojo Abutbul, was born Jewish. I did not decide that. I didn’t have a store where I could take from whatever shelf I wanted. I was born Jewish. I deserve a place somewhere in the world to live the way I want, yes or no?”
“Ah … with regard to that question, you formulated it in a very difficult way.”
“I did not!” Jojo cried. “That’s a question from the gut, not from the head!”
“Look, Jojo,” Mohammed said, getting a little more serious. “Before you came from Morocco, I was here.”
“I’m not kicking you out!”
“One second, give me a second. This pretty, sparkling Ashdod of yours, just for your information, even after the country was established in 1948, there were still Arabs here and in Ashkelon, and Israel expelled them in accordance with the infamous Plan D.1 Now you’re alive and you exist, and you have this country, and I’m not challenging your right to a country, but according to what you say, ‘I’m here, I don’t have anywhere else to go,’ ditto as regards the Palestinians—they have nowhere else to go—”
“I agree with you,” Jojo cut him off. “But just a minute! I can help you with something that I don’t know if you know. I say that having the Law of Return only for Jews—that’s racist! I’m not hiding that! But I ask you, Mohammed, you have the option of getting up tomorrow and moving to Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon—all those are Arab countries. But here I’m saying to you, in addition to all twenty-two of those countries, I’m saying to you, here I’m going to build another country for you, completely Palestinian, in Gaza and the West Bank. Wait a minute! You don’t have to take your things and move there. Understand! As far as I’m concerned, you are a citizen of the State of Israel, with all your rights! But by this act that I’m making, do you accept that Israel is my country? You can live in it, but under my conditions, my government, my laws. And if I should want to live in your country, it will be under your laws and your government and your conditions. Can you live with that?”
“You and I, Jojo, when we’re aware of those discriminatory, racist laws, and we both fight for their repeal by the legislature …”
Jojo: “You’re not answering me! Say yes or no!”
Mohammed breathes deeply: “If you don’t recognize my right to full equality here, I won’t recognize your right.”
“No, no, you don’t understand.” Jojo smiles uncomfortably. “I’m saying this: you and I want a divorce. You’ve been married to me for forty-three years. I love you, you’re my soul, everything. I don’t want to live with you! Let’s get divorced. What do you want as a dowry?”
“I’m not asking for a dowry. We really married against our wills. Not out of love. But today we’re sailing on this sea in the same boat.”
“And I own the sea.”
“I don’t agree that you own the sea!”
“But I’m the strong one! If I want, I can come today as Prime Minister Jojo and make a law—Whoever doesn’t accept Israeli citizenship in the Jewish state—the Jewish state!—gets put in a car and taken away. Can you do anything to stop me? Nothing. Cry, scream until tomorrow!”
It’s only Mohammed’s mouth that is smiling at Jojo now. “First, Jojo, my friend, inside, in my heart, I don’t feel that you are in control and that you have power. I don’t feel that I’m inferior to you. True, you now have strength and power, but I am among those who believe that power changes hands. I’m a minority under you, but you are a minority under me, in the Arab Middle East. I have no feelings of inferiority with regard to you. I was born here. I have the strongest possible links with this homeland. I don’t feel that I’m a guest of yours. I sometimes feel, if I may be presumptuous, that you are a guest of mine, and that I accept you because I want to be realistic. That is, the Jewish people’s starting point, that they’re doing me a favor when they let me live in Um Elfahm, is mistaken. Look, in Um Elfahm we had 140,000 dunams of land before Israel was established, and then the Knesset came and made all kinds of laws and confiscated from Israel’s Arab citizens 1,200,000 dunams all at once. Today two kibbutzim and a moshav sit on Um Elfahm’s land. On our land! Another thing, 92 percent of Israel’s land is state land. If this country really recognizes me as part of it, then I should have a proportional part of that 92 percent of the country. Do you understand why I’m shouting? Because when you tell me that you’re doing me a favor by accepting me here, you have to look at things from my point of view, and then you’ll begin to understand what kinds of huge concessions Palestinians are making today when they offer two states side by side. But if after the Palestinian state comes into being you come and rescind the discriminatory laws, if with regard to the Law of Return, for instance—”
“But here I’m not arguing with you,” Jojo stops him. “The Law of Return has to apply to everyone.”
