CHAPTER 14
FRIDAY, FIVE IN the evening and the village of Bara hums like a beehive—tonight they are paving sidewalks here, putting up fences, repairing roads. Two hundred fifty men run through the village streets with work tools in hand, breaking stubborn boulders, heaving picks, lugging bricks, no time to stand for even a second.
A pile of stones brought from the village of Jama’in in the West Bank lies in the middle of the road. One of the foremen, a sweating, large-boned young man, consults with the members of his work detail as to where to move the heap and how to parcel it out to the other details. A tractor honks at the crew’s back, passing by: it’s almost dark. When the driver sees the village’s mayor, Kamel Rian, he asks him at a roar to send two trucks with soil so that the new roadway can be lengthened. Best to finish it all tonight, it’s a good night to work.
Rian listens, cocking his head while half closing an eye, rubbing his beard. It’ll be fine. The truck drivers are praying now. Right after their prayers they’ll be with you. Take fifteen minutes. Come on, he calls to me, we’ll go see how the tar is doing.
He is thirty-three years old. Born in the village, a graduate of the teachers college in Netanya. Three years after completing his studies he became religious. “I began to read religious books. I became close to Usrat Eljihad, “the Family of the Holy War,” the forerunner of the Islamic Movement in Israel. Ever since then the Shin Bet has been following me. Even if I landed a job, they would fire me a week later. What could I do? I had an uncle, a partner in a stone quarry. I went to work for him, and there I found what I was looking for.”
Well built, bearded, with glasses. Good-natured. It’s hard to believe how he has transformed the village in the eight years he has been mayor.
“After you set off explosions in the mountains, you have to transfer the blocks of stone from the mountain to the work site, where you smash them. I worked at crushing the stone, at the hard stage of processing the stone. For two years I smashed boulders, ground them into gravel.
“I enjoyed the physical labor, and I liked being independent. I was completely free there. My own boss. During breaks I’d find myself a corner, sit down, and read religious books, commentaries on the Koran. Culturally, it was the richest period of my life. The Koran, after all, is not just a religious book. It is also the essence of literary power. There I was my own king. Then I also started being the imam at our mosque, and I’d give the sermons on Fridays. Then I was really religious,” he says, a bit apologetically.
“And today, less so?” I asked him, trying to talk over the clamor of the trucks.
“Let’s just say that I don’t have the time to exercise all the laws and precepts.” He mixes and mingles, in a single sentence, slang, military expressions, and biblical Hebrew. “I miss the days in the quarry. There I was calm. I put my trust in Allah. I did things in perfect faith. Today I’m in politics. Do everything relatively. Make compromises, put things off …
“But a group from the village decided that I should run for mayor. I didn’t want to. I had no chance. The incumbent mayor had had the job for twenty years. His father had been mukhtar for twenty years. He had Turkish roots! And he was also head of the largest clan in the village—they’re 70 percent here—and I’m from a small family. How could I run against him?
“But look, 70 percent of the village voted for me, and in ’83 I entered city hall, and for six months the security services slandered me in all kinds of ways, saying that I was a Khomeini supporter on the outskirts of Petah Tikva, and they quoted an article they claimed I’d written, that I was waiting for Khomeini to destroy Israel and that I was already inviting the PLO to come.
“In every government office I entered I’d see a photocopy of that article with its lies. Doors were closed to me wherever I went. They didn’t give money. They tried slowly, slowly to strangle the village because of me. We didn’t have money to pay for electricity; they cut our water off, too. The village didn’t have a single meter of pavement then. There was no sewage. No underground water network. You didn’t see a single flower. There was no place for sports, no place for culture. There was no medical clinic. Whoever needed a shot had to run to Petah Tikva! Our city hall was one room and one employee. Try working with that.
“I was young, a boy! From where do I know how to run a municipality? When in my life had I ever chaired a meeting? All that and the pressure from the Shin Bet outside. I went and studied in a program in local government at Bar Ilan University. I worked by day and studied by night. The people here helped. They suffered from the water being cut off, from the pressure, but they knew it was directed against me. The entire village would go seven to ten days without any water. We would bring water from Kibbutz Hahorshim, they helped us. The whole time I wanted to resign. My conscience wouldn’t let me leave the village without water. If the village hadn’t supported me, I would have resigned.
“But they supported me, and I kept going. I was twenty-five years old. Hot! I saw that I wouldn’t get anything out of the national government, so I began enlisting the Islamic Movement. Here, in Bara, we held the first muaskarat, the first Islamic work camp; today, praise God, you find them all over the country.”
I drove to Bara on a Friday, during the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth. I had heard enthusiastic stories about the Islamic Movement’s work camps, and I wanted to see one with my own eyes. Along the way I started to have doubts. I’d already interviewed several of the movement’s members and leaders. More than once I had come up against that invisible boundary no stranger can cross. He can only sense that beyond the faces smiling so cordially, behind the answers, which are always well-meaning, there is something else, something enigmatic, irrational—inaccessible to him.
