Sleeping On A Wire

“… SO EVEN IF there are a few Jews here and there in the Galilee, there can still be Arab autonomy there! Absolutely! And the extent of the Arabs’ allegiance to the state will, if you ask me, depend precisely on the distance of the Syrian tanks from the border! You saw in January 1991, in the first moment of the Gulf War, how all the truth came out. If we succeed in Judaizing the region, we will have put off the danger a little. It all depends on us.”

Professor Amon Sofer, a Haifa University geographer. For the last twenty-five years he has been sounding the alarm against the trends he sees in Jewish-Arab relations in both Israel and the territories.

“First, the facts. Human beings behave in an interesting way. Over the years the birth rate has been declining steadily, while the death rate has not changed much. There is the primitive stage—many are born, many die. Then there’s the ‘Ashkenazi’ phase—you have fewer children because your wife wants to fulfill herself, wants a Subaru, and you put off another child until next year.

“The Israeli Arabs have sustained for almost fifty years the phase in which there is no decline in the birth rate, but a unique historical event has happened to them. We have brought their death rate down drastically over the space of four years. It happened when the people of Sakhnin stopped giving birth at home and started giving birth with us, at the Rothschild Hospital in Haifa.

“So we find a situation in which their birth rate is as if they were the most primitive people in the world but their death rate has dropped below even the Jewish death rate. Is it because they’re cleaner than you are? No! It’s because they are a population made up entirely of children. Here I want to touch on the worst situation, about which the public is generally mistaken. Approximately 50 percent of the Israeli Arabs are young children! Nearly 12 percent are high-school students. In other words, 62 percent of them are under the age of twenty! There are almost no old people! Because those are fellows from the Ottoman period, when the life span was short. There are very few old people in Arab society, and the great majority are young people and small children.”

I remembered that pleasant afternoon with Tagrid and Abed Yunes in Arara. The two children in diapers, and the couple’s argument over how many children they should have …

“True, true,” he confirmed patiently, “there is a decline in the birth rate. We see it in the tables. In recent years, however, there has been a small rise, which is also a cause for concern, and I think it is intentional. Women have come to the hospitals—in Afula, for example—and asked to have their IUDs removed, saying that it is their contribution to the intifadah. Yes, yes—Israeli-Arab women. A pediatrician reported it to me. But that’s not the decisive thing. What will be decisive will be the demographic process that I call ‘momentum.’ Even if Israeli Arabs today decide not to have more than two children per couple, there will still be twenty years during which the business will keep on going just as it does today, and it will explode. You don’t believe me? Take their one-year-olds. What will happen with them twenty years from now? Even if we suppose that they have only two children, think of what massive numbers of young couples there will be. The coefficient will remain horrible.

“And there are those who don’t limit themselves!” he shouts, as if outraged by some disgraceful breach of faith. “Sometimes you go to a village—and I have to tell you, these are my real friends—Feisal Zuabi in Miser, thirty children, all of them accountants, teachers. There’s a village here, Hajajra, and there’s a man there: when I was a student he had eighteen children, and when he was killed in an accident in 1978 he already had forty-eight children. Today he has 671 descendants in the village! Unbelievable! To put it concisely, religious Muslims continue to have children as if nothing had happened. The Druze continue. The Bedouin, too. So even twenty years from now you’ll have no consolation, so don’t look for it.

“Now, the main thing. In the year 2000—without counting immigration—the Jewish population will be 4.2 million and the Israeli Arabs will number 1.2 million; there will be about 1.5 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria and close to a million in Gaza. In other words, in Greater Israel, if we continue to control the territories, there will be 4.2 million Jews and 3.7 million Arabs. That’s already a binational state, clear and simple.

“Even if we add a million Jewish immigrants, and add them in as if there is no emigration, and as if the big wave of immigration does not increase emigration, and assuming that the Arabs continue to act just as they do now—compute the figures and you’ll be surprised. The Jews will rise from 54 percent to 57 percent of the population, and the Arabs will drop from 43 percent to 40 percent. That’s the whole difference. The binational state remains.”