Mohammed raises a finger. “In other words, you agree that the Arabs who were expelled from Ashdod can come back to live in Ashdod?”
“Yes! They can buy a house the way I do! I’m not giving them any privileges!”
Mohammed: “Allow me! You’re saying that this country, this future country of ours, will agree that every man in the world who wants to live in it can?”
Jojo: “Suits me!”
“Even if some miserable Kurd from Iraq or Turkey wants to live with you in Ashdod?”
“I’ve got no problem with that. If, if, if. If he promises to serve in my army, to be loyal to the Jewish state and not betray it. To fight together with me against whoever wants to take this country from the both of us, even to fight against Syria with me!”
“But it should be clear to you,” Kiwan says, “that if there’s total equality here, the country won’t have its Jewish character anymore.”
“Why won’t it?” Jojo asks in horror. “It has to have! There’ll be maximum equality, as much as possible! But subject to this being a Jewish country!”
“Then it’s not real equality! Then the Jews have extra rights because of their Jewish birth! Then it’s no longer Mohammed’s country!”
“Just like in Syria there are extra rights for Arabs, as opposed to Jews!”
“Look, if you come at me with something like that”—Mohammed raised his thick, hoarse voice for the first time—“let me tell you that my counter demand is just as purely racist—have the Palestinian state include all parts of Israel in which there are Palestinians! Give me the Galilee and the Triangle!”
“I’m ready to! I’m ready to give them to you, if—if you give me Nablus and Hebron, where I once lived!”
“Hey!”
“Why ‘hey’? Why not? Don’t you see you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth? Do Jews live in Hebron today? They do! Abraham lived there two thousand years ago? He did! Listen to me, Mohammed.” Jojo sat back in his chair, lit two cigarettes in his mouth, pulled on both, and passed one over to Mohammed. “For years you butchered and exiled us, and for years we’ve butchered and exiled you. What I’m saying is this: we have two possibilities. Either we can talk nice and act bad, or talk bad and act nice. In other words, I, according to the way I see things, I prefer to get the dirt out of my mouth. Let’s sit in a room and argue for twenty hours; I’ll tell you you’re garbage, you’re crap, and you tell me the same thing, but in the end you and I get up with a clean heart, and we have no more demands, and we’ve divided up all the property between us, but for always! Finished!”
“I agree with you on that. But understand one thing, that the minute we repeal all the privileges Jews get here, this country will stop being a Jewish country and will become the country of the people who live in it.”
“People, what people?” Jojo slaps his forehead with an open palm. “Is England a country of its people? Is Syria a country of its people? England is the country of the English, and Syria is the country of the Syrians. And you, if you live in Israel, will live in the country of the Israelis, as an Arab minority in the country of the Jews!”
Their faces are now close to each other. Their hands, waving excitedly, hit one another, and at times intertwine for a moment. Both are solidly built, with black hair and tough faces. Both look older than they are. Mohammed is about fifty, balding a bit, more careful with his words. Every so often he throws out a bit of legal jargon at Jojo in a lawyerly tone, looking at him over his glasses, putting on a tolerant and didactic expression. It drives Jojo crazy.
Jojo, thirty-eight, is in a blue undershirt and shorts. His sunglasses remain glued to his forehead even when he jumps up in indignation. He has lived on the beach since he was four years old—“Everything I know about life is from the sea.” In his youth he was a violent criminal, terrorizing this beach until he won himself a place and was pacified. Ever since his appearance on television, politicians from all parties have been courting him, and he, “even though I’ve been Likud from my mother’s womb,” meets with them all, listens, gives advice—lively, heart-winning, knowing well that they all think that through him they have gained a direct linkup to “the people’s voice.” His face has infinite expressions, and he talks in a very loud voice, at a shout, taking control of the conversation, hyperemotional, undulating like a cat across the table from Mohammed, ambushing words and arguments. He manages the entire beach as he debates—giving advice to a young soccer player who approaches him, giving a contribution to a needy family, trading secrets with a party activist—a one-man band.
The two minutes passed. The conversation lasted close to four hours, and in the process it slowly became clear to both sides how much trouble they were having bridging the gap between them. It was easy for the onlooker to realize that, despite the goodwill, their first line of defense was also their last. Jojo would never give up Israel as the Jewish state; Mohammed would never retreat from his goal of full equal rights with Jojo—that is, that Israel be “a country of its citizens” and not “the country of the Jewish people.”
