The “situation,” like a stage magician, draws another card, links another inseparable ring to the chain. This time it is Barta’a, and actually, the entire problem of the relations of the Arabs of Israel to the Arabs of the West Bank.
The village of Barta’a is situated about three kilometers east of the Wadi Ara valley, between the Israeli cities of Afula and Hadera, in the area called the Little Triangle. The village is built on the two slopes of a ravine called Wadi Elmia, and the huge Kabha clan, with a family tree reaching back to the eighteenth century and inscribed on deerskin, lives here.
The village received its name from Hawali (holy man) Sheikh Muhammad, buried on the mountain peak over the village. Sheikh Muhammad had been a scout in Saladin’s army and had participated in the wars against the Crusaders. When he returned from a victorious battle, he would jump with happiness, and they would say of him bart’a ash-Sheikh, which means “the Sheikh hopped with joy.”
The village was one until 1949. In that year the representatives of Israel and Jordan, meeting in Rhodes, decided that the border between them would run through the ravine that divides the village. It would seem that the drafters of the Green Line saw the ravine their maps indicated as a natural border. It may be that they didn’t realize what they were doing.
One morning, the village was divided. Members of the same family and friends and relatives were torn from each other. The village spring remained on the Israeli side, and the mosque in Jordan. Everything was split in two by the sure and powerful hands of maliciously indifferent giants.
During the first years there was no fence between the two countries or between the two villages, but Jordanian and Israeli soldiers prevented free passage of civilians. When the two armies began clashing in this contact area between them, a “proper” border was built. At the insistence of the villagers, a canal was dug to bring water from the spring in Israeli Barta’a to the center of Jordanian Barta’a. The Israelis drank by day and the Jordanians by night. The children in Israeli Barta’a would urinate in the water to taunt their friends on the other side of the border. The women would launch paper boats containing letters to their friends.
The villagers, suffering from longing and frustration, felt their existence split and their lives disconnected. The meanings of so many primal things seemed suddenly to be on the other side of the fence. The two parts of the village did all they could to maintain some sort of illusory fabric of cooperation. Smugglers would bring news from across the border. When Jordanian Barta’a celebrated a wedding, the residents of Israeli Barta’a would stand on the other side of the border and watch the celebration from afar, with binoculars. When a couple married on the Israeli side, the famous singer Abu Leil would arrive from Kufr Qar’a to entertain the guests, and his voice would fill the emptiness of the valley; the Jordanian soldiers on the other side would shoot into the air out of joy. When a child was born in one of the Barta’as, the proud father would station himself on the hill and shout the news across the border with all his might.
Only once, in 1964, did a Jordanian officer allow the villagers from both sides to meet their relatives. The entire divided clan descended into the ravine for three hours and mixed with each other, touched each other, talked without stopping, and cried. It was then that they saw for the first time babies which had been born and couples who had married. One young man from Israel, who had loved a Jordanian girl during the years of separation and had been able to gaze at her only from far off, asked her hand from her father. The hutba, the marriage contract, was drafted immediately, and the girl “infiltrated” and came to live in Israel.
Then came the war, the war of 1967, and the border was lifted. The two halves, the two lovers, could finally make their unification a reality. They descended into the ravine, looked at one another—and were strangers.
“We suddenly saw how different they are from us,” Riad Kabha, the young mukhtar of the Israeli village, said to me during my visit there. “We had been with the Israelis for nineteen years. We were more modern than they were, more open and free. It was hard for us to get used to them. Their internal rhythm was different. The whole way they thought about things was different. For example, our attitude toward women is liberal and advanced, and with them there was—and is today—complete separation of boys and girls from school age onward, and equality between the sexes is not even a subject for discussion. Along with that, we felt that they somehow looked down on us. As if they had remained more faithful to tradition and to Islam. They would lecture us haughtily, feeling that they were better Arabs than we were.
“Contact with them was awkward and unpleasant. They had been all that time under oppressive Jordanian rule, and their links with the outside world had been extremely limited. Jordanian soldiers lived among them and intimidated them; they were trained to say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ and it affected their entire behavior. Our Barta’a, the Israeli one, was richer and more active. Our houses were more luxurious, and every family lived on its own. With them, a married son would continue to live with his father. People pay less attention to their fathers’ advice among us, and every person sets out on his own. Individualists. Even in daily life there are differences: they go to Tulkarm and Nablus for shopping and enjoyment, and those cities are their focal point in every way. Our focus is the Jewish city of Hadera. There is a gap and there is distance between us.”