He is about sixty years old. Tall, gangly, with glasses. He is open, patronizing. He piles the table before us with documents, studies, tables, data, with an aura of energetic, military, almost Hardy Boys–type enthusiasm. It is apparent that he sees himself as the last soldier on a mountain ridge, defending the lost cause of an inattentive and indifferent convoy. I, in contrast, in the face of the flood of numbers and maps and photographs that he stacks up around me, photographs he takes to keep track of illegal construction in the villages—I get more and more depressed.

“What’s wrong with there being an Arab majority in the Galilee?” young Mohammed Daroushe of Iksal asked me bitterly. “The Galilee has been Arab for two thousand years! So why have they made such a ruckus about an Arab who bought a dunam in Kfar Tabor [a Jewish town in the lower Galilee]? He’s not an Israeli citizen? He didn’t pay for the land?”

“What effect will an Arab majority in the Galilee have? Oho …” Arnon Sofer sighed deeply. “The effect will be over a very wide spectrum of phenomena. First, the sense of being a minority, or the other side’s sense of being a majority. When I go on a bus alone, I hide myself in a corner and read a book quietly. When two of us travel, we talk. And when we’re seven school friends, we shout.

“Because when you are part of a group, you behave differently. In the large Arab concentrations in the Galilee 90 percent voted for non-Zionist parties [in 1988]. Ninety percent! That’s not the case in small Arab settlements distant from the Arab center. You also behave differently on the road. You observe Israeli law less. There are areas in which you feel—from the driving, cleanliness, illegal construction—that the State of Israel ends there!

“Then there’s the language. You won’t speak Hebrew there anymore. You’ll speak only Arabic. And you’ll put on your kaffiyeh. There’s already the beginning of national consciousness. If a Jewish person goes there, the Arab’s territorial imperative stirs. A foreign body has entered the territory! And you ever so slowly gather strength. Then Jewish people have trouble getting there. When you, the Jewish idealist, settle in the Galilee, and everything is taken by masses of Arabs—from land, to shopping centers, to employment—because they’re the cheapest labor force—and you have that great magnet, Tel Aviv, acting on you, then you’ll get out of there pretty fast. You know, in the sixties the Galilee absorbed about 150,000 Jews. Guess how many were left ten years later. Guess. Thirteen thousand.

“In the meantime, all the essential components for the actualization of autonomy have been created. They have territory. In that territory there is a group that constitutes the majority. There you already have the two major factors in irredentism and autonomy.

“Technically, I can trace the borders of that autonomous entity. There is already a physical Arab continuity, including land ownership, that turns the entire area into a kind of territory. Take Arabeh, Sakhnin, Dir Hannah, Nazareth, B’aineh, Rumana. That’s a continuity. And remember that the most difficult areas in Yugoslavia today, between the Serbs and the Croats, are areas of mixed population. That’s where the battles began and got serious. That’s where the destruction is.

“That’s exactly what’s simmering under our noses. And it was spontaneous. No one planned in advance the establishment of the Arab Committee for the Preservation of Land, or the Arab Mayors Committee. But how was I brought up as a Zionist Amon Sofer? I remember how we cried at the song ‘On the Negev Plains,’ and the eleventh of Adar, the day Trumpeldor fell, it was terrible, it hurt as if it had happened just yesterday! We beat the Greeks and got back at Pharaoh and screwed Ahasuerus. That’s how that little Zionist, Arnon Sofer, was brought up—as a great national patriot.

“Now look.” He bends his fingers one by one. “Land Day and Brotherhood Day and Home Day and Olive Day and Water Day and Equality Day. They stand at attention, they write songs, and our friend Toufiq Ziad, the mayor of Nazareth, writes: ‘Here in the enchanted Galilee we have a homeland!’ At their summer camps they celebrate that and draw pictures of it and cry for it, and when you go through Arabeh, you see stores painted with PLO colors, because they’re building a national consciousness!

“I sit with my good friend Majed Elhaj, who may be the next leader of the Israeli Arabs, and he tells me, ‘I won’t live with you in peace if you don’t change the flag. I want a Muslim color on the flag! And until you change that national anthem that does not speak of me or to me, I’ll fight for a binational state!’”

