CHAPTER 17

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THESE ARE THE voices. Years of cautious and deliberate existence, the living memory of the trauma of 1948, and the sight of their brothers rotting in the refugee camps have taught the Palestinians in Israel not to go to extremes—in anything—and not to take any irreversible position. Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learned something even more difficult—to stand still on the wire. To abstain, for years, from any hasty movement. To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will.

Thus, for many long years, has the Palestinian acrobat in Israel stood in place on a high wire—one foot in the air, never set down. He glances out of the corner of his eye to the audience below, which never stops shouting its warnings and its anger. Jewish shouts, Arab shouts—he dares not make a false move.

So he stands still on the tightrope. He has come to terms with Israel’s existence but still does not feel part of it. His identity is Palestinian, but he is too cautious to demand minimum national rights. Yes, he is a Palestinian, but he refrains from taking part in his brothers’ struggle, the struggle of those who are one flesh with him. Officially he is Israeli, but he is afraid to demand for himself, with full force, as is customary in Israeli pressure politics, legitimate rights as an Israeli. Were he to dare to demand civil rights forcefully, he would immediately be accused of nationalist extremism. If he demands nothing and wishes for nothing, he will be accused of alienation and separatism.

So it has been for decades, for hundreds of thousands of acrobats. Sleeping on the wire, in midstep.

In such a situation it is so easy to engage in “self-suspension,” a reduction of the “surface area.” It is so tempting to shut oneself off from a complex external reality, whether apathetic or hostile.

There is no glorious past to long for. The past is linked with a difficult defeat, with being disconnected from the rest of the nation, with a sense of guilt for having learned to live with Jews. There is not too much hope when it comes to anything touching on full self-realization in the future, as Israelis and Palestinians. So, sprawling between their demands, suspicions, and their contempt for and anger at all the camps that follow their movements, many of the Palestinians in Israel stick with the existing and the immediate.

“We have more material things than those in the territories,” Zuhir Yehia of Kafr Kara said to me. “More money, more property, nicer houses, savings in the bank. But material things cannot support a consciousness. If you’ve got material things, maybe you look different, prettier, better dressed, you wear glasses; our water is sweeter, but that’s not depth. The Palestinians in the territories are now more concerned with content. We have only the body; there they have the soul.”

Many of them are attached to those material things with all their beings, out of what sometimes looks like despair, despair that has become a habit (an odd but appropriate expression here). They are inclined to opportunism, pragmatism at any price, materialism, and utilitarianism (expressed, for example, in the fact that 42 percent of them voted in the last elections for Zionist parties, including right-wing ones). They outwardly imitate Jewish manners, they foster provincialism (something that can be seen, for example, in the Arabic newspapers published in Israel, which give almost no attention to world events, or even to events in “Jewish” Israel, being almost exclusively concerned with events within the four walls of Palestinian-Israeli society). One looking in from the outside would think that many, very many, of the Palestinians in Israel create for themselves a narrow present, constricted and escapist, a kind of sumud (endurance) of the moment.

In one of the early chapters I told the story of the “present absentees” among the Palestinians in Israel. One may also say, without any risk of grave error, that the Jewish majority in Israel treats all its Palestinian citizens as absent presences. This is how they are conceived, and how they are depicted in the media—as a collective absence, as a group that exists but is faceless and nameless, of uniform traits, most of them negative. If in 1948 the Palestinians in Israel were “those that are not but actually are,” they have over the years turned into “those who are but actually are not.”

Now, in these past months, I have had a growing feeling that in some subtle and complex way this attitude has been internalized by the Palestinians in Israel themselves, and has even in some turned into a sophisticated defense mechanism against the disappointments with which the state has surrounded them. Yes, sometimes it seems to me that there are those among them who find their absent presence useful. They cloak themselves in it, to shield themselves from the face that the state presents to them—a clenched face that pursues them always, the face of a stingy and suspicious hotel proprietor.

What is so depressing, so ingrained in the relations between us, the Jews in Israel, and them? Maybe it’s that the state of the Palestinians in Israel is so convenient for us Jews. It is convenient for us, pure and simple. It is easier for us to operate in such a complex situation when “our” minority is so passive. It is easy for us to postpone any real and penetrating confrontation with ourselves when there is such a partner. “What an ideal minority!” sociologist Majed Elhaj sneered bitterly. “The quietest minority in the world.”

I write this again, to check. In Israel there live almost a million citizens, men, women, and children, whose suspended animation is convenient for us, the Jewish majority.