As this became apparent, the two of them became impatient, trying to catch hold of each other, to put it into other words, words that would circumvent an abyss. They did not want the victor in this confrontation to be familiar political differences. They wanted victory to go to those nameless things whose potency and insistence could be felt when Jojo’s and Mohammed’s faces came close together—that same link of expression and warmth, the mirror dialogue of mimicry, and the hidden thing that synchronized the two of them, as in a ceremonial warriors’ dance. It was easy to imagine them changing roles and arguing, in an opposite state of affairs—each one making the other’s points with the same fervor.
Mohammed: “The truth, Jojo: you too have suffered discrimination during your life in Israel, right?”
“Suffered?” Jojo guffaws. “I grew up on discrimination. I grew up on inequality. I grew up with the word ‘Moroccan.’ I grew up with everything you’ve felt. Compared with the Ashkenazim, I was discriminated against here, too.”
“So you are the first one who should understand the violent response of the Palestinians in the territories, and the desire of the Arabs in Israel for equality.”
“No, no,” Jojo rebuffed him. “Me, my whole outlook now is against violence. Ask why. Because all violence brings counter-violence. Mohammed tells me, ‘You’re strong in your country and weak in the Middle East.’ But the Arabs are strong in the Middle East and weak in the world. The world, pal, is built like a ladder. For every strong man there’s someone stronger than him, and what we’re talking about is not how to be strong but how to reach an understanding. So that I can turn my back to you and sleep peacefully, and you the same. Look, Mohammed, for instance, wanted to be a lawyer. The country didn’t try to trip him up, he went and learned law …”
“It certainly did try to trip me up!” Mohammed shot him down. “I’ll give you a simple example. When I was studying they put me, in my second year, before exams, on house arrest, to keep me from passing the exams. I stayed at home for an entire year just for having quote unquote ‘dared to protest’ the injustices we spoke of before.”
“But you studied and finished and became a lawyer, right? They didn’t even give me the option you had! That is, between Jojo and Mohammed, Jojo was the one more discriminated against!”
“Look, Jojo. The Sephardim were discriminated against and are still discriminated against. When I was in school, it hurt me to see that less than 1 percent of the students in the university were Arabs, and the same for the Sephardim!”
“Not only in the university! Also in the officer corps, and in the government!”
“It’s very interesting how and why they block cooperation between the Sephardim and the Arabs here, even though, from a theoretical point of view, logic says that both of us, the underdogs, should work together. Let me remind you that here in your Ashdod the government—indirectly but deliberately—uses the Sephardim against us, and when there’s an Arab attack against Israelis, it’s you who go out to beat up the poor Arab laborers! You, the Sephardim! In my opinion, the response of the Sephardim, so hostile to the Arabs, derives first from them not having been given an education. They were not given a chance to study. They’re a simple, unsophisticated public, and when the newspaper headlines and the radio stir them up—and that’s directed very well from above—that public gets hot and blows up. Second—discrimination. You and I, Jojo, both our groups get screwed here in this country, because of the historical reality that the early waves of immigration were Ashkenazim, and after a period of hardship here, they became the ones who eat the cream. Then you became disadvantaged, and it’s well known that the disadvantaged—it’s very simple—wants to compensate himself by discriminating against others.”