The narrow road leading to Bara runs from Ben Shemen to Rosh Ha’ayin, northeast of Tel Aviv, along the marches of a marginal, forsaken land, a land of limestone and chalk, roads full of potholes, past abandoned quarries where huge cutting and crushing machines rust. The settlements scattered there, Hagor, Beit Nehemia, Givat Koah, are preparing for the Sabbath—children becoming formal in holiday clothes, a woman putting a cake out on the windowsill to cool. What are you looking for at this hour in Bara? What does the Islamic Movement’s Sabbath cheer have to do with you?
I picture the members of the movement I have already met. They are young and dynamic. They are feeling a growing sense of power. They are aware of the apprehension they arouse in secular Arab circles, and they are no less attentive to the tremors of anxiety and distrust the Jewish public feels about them. They chart their course with great discretion and awareness. “We have the ability, and the opportunity, to search and scrutinize the Islamic constitution to find the conditions and the means appropriate to our circumstances within Jewish Israel,” explained Ibrahim Sarsur, mayor of Kafr Kassem, one of the movement’s leaders. “The Islamic Movement in Egypt and Hamas, the Islamic Movement in the territories, oppose any move toward peace, and they also draw their ideas from the Koran and the Sunna. But I can understand the Koran and the Sunna as I wish, and I can prove to you that the Koran requires me to negotiate, and to solve the problems between us and you, between us and our enemies, in peaceful ways.”
“‘Our enemies’?”
I could hear his brakes screeching: “Just a minute! I’ll retreat! I take it back!” He raises a finger in front of me, closing his eyes as if reciting. “Even though the Israelis are always saying ‘our enemies the Arabs,’ and in doing so they make no distinction between Israeli Arabs and Arabs from the territories or from Syria. But I still take it back! I’m a human being like you, and you are like me; I’m not willing to have even the spark of a thought that you are my enemy enter my head. Under no circumstances!”
His eyes stay closed tight, and it is clear how that sophisticated, pragmatic mechanism works. It was certainly this way, with eyes shut tight, assimilating new conditions, that the Islamic Movement decided to turn into a law-abiding organization, to raise itself up out of the ruins of the Family of the Holy War underground, after that movement’s members and leaders were released from prison eight years ago. It is really this internal control, this self-programming, that disquiets me. The Islamic Movement smiles broadly at me, but with a twitch in its cheek, and when Ibrahim Sarsur again looks at me with his bright eyes, I know that he has already jotted down a warning to himself.
“And if Hamas believes in expelling the Jews from their homeland, from Israel, then they are also the enemies of Islam!” he added. “Anyone who wants to expel the Jews from their country is my enemy as a Muslim, an enemy of Islam, an enemy of humanity.”
So says Sarsur, one of the leaders of the movement, but in As-Sirat, the movement’s monthly magazine, printed in Israel, there was recently an article stating that “the problem of Palestine and its Muslim nation is a purely Islamic problem, which may be solved only by means of fundamental Islamic solutions.” Another article declared: “Palestine is not merchandise to be sold and bought in a slave market, on the principles of profit and loss … Palestine is Islamic holy land … It is not the property of the Palestinians, or of the Arabs, but of all Muslims of all past and current generations, and no man, whoever he is, has the right to abandon or concede one inch of its land.”
“Hey, you’re treating those sentences as if they were straight from the Koran! Very good!” Sarsur spun threads of ridicule around me. “It’s good that you take us so seriously! Here, I’ll give you some tafsir, some commentary, of a modern type. It says there that the Palestinian problem can be solved only with fundamental Islamic solutions? I agree! We, as an Islamic movement in Israel, believe that the Jews have a right to exist in Israel, which is part of Palestine! Even Salah ad-Din Ayyoubi resolved with the Crusaders that they would remain on the coast. Can I come and tell you today that Salah ad-Din Ayyoubi, a celebrated leader, a [winking] fundamentalist—did he really give up part of Palestine to infidel Crusaders? Or was it an entirely different matter, one of shrewdness and tolerance? And the Crusaders, you know, had no right to this land, unlike the Jews, who really do have a certain connection, they have a history and a well-known right here; but the Christians, they’re from Europe, they claim that Jesus’ grave is here. And I thought Jesus ascended to heaven, didn’t he?”
Thirty-two years old. A graduate of the English Literature and Linguistics Departments at Bar Ilan University. His face is pleasant, candid, his forehead high and glistening, his voice musical. Quick of thought, swift of speech, enjoys an argument. “If fanaticism means devotion to the principles of Islam,” he says, quoting Sa’id Kutub, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, “then the entire world should know that I am a fanatic. In order not to be a fanatic, I must really be torn. I must tear away all the roots that connect me with Islam. If you think that when you call me ‘fundamentalist’ you are insulting me, you are very wrong! The word in Arabic is asuli, ‘rooted.’ So I am proud to be a fundamentalist.