I should have imposed quotation marks on “convenient,” but in the war room of our consciousness, the consciousness of the survivor, there is no room for such fine points, there is no space for a look that will see beyond the current moment. The little security officer in all of us likes the reports he receives from there.

If they are quiet—it is convenient. If they do not take part in national affairs—that is convenient. If we see to it that they have minimal rights, and they are careful not to demand additional rights that legally they should have—it is convenient for us. If they let out their frustrations by satisfying material desires, or with religion—that’s their business. If they are prepared to continue to cooperate with injustice and prejudice and do not force us to change anything—it is very convenient. If they, by their own testimony, do not find among themselves the necessary strength to break out of the fossilized framework of their past, do we have an obligation to help them do that?

“There is something interesting in this story of the Arabs in Israel,” said Azmi Bishara. “Our failure to struggle against discrimination and humiliation does not necessarily derive from fear. Yes, from fear also, but mostly it derives from the feeling that this is not our country. We are strangers to it. So what should we protest about? Who has any expectations of this country? Who says that it will ever grant us equality?”

If that is the situation, senior figures snort with collective vapidity, why should we awaken in them the need to shake themselves out of it, to redefine themselves, to be an equal part? We have enough problems as it is. It is very convenient.

Is this guilt, or just failure? A temptation that a nation in our circumstances found it difficult not to give in to?

It seems to me that the Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian failures have met, and that this was one of the most potent and exhilarating contacts that has ever occurred between the two peoples in Israel.

Of this doubtful coupling twin guilts were born. Dr. Sa’id Zeidani, among the bravest and most open people I have met, described them: “The condition of the Arabs in Israel does not awaken one’s respect. The self-castration. They don’t educate the Arab in Israel to be proud of himself. There is no self-assurance, or any sense of duty or consciousness that the injustice should be opposed in a determined way. They say that power corrupts, but so does lack of power, and weakness, maybe more than power does. We are not creating human beings who take their duties seriously. Education has created people who see no social challenges for which they would be willing to fight. They leave the fight to the parties, to the political forces. I think that what Israel did, connived to do, was to rule in this way—to intentionally create an Arab society that would be quiet, that would not rise up. They did not educate it the way you educate free and thinking people.”

Yes, it is a “convenient” minority that lives among us. It generally speaks to us in very cautious language. But that does not release us from the obligation to face honestly up to Sa’id Zeidani’s blunt words, to what sounds like a quiet, defeated lament rising from among many of the words in this book.

Has Israel indeed made the Palestinian minority “quiet,” obedient, dormant? Has the state, through its apparatus, worked to neutralize expressions of vitality, of force, identity, and ambition? To create a deliberate dullness? It is hard to believe that this was an intentional policy. That people sat down somewhere and drafted a plan to bring it about.

Then the Koenig Report comes to mind. This secret document—later published—was written in 1976 by Yisrael Koenig, the chief of the Ministry of the Interior in the northern district, along with three Jewish mayors. Was it unique? The report proposed to the government a set of policies regarding the Arabs in Israel:

Central institutions should give preference to the employment of Jews instead of Arabs.

In order to take from the Communist Party the leading role in the national struggle and the representation of the Israeli Arabs, and to provide an outlet for “fence-sitters,” a sister party to the Labor Party should be established that will put an emphasis on ideas of equality, humanism, culture, and language, social struggle and the pursuit of peace in the region. [Governing] institutions should organize to establish an invisible presence in and control of this party.

… a special task force (Shin Bet) should be appointed to investigate the personal habits of Communist leaders and other negative figures, and to bring the findings to the attention of the voting public.

Proper arrangements should be made with the directors of industries operating under the Capital Investment Act in critical areas [the country’s north] so that the number of Arab employees will not rise above 20 percent.

We should reach an arrangement with the central marketing groups of various goods to neutralize and hinder Arab dealers, especially in the north, in order to prevent the dependence of the Jewish population on these dealers, especially in times of emergency.

The government must find a way to neutralize grants to large families among the Arab population, whether by linking [this benefit] to economic status or by removing these grants from the purvey of the social security agency and handing them over to the Jewish Agency or Zionist Organization, so that they will be directed at Jews only.