“No no no …” Majed Elhaj protests angrily when I quote that to him. “If I were really demanding everything Amon Sofer says, it would mean that I’m demanding fully equal rights. I’m not demanding that! Under current circumstances, there can’t be equal rights. The Arabs in Israel are struggling for equal opportunities, not equal rights! It’s important to distinguish between the two. When Jews and Arabs speak of ‘full equality,’ they actually mean two different things. The Jew means changing the Jewish character of the country, and he fears that. The Arab means equal opportunity as regards budgets, services, and so on. There can be full equality only at a later stage, only if—in a peace process—the country begins to think again about its orientation, and to define for itself what it wants, whether to continue Zionist nationalism forever or whether there’s a new situation that allows a new social contract, in which all groups in Israeli society, including the Arabs, are partners as legitimate elements in Israeli society. Then, under such circumstances, it will be possible to speak of full equality of rights and responsibilities in all senses. Today there can’t be anything like that. Not yet.”

“Oh, don’t be so naïve,” Amon Sofer prodded me. “That’s their goal. They’ll fight for it. Their goal is not equal rights. Here they’re already talking about a deep national problem! Their battle won’t end if Majed receives four tons of gefilte fish for Friday night! They’ve already built the institutional infrastructure for autonomy. But let’s examine what will happen from here on out. A Palestinian state will be established—something, by the way, that I favor—and the Israeli Arabs will tell us, Hey, guys, no more excuses! Now give us full equality. Now give us work in factories and industry and in military camps! But we won’t give them that. For objective Jewish reasons, we’ll always think of Arnon Sofer’s son before Majed’s children. And of your children’s education, and the new immigrant who will come to you, and not of him.

“Then the million and a half that will be in the large concentrations around Um Elfahm and the central Galilee will begin to say, as in Kosovo, that they want to be annexed to their country, to the Palestinian state. Irredentism. I ask my good friend Majed about that and he has no answer. Why should you be different from any other group in the world? Why should you be any different from the national groups in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia? Why should you be different, especially when you have a historical account to settle with me, and especially when we will never agree to non-Jewish rule here?”

“I am very concerned,” Majed Elhaj responded in his home in Shfaram, “that all this talk of irredentism, and about the ambitions of the Arabs for autonomy within Israel, will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s because it will grant policymakers the legitimacy they need to persist with their current Arab policy, even to make it worse. It confirms their assumption that nothing has changed with the Arabs, that nothing will help, and that the Arabs’ ambitions will remain, when it comes down to it, antithetical to Israel. My friend Arnon Sofer forgets, for some reason, that there are many minorities in the world and that not all of them demand their own country.”

Arnon Sofer: “All I am saying is that if the Palestinian state comes into being, and they really do deserve it, let’s redraw the maps of the old State of Israel. Because I say, Damn it, Jews, you don’t want to live in Um Elfahm, you don’t want to live in Wadi Ara? Then give them up! Let’s, for instance, give them that whole area, here, the southern Triangle, with its tens of thousands of Arabs, in exchange, for instance, for the security guarantees that were included in the Allon Plan. For all the army outposts along the Jordan River!”

I read what I have just typed with eyes that have recently become somewhat bifocal. This way of seeing with a Jewish-Arab double focus helps me a lot. Without it, how could I know how to find my way when, over the thousands of kilometers I’ve burned these past months, I saw almost no important road sign written in Arabic as well, even though Arabic is an official language in Israel? At the grocery store, how would I be able to tell the difference between spaghetti and macaroni, between yogurt and sour cream, if I didn’t know how to read Hebrew? How would I know that I should keep my children away from poisonous cleaning fluids and pesticides? Could I tell the difference between aspirin and antibiotics if I couldn’t read Hebrew and English? How could I understand that a sign says FALLING ROCKS, while another says CAUTION—HIGH TENSION WIRES? (At least I’d be spared the bumper stickers on the pickup trucks that read JEWISH LABOR! and the placards pasted up by Meir Kahane’s disciples that proclaim “We propose five years’ imprisonment … for every non-Jew who has sexual relations with a Jewish woman.”)