“But you”—he nods at me—“your Western eyes see another fundamentalist, an evil one, with a big beard, a shaved mustache, wearing a robe, with a sword in his hand and blood dripping from the point of the sword. That’s how the world sees fundamentalism today. It’s in the West’s blood.”
I asked, “And whoever says, ‘You make compromises over money, compromises over property, but you don’t make compromises over the soul of the nation,’ and by that he means land, what is he in your eyes?”
Sarsur chuckles. “Who said that land is the soul of the nation? I’ll give you an example. Mohammed was in Mecca, at the Kaaba, and he heard a Muslim praying, raising his hands to the sky: ‘Allah, bihak el-Kaaba!’ He was asking Allah’s aid and invoking the name of the Kaaba, that Allah answer his petition. So the Prophet took him to one side. Listen, he said, you are calling on God and invoking the Kaaba. You should be doing it differently—you should be calling on God in your own name, your own personal name! ‘Because he who raised the sky without pillars, the name of the believer is for him more sublime than the name of the Kaaba,’ so it is written in the Koran. So do you want to tell me that this dirt that they call Palestine is more important than the Kaaba to a Muslim? If the Kaaba is no more important than a human being, then Palestine isn’t either.”
“What I just quoted you on the soul of the nation,” I admitted, “was said yesterday on television by a Jewish settler from Hebron.”
“You played a trick like that on me?” He laughed long but silently. “Oh, a Jewish settler said that? With fundamentalists like that we’ll really find ourselves at war, God willing.”
I said, “Your slogan ‘Islam is the solution’ is too cryptic for my tastes.”
He said, “What’s cryptic? What’s unclear? It’s very simple and straightforward: Islam is the solution!”
“Still,” I insisted, “I was once the subject of a solution, so I’m a little suspicious. A solution to what? A solution for whom?”
“David, David, don’t be scared. We’re not the Islamic Movement in Jordan or the territories! We live under other conditions. They have the opportunity to fight the occupation in their own way and to save themselves. We have the opportunity to find other ways and interpretations to live together with you. As a Muslim, I now accept the existence of Israel as an established fact. We have nothing to say about this given. God forbid, you should say we’re against the country,” he warns me with a smile, always a smile. “We’re against the policy, not against the country. After all, under today’s conditions it would be foolish to expect the establishment of an Islamic state inside Israel. So we act within the framework of the law.”
“And what is the nature of your ties to Hamas?”
“They are there—we are here. Each one functions in his own reality. Listen, there is not a single regime in the Arab world today that will allow its country’s Islamic Movement to progress and develop. We’re fought against everywhere in the Arab world. They know that if we gain control it will be the end of their regime. Our luck is that in Israel the regime is different from those in the Arab world. Despite it being a Likud government, there’s democracy, and if you don’t undermine Israel’s security, if you are aware of the limitations imposed by law, you have a chance to act. We had a certain experience with that in the eighties when Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish and other leaders and members were accused of various things, of supporting the Fatah, and were imprisoned. Since that experience everything with us has changed completely, and there has been a 180-degree turn.”
“You mean,” I asked, “according to what you said, that Israel is actually the only country in the Middle East that allows its Islamic Movement to act freely?”
“Of course! I admit it.”
“And what about the commandment to fight a jihad [holy war] obligatory on you as a Muslim?”
“Good thing you asked. What is a jihad? There are many forms of jihad. Seven or eight gradations, maybe even twelve. The military jihad is only one of them, and it’s the last one. If I improve my life in the village, and hold a work camp—that’s a jihad. If I add rooms to a school—that’s a jihad, too. If I sit with you and persuade you that it’s worthwhile for us to live in peace—isn’t that a jihad? Now, the most important thing: if I have the possibility of liberating the part that was occupied in ’67 peacefully, then I’d be guilty, a criminal, if I caused the blood of a Muslim to be spilled in a war, when I can obtain the same thing with a jihad of peace. That’s what Sadat did, after all, when he liberated all of the Sinai peninsula, without spilling the blood of one Muslim!”
“And what about the territory that the Muslims lost to Israel in 1948? Here you make a tactical concession in your faith?”
“We don’t deal in tactics. In 1948 there was a war, and there was a decision of the United Nations about dividing Palestine into two countries. As a Muslim today, I accept the existence of Israel as an established fact. We have nothing to say about this given. The occupation of 1967 is an occupation, according to all the countries in the world and according to the U.N. But if Israel does not offer its hand in peace and does not withdraw from the occupied territories, and does not return the land to its owners,” he declaims in his pleasant tenor singsong, giving everything he says the same strange amicability, “only then must the Palestinians and Muslims all over the world fight Israel in accordance with the precept of the jihad and expel it from their land.”
“Does that include you, within Israel?”