But why bother with Koenig’s recommendations? Reality plants itself in front of our faces in a much more blunt way. Who recommended a policy that causes 55 percent of the families under the poverty line (in 1991) to be Arabs? Or one that ensures that Arab villages receive 6 percent of the development funds available to non-urban local authorities, even though they represent 30 percent of the population living in such settlements? Or that the budget per person in these local authorities is only a quarter of that in Jewish settlements? Or that fifteen of the largest Arab municipalities have not yet had their zoning plans approved by the central government, causing delays in granting business licenses, preventing investments, and forcing the inhabitants to build illegally? Furthermore, the zoning plan for Nazareth, the largest Arab settlement in the country, was last reviewed and approved in 1942. Who are the people who constructed a reality in which the water allocated for Arab agriculture is only 2.4 percent of the water available to Israeli agriculture, even though Arab farmers cultivate 17 percent of the agricultural land? The water allocation for an agricultural unit belonging to a Jew is 14,000 cubic meters of water, while a unit belonging to an Arab gets only 1,500 cubic meters. How can it be that the Ministry of Labor and Welfare has established only one institution for mentally retarded children for the entire Arab population? That in the Ministry of Justice only 3 out of 1,000 employees are Arabs? That there has never been an Arab among the Supreme Court’s twelve justices? That there is only one social worker for every 5,000 Arabs, but one for every 1,800 Jews? That in Sakhnin, a town of 18,000 residents, there is no social services office? That of all institutional places available for handicapped children in Israel, only 4 percent are set aside for Arabs—who make up 24 percent of the children in the country?

The Arab educational problems cited in the last chapter were certainly known to government officials, experts, and policymakers. True, the compulsory education law applies to Arabs just as it applies to Jews, and there is a high literacy rate among Arab high-school graduates in Israel—93 percent among men and 78 percent among women (as compared with, in Jordan, 80 percent among men and 63 percent among women, according to the Israel Statistical Yearbook, 1990). True, there were only 7,000 Arab children in school on the day the state was founded, while in 1991 there were more than 220,000. Then there were 170 Arab teachers, and today there are about 10,000. A large number of schools have been established in Arab communities (in 1949 there were 45 Arab elementary schools and one high school; forty years later there are 410 schools—this according to data from the Central Statistical Bureau). But this impressive growth is misleading—the need is much greater than the supply. According to the report of the Director General’s Committee on Arab Education, submitted to the Ministry of Education in 1985, if the conditions in Arab schools were equalized with those prevailing in the Jewish schools, the former would need 50 percent more teachers. A field study carried out by Dr. Majed Elhaj reports that, in 1989, Arab students lacked 1,231 classrooms. An internal Ministry of Education report revealed (in May 1987) that 77 percent of the rooms rented as classrooms (which almost always fail to meet the standards set by the ministry) were being used by Arab students, because of the lack of any organized plan to erect school buildings in Arab communities.

There is no point in starting to detail the physical privation of the Arab schools. That is not the root of the Arab education problem. The question is, What could jar Arab consciousness and help those who wish to do so to extricate themselves from what impedes them? Here, at this point, precisely on the subject of education, it is necessary to examine the facts with a very sober eye, so as to discern when the country’s disregard is not coincidental, when banal apathy is no more than a cover for a flexed muscle. And while a string of numbers and data is liable to numb the mind, a story hangs by them.

In the framework of a program for disadvantaged children, the Ministry of Education has added a total of 40,000 annual teaching hours since 1970 (according to Elhaj’s survey, “The State of Arab Education,” 1988). Not a single one of these hours was allotted to any Arab school. Yet, according to studies by senior educators such as Professor Yosef Bashi and the late Dr. Sami Mar’i, most Arab students meet the criteria for being disadvantaged, given their low socioeconomic background and the large number of students who drop out of the Arab schools. The official explanation for this discrimination was that Arab students did not need this assistance because they, unlike Oriental Jews (for whom the program was intended), “did not suffer due to the transition from one culture to another”(!).

Eighty percent of the Arab pupils in need of special educational frameworks continue to learn—mostly for lack of funds—in regular schools. This may be the reason that at the high school in Jat, for example, three hired thugs roam the schoolyard armed with thick batons. “One is a deaf-mute, one is a shepherd, and all three are illiterate,” Ahmed Abu Esba, a former teacher, described them. “Is there another educational institution in Israel where order is kept by force? Sometimes, when a teacher has to confront problem students, he calls on them to beat the student in the classroom! Even in Brazzaville in the Congo there’s nothing like that!”

Of the 42,000 teaching hours allocated by the educational system as part of the “long school day program,” only 3,300 (8 percent) were given to Arab schools, which make up 20 percent of the educational system as a whole.

The Arabs in Israel have no real vocational program in electronics and computers. There are, however, many programs in auto mechanics for boys and sewing for girls.