I also read Arnon Sofer’s words with my bifocal eyes. To do this I enlist the gaze of Riad Kabha of Barta’a, for instance, who works at Givat Haviva for Jewish-Arab coexistence and integration; and the eyes of Amal Yunes of Kafr Ara, who said, “I feel that I belong here, this is my place. I so much want to be a part of it, to be ‘someone’ in this society”; and Lutfi Mashour’s wink: “I don’t want autonomy here! That’s all I need, autonomy: to live in a ghetto. Maybe we really deserve a ghetto, but I want to be equal. To belong!” Of course, not all the Arabs in Israel want to be part of Israeli existence. And those who do did not arrive at that desire out of overwhelming love of Israel but rather out of acquiescence and prudence, through an arduous process of formulating a new identity. Their struggle is for the achievement of civil equality. When I read the new partition plan proposed by Arnon Sofer, my Arab eyes go dark—my homeland unremittingly measures me through the lens of a numerus clausus, counting my babies and my dead. Switching me by decree from fate to fate, and in any settlement that is reached, no one will ask my opinion.

(Maybe on this matter it is worth asking the Jews who have come from Russia what they felt when they heard the sighs of relief of so many Russians when their homeland’s door slammed behind their backs.)

“Their allegiance to the state is exactly commensurate with the distance of the Syrian tank from the border,” Professor Sofer says, and for a moment I accept his words at face value, because the assertion fits in well with my fears. Then I examine his statement in the light, and I am already unsure. No, I don’t think Israeli Palestinians will fight shoulder to shoulder with the Israel Defense Forces against the Syrians, but neither am I convinced that many of them will be prepared to act to exchange Israeli rule for a Syrian, Iraqi, or even PLO regime. I have no doubt that today many of them have a good sense of what Israel still has to offer them. For them, Israel’s destruction will mean the end of a dream that has not yet been fulfilled but which is worth fighting for.

Arnon Sofer: “So you’ll say, Very nice. You’ve solved the problem of the Triangle. But what about the Galilee? And I say, If—if there’s a role for population transfer to play in this country, it’s not with the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It’s with the lower Galilee. If! Now you’ll probably ask, How is it that liberal, progressive Arnon Sofer can say a thing like that? Well, first of all, the Labor Party has done it twice already. The classic case is the Golan Heights. There we feverishly deported 70,000 Syrians in the space of two days. Now when you, sir, travel through the Golan, everything is nice, and you’re a good Zionist and you can explain to your children how nice it is here. Or in the lower city of Haifa. Or in Jaffa, from which you transferred 60,000 Jaffans! Don’t try to escape that! So you know what? Ten hard minutes, and maybe it’s the right solution?”

“Ten hard minutes,” I reminded him of what we both knew, “and afterward forty even harder years.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t do it. You see? Here my entire model collapses, because I’m not able to take it through to the logical conclusion. I won’t deport my good Arab friends. Do you think I can tell people I’ve known for years, with whom I work, to leave their homes? I recently told one of those friends, If something should happen, call me immediately and I’ll be right over!

“So, in theory, transfer might be the right solution. With the Bedouin in the Negev, too, since they are an absolute majority in their territory. In theory. In practice, that’s a different story. Because I am not morally able to carry it out. Even if my life was in danger. I can’t. Even if it costs me my life. [He shouts.] What will I do? I’ve got a big moral problem. I don’t have an answer. We’re in a horrible, terrible, vicious circle. I take figures like these home each night and I can’t sleep. I have no answers. All the tricks we can do can put it off only for a week or a year. The Arabs don’t want us, and that’s horrible!

“So what can we do? Not much, but something. First of all, get out of the territories. That’s the only logical response to the demographic problem. Get out of the territories and you’ve created an overwhelming Jewish majority in the State of Israel. A fifth of the country’s population will be Arab, and that’s not a binational state. That’s a normal ratio of majority to minority, like in most countries. Even if the minute after our retreat there’s a bloodbath in the territories, get out!

“Then, divide and govern. Yes, that blunt, cheap trick. Cultivate the Bedouin. Cultivate the Druze. The Christians. And give. Give to whoever is good to us. If he feels good, he won’t want to rebel against us.”

“One of the things that really drive me crazy,” says Lutfi Mashour, an Israeli Palestinian Christian Arab and a newspaper editor, “is how smart Jews make the same mistakes that others have made. The Jews will fall the same way the English fell, with the ‘divide and rule’ method. You, too, are always redividing the Arabs into Christians, Muslims, Bedouin, and you explain to us that we, the Christians, we’re really part of the West, who got here only by chance, and that we’re not Arabs at all. You said that the Druze aren’t Arabs, and now you’ve started saying that the Bedouin aren’t Arabs! And we call the Bedouin Al-Arab—they’re the original Arabs, not us! Then you made a new division, and said that the Christians themselves are divided into Maronites, who are, as you know, fervent, strictly kosher Zionists; and the Catholics, who are, you know, still on probation, and the Protestants, whom you once thought of as the best Zionists, but today they’re the top PLO supporters. So you play nicely with your toys and don’t understand anything.”