“I don’t agree!” Jojo jumped up from his seat. “Take the most extreme anti-Arab movements we have, Kahane and the Moledet Party who want to transfer all the Arabs out of Israel, in all their hierarchies you’ll hardly find a single Sephardi! The entire leadership is Ashkenazim! Americans! So tell me, how can that be? Where’s your theory? Listen to me, Mohammed, don’t go looking for university explanations. When it’s a matter of life or death, there aren’t any Ashkenazim and there aren’t any Sephardim. Everyone comes together. Just as an Arab from Sudan hates me when I send my army into Lebanon, we’re all against you when you butcher one of us. And precisely because you and I have the same mentality, you should understand that, and I’ll explain to you: Our behavior, Mohammed, will be different from Grossman’s in many ways, different from the Ashkenazi’s. If he has a guest who comes in and talks to his wife, it won’t bother him at all. If a guest comes and talks with my wife, he’ll never enter my house again! That means with us, with you and with me, my wife, and to put it more generally, my honor, is a higher priority than my work, before everything. With the Ashkenazi, no. First his work, first advancement. With us, a guest comes to my house, even if two hours beforehand he ran over my son, the minute he comes to my house, first I welcome him in. I’ll get him afterward—but that’s separate. Our commitment is to honor. Our mentality all plays accompaniment to the first violin—our honor. And I, Jojo Abutbul, don’t hate Arabs, but I would make a law that every Arab who throws a stone in the intifadah should be shot. Because for me the act of throwing a stone is not just throwing a stone. I’m not afraid of a stone!” Jojo shouts, the veins in his neck bulging. “But with me, in Morocco, who do you throw stones at? At a dog! At a snake! It insults me! I’m not his dog, not his snake! And don’t forget, Mohammed, that same stone you throw at us today, we grow up with it, we remember it!”
Kiwan’s face went sour. “First of all, the Israeli public—and you, I’m very sorry to say, are a part of it—doesn’t understand what the intifadah is. You don’t understand the pathetic state of the people there, how bitterness built up to the point that—how did that writer of yours, S. Yizhar, put it—‘a nation rose up.’ People had no way to remain silent any longer, so they used the stone. Not, God forbid, to insult you! They are certainly not treating you like a dog, God forbid. An Arab will also throw a stone at another Arab. It’s simply the only tool he has to make the world hear him! And besides, Jojo, you have to understand something important. When you’re there, you’re not a private citizen. You are an instrument in the hands of the Israeli regime …”
“I’m no instrument! What do you mean instrument? I’m part of this country, and because of that I’m also part of the government!”
“You’re an instrument in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime! I’d expect of you, my dear friend [Jojo nods with a smile, waiting in ambush for his prey], that you, as part of the progressive Israeli public [Jojo the whole time is going, “Yes, yes …”], you should be saying that you refuse to serve in the territories!”
Jojo pounces. “Aha! In other words, I should rebel against the law! Against the law that I previously agreed to accept as a citizen here! And that’s probably exactly what you’ll do to me tomorrow if you and I have that country of equality, and you suddenly don’t agree with me about the law, you’ll say, Wait a minute! I’m resigning from the army until you, Jojo, agree with me!”
Mohammed: “There are laws, and there are laws!”
“No, pal!” Jojo bangs on the wooden table; the coffee cups and soft-drink bottles shake. “When I was in Morocco with you, you were my boss. Did I come crying to you and throw stones at you? There were things I didn’t like there! I walked down the street and they threw stones at me, too, and they said dirty Jew and I got slapped in the face! Did I dare rebel then or say that there are laws and there are laws? I had two options then, to leave Morocco and come here or to accept what there was there, the good and the bad! You, if you don’t want to live with me, as you wish, I made you a Palestinian state over there, there you have your own laws, fine with me. I’ll go there with a visa, like a tourist!”
The conversation was interrupted for a moment. One of the workers from the restaurant came up to Jojo to ask him something. He was limping a bit. Jojo introduced him to us as Uzi. “Actually,” Jojo explained, “his name is Awad. I changed it to Uzi. Easier for him, easier for me.” A deep, heavy glance curdled for a long moment between Mohammed Kiwan and Uzi. “He doesn’t feel comfortable either when I call him Awad in front of people. Look at him, Mohammed. He lives in Gaza, and because he had good relations with Jews, your friends there put two bullets through his legs.” Jojo sent the man off and resumed his flood of words. “We said I’d visit you there with a visa. If you want, let me come in. If you don’t want, throw me back. But here, in Israel, you and I will live in equality. According to the laws we make together. We are not allowed to decide to take the law into our own hands. If you or I start deciding which laws to obey, it will start today with the law about military service in the territories, tomorrow it will be the income tax law, and the day after it will be the law about how many wives I can have. You have to understand what the real meaning of democracy is. It’s in your interest to understand, because you want democracy in the country you’ll have someday. Democracy is that if I don’t agree with the law I don’t have a choice! And I want to hear from you now an answer to one question about all this—you, as a citizen here in the State of Israel: Will the Palestinian state, when it is established, satisfy you for good?”
