THE END OF THE BEGINNING
How can it be that I knew so little of how the Palestinians in Israel aspire to autonomy? I had, after all, heard of them in the past, but still, I didn’t know. I read about it—but I didn’t know.
Had I put myself in their place, in their circumstances, for even an hour, I would certainly have known. Had I but imagined myself, for example, as a Jew in another land that rejected me, watching and restricting my every move, I would certainly have felt the desire to separate myself from that country.
And why was I unable to arouse within me the sense of primal family ties between the Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line? How could I not have ever exposed myself, until now, to the tangle of emotions and anguish of the Arab who wishes to be part of the Israeli reality yet finds himself endlessly rejected, suspected, detested? And why was I unable to estimate the great comfort and reward that religion gives to a people with a national handicap?
I did not, I knew not, I remembered not, and I thought not.
In all that touches on the Arab minority, the collective Jewish consciousness in Israel is like that of a city obliged to house within it a large institution for criminal rehabilitation.
On the face of it, life goes on as usual. But people learn to avoid the neighborhood where the institution is situated. Good citizens like us can live our whole lives without going near that neighborhood. In our imaginations—if we are forced to think about it—it is a violent, dirty, hostile place. Everyone there dresses the same. They have no individual names, only one collective name; they have no faces, only “characteristic features.” It is important for first-class citizens like us to know that “they” are always under supervision; that they are carefully counted; that with prudence, and in ways that will not disturb our self-image as enlightened persons, their access to the rest of the city is carefully controlled.
When we good citizens meet them outside, in our territory, we treat them suspiciously, as if they were a mobile enemy enclave. We display a sense of civic concern—can they really be trusted? Will some primal instinct not suddenly overcome them? To what extent are their relatives in the criminal world (that is, the Palestinians from the territories and the Arab world) liable to influence them? Will they, when put to the test, prove their loyalty to Israel?
Yes, I know—over the last decades real friendships, relationships of deep and symmetrical fraternity, have been established between Jews and Arabs in Israel. But these are exceptional. In general, “good citizens” have but a functional, restricted contact with Arabs. “My Arab” is, generally, the mechanic, the gardener, the plumber; the metal worker or construction laborer or the tile layer, and sometimes, the student at the university. “My Arab,” working where we good citizens live, is no more than an inmate of that institution permitted to work outside (for wages lower than what we would normally pay). Generally, he has only a first name, like a child. There is food for thought in the difficulty Israeli Jews have with Arab names, so common in life in the East. (It is hard here to overcome the temptation to ask whether the Israeli reader can remember even three of the names that appeared in this book? Two? One full name?) “My Arab” ’s good features are, for his Jewish friend, startlingly exceptional in the society from which he comes (His Hebrew is amazing! He’s so sensitive! So clean! And honest!), and his negative characteristics confirm everything the good citizen always knew.
It is not only individual names that the Arabs in Israel lack—the Hebrew language also lacks a correct general term to indicate our complex relations with the Arabs in Israel. Our problematic relations with the Palestinians in the occupied territories already have a plethora of names. Some we have counterfeited, and some have been imposed on us. We say: the problem of the territories, the question of the territories, the Palestinian problem, the intifadah, the occupation. In each of these smolders a sense of disquiet, even unrest.
When is the last time that someone in Israel explicitly referred to “the Palestinian problem within Israel”? Or “the national aspirations of the Arabs in Israel”? Or even just “the Palestinian national minority in Israel”?
They all exist.
The people themselves are alluded to in Hebrew as “Israeli Arabs,” a name that is in no way innocent (even if some of the Arabs themselves use it, maybe out of linguistic absentmindedness, just as the Palestinians in the occupied territories sometimes call themselves, when speaking Hebrew, “the Arabs of Judea and Samaria”). A more widespread term is “minorities,” which is at first glance a factual label. Its greatest distinction is, however, that it is “clean”—it avoids the word “Arab,” and whoever it was that coined it toward the end of the 1940s also knew well how it sounds to the Arabs themselves—it is a standing reminder of their humiliation. (By the way, in the country’s official statistics, the term used for the Palestinians in Israel is “non-Jews.”)