In 1971, a young man from Jordanian Barta’a described the young people on the Israeli side as follows: “They are shallow politically. They do not have a serious foundation for understanding current events and lack a proper outlook for the future. They are influenced outwardly by the Jewish people; they took the shell of modern society and threw away the content. They do not have strong family connections. They change their opinions as the situation changes, and they have no principles.”
Riad Kabha’s comments on this criticism were in a way defensive and apologetic. “We have not taken only the shell of the modern world,” he said. “We have taken more than that. We have many positive characteristics—higher social awareness; we are more active than they are, better able to organize ourselves in order to help ourselves, and in the framework of the political problems, we do everything possible in order to…”
Kahba continued to speak, and it was possible to guess in advance what he would say and how he would say it. He is a nice person, wise and moderate, and he is caught, to his sorrow, in the trap that captures every uprooted person. He has abandoned one way of life without having absorbed another. People like him speak very carefully: they are well acquainted with the tenuousness of uncompromising statements untested by threats and temptations. I supposed that in the other Barta’a I would hear more uncompromising, determined, strong language, but Riad Kabha and the people of Israeli Barta’a had personally felt how life can erode the totality of the ideal, and of natural, primal aspirations.
* * *
The other Barta’a (the people of each call their sister village “the other Barta’a”) winds up the face of the ravine, and is poorer and more crowded. Lines of cactus break through the fences of each house, and herds of sheep kick up dust in its alleys. ’Amar Kabha notices me talking with some teenagers in the street, and suggests I come with him to his house. He is twenty-six years old, but looks much older. He works in the poultry slaughterhouse in Hadera, and does nicely. His new house is large and sunlit, built like the houses in Israeli Barta’a. His small children play on the floor mats, and there is a wide, open view from the window.
“I was a boy when the village was reunited. I remember not knowing my grandmother until the reunification. Other children had grandmothers and I was jealous. I would run over the hill facing the other Barta’a, and I would call out “Siti Siti, Grandmother” to every old woman I saw there, but I didn’t find her. When my grandfather died, we learned about it from hearing the shouts and wails from the Israeli side. My father could not go to his funeral, of course.
“Every so often, the Israeli authorities would bring a movie to the other Barta’a, and the people there, with us in mind, would project it on the side of a house that faced us. I remember how we would bring benches and chairs and sit out at night to see those movies. They were very popular among us, at least as much as Egyptian President Nasser’s speeches on television.”
* * *
“As-salam and aleikum.”
Judat and As’ad, friends of ’Amar’s, enter the room. They are also, of course, of the Kabha clan. Judat, tall, curly-haired, delicate-featured, studied economics at Irbid University in Jordan. He cannot find work in his profession here: “I worked for a while in a pub in Tel Aviv, and I spoke to Israeli students there. They studied exactly the same material I studied. Afterwards, I worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Until I couldn’t stand it anymore—they paid me so little, and treated me like a servant—so I came back to the village. You’re surprised? We have an Oxford-educated engineer here who works picking oranges and repairing cars. We have some street cleaners with college educations. I know a dishwasher who has a master’s degree in economics. Can you imagine how someone like that feels? We made a mistake when we went to college. We had great aspirations, and we forgot where we come from. Our parents spent their life’s savings on us, sold their herds in order to pay for our studies, and we come back to the village, no longer really belonging here. But they won’t accept us anywhere else. I sit and read newspapers all day, hang out with my friends, and grow older.”
I ask him if he knows what the people in Israeli Barta’a think of them. He laughs and says, “You talked with them, didn’t you? You tell me.” I say that on my way here I recorded an unflattering description of them from an Israeli Arab, a native of nearby Um el Fahm. I qualify it in advance by saying that it is very derogatory, on the most general level, but authentic nevertheless. “Immediately after the war,” the young Arab told me, “without even waiting for the cease-fire, we all ran to Barta’a. All those years we had heard the adults talking about how Barta’a had been cut in two, and about the wonderful people there, and we wanted to see for ourselves. So what did we see? A filthy village. People dressed shabbily, in clothes from twenty years ago. We had bell-bottom pants, they had straight-legs. When we started wearing straight-legs again, they started wearing huge bell-bottoms. We, when we got older, didn’t grow mustaches. They all have mustaches two meters long! We had a game when we were kids of counting the mustaches of dafawin, that’s what we call them, dafawin, you know, people who live in the dafa, the West Bank, and every Arab will put down the Arabs of the West Bank Barta’a by saying, ‘What a dafawi!’”