“No. We are not part of the Islamic nation which is required to fight against Israel. We live as a minority that cannot fight, and according to the principles of Islam, we are not required to fight Israel. Islam says: When you are a minority, you are not even allowed to behave in a way that will undermine the security of the ruling nation—on condition, on condition, that it allows you to live as a Muslim. If the Knesset comes and decides that I am not permitted to pray, if it decides to damage the mosques, in such a case Islam compels me inexorably to fight and to maintain our rights. So long as that does not happen, we do not fight.”
I examine him carefully. There were no surprises. He does not deny his ambitions. He is pragmatic and sober. Islam does in fact concern itself first and foremost with the well-being and security of its adherents. After the death of the Prophet Mohammed, the community of believers was torn apart by a great and traumatic civil war, the Fitna. Ever since, Sunni religious sages have advocated refraining from rebellion against the ruler of a Muslim country, and all the more so when the Muslims are a defenseless minority. Ibrahim Sarsur is without a doubt giving me the interim truth. But in his fluent Hebrew discourse 1 hear also the echo of far mosques, and the roar of the aroused crowds in the streets of the Sudan and Iran and Algeria, the sound of the bullets that Muslim fanatics fired at President Sadat. And it was not long after this conversation, in the winter of 1992, that three Israeli Arabs, members of the Islamic Movement, butchered three Israeli soldiers with knives and a pickax—the most serious act of terror yet perpetrated by Arab citizens of Israel. I listened attentively as Sarsur testified: “I am worth nothing without the Islamic Movement. I am zero without it. Whatever it tells me to do, I will do.”
The sun is already setting in Bara. The village roads are boiling. Steam rises from the sidewalks as they are leveled by steamrollers. I compress a lump of warm, sticky tar in my hand. Wherever I look I see people working, eyes sparkling, bodies heaving. Boys run between the workers carrying trays of cold drinks and coffee. The neighbors beside whose houses the sidewalk is being laid invite the laborers in to get their wind back. In the afternoon all the workers eat at the home of one of the neighbors. Two sheep were slaughtered. Two hundred people squeeze into the yard. It is a privilege for a Muslim to slaughter a sheep when a son is born to him. But this privilege, the akika, may be “saved” for another opportunity. “What’s better, to give the meat to satiated, celebrating people or to people who are working hard?” asks Kamel Rian. “So we ‘save’ the privilege, sometimes for half a year, until the Islamic work camp.” Two other villagers have asked to host the work details for meals tomorrow. The day after, there is a problem—too many villagers are fighting to host the meals. Most of them do not even belong to the Islamic Movement. “It looks like we’ll have to extend the camp for a few more days.” He roars with laughter.
I’d bring activists from poor neighborhoods, people from urban renewal programs, mayors, here to learn from this young man. How, without any experience and, especially, without support from the national government, did he turn this backward village into a place it is a pleasure to live in? I’d bring the Arab mayors whose towns contain neighborhoods of luxurious houses lying along miserable dirt roads, stained with sewage, where no one lifts a finger to help himself. Rian, one of the people, sharp, tolerant, omnipresent, picking up every piece of trash from the ground, hugging the whole village to his barrel chest. I rush after him to one of the distant fields outside the village. Bulldozers are working there, their headlights lit, conquering another detour. The trucks dump earth. “This is soil I kept from the roads we built during the last work camp. Instead of throwing it away I saved it, and now I can use it for this new pavement.”
The two bulldozer operators descend toward us in the light of their vehicles. Sweaty, grimy, glowing. Nidal Sutani from Tira, and Ali Abu Sheikha from Ara. They have come for a week. Staying with friends in the village. “I can sleep wherever I want. Wherever I want, they’ll let me eat,” Ali says. He is working here as a volunteer. He is sacrificing a week’s profits from work on his Volvo BM tractor and a week’s salary from another job. He even pays for the bulldozer’s fuel. “I’ve already learned that if I do a good deed here, I earn more afterward outside.” His friend adds, “In these camps I’ve learned what the power of religion is, what the power of work is when you do it for yourself and help yourself. Look at how the people here are giving with all their hearts. I got up this morning when it was still dark, at 4:30, I prayed, and ever since I’ve been working, and we’ll keep working until we collapse.”
Over the last seven years the movement has succeeded in “conquering”—a characteristic term—seven local authorities, a most respectable achievement. It is also well represented in the councils of two cities and twelve villages. It is steadily gaining power in the Histadrut labor federation; it has founded an Islamic soccer league (with prayers at the beginning and end of each match); it has founded dozens of nursery schools, youth clubs, and clinics. Um Elfahm, inspired by the Islamic Movement, is about to establish fourteen separate classes for boys and girls in its high school, and Teibe is establishing a religious college. As the feeling of discrimination and frustration grows among the Arabs in Israel, an ever greater number, it seems, seek the solution to their troubles in religion and in the Islamic Movement. As faith wanes in the power of the Arab leadership in Israel to achieve real progress, the movement is reinforced by new recruits. Perhaps, instead of listing all its achievements, I should have noted one detail—during the last decade more than one hundred mosques have been built in Arab settlements in Israel.
Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish, founder of the movement and among its most prominent leaders, sighs when I ask him how the great power he wields affects him. “In politics, when a man my age takes up a position of power, that’s a big thing for him. I’m looking to resign now. Enough already! Enough!”
“Are you tired? You haven’t accomplished enough?”
“No, no. Everything I’ve planned I’ve achieved, thank God. I even achieved what I didn’t plan. I didn’t think that in the 1990s a man from the Islamic Movement would be the mayor of a city like Um Elfahm. If we’ve already achieved Um Elfahm, I don’t think it’s at all impossible for us to win the city. The big one, Nazareth.”
“And after that?” I asked.
The sheikh flashes me a smile, direct to the dungeons of my fear. “Afterward the government, no? Relax. All of you, relax. Nazareth is something very important for us. We don’t think beyond that. If we do, we need to build an Arab society in Israel that will fight on two principles: to achieve all our legitimate rights and not to break the law. If we achieve that, that’s the society I’m seeking.”
“If that’s the case, why so far have you refrained from entering national politics to achieve your rights?”
“I don’t reject that. But we haven’t yet decided to do it. I hope that within two or three months the Arab leadership in this country will sit down and decide to present a united Arab slate of candidates for the Knesset. As long as there is no such slate, I have no interest in national politics.”
“Will Jews be accepted into such a party?”
The sheikh, emphatically: “Arabs. Arabs. That’s enough. Enough already.”
“That’s racism.”
He shakes his head angrily. “Whoever wants to talk about racism should take a look at most of the Zionist parties! You’ll find racism there. All those parties, except for Mapam, the United Workers Party, put Jews in the Knesset with Arab votes! Show me one Zionist party that gave an Arab a chance to fill any important position! One government minister! One deputy minister in a serious job! We’re 18 percent of the population! I’m not a racist. I’m a believing man who knows that racism is Satan’s creed. Satan said explicitly, ‘I am unwilling to accept man, because you created him from sand, and I am made from fire.’ That’s racism.” He leans forward, his eyebrows slightly arched, forced upward. “And if in the end there’s an Arab minister in the cabinet, you know what they’ll make him? Minister without portfolio! Do you know what humiliation we feel when they appoint us a Minister for Arab Affairs? Hey, do you have a Minister for Jewish Affairs? And why do the police need an Officer for Minority Affairs? Isn’t just a regular officer enough? Let him investigate the minorities and the majority. Why, everywhere I go, do you make me feel—Stop! You enter afterward! No. No. This time I want to enter first. To be the first to enter the hall in which they are deciding about me. Deciding my fate.”
Why has the Islamic Movement refrained from putting its own slate up for elections to the Knesset? One possibility is that today it enjoys ever-growing esteem—some estimate its electoral power as the equivalent of six of the parliament’s 120 seats—but that it is cautious about getting a precise measure of that support. Another possibility is that participation in Knesset elections would imply de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty. Its Knesset members would have to swear loyalty to the Jewish state and to the laws of the Knesset, which are, according to Sheikh Raad Salah, “opposed to what God commanded and bestowed upon us.” Participation in Knesset elections would force the movement to publish an official platform in which it would have to take clear positions on many issues; apparently it wishes to refrain from this. One may assume that they prefer to leave many fundamental matters touching on the life of the zealous Muslim in a Jewish state to speculation, confidences, and silent prayer.
Participation in local elections however, is permissible, even desirable, in the view of the Islamic Movement. In town councils they can determine the character of Arab rule over Arabs, and it is a step of sorts in the direction of the independent, autonomous rule that Islamic Movement activists “ever aspire to, but do not actively pursue,” as Sheikh Kamel Rian diplomatically puts it.
Sheikh Darwish receives guests in his home in Kafr Kassem in a gray robe and black plastic slippers. The house is simply furnished. A few armchairs, a single couch, a wood table, and a bookcase with volumes of religious books. A large urn filled with cold water sits on the windowsill. There is one spot of color in the room—a poster the sheikh received in Mecca when he performed the haj, or pilgrimage required of all Muslims. It shows a Chinese child gazing longingly at the Kaaba and at the Dome of the Rock. There are 31 million Muslims in China.
“So ask—how many Palestinians are there in the world? Five and a half million. Arabs? One hundred sixty million. Muslims? One thousand two hundred million! What, you’re not afraid that a day will come when all the Arabs will be sick of you? Not only the Arabs in Israel, but those everywhere! What behavior!”