The most commonly used term is “the Arab sector,” another seemingly neutral delimiter. Still, for some reason it rings in my ears as a description of something that has a dotted line showing where it is to be cut out.
At most, people will say “the minority problem” or “the Israeli-Arab problem.” In general, the speaker does not mean the whole range of the relationship but rather only the narrow security issues involved.
There are no correct names—there are only a few terms created by the military, the bureaucracy, and the legal system, sterile forceps with which to grasp what the hand dares not touch.
Only four years ago, at the outbreak of the intifadah, we discovered the price of this self-delusion. From 1967 onward we had gradually ceased to find new words to describe our rule over the Arabs in the occupied territories. As the situation worsened, we stopped telling what was happening there; our power to find new words, words charged with heat and vitality, words that would describe the situation as it is, was sapped. We called it all by fictitious names, using laundered words.
Since we lost our ability to use words to describe reality there correctly, we woke up one day to a reality that was hard to describe. Israel had become so good at fooling itself that the army did not even have contingency plans for confronting mass demonstrations; in the intifadah’s early days its agents rushed out to the most questionable markets to buy net throwers and rubber bullets and gravel blowers and other nasty toys.
After all, any country that conquers and represses another people ought to be prepared for large demonstrations. Israel wasn’t ready, because it did not know it was a conqueror, did not think it was being repressive, did not believe that there was a people there. This was a lesson for us—if you do not continually ask yourself the new questions that problematic reality imposes on your cowed, lazy, noncommittal consciousness, that reality will vanish from your mind. But only from there.
Moshe Arens, the Likud Minister of Defense, said, “There is no correlation between the time the cabinet has devoted to discussing the subject of the Israeli Arabs—perhaps a thousandth of its meetings or even less—and its importance. Neither have Israeli governments had a firm general conception of a policy regarding the Israeli Arabs. This derives from a mixture of lack of understanding, lack of interest, and lack of desire.”
The Nazareth poet Michel Hadad once wrote that after the 1967 war the Arabs in Israel discovered that they had been “living with a single lung.” This painful image applies to Israel as well—in abdicating its Arabs it seems like a country breathing with one lung, leaving the other collapsed. Nearly a fifth of the Israeli organism is in suspended animation, “lying on the shelf.” When you get close to that Arab society you discover what ought to be obvious—it is a world unto itself. There is a special pleasure in meeting people who are, largely, a collective foreign entity, a sealed package, bound undoubtedly in preconceptions, stereotypes, and suspicion, and here it is unbound before you, and there are faces, voices, body movements, weaknesses, pains. I met myself also, not always happily—the bounds of my tolerance of the stranger, the other; my own deceptions and twisted anxieties. The temptation to say “we” when you cannot bring yourself to admit that it is actually “I.”
And mostly on this journey (and sometimes it really was a journey to an unknown land) I met my country—people, Palestinian men and women, whom I would like to see everywhere in Israel. In the cabinet. And the army. (The previous Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens, was already initiating such integration with the Christian Arabs, and aspired to the voluntary enlistment of Muslims as well.) In the cabinet? In the army? You’re not afraid of that? Yes, I’m afraid. Like the fear you have before setting out on a long hike. Like before beginning the composition of a new book.
I met people with whom one can build a country. People from whom Israel could benefit if they were to contribute their abilities and minds and talents, as well as the special cultural nuance they could bring to our Western, technocratic lives. A country as meagerly endowed with natural resources as Israel is cannot afford to give up a large part of its human ore. Why should it keep Rima Othman, Tagrid Yunes, and Sa’id Zeidani from the center of activity—not only within the narrow bounds of their community, but in the entire range of activity in Israel? Of course, the Arab population, like the Jewish, contains those who are not “constructive citizens,” and sometimes these are even a burden. But the country carries that burden anyway. Why should it not benefit from the good the others can—and wish to—offer?
As I’ve noted, one cannot ignore the objective reasons that have created this special situation. But for several years now new conditions have prevailed in the country and the region—reality invites us, Jews and Arabs, to make use of their potential—and we are still prisoners of old conceptions. Our strength is gone.