“It’s not a serious study of us,” Judat says, “but simple things like that really do reflect a lot. When we met Israeli Arabs, and from the other Barta’a in particular, they thought we were simply backward. Like the Negroes in Africa, for instance. They still like to think they are better than us, but there are statistics, and they say that there are more high-school graduates among us, and more college graduates. Maybe the conditions of the occupation are what keep us from making the most of our abilities; after all, the whole world knows that the Palestinians have great potential, knowledge, and experience of life. Israeli Arabs have already lost that gift, that ‘spark.’ They have become spoiled and rotten. Their thinking is already lazy. So they have color televisions and I have only a black-and-white, and he eats meat every day and I have meat only once a week. He thinks that’s culture, but he is wrong. Israel improved their standard of living a great deal, but their minds have gone to sleep. Maybe it’s because they try very hard not to think of their complex predicament, so they busy themselves with unimportant things: they spend their lives competing with their neighbor over standard of living and external wealth. The most important thing for them is who can build their son a house first. It’s the opposite with me. I have a sixteen-year-old brother. He could get married tomorrow, but I won’t let him: he needs to finish his studies first. To build his life. And another thing—we are better than them when it comes to human relations. Israel was a bad influence on them in that area as well. Friends and relatives aren’t as close. They’ve become like the European Jews among you”—he laughs—“and we’ve stayed like the Middle Eastern ones.”
’Amar: “When we go there for a wedding, they laugh at us. ‘They’ve come to get some food!’ And afterwards they laugh and say, ‘The dafawin came and ate everything!’ They say they’re just joking, but we know they mean it.”
As’ad (twenty years old, baby-faced, works in the village, getting married next month): “They have Israeli identity cards, so they can go to Tel Aviv and hang out all night and no one does anything to them. I have to return to the village at night, or hide if I want to sleep there. My car has the blue license plate of a dafawi, and they have yellow Israeli plates. They feel like kings because of that, because the police will stop me at a roadblock and let them pass, like Israelis. Once I was driving along the road and the car behind me honked the whole time so that I would get off the road and let him pass. I looked in the mirror and saw an Israeli Arab. It didn’t help me any—he almost threw me off the road, and as he passed he even shouted, ‘Move aside, move aside, you dirty dafawi, go back to Nablus where you came from!’”
The other two nod their heads.
As’ad: “If you ask out a girl from there, she says, ‘I don’t go out with dafawin.’”
’Amar: “Still, there have been some marriages with them during the last few years. At first they didn’t want to, but now they’re getting used to it.”
As’ad: “It’s like an Ashkenazi Jew not wanting to marry a Yemenite Jew.”
’Amar: “And there’s something interesting. Whenever they have a fight with someone over something, they run to us and ask us to fight for them.”
The three of them laugh. “As if we were their bodyguards.”
Riad Kabha from Israeli Barta’a confirms this with an awkward smile. “In 1972 the Israeli border guard wanted to fence off part of our land for training. We didn’t know what to do. We sat and talked about it. People from the other Barta’a, the Jordanian one, suddenly appeared, and asked us, What are you planning to do about it? We said, We’ll shout, we won’t let it pass quietly, we’ll have a press conference! They laughed at us and said, Come out to the land itself and we’ll fight. We fought together with them. They came and lay down in front of the bulldozers. They had a lot more nerve than we did.”
Judat: “They always brag about how much like the Israelis they are, yet they don’t sense what the Israelis think of them. Israeli Arab towns like Faradis and Kufr Qar’a don’t get the same kind of government support Jewish settlements get. Here a week ago the government decided that the Druse and Circassian communities would be granted equal rights with the Israelis. They’re not giving equality to Israeli Arabs. I don’t envy them—they don’t have any pride. They only take things from the country, but they don’t do anything for it. While you do reserve duty forty-five days a year, they go to the beach. If I were in their position, I wouldn’t take anything from the country at all—not social security, not social benefits, nothing.”
