Again in Deheisha. It is a quiet day today. No demonstrations. No stone throwing. The army can be seen only from afar, riding along the road. A week later there would be riots and demonstrations and rocks would fly, and around Deheisha would rise a six-meter fence, to prevent stones from being thrown on every passing car. Deheisha would become invisible as far as the travelers along the road were concerned, and the fence would become, it seems, a new Palestinian symbol. The rainwater and the sewage still flow in rivulets along the paths. A man lays a heavy stone on a tin roof to prevent the wind from blowing it away. A group of young men build another room onto a house. They are building everywhere here. With determination and without any plan. “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” Marco Polo asked the hardworking builders in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, and they answered him—without pausing for a moment from lifting pails and moving their long brushes up and down: “So that its destruction cannot begin.” Do you fear that the minute you take down the scaffolding the city will begin to crumble and fall to pieces? And the residents of the invisible city answered hastily, in a whisper: “Not only the city.”
The owner of the little grocery store is surprised at my entry, and rises in concern. The merchandise is scanty and old. For the most part it consists of cigarettes, soft drinks, and cans of pineapple displaying suntanned young women covered with dust. Why bother describing it? We are all acquainted with a store just like it. The store-owner’s friend, Abu Hana, checks first to see if I am not from the mukhabarat, the intelligence service, and afterwards says that he will speak of anything except bolitics, since bolitics is a science in which it is very difficult to discover anything new, no?
Yes, it would seem.
It is better to remain silent, he says. Then he finds that he cannot hold back, and sounds a hurried whisper: “Napoleon, Bismarck, Hitler,” he says. “None of them lasted. They were too strong. It’s best to sit quietly and wait.”
Wait for what?
I don’t know. I’m no genius. What do I know?
And he smiles me a calculated, distancing smile.
I look him over. An Arab dressed in a kaffiyeh and enveloped in a neutral, purposeful expression, against the background of a strongly lined face, engraved by a harsh hand. The bank clerk who told me a week ago, in the voice of one making me party to a secret, “I most hate working on the tenth of the month, when all the arabushim get their pay,” was thinking, no doubt, of this arabush. Or maybe she meant the other arabushim, who also wear a mask of ignorance and apathy, to the point that the mask has seeped into their skins.
And on the slope of the hill in Deheisha, I passed a group of small children racing upward. Rowda. An Arab kindergarten. Two teachers (Don’t give our names, but you can quote) and thirty-five children from two to five years old. The Deheisha kindergarten.
I want to expand a little on this subject: the small children, nameless, with running noses, the ones we see along the roads, playing by the passing cars. These are the children who in ’67 sold us figs for a grush and washed our parents’ cars for ten grush. And afterwards they grew up a little and became the shbab, you know, the ones with the look of hate in their eyes, rioting in the streets and throwing stones at our soldiers, tying a lasso to the crown of a cypress tree, bending it to the ground, attaching a Palestinian flag to it, and freeing the tree—and you, the soldier, go cut down the moon; and afterwards they grew a little more, and from among them came the ones who make the Molotov cocktails and the bombs. They are the same children from ’67. Nothing has changed in the refugee camps, and their future is etched on their faces like an ancient, fossilized record.
For now, they are little children in kindergarten. One group shouts and cheers, and after making a conscious effort—necessary, perhaps, for all strangers and for Jews and Israelis in particular—I begin to differentiate their faces, their voices, their smiles, their characters, and slowly also their beauty and delicacy, and this is not easy. It requires an investment of energy on my part, since I also have trained myself to look at Arabs with that same blurred vision which makes it easier for me (only for me?) to deal with their chiding, accusing, threatening presence, and during this month of encounters with them I must do exactly the opposite, enter the vortex of my greatest fear and repulsion, direct my gaze at the invisible Arabs, face this forgotten reality, and see how—as in the process of developing a picture—it emerges before me slowly, slowly from the emulsion in the darkroom of my fears and my sublimations.
The teachers? They giggle, they blush, they consult each other: yes. They would be happy to take me to see their kindergarten. We stride upward between the boulders and the puddles. In every direction, someone is busy building. Renovating. Painting. The families are large, and more and more must be built. “Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?” Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo asked the citizens of Thekla, and received no answer until night fell and the star-filled heavens were spread above. “There is the blueprint,” they answered him.
And on the roof of one of those houses sits a boy, twelve years old perhaps, head shaved and eyes closed, and he plays devotedly on a comb wrapped in paper. Fiddler on the roof.
Between two buildings sits a cement structure, plastered white on the outside. Closed with an iron door on which is the UNWRA emblem. It looks like a public bomb shelter from the fifties. The young teacher opens the iron door, filled with holes, and I enter the Deheisha kindergarten.
First, one has to get used to the dimness. There is no electricity in the kindergarten. I stand in a long, narrow space, divided into two rooms. There is not one picture on the grayish walls; because of the dampness, the wall crumbles if you try to pound a nail into it. In the corner of the room, a metal table and two chairs. And one other piece of furniture: a thin reed mat.