In many ways, overt and covert, Israel puts the minority within it on hold and blocks its chances—and ours—for integration, for mutual resuscitation. If, for instance, out of the 5,100 full-time university faculty members in Israel only twelve are Arabs; if out of 13,000 employees in the eight most important government ministries only 5 percent are Arab; if among the 400 prosecutors in the Ministry of Justice there is not a single Arab; if the Department for Muslim Affairs in the Ministry of Religious Affairs is headed, still, by a Jew; if there is not a single Arab on the managing committee of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, meaning the Arabs have no influence on broadcast policy; if the director of the government’s Arabic-language radio station is a Jew; if 44.9 percent of all citizens in the bottom tenth income level are Arabs; if according to the standards of the social-security system, a Jewish child in a large family is “worth” two Arab children—if all this happens here, what will happen here?
Does Israel act this way because it is sure that this is the correct way to realize its goals or simply because it does not have the strength to search for another way, and because it knows no such way? Sometimes it seems as if Israeli-Jewish DNA, after being modified by long generations of oppression and pogroms and blood libels and mass extermination, contains no gene for any other attitude toward people who might also be dangerous, even if their deeds, for almost half a century, prove the exact opposite. Professor Arnon Sofer says, “Their [the Arabs in Israel] loyalty to the country depends precisely on the distance of the Syrian tanks from the border!” I met too many Arabs during the last few months to be able to second such a sweeping statement. In any case, the distance of Syrian tanks from the border is the army’s responsibility. The border is the legitimate and necessary arena of the instinct for aggression and survival. For this reason the country has an army to defend it. But as for the citizens within the country, citizens who have performed their duties for forty-three years—Israel cannot continue to relate to them according to the laws of the struggle for survival only. These citizens are not enemies.
Understandably Israel, cramped within such narrow borders, feels that it is all border, that it is in a state of permanent siege, that “the whole nation is an army,” but we may, finally, rise up against this way of thinking. Precisely because such large parts of our lives are so close to the border in every sense of the word, because they are omnipresent, we must struggle so that in the little space free from the border we will make a real life for ourselves that contains spiritual space and expansive thinking and a place for us to discard some of our rusty armor. It must be a life in which—unlike on a border—one may stray from the main road and try others; in which it is possible to err and be of errant imagination; in which it is possible to be generous to and tolerant of the differences of the other, differences that do not have to be hostile.
I write these lines on December 1, 1991. Twenty-five years ago today, the military regime that the Arabs in Israel lived under from 1948 onward was dismantled. Under the military regime, the country had been divided into regions, and the Arabs in each region were the subjects of a military governor of almost unlimited powers. The governors could order deportations, the confiscation of property and belongings, curfews, the destruction of houses, arrests, and restrictions on movement. To go from Ramla to Tel Aviv—a fifteen-minute drive—an Arab had to obtain a special permit that was given, or not given, according to the whim of the regional governor. When it was given, payment was demanded—in the form of “goodwill” on the part of the recipient. Obtaining a driver’s license, a construction license, or a teaching permit involved proving one’s loyalty to the regime—that is, to the Shin Bet. It is hard today to believe that it was only in 1962 that the Druze were allowed to move freely within Israel, and that it was only in 1963 that Arabs were allowed to spend the night in areas where they had previously been allowed only during the day.
How much fear, how much suspicion and hatred were poured into those who supported the continuation of this regime, which provided complete, tyrannical control of every moment and every action and every word in the lives of the Arabs in Israel. Then the military government was abolished, and none of the dark prophecies of espionage and terrorism came true. On the contrary, the elimination of close supervision released pressures within both population groups and drained off some bad feelings. I am sure that many of us today would rather forget the position they took then in the endless debates over whether Israel could allow itself to abolish the military government.
In recent months I have incessantly heard from Israeli Jews that whining sentence: “No way.” “We’ll give the territories to the Palestinians, there will be a Palestinian state, and even if Israel behaves as fairly and as equally as it can to its Arabs, they’ll still, after a time, want to live their life in a framework that does not restrict them because they are not Jews. Here, within Israel, a new uprising will explode, demanding autonomy. And if that is our doom, why should Israel try so hard, go to such great lengths, in order to improve the living conditions of its potential enemies?”