“Me?” Mashour, an intricate, quick-thinking, and ironic man, chuckled. “When I am cursed as a Catholic, I’m Catholic. When they discriminate against me as a Muslim, I immediately become a Muslim. Ask—what about Jewish? Well, in the original sense, as I understand Judaism, I’m more Jewish. More than the Jews here, because what remains in your Israel of Jewish values?”

“… and reinforce the Shin Bet,” Arnon Sofer keeps hammering away, “and the police and border guard! A Shin Bet and police state, yes! Without any window dressing. There’s no choice. We really are doomed to make a Sparta here. A country with a military landscape!

“And bang in wedges! Put new settlements between them wherever you can. Push them in here and here and here. I can be proud of that, because I am one of those responsible for the idea of Gush Segev [a cluster of small settlements in the western Galilee]. We shoved wedges in here and here and here, so that as much as possible they don’t have territorial continuity.

“But in any case, all that is only a delaying action.” He slowly gathered up the papers, documents, maps. “It only postpones it for a few years. If you see the future with open eyes—the demographic balance, the youth leaving the country, the deterioration of society, the defense effort that is pushing us into economic catastrophe, and the disappearing democratic forces.… We don’t live on a desert island, and one day, when we’re weak, we’ll take the blow. The State of Israel, I very much fear, will be destroyed.”

“A wonderful question. Why do I stay here? Because I was born here. Because my parents were Zionists. Because I’ve buried so many here. I’ve buried two hundred people here—friends, relatives, students. My brother fell in the War of Independence. And mostly—I don’t want to live in the Diaspora. I can’t. I told my children, That’s the way things are. This is my prediction. You are free to decide. I’ll stay here to hold the fort.”

Arnon Sofer has been saying these things for more than two decades. The Israeli left accuses him of racism, and the right accuses him of defeatism. The Arabs in Israel are angry that he suspects them of an aspiration for autonomy, an aspiration most of them forcefully deny.

To myself—through the hail of data, factors, and numbers that he pounded me with in forceful amicability, I considered to what extent the demographic question had, in recent years, become one of the central points of debate in our faded political discourse. Each side brings its own data, and even data that everyone accepts get interpreted by each side in accordance with its needs. All kinds of predictions about what year will bring equal numbers get launched—2015, 2030, 2045 (these relate to equality in all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, including the occupied territories). Many treat the numbers and percentages submissively and simplistically, as if at the very moment the demographic tie score is reached—and only at that moment—some magic, total process will begin. As if an especially determined or frightened minority, or one suffering from megalomania, cannot with its military power and advantage long rule over a majority larger than itself. As if we are not now deep in the tie score’s magnetic field, turning us for all practical purposes into a binational state in which there are inhabitants of three different ranks—Jews, Arab citizens, and the Arabs in the territories. As if the only important thing is how many Jews versus how many Arabs, and not what kind of life we make for ourselves here.

Sa’id Zeidani is the only one, so far, who has raised the idea of autonomy for Israeli Palestinians in such an open and explicit way. The idea won attention in 1989, after Arafat’s Algiers declaration of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians in Israel realized that day that Arafat’s “state” did not include them, and this meant that their interests were not even on the Palestinian agenda. “We, whatever happens, stay on the shelf,” a Palestinian-Israeli intellectual told me. This realization, along with the sense of discrimination in Israel, with the fear of a wave of Russian immigration, and perhaps—and this is only conjecture—smarting from the PLO’s failure to make any mention of the Arabs in Israel in its declarations, apparently induced Zeidani to publish his plan at the end of 1989. One may also suppose that now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the blow to the Israeli Communist Party—which for years led the struggle for equal rights for Arabs—some of its supporters will turn to more extreme and separatist modes of thought.

The most forceful opposition to Dr. Zeidani’s plan came, as I’ve noted, from the leadership of the Arabs in Israel. The arguments brought against it dealt with its geographical impracticability, with the implausibility that the Jewish majority would agree to it, and with the belief that demanding autonomy would lead the country to treat its Arab citizens more harshly.