Mohammed: “I accept that, with two of my reservations. That I have my basic rights, and then there’s the last little problem that remains, my national identity.”
Jojo leaned over at him suspiciously. “What’s that? What did you say?”
Mohammed studied his fingers. “Give me recognition as a national minority. In other words, internal autonomy. In Israel. For the Arabs here.”
“Oho!” Jojo erupts. “Hello, trouble! So now you’ve made me another problem—that you know in advance you’re looking for as a problem, not a solution! Very nice! And here, from the start I’ve been telling you, Listen, let’s the two of us bake two cakes. When it comes to how much flour, how many eggs we’ll put in—about all that I’m willing to ask your advice. But the minute we’ve baked the two cakes, don’t eat mine! And you, Mohammed, you should understand from your nature and I’m also appealing to your logic and your sense of justice—you can’t take part of mine once I’ve given you yours! You got your country and flag and leadership, so leave me alone with my country and flag and leadership!”
He is breathing rapidly, wrathfully. Offended. An idea suddenly comes to him. “You know what? You want autonomy here? Fine! But all the Jewish settlements in your Palestinian state, give them autonomy, too! What you demand for yourself, demand for me, too! But listen, let it be, I’m telling you, let’s not fool around with leftovers. I won’t put my fish in your meat, and you won’t put your chicken in my steak. Let’s leave the fish to itself and the chicken to itself!”
Mohammed: “Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza—and of course I consider East Jerusalem to be part of it—there will still be our problem inside Israel. Am I forbidden to educate my son in accordance with my cultural heritage? Am I forbidden to foster my Palestinian nationalism? Am I forbidden to hope that the country’s flag should reflect my national sensibilities also?”
Jojo shakes his head in anger and amazement. “Look what kind of person you are. You came here to tell me that you want your flag, your leadership, independence. That you don’t want to live according to my law. And I’m saying, You’re 1,000 percent right! So why don’t you understand the same thing about me, that I want a flag that’s all mine and laws that are all mine? Why do I need to try so hard to understand you, despite the fact that today I’m stronger than you and I’ve got power, and you, with nothing, you exist just in theory, you’re already starting to tell me what to do here! So what will happen tomorrow when you’re strong? Where will I be? After all, you butcher your own brothers who don’t agree with you, so me you’ll grind to a pulp! You scare me, Mohammed! You’re scaring Jojo, the most moderate man in the country, who’s willing to listen and to talk. What you’re saying to me is, Listen, Jojo, now I’m getting something else ready for you! So what happens with people like me? They tell you, Hey, just a minute, if that’s the way it is, motherfucker, I’ll live my own life, and shit on all the rest! Let my kid burn out his brain with your kid in his own good time! But I’m saying no. I want your guts and my guts to stop fighting! I want to be able to look my kid straight in the eyes. I want my kid to live here, and if your kid wants to live here, that’s just fine.”
“Do you know that because of the land confiscations my child won’t have anywhere to live in Um Elfahm? My house is already on the very edge, and there’s nowhere to build for my son?”
Jojo stretches out his arms at him in an expansive gesture of brotherhood. “Hey, Mohammed, my son doesn’t have anywhere to live near me either! Jojo would also like a house with ten rooms—but he doesn’t have one! So what, the two of us will fight over ten rooms, or maybe we should both squeeze ourselves into five rooms so there will be room for both me and you? What do you say, Mohammed?” He gives him a smile of “Let’s shake, let’s find at least one thing in common to start with.”
But for Kiwan this is not just a one-shot argument. He’s fought his whole life for these ideas of his, and he’s paid the price. So he gets precise: “Just as you said. We need to look for a way to live together. But if your basis for discussion is to equate the rights of the settlers who stole land from Palestinian peasants with my rights in Um Elfahm, where we’ve been living on the land since time immemorial, then there’s no symmetry in your comparison!”