This question has to be taken seriously. Yes, it is natural for man and natural for a nation to aspire to the greatest possible control of their own affairs. All over the world national minorities are now demanding the right to govern themselves. Even if the Palestinians in Israel are, for various reasons, still outside that “spring of nations,” the day may well come when they will ask to live as an autonomous national minority.
First, it should be noted that the voices calling for this today are few and far between. Maybe that is but an interim position, but it certainly may also be seen as an expression of the judicious acceptance by the Palestinians in Israel of the fact that their lives will be lived in the State of Israel, within which they will fight for equality.
But even if we examine the worst possibility—and no one can evade it—there will be a fundamental difference if Israel’s stand against Palestinian separatism derives from a solid sense of justice. Today, with Israel ruling over 2.5 million Arabs on both sides of the Green Line, and with its leaders denying that line’s existence yet discriminating against its minority in almost every sphere, what can we say to the Arabs among us who see themselves less and less as citizens and more and more as plundered of their rights? Can there be any wonder that they want to cut themselves free?
Israel’s position will be decisively different if it faces an Arab minority with many rights, with varied channels of expression and self-fulfillment, integrated into all the country’s elites, taking part in determining the country’s character and responsible for its decisions—yet despite all this demanding to go its separate way.
You haven’t convinced me, my interlocutor will say. Look at Yugoslavia. Its various communities were reasonably balanced. There were tensions, but each group had its channels of expression, there was equality for all (or inequality for all), and there was osmosis between the elites. Yet look what is happening there. And here, where we are—
I can respond to that only by making one assumption: that there will soon be a peace agreement in the Middle East, at least between Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan. If no such agreement is reached, if the current negotiations end without granting concrete rights—in particular, the right of self-determination—to the Palestinians, who knows what will happen.
But let’s assume that an accord is reached, and that after a few years of autonomy, and after the establishment of a Palestinian state, the Palestinians within Israel nevertheless ask to secede from Israel. How will Israel respond to this threatening challenge? This is, really, the decisive question, the one that keeps many of us from dispensing with the burden of suspicion and animosity, even if we want to do so.
It seems to me that part of the division in Israel over the question of the occupied territories derives from the fact that in the consciousness of most Jews in Israel the “territories” do not coincide—neither psychologically nor emotionally—with the borders of Israeli identity. One could say that the heat of the Israeli identity’s “internal combustion” reaches, among most Jews in Israel, as far as the Green Line. Beyond it, the nature of this heat changes. Either it cools and diffuses or it becomes a conflagration. The fact is that to this day, twenty-five years after the Six-Day War, there is no Israeli consensus for annexing the territories. The people would prefer a peace agreement.
One can believe that giving up the territories will bring the Israelis back into the authentic sphere of experiencing their identity, to a true, current sense of Israeliness. Once again, for the first time in years, the borders of the country and the borders of Israeli identity will coincide. It is impossible to say that these will be the “borders of the national consensus,” because there will be many who will be outraged by the retreat, but within these new-old borders the Jewish majority’s sense of internal justice will without a doubt grow stronger, as will its determination to defend those borders—not out of fear, out of the reduction of its territory, but because the people’s identity with its state, as an organic body maintaining an equally emotional and neuronic link with all its parts, will become clearer and more concrete.
The Palestinians in the territories can make a determined challenge to our right to rule them, partly because we ourselves, deep within, lack confidence in this right. But our identities fill the Green Line borders of the State of Israel with full force. There we also have moral force; and there the collective message we broadcast is unambiguous.
If, in addition to the geographical-external change there also occurs a cognitive change with regard to the Palestinian citizens’ place in society—if we internalize the fact that they are equal partners, if we give the Palestinians the greatest measure of autonomy in areas that present no challenge to the country’s sovereignty (education and culture, religion, community services, independent radio and television, etc.), if bicultural fluency develops in Israel, if it becomes possible to find Arab citizens in every ministry, in every institution, on every newspaper staff, in every school—if all this happens, then the majority in Israel (and I include both Jews and Arabs in this) will be steadfast, as well as correct, in their opposition to separatism. That same majority will also be a counterweight to passive tendencies of isolation, that “absent presence” which is also, in the final account, destructive to the country.