The teacher tells the children to sit, and they do so, crowding onto the mat. They chatter with each other, as children do, until the teacher tells them to be quiet. From that moment on, they are totally silent, not making a sound during the entire conversation. In an Israeli kindergarten the children are unable to remain quiet for a single minute. They jump up from their places, run to the teacher, say what they have to say, argue. They are free children, and you can understand what this blessed, natural freedom is only when you see its opposite. “The children here are so quiet and disciplined,” I said to the kindergarten teacher in Deheisha, and she answered with an Arabic proverb: “The gosling floats like the gander”—like father, like son.
* * *
“Where are you from?”
“From Zakaria. A village.”
“Were you born there?”
She laughs. Really. Even her mother has no memories from there. Mother was five years old when they fled. It is Grandmother who preserves the family tradition. Grandmother, married at the age of seven to a twenty-year-old man. This is what happened: the Turkish Army was at the gates of the country, and the Arabs feared that the Turkish soldiers would take the girls. So they betrothed them while they were still in diapers. Grandfather himself went out to the Great War, and when he returned once on furlough his little wife called him a bad name. He became angry with her, lifted her up in his hands, and threw her far away. That’s how little she was!
And the giggly kindergarten teacher bends over with laughter as she tells the story. Today that grandmother has four sons and a daughter in Deheisha. She has survived the Turks, the British, the Jordanians, and the Israelis—four occupations.
She is attractive, the ruddy-cheeked teacher, and looks the way our high-school girls once looked. That anarchist enthusiasm of youth. She is sharp and excitable, and is not afraid to say what is on her mind. She was born in Deheisha, and she supposes she will spend her whole life here. She is engaged to a young man from the camp. How do they enjoy themselves? There isn’t much to do here, she answers, we go to friends, to relatives. Even after the wedding, the couple has no place to be alone.
“Where will you build your house?”
“In the camp, over my parents’ house.”
“And you don’t want to leave here for a better place?”
“Only for my homeland. Even if they offer me a palace. Our parents made a mistake when they left their homes. We won’t make that mistake.”
“And you don’t dream sometimes, only dream, that you might live in a better place?”
“Dreams?” She laughs. “I have a responsibility,” she says, “to the suffering my parents endured, and to my own suffering.”
“And because of responsibility to suffering you won’t try to achieve even limited possible happiness?”
“I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“And who will help you return to your village—Arafat?”
“Arafat? Arafat is bourgeois. He drives a Mercedes. He doesn’t feel the suffering of the refugees. All the Fatah commanders have houses in Syria and the Gulf states. Arafat has no supporters here. Only we can represent ourselves.”
“And if Arafat achieves a political settlement? There is talk now of an international conference, you know.”
“Understand. We are against Arafat, because Arafat wants peace. We want a solution by force. What was taken by force will be returned by force. Only thus.”
Only thus. I remember the similarity between the symbol of the Irgun and that of the PLO: here a fist grasping a rifle against a map of the land of Israel, and there two fists, holding rifles, against the very same map.
The young and enthusiastic kindergarten teacher was neither the first nor the last person I met during these weeks who voluntarily turned himself into an object, a play toy in the hands of those dealers in life and death, into an impersonal symbol. Into a collective noun. When I stand before such people, I have no idea where to begin unraveling this web of iron.
“And the children, what about them?” I ask.
“The children here know everything,” she says, and her friend nods. “Some of the children here are the fourth generation in the camp. On any night the army may enter their house, right into the house, conduct a search, shout, turn over the blankets and slash at them with their bayonets, strip their fathers—here, Naji here—”
Naji is two and a half years old, short for his age, black eyes, curls.
“A month ago they took his father, and he doesn’t know where he is, or if he will ever return.”
“A little while ago,” says the second teacher, somewhat heavy, blue-eyed, and delicately made up, always on the edge of a giggle or a blush, “a little while ago the military governor visited the kindergarten and asked if I teach the children bad things, against Israel and the Jews.”
“And what did you say to him?”
“I said that I don’t. But that his soldiers do.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I’ll explain. When a child goes for a walk outside and sees a tree, he knows that the tree bears fruit and leaves, right? When he sees a soldier, he knows very well what that soldier does. Do you understand?”
“What do soldiers do?” I ask a girl of about four, called Naima, green-eyed, little gold earrings in her ears.
“Searches and beatings.”
“Do you know who the Jews are?”
“The army.”
“Are there other Jews?”
“No.”
“What does your father do?”
“Sick.”
“And your mother?”
“She works in Jerusalem for the Jews. Cleans their houses.”
So she answers me, the new little Palestinian problem.
“And you”—a chubby boy, somewhat dreamy— “do you know who the Jews are?”
“Yes. They took my sister.”
“Where to?”
“To Farah.”
(Both his sisters are there, in jail, the teachers explain.)
“What did your sisters do?”
“They did not throw stones,” he says angrily.
Suddenly a little boy gets up, holding a short yellow plastic stick in his hand, and shoots me.
“Why are you shooting me?”
He runs to the teacher, peeks at me from behind her arm, and laughs. He is two years old.
“Who do you want to shoot?” the teachers ask, smiling, like two mothers taking pride in a smart child.