Only 4 community centers have been built in Arab communities, as compared with 126 in Jewish municipalities.

According to data given me by the Ministry of Education personnel department, there is not a single Arab employee in the following departments of the ministry: the neighborhood rehabilitation department, the educational television center, the adult education department, the textbook unit, and—no less important—the road safety unit. Arabs (thirty-three of them, all told) work only in the division of Arab education and culture.

And where are the VCRs and the computers that you can find in almost every Jewish school? Where are the laboratories, the workshops, the sports facilities? Where are the counselors? Where are the psychologists (there are only twelve psychological treatment stations in the entire Arab school system; only ten positions for psychologists have been allotted to Arab education out of a total of 416 such positions in the educational system as a whole)? Where are the educational television broadcasts in Arabic, where is the advanced technological vocational education (it does not exist in Arab schools in Israel), where are the special-projects classrooms and the college preparatory programs? And what about enrichment like music, visits to museums, drama clubs, and reading rooms? Where are all the teaching aids that can stimulate thought and imagination and open new horizons?

And I’ve still said nothing about the subliminal messages that the Israeli educational system pours into the Arab student’s consciousness. According to Dr. Majed Elhaj, formerly a pupil in the system he now studies, these are messages meant to “create a submissive Arab, ready to accept his inferiority and Jewish superiority, thereby weakening and destroying Arab-Palestinian identity.” Azmi Bishara seconded: “Maybe the thing that pushed me from a young age toward social action was that, in eighth grade, in our grammar book, it said, ‘Decline in singular and plural forms: Jewish teacher, Jewish teachers; Arab shepherd, Arab shepherds’; that’s what I had to learn.”

At what point does ongoing dereliction become active negligence? What would the fair-minded person say upon reading the following lines from the notorious Koenig Report: “We should encourage referring [Arab] students to technology and the exact and natural sciences, because these leave less time for occupation with nationalism, and the drop-out rate is high … We should facilitate trips overseas for study, and make it difficult for them to return and find work—such a policy can encourage emigration.”

Something flickers behind these appearances, and invites us, the members of Israel’s Jewish majority, to once again ask whether several factors have not mated here to place a cunning and dangerous trap at our feet.

We have already said that we have an “easy partner.” There is an interest and a motive—even without a volatile Arab minority steeped in manifest nationalism, it would be difficult for us. Our interest and motive also have wide backing, tacit and vocal, from large parts of the Jewish public. And the State of Israel has, without a doubt, the most sophisticated and ingenious overt and covert mechanisms to ensure the “obedience” of the Palestinian minority, to keep it under control, to threaten it, and to try to bend it to our wishes, the security and educational systems in particular.

More important than all these together is that Israel today does not have the psychological force or the moral power to deal with the problem of the Palestinian minority. On the face of it, the problem seems insoluble, and a combination of circumstances has made the problem seem dormant. The slightest touch is liable to waken it. So it is best to tiptoe around it and pray that it fades, or melts away, on its own. Or something.

It is very hard to put one’s finger on the right words. After all, we are not talking here about a single, dramatic event. It is an ongoing, complex, ambiguous state of affairs. Every one of us can open this locked door with a different key and see only what he or she wishes. Israel can also point to achievements in its treatment of its minority. When it comes to living conditions and certain civil rights, the position of Israeli citizens, even Arabs, is far better than those of Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, or Jordanian citizens. The Palestinians in Israel have indeed come a long way since 1948. Many Palestinians have found places for themselves in Israeli life; there are points of contact between the two peoples and joint ventures. Still …

I put together all the factors I have mentioned—the motive and the partner and the justification and the tools, and the temptation to forget it all; alongside I list the factual data known to me, some of which I have presented here, a long and depressing list of minuscule budgets, sparse services, discriminatory and one-sided legislation, social and cultural alienation. Faced with all this I ask whether one can reasonably deny that the manipulative process of suspension, or “active deferral,” or “pacification” has been going on for years and is going on now, performed by the Jewish majority in Israel against the country’s Palestinian citizens.

After all, exploiting the weaknesses—or building up the failures—of another is “legitimate” only toward someone for whom you wish ill, whom you wish to destroy—the enemy.

“But they really are the enemy!” many Israeli Jews—maybe even the majority—will assert.

Are they the enemy?

How do we decide who is an enemy? According to his secret desires? According to the way we interpret those secrets? According to what we know of human nature? According to our anxieties? According to his deeds?