A true state of equal opportunity will put not only the Jews but also the Palestinians in Israel to the test. How willing are they really to be fully and equally integrated into Israeli culture? To what extent have they internalized life in Israel? How much are they willing to step out of the meantime and go into the present and future? To what extent will they be willing to sense a connection with, a sense of belonging to, the country, if it gives them maximum rights and treats them with respect?
The Palestinians in the occupied territories have reached a kind of national and political maturation through breaking the eternal framework, and through bloody struggle. Their brothers in Israel have achieved the same maturation without having to undergo such an intense crisis. For them it has been a long and painful process that has taught them many things and made them forget many others. Now they will once more have to connect themselves with parts of themselves that were suspended and put to sleep. Now they will have to rewrite themselves as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities, to redeem themselves from apathy and foreignness, to learn to breathe with both lungs.
A solution to the problem of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will certainly mitigate the dilemma of identity of the Palestinians in Israel. But it would be an error to wait until the peace process is completed. The final end of the occupation is liable to be put off for many long years, and precisely for this reason, the peace talks should consider the special circumstances of the Palestinians in Israel. Any agreement made with the Arabs should be complete and final, ending absolutely all border and land disputes, all claims and ambiguities between the two peoples.
There will be those who will be alarmed by this proposal—why are you giving them ideas, at the height of the negotiations! What is open to question here—after all, we’re talking about Israeli citizens! Are you proposing to concede the power you achieved years ago? Nevertheless, hundreds of hours of talks strengthen my sense that now is the time to open discussion on the question of the Palestinians in Israel, and that it is in Israel’s manifest interest to do this now, when we still have all our cards in hand. We should not give in to the urge for denial, to the faith that things will solve themselves—they won’t.
Many Palestinians in Israel, including those who have come to terms with their Israeli citizenship, see Yassir Arafat as their representative. Toufiq Ziad, a member of the Knesset and mayor of Nazareth, said at a gathering in his city on November 15, 1991: “Shamir did not represent us at the Madrid conference and he will not represent us in the future. We say with all sincerity”—and here Ziad turned to the head of the Palestinian delegation to Madrid—“that we, the Palestinian Arab public in Israel, are represented by you.” There are also reports that the Arab delegations to the peace conference prepared a special file on the Arab citizens of Israel, and they may bring it up at a later date.
If peace comes to the region, the ties between the two parts of the Palestinian people will become stronger. It may well be that those who live in Israel will carry—at the end of the process—Palestinian passports, and will vote for the Palestinian parliament. The situation then will be no less complex than the present one, and only truly daring thinking—not that of a people besieged, not defensive, Diaspora, minority thinking—can create a dynamic system of relations that will gradually release the partners in Israeliness from the mentality of conflict.
It is evident to everyone that Israel, which cannot raise the money necessary to absorb mass immigration, cannot—and apparently does not want to—set aside the necessary funds for improving the lot of the Palestinians within it. It is not hard to imagine the results of this discrimination. An explosion by the Palestinians in Israel over ongoing discrimination and humiliation will be complex and dangerous when an independent Palestinian entity exists. But if the issue of the Palestinians in Israel is raised in the framework of the peace talks, and Israel’s objective difficulties in solving this problem are presented, one may certainly hope that the peace treaty will also include economic support from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East that will vault Israel’s Arab society into a position of equal opportunity with the Jewish community, and will magnify the chances that all Israeli citizens can live a life of peace and satisfaction—a fully realized life, not only teeth-gritting defense of the boundaries of its existence.
It is not necessary to be a political or psychological genius to know that the continually constricting helplessness of the Palestinians in Israel will take its toll. The cost will be insult and discrimination, Israel’s use of its superior force, its military guile, against Arabs in the territories. In particular, Israel will have to pay eventually for its ability to ignore the Palestinians’ private and collective pain, for the selective blindness it has assumed. It will all be tallied up. Were we to read of the accumulation of these facts in a different context, in a country far from us, we would all be oracles—sometimes a person, or an entire nation, understands what he needs and what was hard for him to bear only when he suddenly breaks his bonds with hideous force.