Jojo is again surging forward, and Mohammed’s lips are already moving, mumbling his prepared answer, and it is already manifestly clear how each argument lights a long wick of memories with the other, running swiftly down the fuse of painful wounds. You can see how in each segment of their conversation the entire conflict is reborn, from its shell made of yesterday’s newspapers back to Sarah the matriarch saying, “Cast on this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, with Isaac.” And in the background—the sea, which also, you may recall, was once assigned a role in the conflict. “You’re still not answering me about that, Mohammed, and time is running out. Think about it now and tell me yes or no, in one sentence; it has to be only one sentence, from the guts; you’ve got a problem, Mohammed, maybe because you’re a lawyer, you send it from the guts to the brain and then to the mouth, and the whole time I’ve been talking to you out of my nature. Will you, Mohammed, recognize without any challenge my right to one Jewish state? Yes or no?”
Mohammed laughs. “Look, my dear Jojo, from the cumulative experience of the Arabs in Israel …”
“He’s being a lawyer again.”
“Just a minute. Listen to me. After the Palestinian state is created, we’ll still have a problem with you. Our land. Our education. Our definition as a national minority here. Our national symbols. I’m coming out of all this, and in the most democratic way possible trying to change the situation, trying to convince you—not violently—that my good is your good. That we, the Arabs in Israel, will be a kind of, a canton, we ourselves will manage the—”
“Canton?!” Jojo burst out, from the heart. “Now you’ve killed me! Now you’ve actually created a state within a state!”
“Just a canton,” Mohammed Kiwan blurted out, “a small kind of authority …”
“A canton is a state within a state!” Jojo Abutbul repeated.
“Switzerland, for instance, is one country and it has cantons in it!”
“So you know what?” Jojo banged his fist in his hand. “I’ll keep the whole West Bank and Gaza under my control, and I’ll make cantons there! You decide what canton you want to live in!”
“I want to explain to you, Jojo, that autonomy, or a form of self-administration, call it whatever you want, does not diminish your future State of Israel; it can even augment it and be helpful to solve all the problems now, and not to leave any wounds under the skin, because I don’t want to reach a situation where ten years from now, because of the country’s discrimination against me, there will be an internal intifadah.”
“So there can be an intifadah of Ethiopian Jews, too, and an intifadah of Russians, and of the oppressed Moroccans, too! So we should make a Moroccan canton? Listen, Mohammed, what you’re actually saying is that a man like the Transferist is right. Gandhi says, I’ll transfer out the Arabs, by consent or by force, but when I finish there will be only Jews here. That way I prevent any wounds under the skin! Then they’ll be one wound, one earth-shattering scream, but that will finish it off and it will be healthier for everyone! You live with all your brothers in your Palestinian state. You won’t have double identities, you won’t have a problem that you need ten words to explain who you are, Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, Muslim, and I won’t have any problems either with citizens that threaten me constantly with an intifadah.”
Mohammed’s face paled. “If you are such a racist and ignorant man that you think, like Gandhi, that in the twentieth century it’s possible to transfer nations, then please. I think it will fail.”
Jojo: “I’m against it! But now you’re coming and scaring me, and not leaving me a choice!”
“People aren’t sheep to be taken to slaughter!” Mohammed shouted. “They’ll oppose the transfer! There will be more bloodshed here!”
“Then 200,000 were killed and the problem was solved!” Jojo came back with a shout. “Then 400,000 were killed! But with that we’ve solved it for good!”
“But you already know from historical experience that that won’t solve the problem! There will be a new problem!”
They pound the table furiously, shouting without listening. Two families of Russian immigrants, who might very well have arrived only a couple of days before, watch them in astonishment. They certainly have no conception how much this debate touches on them and their children. When Mohammed gets up for a moment to make a phone call, Jojo turns to me in amazement: “So there’s a problem here that will never be solved! So whoever is strong will live! There’s no other choice. Our leaders apparently know this problem. That’s one of the things we don’t know as citizens … So we’re back at square one with them again. We’re in a round room without corners. No one can sit in his own corner; wherever you sit there’s no corner …” He whistles in amazement. “So it really has to be clear in the peace agreement that we solve this problem finally, and this is the last opportunity. If the PLO is Mohammed’s sole representative, the PLO will have to commit itself to not having any more claims on the Galilee. We’ll be sorry if that’s not in the peace agreement.” He rose, then sat down. “And even though I’ve been arguing until today that peace is the thing Israel needs most urgently, now I’ll oppose it! With that kind of peace I’d rather not have it! Because then I didn’t heal a wound, I only covered it up, and underneath, the wound will continue to become infected. Then my situation will be that much worse, because I’ve already handed over my best cards, Nablus and Hebron … very interesting … and he’s honest, Mohammed, he’s speaking sincerely. Someone will have to give way here, no arguing that … I’m starting to understand what’s happening here … I’ve discovered a point of view that I, as an Israeli, never knew about.”
