What do the Arabs dream about? And what do Jewish children dream about? Is it possible to hope that the dreams of the Jews and the Arabs provide some sort of escape and easing and refinement of the harsh and cruel reality of life—or are dreams only a direct continuation of it?
And why should the mirror mold of dreams not create some sort of closeness, a dialogue unknown to its participants, anti-grammar, unexpectedly creating a new language?
It will not happen.
Dr. Yoram Bilu, a lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, examined with the help of his students, Yussuf Nashef and Tehila Blumenthal, the dreams of eleven-to-thirteen-year-old children in different parts of Israel and the West Bank. Part of his study concerned the children of the Kalandia refugee camp, and the children of Gush Etzion and Kiryat Arba, Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Every child who took part in the study received a colored notebook and was asked to record four dreams immediately upon wakening. The age of the subjects was fixed so that they would be old enough to write down their dreams but not old enough to be bothered by sexual dreams.
And one other important comment: the children in the refugee camp did not know that the study was for the Hebrew University. The notebooks were given to them through UNWRA and afterwards were carefully translated. What dreams do they dream?
Seventeen percent of the dreams of the Jewish children dealt with meetings with Arabs. (To the attention of those who wish at any price to prevent such meetings. And by the way: does the law recently passed by the Knesset making it illegal for Israelis to meet with PLO members include dream meetings? Check.) In contrast, 30 percent of the children in the Kalandia refugee camp dreamed during the brief period of the study at least one dream involving some sort of meeting with a Jew. The meaning of this, according to Dr. Bilu, is that the children in the Kalandia camp “are obsessively involved with the conflict.”
But whom exactly do Jews and Arabs meet on moonless nights?
Among 328 dreams of meetings (Jews and Arabs) there is not one character identified by name. There is not a single figure defined by a personal, individual appearance. All the descriptions, without exception, are completely stereotyped; the characters defined only by their ethnic identification (Jew, Arab, Zionist, etc.) or by value-laden terms with negative connotations (the terrorists, the oppressors, etc.). The Arabs do not try to refine their stereotyped characters. The Jews make some sort of effort—in general, the word “Arab” is associated for them with the word “criminal.” “I lived in an Arab city, full of criminals,” wrote an eleven-year-old from Kiryat Arba. “I entered the grocery store and two men, an Arab and a gangster, attacked me there,” dreamed another boy from the same town. “We have to educate the Arabs, so that they will be good, law-abiding citizens,” declared another young citizen from among the Jewish settlers in Hebron. “I taught them to write in Hebrew, until they became good people, and then they freed them from the jail, and they didn’t make any more problems.”
The Arabs often find escape in apocalyptic dreams, in which the final, decisive battle is held, and the Arab armies, dressed in shining white, are ranged against the Jewish heretics, wrapped in black. The battle is always won by the good guys.
Jewish children also have trouble facing the constant struggle, offering no escape, and they find release in imagination and transference: Kiryat Arba children told, for example, of a colored flying saucer which landed on the border between Israel and “the land of the enemy”; of soldiers from Uganda who attacked a Jewish child, and a twelve-year-old went the farthest when he dreamed that he was walking, minding his own business, in the heart of Hebron and was cruelly attacked from the back, “and I turned around and managed to see that it was a Chinese boy…”
The majority of the interactions in the dreams are violent and aggressive and end in death. The dreams of the children of the Kalandia refugee camp indicate a hard and threatening reality, a fragile world with no defense. The typical “plot” of such a dream is played out in the camp: the boundaries of the dreamer’s house are very permeable, nothing provides him with defense and security, strange people invade the house and attack the child. Frequently, they torture him to death. His parents are unable to protect him. One dream in particular caught my eye: “The Zionist Army surrounds our house and breaks in. My big brother is taken to prison and is tortured there. The soldiers continue to search the house. They throw everything around, but do not find the person they want [the dreamer himself]. They leave the house, but return, helped by a treacherous neighbor. This time they find me and my relatives, after we had all hidden in the closet in fright.”
The Holocaust appears in many dreams of the Kiryat Arba children. An eleven-year-old girl writes: “My friend and I decided to go to Jericho. Suddenly we heard someone calling us from behind. They were my parents. They said that I have to take off the yellow star I was wearing. The star is a large yellow piece of paper, showing that we support the partisans. The city, Jericho, was against the partisans. But it turned out that my friend and I had taken off the star too late, because suddenly someone came, took us to a grove of trees, and ordered us to crawl on the ground along with many other people. Crawling, we reached a tunnel, but only my father was allowed to enter, and my mother and I had to continue to the place for the women. Suddenly I saw something move: it was an old woman starting out of her grave. Her face was covered with earth.”
Guilt feelings appear only among the Jewish children. So, for instance, in the dream of a twelve-year-old girl from Kiryat Arba: “… suddenly someone grabs me, and I see that it is happening in my house, but my family went away, and Arab children are walking through our rooms, and their father holds me, he has a kaffiyeh and his face is cruel, and I am not surprised that it is happening, that these Arabs now live in my house. I accept that as if that is the way it is supposed to be.”
It is a long and detailed study, but it seems to me that these few examples are sufficient. The dreams offer neither escape nor relief. There are no moments of pity and no friendly contact. Some of them are nightmares, difficult to read, and more difficult to realize the price being paid by our children and the Arab children for living in this conflict. This conflict, from which there is no escape even in dreams.
The writer J. M. Coetzee, who also lives in a cruel land, complex to the point of being almost insoluble, recently received the Jerusalem Prize; in his speech he recalled the philosopher Nietzsche, who said: “We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” “In South Africa,” Coetzee said, “there is now too much truth for the art to hold. Truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination.”
Among us, even dreams are crushed under the weight of reality.
One fact is particularly interesting, concerning what does not appear in this study: among some thousand dreams of Jewish and Arab children, there is not one which indicates a longing for peace.