“Jews.”
Their lips make out the answer with him.
“Now tell him why,” they encourage the little one.
“Because the Jews took my uncle,” he says. “At night they came in and stole him from the bed, so now I sleep with my mother all the time.”
“Is this the answer, to bring up another generation and another in hatred? To teach them that this hatred justifies the refusal to work toward a solution? Couldn’t you try, maybe, another way?”
“There is no other way,” they answer, both of them, each in her own way, in a whisper or with self-assurance, but the same words.
I stand and listen and try to be neutral. To understand. Not to judge. And also not to be like an American or French correspondent, completely severed from the whole complex of events, and quick to pass judgment. But I also stand here as a reserve soldier in the Israeli Army, and as a human being, rising up against this education in blind hatred, and against such tremendous energy being expended for the preservation of malice, instead of being spent in an effort to get out of this barrenness, this ugliness in which this kindergarten lies, these little children who are so good at hating me.
* * *
A boy raises his hand. Needs to make peepee. I accompany him. The bathroom is only a little niche separated from the room by a curtain. In its center, a hole in the ground and a porcelain platter. Little piles of excrement all over, and the urinating boy steps in some. I remember the textbooks full of hate and anti-Israel propaganda found by Israeli soldiers twenty years ago, after the war, in the schools and kindergartens. Those books were confiscated, but their content is now transmitted orally. The oral law. It doesn’t matter at all who is really guilty of the refugee camps—we, the Israelis, will pay the price. We, and not the Arab countries or the world. It is us they will hate, these children living their whole lives in a colorless world without happiness, who spend long summer and winter hours in a cold and mildewed kindergarten, which has neither a glass window nor electricity. With the all-pervading stink rising from the “bathroom” a grotesque symbol of their situation.
“What games do you play here?”
“Games like everywhere,” says the younger teacher. “Tag. Hide-and-seek. There are toys, too.”
Two small cardboard boxes hold the kindergarten’s toys: old, faded toys. Someone’s donation. Not one toy is whole. None of the cars has wheels. Dolls have missing limbs. There is no mercy.
They also have songs, the kindergarten children in Deheisha. The teachers stand them in a line. “What do we sing when the army goes by? One, two, three, four!” And the children break out in song:
“We went out into the street/We waved the flags/We sang for our country the nicest of songs/a song of freedom and unity/a song of victory through struggle/Bloom, my land/By throwing stones and burning tires we will free the motherland…”
I recall the Jewish children who sang patriotic songs when British soldiers passed by. They must also have felt like heroes when they did. It is always the same play, only the players change, and sometimes the roles. It requires a lot of strength to change roles, adapt, learn new lines, inure yourself to the complex significance of the new part.
“And jokes about us,” I ask them, as if I am not at all part of the joke, “do you tell jokes about us?”
They think for a minute, astounded that there aren’t any. There really aren’t. No jokes at all? No slang expression, twenty years old, to describe the border guards, the Shin Bet (the secret security service), the military governor?
We, says the smiling teacher, laugh mostly at ourselves.
Strange that they have no jokes about us. In other places I received the same answer. Really, they asked themselves, how is it that there aren’t any jokes? It would be interesting to examine what they do with all that aggression and hatred of us. Who is their Sholem Aleichem? Is it that they unconsciously avoid seeking an outlet in humor? Do they prefer to preserve their hatred and humility unworked, raw, and wild?
“I don’t tell the children bad things about Israel,” the heavy one says, and adjusts her sweater, “but I tell them stories, stories about animals,” she hints.
Like fables.
“… like, for example, there were small sparrows on a terebinth tree, playing and having a good time, and suddenly came a cruel black raven who coveted their tree and expelled them from it. They were very sad. They almost died of sorrow, until they got up and gathered together, and flew against him as a great and united group, and so were able to expel him from their tree.”
“You made it up?”
“Yes. I have a few stories like that. The children already understand.”
“And did they succeed in organizing themselves together, the birds?”
“Yes. They are very wise. They’re birds, not Palestinians.”
Toward evening I travel to Jerusalem. The roads are lined with rusty cars. Metal ruins, tires stuck on barbed-wire fences, old hot-water tanks, discarded doors, walls dirtied with half-erased graffiti, old shoes … everything left bare and harsh along the road, everything preserved, awakening pent-up melancholy: all this abandoned, like a rebellion and cry against a destroyed, corrupt, irreparable circumstance.
At six in the evening I arrive at the Ben Yehuda mall in downtown Jerusalem to buy Dear Brothers, a book about the Jewish underground by one of its members, Haggai Segel. The evening is gray and misty, and the people are burdened with their civilian matters, isolated so much from the hate and the danger, as I walked among them like the bearer of evil tidings among the unaware. In the thin fog and with the light of the yellow streetlamps it is possible to succumb to illusions and see behind every person a halo, a sort of double peeking out for a split second, the identical twin of this man, his double from Nablus, and that young woman, whose unknown twin I met this morning at Deheisha, that same walk and same smile and same quiet sensuality, and for every child there was a double, and none of them knew, and none of them guessed a thing.