It is generally hard to catch him angry. Even when there is an outburst, it seems to have been premeditated. He is generally calm and possesses a kind of serenity that radiates power and security, a leopard-like serenity, I thought, and then recalled that his name Nimr means leopard. He is very conscious of himself, frequently speaking of himself in the third person: “Sheikh Abdallah always says that …” A relatively young man, forty-three, with close to twenty years of public activity behind him. His beard is cropped close to his cheeks, and his face is a fascinating one. Sometimes, in the course of a single phrase, an entire range of ages fans across it, from childhood to old age. At one moment it is saturated with craftiness and evil, and experiences that are greater than his years; at another it is simple and innocent. He is certainly not naïve. More than anything else, one sees in him the desire of a very strong man to dispel apprehension about him by means of a demonstrative effort to appear more disarming. When you meet him, it becomes clear how much the entire movement has internalized its leader’s mode of behavior.
His six-year-old daughter, Bara’a, enters the room. A full-bodied, lively girl with black hair. She cuddles him, pulls his beard, assaults him, and he accepts his suffering with love. I ask him if he remembers himself at that age.
“I was an unquiet boy. I wasn’t easy. I made problems for my mother. I was ill from the age of eight months. Polio. To this day my left side is paralyzed. I was with my father and mother all the time, and I felt—and they made me feel—so spoiled, special. I remember very well [he pulls his head into his neck, going red with laughter], I don’t know whether to tell you … Father and Mother were young, about thirty, and I slept between them … day and night [he was laughing heartily, his face glowing]. Maybe the way I felt they behaved with me is the way I behave with Bara’a today.”
I asked whether his illness, which struck him in infancy, had influenced his life.
“How should I know? I only know that always, ever since I can remember, I behaved differently from everyone else. I, for instance, even before I was a believer, never drank. Never! Because I’d see drunks and the way they acted, and I didn’t want to be like them. I’d say, In any case I have to do all sorts of things to look more or less like everyone else, so how would it look if I were drunk?”
He halted for a moment. Sank into himself. “Look,” he said in the end, “I was just thinking that maybe I’ve made a mistake. In all I’ve said and written my entire life, I’ve never mentioned the handicapped. I think that has been an error. Maybe I should do it every week! Understand that I did not myself suffer. I did not feel alone as a child, I did not feel inferior. Maybe because my family was an important one so people didn’t dare. That’s our mentality, but now, after having spoken about it, maybe I’ll start talking about it outside, writing about it.”
I reflected on how such an unequivocal political and social consciousness had developed in him at such a young age. It spurred him to fight against restriction and arbitrariness. Out loud, I said that sometimes a disadvantage of that kind can give a person a certain sense of election, of having been set apart.
“Maybe it is a key,” the sheikh said, “that enables you, unconsciously, to open yourself. More and more I think of how I, at age twenty, studied under a certain teacher, a wise man who taught me Arabic literature, and of the texts we learned that year, especially the poets—one blind, one deaf. Disabled. That lit a candle with me—hey, what’s going on here. Why them? I read their poems eagerly. All of Arab literature from the early days of Islam, and from the Middle Ages, was founded on those writers. So I, at the age of twenty, began to think, Maybe that blind man, because he doesn’t see, has the opportunity to think more? To understand more? To feel more?
“So, at that young age, I decided to shut myself up in a room, not to see people, to be alone. To read. I read, in one year and three months, all the important books of Islamic philosophy. I wouldn’t leave the house except to pray in the mosque. Without people. Without arguments. It was easy and good for me that way. I had the chance to understand the spirit and depth of Islamic thinking.
“To this day I maintain that—what can I say, it is impossible to be modest about it—I can say that in the commentaries on the Koran, Sheikh Abdallah is among the best, the best, maybe, in the entire region! Because to interpret the verses of the Koran you have to have mastered the Arabic language, Arabic grammar, Arabic literature. And the wisdom of the Islamic judges, their way of thinking. Because what is the real teaching of Islam? The teaching of Islam is peace for all human beings. Period.”
In 1980 the Shin Bet uncovered the Family of the Holy War underground. Its members had a vision of an entirely Islamic Palestine, with whatever Jews remaining in it playing the role of an obedient minority. The Family of the Holy War set fire to fields and forests in the Negev and the Galilee, uprooted orchards, and stole weapons from Israeli army bases. The members of the group, which advocated a violent holy war, or jihad, against Israel, considered Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish their spiritual leader. Sixty men, Sheikh Darwish among them, were convicted in a military court in Lod. The details of that trial are still classified. According to a leader of the underground, Farid Abu Muh, the prosecution was unable to prove that Darwish was indeed the ideological leader of the group. He was sentenced to prison and released after serving about three years.
After his release, he and his fellows founded the Islamic Movement, which committed itself to obeying the law. Its declared goals were much more moderate than those of the Family of the Holy War. The sheikh wisely found a special path his disciples could walk securely in Israel. They could declare their loyalty to Israel without infringing on their national identity. They found their national identity at a deeper level than Palestinian nationalism does—in the essence of the entire Arab nation, in Islam. It was possible to hear those gears whirring when the sheikh referred to the enthusiasm of the young Muslims of the work camps. “While all of them work under the green flag of the Islamic Movement, many of the young people don’t belong to us at all. Because even those young people of whom it is sometimes said that they are materialistic and not active, they, too, are searching for the opportunity to give of themselves. To contribute. And what other opportunity does the democratic and glorious State of Israel give to contribute voluntarily? To identify with an idea?”