I tried to obtain from the Israeli police precise details about the involvement of the Arab citizens of Israel in terrorist activity inside the Green Line, but the police (the investigations division) refused to give me information. While they annually publish data on terrorist activity in Israel, the data is presented in a misleading way: the official statistics do not state how many of the attacks were carried out by Arab citizens of Israel and how many by Arabs from the territories. My repeated requests for more accurate information were rejected. For some reason, after my limited experience of recent months, it is hard for me to believe that this fudging of the facts is coincidental.

“During the forty years of Israel’s existence only .4 percent of Israeli Arabs have been accused and convicted of hostile activity against the state. So 99.6 percent have proven their loyalty to the country,” said Shmuel Toledano, formerly the prime minister’s Advisor on Arab Affairs.¹

“If you had a choice,” Jews and Arabs were asked in June 1989, in the framework of the first study of its kind on peace proposals, “would you prefer to live your life outside the State of Israel?” Some 80 percent of the Jews and 75 percent of the Arabs responded that they would not want to live outside Israel. Of the Jewish citizens surveyed, 53 percent believed that Jewish-Arab coexistence is possible in Israel. Among the Arabs a majority of 83 percent believed this, and 96 percent of the Arabs supported, according to Dr. Elhaj, one of the researchers, a “two-state solution” (the study was carried out by the Guttmann Institute for Applied Social Research).

Every so often there are surveys that check the attitude of Arab citizens to the country. Some of the figures are disturbing (17.6 percent of the Arabs surveyed in a 1987 study by Professor Sami Smooha rejected Israel’s right to exist). They show that a minority of the Arabs in Israel might be enemies, and might even participate in violent activity against the state and its Jewish inhabitants. Yet the direction of the surveys is clear, and an unscientific but open-minded look at the familiar Israeli reality confirms this. The great majority of Palestinians in Israel have decided in favor of integration into the state, in favor of a struggle for equality in the framework of Israeli law. Out of all the choices and options for action and behavior available to Israeli Arabs, most of them have chosen to accept reality.

“And I already know—even if an Arab prostrates himself twice a day on some rabbi’s grave, even if he eats gefilte fish to break his Ramadan fast, he won’t be equal and won’t be an integral part of Israeli society. It just can’t be!” sighed Majed Elhaj. “So I say to myself, Listen, I’ve come to terms with the existence of the state as a state. But it hasn’t come to terms with my existence as a human being. True, it took the Arabs in Israel ten years before they began to accept Israel, but there are many Jews in Israel who still live in that period of anxiety and disquiet. Something ingrained in them says that an Arab cannot be an Israeli. He must be a potential enemy of Israel. An Israel hater. He won’t think twice if he’s given the opportunity to do harm to Israel. This is incorrect. And it is liable, paradoxically, to push the Arabs into alienation and extremism. I don’t want to repeat that obnoxious sentence: ‘The Arabs have again proven their loyalty to Israel.’ As if they always, at every moment and in every event, have to prove that they are always loyal. ‘What does it mean that we’ve “proven” it? We’re citizens like every other citizen!’ But the new generation, my children, will no longer accept it. We, perhaps, were a kind of intermediate generation, our parents always took us back, we were educated by the generation of the defeat. But our children have been educated by a generation that has political awareness and national pride, and they will not accept everything we accepted.”

“The Arabs should be judged according to what they might do, and not according to what they have done,” said David Ben-Gurion at the beginning of the 1950s, formulating the state’s fundamental attitude to the Arab minority. Yet forty years have passed since then. For how many years will we continue to “convict” the Arabs until their “innocence” is proven? Forty years or more is certainly cruel and unusual punishment.

For the moment they are still waiting for us. Waiting with amazing patience for the country to decide once and for all what it wants from them, and what it sees in them—stowaways? a fifth column? a security burden? an unwanted pregnancy?

It is making no decision. Or, more correctly, Israel has not, since 1948, fundamentally changed its internal judgment of the Arab minority within it, even though today’s circumstances are so different. This judgment—expressed in many ways—prevents Palestinians in Israel who so wish from becoming allies and partners. Israel is liable in the end to doom its Arab citizens to fulfill its fears of them.

How long can a relatively large minority be assumed by the majority to be an enemy without in the end actually turning into one? How long can the state exist as a stable political framework if this is how it treats a sixth of its citizens?

Slowly and steadily, as if slumbering, Israel is missing its chance to rescue itself from a horrible mistake. It is creating for itself the enemy it will run up against after its other enemies have made their peace with it. And war (as the Serbs and Croats teach us today) means war.

¹ Radio interview, Voice of Israel, second channel, March 21, 1988.