Can we believe, may we demand of the Israeli Jew, whose life is surviving from one war to the next, that he act in opposition to what seem to be his basic survival instincts, instincts that have proven themselves in so many battles? That he try to formulate a common identity with those who are part of the family of his enemies? Such a resolute reversal requires enormous, almost superhuman strength (and perhaps this is the source of the despair and the doubts—that sometimes, in order to be a human being, one needs to counteract human nature). Will Israel succeed in mobilizing that strength? Or better said, do we clearly understand the significance of failure?
We are certainly not guests in the Middle East. Neither do we need—nor have we received—the explicit permission or agreement of the Arab countries to be here. But in the things I have heard and have quoted in these pages, in the lowered gazes, one may clearly make out some of the invisible webs we are liable to tear in our haste, or indelicacy, or apathy. The wisdom demanded to improve our situation, to improve our relations in the region, and, finally, to be part of it is very great. Not the wisdom of the engineer who builds the fighter jet, or that of the computer whiz—we have those in abundance. Instead, we need wisdom of the heart, the wisdom to know how to behave toward these people, even if they are still our enemies.
Once, when we were weak and dependent on the capriciousness of forceful others, we had no choice but to learn this lesson, and because we had no choice, it had the sour aftertaste of humiliation. Afterward, in the years of our independence, we threw it off, along with other signs of humiliation. But (shouting): “then” is over now.
I cannot conclude without relating something that many Israeli Jews might not know, something that to my mind illuminates in a painful and cruel way the relations this book describes.
“There is not one Arab who does not think to himself about how they will transfer him, nor am I free of that fear,” Dr. Nazir Yunes, the surgeon from the Hillel Yafeh Hospital, told me, and added, “It’s always on my mind. Either they’ll passively press us to the wall and I’ll have nothing to do here, or they’ll do it physically: bring me to the border, on foot, in a truck, and say, Go! Why are you so surprised?”
“What are you talking about?” I said in anger and shock. “How can you believe that such a thing is at all possible? Who will allow such a thing to happen? Both outside and inside Israel people will fight any such attempt!”
Yunes smiled sorrowfully, nodding his head. “The people who advocate it have enough experience … They’ve already tried such methods on us, and they’ve succeeded.”
I thought he was exaggerating, that he was expressing a totally personal and private fear; I was even insulted to hear such things from Yunes, who is in my eyes living proof that it is possible to realize the idea of a common Israeli citizenship. But afterward, in many other meetings I had, with common people and educated people, with old people and children, the threat of transfer continued to echo, and I felt the living fear. It was amazing and depressing to realize how familiar my interlocutors were with the technical terms and practical details—how they would be taken, where they would be led, in what they would be transported. Many were convinced, for instance, that a peace agreement would include an exchange—the Arabs would be expelled from Israel to the Palestinian state that would be established, and their villages and homes in the Galilee and Wadi Ara and the Negev would be inhabited by the Jewish settlers who would be evacuated from the “territories.” One man, who asked to remain anonymous, an astute and impressive person, told me that for years, in a compulsive way, he has examined a certain kind of military truck on Israel’s roads in order to estimate “how many of them there are already in Israel, and if there are enough.”
I have been thinking about it ever since. People I know, citizens like me, live in the terror of that nightmare. Today, after the fact, I am no longer sure whether the anger I expressed at Dr. Nazir Yunes when he spoke to me about his fear of transfer was not a little overstated and meant to hide (from myself) the fact that somewhere, deep inside me, I knew that his fear was not unreasonable. Who knows what warped use many of us make of this fear to ensure that the problem of the Palestinians in Israel will never be the subject of an open and critical discussion.
When that anonymous man told me about the trucks he counts, I thought to myself, In the book I am now writing, there is the desire, which I do not always know how to realize (but which now, at least, I am confident of), to make room for you here. I sense that this is the opposite of the idea of transfer; that is, an attempt to internalize, finally, the Arabs in Israel, into Israeli life. To bring you to the place set aside for you with us, the Jews in Israel, the place imposed on all of us forty-four years ago and which has remained since then hard and twisted, like scar tissue on a bone that was broken and badly set and every careless movement threatens to break it again, and the entire body learns to move without using it. The place in which, only when we reside there together, we will be able to have our first conversation about all we have distorted and hidden for more than forty years. This, in my eyes, is the reason for this book: it is an invitation, in Hebrew, to enter and begin.