By the light of projector lamps volunteers in Bara are preparing the foundation for a sidewalk in the southern neighborhood. They pour in the foundation and the gravel. They consult on how most efficiently to coordinate the work of the steamrollers that have been brought from other villages. The plan is to pave 3,500 square meters of sidewalk in four days. Since morning, up until this hour of the evening, they have paved 1,200. In the schoolyard a teacher and his pupils complete the planting of a small grove of trees. They survey their handiwork in the dusk: “We didn’t want to plant cypresses, because cypresses look like missiles on launch pads.” They planted eucalyptus instead, the tree used by Israeli pioneers to drain swamps. At that same moment a long file of children passes, half running, carrying pots with saplings in them. A special work detail is already preparing, on the sidewalks, the squares of edging stones to form boxes for the young trees. Bara is a green village. “Arab villages generally don’t pay much attention to green things; they plant today and it withers tomorrow. But I wanted it to look nice here,” Kamel Rian says. “And it turns out that if the people themselves plant the trees and the grass, they continue to take care of the tree near their house and the nearby lawn. If someone in the village dares pluck a leaf from a tree, everyone gangs up on him. Why? Because they themselves planted it.” As we speak we reach a pretty building, large and proud, lit in green light. Bara’s cultural center.
“Now tell me, have you ever seen such a building? Guess how much time it took us to build it.”
I answered that nothing he said would surprise me.
“Listen to the story. We were busy planning a volunteer operation in the village, and one of the planners died of a heart attack. He was young. I left him at one in the morning, and at three they called and said he was dead.
“I, at the height of the first three days of mourning, called my friends together here and said, Let’s change the plan. Let’s build a community center named after him. We checked and saw that the cost of putting up such a community center was more than $200,000. We didn’t have it. Where could we get it? The town council’s development budget, you know, was $4,800, for 1,400 residents. And I had to use that money to make a reception for the Minister of the Interior, who came here with fifty people, and they demanded that I bring a kosher cook from Petah Tikva, and there went the $4,800! That’s why I never invite any of those thieves.
“So what did we do? We set up a national team. We brought five engineers, from Kafr Kana, Um Elfahm, Kafr Kassem, and one of our own. That was the steering committee. We created five committees, one responsible for materials, one for labor, one for equipment, and so on. On the fourth day of the mourning period we’d already begun to work. We collected $35,000 from the people in the village: people withdrew savings. Women took rings from their fingers, gold earrings, we filled up a bag with gold and jewelry.”
“Just voluntarily? There are rumors that you force people to contribute.”
“Everything was voluntary. We are forbidden, religiously, to force a man to pay. Besides, what power do we have to take by force? I’ve got only peer pressure behind me. Everyone around you gives, you give, too. There are political parties that oppose us, but when we lay a sidewalk next to the house of an opponent, do you think he doesn’t come out to help? Of course he does!
“To make a long story short, eighteen days later we’d poured the last concrete for the community center. We worked day and night. Twelve-hour shifts—you finish, go to sleep, get up and work. It’s more than 700 square meters. A public library that will hold, God willing, 20,000 volumes. A huge conference hall. A stage for the Islamic Women’s Theater that we have in the village. And on the bottom floor, two private day-care classes that cost $13 a month per child.”
I saw the nursery school. Happy rooms, full of color and stimuli and places to play and equipment. “Sure. Because the budget doesn’t come from the Ministry of Education. It comes from us. From a charitable society we established. What do you think, that we can’t have a separate educational system, like your religious people?”
He ticks off on his fingers: Today the village has a senior citizens’ center, there is a regulation basketball court and two public playgrounds with the best equipment. We finally put the cemetery in order. We constructed a sewage system. Roads. Streetlights. The Ministry of Education hasn’t built a single room in the school since I’ve been in the village, he notes, with no tone of reproach in his voice. The whole school had two bathrooms. The teachers go together with the students—what kind of thing is that? We built twenty bathrooms. We added classrooms. In my village the Islamic Movement did what the Ministry of the Interior won’t do for the next fifty years. Even if it doubles our development budget for fifty years, it won’t attain what we’ve already done in the village. Today’s project will cost me $22,000. If I had it done by outside contractors, it would have cost me $130,000.
Of course we want autonomy, said the men—each in his own way—with whom I ate a sumptuous supper during one of the breaks from work. “We talk about it a lot,” said Sheikh Kamel. “Everything’s moving in the direction that in the end will bring us autonomy here. The establishment is pushing us by force to want it.” His fellows, in chorus: Take the matter of the appointment of the religious judges. How can a bureaucrat in Petah Tikva who doesn’t know Arabic appoint a kadi for a village, especially when everyone knows he’s a drunk and was appointed only because he’s a Shin Bet informer? How can you appoint an illiterate imam? Why do I have to wait ten years before I can build a nursery school out of the municipal budget? You’ve seen what we can do ourselves. Why don’t they let us set a traditional Islamic curriculum for ourselves? Why don’t they accept our soccer team into the league? The Islamic League was established for lack of any alternative!