“One of the central arguments always used by the extreme right is that the Arabs don’t show their cards. Now they are suddenly being given a present by Arab groups—not in foreign currency, but in gold—autonomy!” fumed Salim Jubran, editor of the Communist Party newspaper Al-Ittihad, in an interview with a local Haifa newspaper. Knesset member Nawaf Masalha (Labor) said, “The demand for autonomy will pull out from under us the moral correctness and legitimacy of our demands for Palestinian independence in the territories, first and foremost with regard to the Israeli left, which is our partner in this struggle. Whoever demands autonomy sabotages relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel.”

“Of course they attacked me,” Zeidani says dispassionately, as if he were not the target of the attacks. “I’m saying very harsh things, after all. But perhaps if for forty years you give the entire public a political education in a certain direction, you can expect that such ideas will not break through the ideological and pragmatic barriers. Their realization demands something hard and serious, and the political leadership is trying to escape into something easier. But I would like to hear,” he queried, “what your opinion is, as an Israeli.”

I responded that I respected his courage. That while he spoke I thought of how unfortunate it was that Israel had not been wise enough to create, for a man like him, channels through which he could express and realize himself as a real Israeli. But I agree, I told him, with only some of the opinions you’ve expressed. The word “autonomy” is not so frightening to me—I would like the Palestinian citizens of Israel to win maximum freedom as a national minority, to be able to manage their independent educational system, to establish an Arab university, to run their own religious institutions, instead of a Jewish official appointing the kadis (judges) and imams (preachers). I would like their young people to perform national service within and for their communities, and I would like the Israeli government to recognize, finally, their representative bodies, such as the Supreme Oversight Committee. Yet all this must be done, in my opinion, in the framework of the State of Israel, as the country of the Jewish nation, existing alongside the country of the Palestinian nation. I know that you don’t agree with me, and that in your opinion there is no chance for such integration, but in my opinion, even after forty-three years, we have still not sincerely tried, with full commitment, to create integration in the State of Israel. We have still not clarified for ourselves, Arabs and Jews, the meaning and requirements of terms like “equality,” “coexistence,” and “citizenship.” The process that took place between us up until now was, largely, one of mutual evasion and abstention. I’ve spoken a great deal; now I’d like to ask, in conclusion, whether you intend to take any practical measures to carry out your ideas?

“I am not a politician,” he said, “and I have no ambitions in that direction. I would like to contribute to self-understanding. It is a process, and there are already far-reaching changes in the existing leadership. The ideas have made their mark. The Progressive Movement speaks of ‘self-management’; the Islamic Movement is working for autonomy in education; Knesset member Daroushe has established a party made up solely of Arabs, there is a Supreme Oversight Committee of the Arab public, there is a Sons of the Village movement. All these are the germs. It’s true that today autonomy is a theoretical idea. But I’m telling you that ten years from now there will be a whole range of problems that will have no solution except in that direction. Problems of employment. Economic and social problems.

“So I think that I’m presenting you with a great challenge. I am presenting a great challenge to Jewish democracy, and Jewish values, and your entire tradition. I am presenting you here with a moral demand in the name of the categorical law that is above and beyond questions of nation or religion. It is a matter of humanity!” For the first time since the beginning of our conversation Zeidani raised his voice, and his face paled a bit. “You, by discriminating against me, are saying that I am a man of less worth than you are. That I am less than a man. If you say that—and that’s what the attitude of the Israeli majority implies, it follows logically—then the practical conclusion, in an Aristotelian sense, is to slap you in the face.”

Early morning in Faradis, on the old Hadera-Haifa road.