I read them what the young man from Um el Fahm told me: “They’ll tell you how miserable we are and how much Arab pride they have. Sure! We were in Israel twenty years, and we collaborated with you a little, but not excessively, and never of our own volition. They did. True, there were some among us who sold you land, but you took most of our land by force. And here they came, the dafawin, and within a year or two they had sold land, received weapons from you, collaborate with you even more than you need them to, maybe! They look down on us? They haven’t suffered a tenth of what we have! They took all our lands. We suffered horrible oppression under the military government before 1966. And them? What do they know? They can travel freely wherever they want. At the most they get stopped at a roadblock here and there. And I’ll give you one small example why I hate the dafawin: once an Israeli took his cigarettes out of his pocket and offered them to me and to a dafawi. I said no thanks and nothing more. The dafawi kissed the Israeli’s fingers and said he didn’t smoke. Kissed his fingers! That’s the difference between us.”
’Amar, Judat, and As’ad listen and laugh derisively. Judat says: “They suffered more than us? How many years did they live under a military government and how many years have we lived under one? And with us there’s no end to it in sight! They talk about oppression? What do they know about oppression? They say we sold land? Sure, there are some who sell land, and there are others who sell their souls…”
The three of them talk together excitedly, interrupting each other in an odd, almost Jewish, competition over how much they had suffered at the hands of the Jews. Judat adds: “They cry about being second-class citizens. But the truth is that they are fifth-class citizens!” The three West Bank Barta’ans give me their ranking of all those who live under Israeli sovereignty: first come the Jews, who are first-class citizens. Then come the Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia, who are second-class. Then come the Bedouin, and then, they say, we come, because we lack rights but we have pride, and at the very end come the Israeli Arabs.
“Understand,” says Judat, “that in living here, in the West Bank, I constitute an international problem. The whole world talks and argues about me. No one talks about him. I am free in my soul, I know that I can say what I feel toward you and the occupation with a full heart. He can’t. He is too tied up with you. He can’t even think about it. He prefers not to think about it.”
As’ad: “That’s why they feel uncomfortable when they meet us. They suddenly have to decide who they really are.”
’Amar: “They call themselves Israeli Arabs, but they don’t call us Palestinians, because that is problematic for them. They call us West Bank Arabs or just dafawin. Their children even talk that way—instead of saying, ‘I’m going to the other Barta’a,’ they say, ‘I’m going to the difa,’ to the West Bank.”
* * *
Riad Kabha, the mukhtar of Israeli Barta’a, said of that: “They really see themselves as part of the Palestinian people. We see ourselves as part of the Palestinian people, but also as an integral part of Israel. The sad part about it is that the Israelis reject us because we are Arabs, and the Arab countries reject us because we are Israelis. The Arabs in the other Barta’a continue to see us as part of Israel. But despite that, if you write about us, you should write the whole truth: in recent years the differences between us are starting to blur. After all, twenty years have passed. There are more marriages between them and us. There is more contact. They are beginning to be a bit influenced by our way of life. We’ve also gained something: our national consciousness has grown stronger as a result of contact with them. As if we had remembered our roots again. Our economic superiority could not stand up to their political superiority.”
“If, in the future, they ever decide to set up a Palestinian state,” said the young Arab from Um el Fahm, thirty years old, university graduate, now living and working in Jerusalem, “and if Um el Fahm were to be included in that Palestinian state, I would not want to live there under any circumstances. You have to understand that I was educated here. My way of thinking is from here. I’m already used to this life, even to our special status among you, on this quarter-democracy you have given us. Do you think I could go now and live with them in Nablus?”
Just before I left West Bank Barta’a I met a young, embittered man who works as a laborer in Israel. After asking that I not print his name, he told me: “If we act like fools, the gap between us and Israeli Barta’a will always remain. If we are smart, we will learn it all from them. There are lots of things worth taking from them. The future lies in their direction, not in ours. Look how they enjoy life, and what dogs’ lives we have. With us, the father decides everything, and he doesn’t always understand how life has changed. Their women study, ours don’t. Among us, a father has many children, so they all remain poor generation after generation. With them, every family has three children and stops. A guy my age and with my intelligence who lives there will succeed more than me, and will be happier. But if we are smart, if we learn from them exactly what they learned from you, when you come here twenty years from now, you won’t see any difference between Barta’a and the other Barta’a.”