Mohammed returns, sitting down heavily opposite him. Jojo turns to him with a now quiet, slightly wounded voice. “I always thought that you and I were equal. You and I—part of the map. Sure there are problems, sure there isn’t complete equality, but we try to attain it. You are an Israeli Arab, I don’t interfere with your feelings or with your religion, and I’ll try to help you as much as I can, so that your son will go to a good school, so that he has a future here like my son. I was ready to put my shoulders level with yours. But to reach a state where one day you’ll want to set up a state within a state? I don’t care what you call it—canton, self-administration, the Autonomous Region of the Galilee. I, Jojo Abutbul, would be making myself a misery that I never thought of! So Jojo Abutbul is sitting and thinking that if that’s the case, maybe Gandhi and Sharon really know what I didn’t know and what you knew.”
Mohammed’s face isn’t what it was before, either. With a weariness much greater than that caused by the conversation itself he says, “Linking my ideas and Gandhi’s is very strange. Because if I wanted to be like Gandhi in my opinions and demands, I would have to say, Transfer the entire Jewish state of Israel! Abutbul will go to Morocco, the one from Russia will return to Russia, the one from Romania will return to Romania. But what I’m trying to explain to my friend Jojo, unfortunately not with any great success—”
“No, no, you really succeeded! God help me if I understood right what I understood!”
They sat and talked for a few more minutes, repeating their indictments and marveling at one another, trying to find a crack in the round, cornerless wall. Afterward Mohammed told of the classroom where his son studies, “in a four-meter-by-four-meter storage room, and in the winter, for there to be enough light, the teacher has to leave the door open.”
“The country should be ashamed of itself,” Jojo said. “It hurts me, it wounds my pride in my country, I won’t accept it.”
Mohammed continued to recount the daily hardships and harassments he endured as an Arab, problems deriving from the law and an abuse whose source was deeper. He told of a Jewish boy who had come up to him on the Netanya beach when he was there with his two small children and demanded that he, Mohammed, leave “because you’re polluting our beach.” Jojo listened. Before they parted, in an effort to smooth over—in retrospect—the sting left by the conversation, a clumsy effort but still heartwarming in its magnanimity, Jojo tried to put the best possible face on Kiwan’s demand for autonomy. “If we want Mohammed and his people to be loyal Israeli citizens,” he said, “first we have to be loyal to them. That means we can’t take what little remains to them: their honor, their pride, the little that a man needs in order to live. We won’t think only of what we want from them, we’ll also think of what they want from us. They’re part of us. And if there’s a Palestinian state next to the Jewish state, and Mohammed has the right to choose where to live and he decides to live here anyway, that will be to our benefit, it will bring us honor that he feels good and equal here. And when a man like Mohammed comes and says that he wants that, autonomy, his canton, he, in my opinion, doesn’t really mean it. He wants security. He wants a way to defend himself. That’s what he means when he asks for a canton. He actually wants a lot less than that—equality.”
Mohammed Kiwan accepted the hand proffered him. It seemed to me that Jojo’s moving gesture was more important to him—at that moment—than standing his ideological ground. Maybe Jojo really had understood Mohammed’s intent. I don’t know. “Maybe, as Jojo said with great justice,” Kiwan responded, “it may well be that the ideas I raised with regard to the canton were raised as a kind of shield, as the result of the cumulative and very bitter experience of the way the government here has behaved to the Arab population. But for me the most important part of this meeting was that I met Jojo the man. I felt in a very human way Jojo’s willingness to understand me, to identify with my suffering, and I leave here exhilarated, not because of what we said, but because of the sublime values of man and humanity. I always believed that every human being is, when it comes down to it, human. The stigmas, the labels Jew, Arab—this conversation proved that they are as important as an onionskin. And just for that I’m happy I came.”
The two of them stood, exhausted from the conversation, and then, in an impulse of the moment, embraced.
1 Plan D was the first strategic plan of the IDF in 1948 to occupy towns and villages populated by Arabs, in lands assigned by the UN partition to the Jewish state.