The coffeehouse sits right on the street. When I come and sit there, the conversation of the men dies out. They examine me carefully. Then they disappear. Around the square the stores open with a yawn. The large village awakens slowly. It lives with the road, just as another village might live with a river—small children sit on its edge and gaze longingly at the other side; boys careen with their bicycles between the waves of traffic and navigate them boldly; a shepherd crosses with three goats and two cabbages …

Afterward an old woman fords the roaring flow, erect, balancing a tall bucket on her head. A wonder of concentration and direction. Her hands lie at the sides of her body, holding her dress around her thighs, and the bucket does not move. She looks right, looks left, strides swiftly, and the bucket does not move. Hundreds of generations of the oppression of women have, one might say, molded her and her burden together. I drink a first cup of coffee, the sweetest of all, and eavesdrop on the conversation of the men behind me. There were once two sages, Rabbi Haya the Great and Rabbi Shimon Ben Halafta, who “forgot words of the Targum”—the Aramaic translation of the Bible—and “went to the Arab market to learn from them.” There they eavesdropped on the people until they recalled the meanings of the forgotten words. In Faradis, even an Israeli who knows no Arabic would be able to puzzle out the conversation: “Al me—ruh from department to department, jib me a red form …” “Wahada mush a primitive zalameh, you know, a zalameh in modern dress.” “Ana ahadit from him twenty cartons of tomatoes, daf’at him a down payment …” “And they fi idhum an arrest warrant, wa-ana shaef, mafish a judge’s signature!” “An-nas amalu in two days, all the concrete and all the electricity …” And this is how they talk among themselves.

I listened. I made a mental note of the Hebrew words—VAT, income tax, down payment, bank guarantee, social security, license, fines—an instrumental Hebrew screwed onto Arabic like a metal joint or, more often, like a clamp.

I thought of the rich, sensitive Hebrew I hear from people when they speak to me. The words of Zuhir Yehia of Kafr Kara came to mind: “Our soul is not here. Maybe our soul has gone dormant here with you. Our soul is there, with the Palestinians in the territories. All our soul is there, and our body is here. I try—in order to preserve the body—to kill the soul. Or to push it aside. I don’t know when it will awaken. I don’t want to endanger the body. Maybe one day it will awaken.”

When? I asked.

“Listen, today I’m more accepting of the fact that Kafr Kara will not be in the Palestinian state. But even if I’m not there, it’s okay. It will make it much easier for me if there is a country like that. My soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian state.”

“And in the meantime?”

“According to legend, on a scale the soul weighs heavier than the body. But with us the body is heavier. There is a soul, but in the meantime it is waiting. It’s as if you are in love with someone—maybe this is not a modern example, but it could happen with us—and suddenly the family decides that you have to marry someone else. Even if it’s brutal, you accept it and say, It tastes all right. You can’t go on saying that it doesn’t taste good.”

A few weeks later I read an article by Emmanuel Kopelevitch, formerly the Director of Arab Education, about how spoken Arabic in Israel has borrowed Hebrew words. According to Kopelevitch, there are some three thousand different Hebrew words in regular use in Arabic. Sometimes those using these words are not even aware that they are borrowed from Hebrew.

The article contains a list of “the sixty-two most common Hebrew words in the Arabic of the State of Israel.” Here are some of them: health fund, cab, traffic light, computer, appliance, permit, mail, cold cuts, vacation, VAT, station, report, form, office, membership card, director, theory (the written part of the drivel’s license examination), pay slip, driving test.

The list goes on. It includes the names of tools, automobile accessories, kinds of foods. Taxes. Forms. Appliances. Objects. Legal processes. Punishments. Various government functions. These are the impressions left on the language by this long association—which is still only a material one. A physical one.

I was the only Jew in the little coffeehouse. I was a minority. Each of us is a minority in at least one context in his life, and we all know how it feels to be the exception in a given situation, so there is no need to waste words on it. But there was one moment when the buzz of conversation around me suddenly swelled, and someone by chance bumped into my chair, and a passing motorcyclist revved up his bike too close to me, and there was the sound of choked laughter behind me. None of these, apparently, was directed at me, but something welled within me, and in my distress I bent down to my briefcase to take out my notebook (maybe I just wanted to hold on to a pen so as to draw security from it), and suddenly I understood how I would look—sitting in an Arab coffeehouse, my eyes behind dark sunglasses, recording the background conversations. I knew that if I were to take out my pen I would frighten them. They would be scared, there would be a silence, a few hearts would stop for a moment, and people would hastily reconstruct what they had said, to check if they had said something that might be misinterpreted. For a long moment I had the malicious itch to pay them back for the previous annoyances. The temptation was very strong, and from within that temptation I also realized with certainty how many times each of those sitting around me had been the victim of such simple, cheap, opportunistic malice, when within one of “us”—as within me at that moment—the domination gland secretes a single drop into the bloodstream.