“Little by little,” Kamel Rian sums up the furious shouts, “our private projects add up and give us a sense of independence. The Islamic Movement today already has its tools and its institutions and its representatives. These things push us in the direction of independence.”
We continue to run. The time is short and the work great, and you are the master, and that, apparently, is the secret. The air shivers with emotion. Now I understood why I had to come and how pale words are when compared to deeds. I recalled the ziker ceremony of the Darwish sect I once attended in the Old City of Jerusalem—for several hours the men of the zawia fired themselves into an ecstasy. A hint of the same internal fire and addiction is here tonight. Everywhere you look hammers clang and picks strike. The odor of asphalt sticks to the skin. Piles of gravel and sand disappear in the whirlwind of a few minutes. An old Zionist pioneer song ran through my head: “We will dress you in concrete and cement.” Facing us, in the dark, is Petah Tikva, rejoicing in the Sabbath, gathering around the bowls of soup, and here where we are, that is, where they are, a truck unloads another heap of stones, and the “stone detail” charges to distribute the stones to the “fence detail,” and in different parts of the village six bulldozers, twelve trucks, three cement mixers, and steam shovels are all working, and amid all this commotion a three-year-old boy named Wasim deals a blow to the asphalt in front of his house with a yellow plastic hoe. That child’s tool reminded me of another boy of his age who aimed a yellow plastic rod at me at the Deheishe refugee camp and shot me because I was Jewish. That boy is already eight today, and if nothing has happened to him he has presumably graduated from plastic to stone. Wasim is enchanted with the asphalt. With great seriousness and dedication he smooths a little hill, sniffs it, touches it with his hand—an unforgettable sensory experience. Maybe, without his realizing it, his political and religious consciousness is being fixed within him.
Beside the small post office the village manager scrubs splotches of cement from the new fence with a stiff brush. “The finish is important, too,” Rian says, sharing his concern for detail. It makes me think of that expression “Arab work,” Hebrew slang for a sloppy and badly done job. Nearby, before my very eyes, in the space of two hours, a narrow dirt path turns into a broad, comfortable, tree-lined sidewalk, and the team responsible for painting the curbstones charges at it, and after them the clean-up crew to cart off the debris, and the frames are already going up around the saplings, and the trash cans are already being put in place …
A different, almost forgotten spirit. A kind of momentum that a stranger finds difficult to face. “You asked if we’re connected to Hamas,” Kamel Rian reminds me. “What’s for sure is that we have a connection with hamasa, with zeal.”
What if they ask me to join them? What if someone hands me a hoe or a pick? How tempting it is to forget what lies beyond them and to surrender to that patriotic fire that blazes in the heart. How is it possible, in that all-encompassing storm that sweeps you off your feet, to refuse a human hand offering you a work tool? It’s such a complicated question; it asks, through intermediate stages of evasive and roundabout translations, one thing: Do they and I have the same goal?
Yes, yes, they are building the country. No, because I feel that they are not building my country. Yes, because they are doing exactly what any Israeli group with initiative and vision would do. No, because that hamasa is part of an entire web of desires and beliefs that are not mine, and only for now is that fire being used to heat the huge tank of asphalt. A brawny man with kinky hair approaches Kamel Rian. His hair is white with dust. He is in charge of the asphalt. There’s an unexpected problem—because of the quick pace of the work, the asphalt has run out. Seventy tons. Some 1,700 square meters of sidewalk have been paved in a single day. Everyone marvels. Torpor begins to seep into their movements. Kamel scratches his head as if just waking up. “Everything’s gone? But it was for two days!”
“The Islamic solution is for us, for the Jews, and for all of humanity … There is room for only one country between the river and the sea. That country will be Muslim,” I read a week previously in the Islamic Movement’s newspaper, Sawt Elhak Walhuria (The Voice of Justice and Freedom), but under the existing conditions in Israeli-Arab society, passivity and abnegation, it was hard not to be impressed by the deeds and not to understand the secret of their attraction for so many. There, in Bara, across the way from the drained swamps of Malabis in which the water buffalo once waded, out of which the very earliest Zionist pioneers built the first new Jewish village in Israel, Petah Tikva, the Gate of Hope, it was possible to sense and understand this Muslim Petah Tikva, and to feel a surprising pang of remorse, a longing for ourselves as we once were.
“Come on, what are you dreaming about?” Kamel Rian had already recovered. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me after him. “Come see something you won’t believe.”
But I stopped and stared ahead. At the edge of a dark empty lot I suddenly made out many, many figures, swaying silently. I saw only their backs, kneeling and rising and kneeling, their faces to Mecca.