In the heavy fog I almost did not find the village. It was a white and thick night, and low clouds rose in front of the car. I searched for the house, but the fog led me astray into the wrong alleys and sent me over dirt paths. Then I stopped struggling and allowed myself to travel at a crawl through the village, and then, for the first time, I could feel something soft and free before me, maybe because of the fog lying over the village, maybe because of the quiet and the late hour; in any case, the air was completely rid of that thing bitterly called “the conflict,” from the poison of the facts and interpretations and the enmity and the lingering memories. The Arabs were alone, and I was simply an undetected voyeur, and they were without us. From between the scraps of fog I saw a woman come out toward the doorway of her house, wiping up the drops of rain with a mop; a broom seller walked bent over, returning home after the day’s work; in a corner of the street the headlights of a car lit up the warm secrets of a small grocery store, where two men sat playing backgammon. It was already 10 p.m. when I found myself outside the Tahers’ large house. Taher is not his real name. He asked that I call him that, because the people here are still not willing to listen to his ideas. “Here they want to understand what you think right away: to know whether you are against the occupation or a collaborator and traitor. Black or white. They don’t understand that there are several grades in between.”
Taher is middle-aged. Somewhat heavy, with glasses, and quick of movement. His speech is swift, a little musical, as if each of his sentences were a question, and movements of his hands illuminate his words with improvised drawings.
He asked me what I had heard from the people I had met in the area.
I told him that only two days ago, in Beit Jala, one public figure told me that if we, the Israelis, were to leave the area, there would be a “second Beirut.” The Moslems would slaughter the Christians, and then each other.
Taher answered immediately: “There will be a great slaughter. They will butcher each other on the bridge, anyone who is armed. Afterwards—the others: first they will kill whoever had any connection with Israel, and those who did business with Israel. And those suspected of collaboration with the mukhabarat, the intelligence service, and after they kill half of the population here, they will begin killing each other in a struggle for power. But I think”—he smiled—“that if you leave our land, there will be a second Beirut among you as well, because your debate over us, about the territories, is what keeps you from the real disagreements you have among you, which you haven’t pursued for twenty years.”
And if we stay here, I ask.
“Even if you stay here, it will be the end of you. We are dismembering you from the inside. You are small and want to be a great empire. And as you grow, you will approach your end. Like a child’s balloon. And we are gaining strength in the meantime. We have more money, from working for you; we have identity, and that didn’t exist before; and we learn many things from you. And today there are many people among us who can send their children to college to study literature and history, as I did—who ever heard of sending a child who can work and bring in money to study, of all things, humanities?”
And if we arrive at some arrangement under which we leave here and you have a government of your own? How do you see the country which will then be born?
He smiles broadly. “That won’t be in my time or in yours. It’s a dream. If the Jordanians didn’t give me a government, do you think that Shamir will? Or Sharon? Peres won’t, either. Why waste strength on dreams? Even without that, life is hard for us. Here we live in constant fear that the time is approaching when you will expel all of us from our land. That, after all, is the only difference between your parties, the good ones and the bad ones: when to expel the Arabs. I need all the strength I have in order to live with that fear, and in order to live without freedom, and you ask me about dreams? We need to think only about the possible.”
The conversation, by the way, was conducted in Hebrew: twenty days after the Six-Day War began, Taher went to Jerusalem and registered for the intensive Hebrew course at the Beit Ha’am community center. “I knew that the Jews would be here in the West Bank for a long time.” How did you know? We ourselves weren’t sure that we would. “That’s because you still didn’t know how much it suits a person to be a conqueror. You thought then that you didn’t know how to be like that. But don’t forget that I had lived for twenty years under another occupation, the Jordanian, and that I am a much greater expert on conquerors than you are.”
And what did your neighbors in the village say when you began to learn Hebrew?
“At first they said jasus [spy]. Afterwards, they quieted down and saw the truth.”
And what is the truth?
“What I said. That we need to learn from you, and take from you what you can give us.
“If you leave here now and leave us alone—it will be very hard for us.” He explained: “You accustomed us to many things, and we aren’t what we once were. It would be as if you were to take us to the middle of a stormy sea and say to us: Get along on your own now. We aren’t ready for that yet. Maybe in another ten years, twenty years we will be. Not now. And we know that in our hearts—it’s just that no one dares say it out loud.”
And in the meantime?
“In the meantime, stay with us for a little bit longer. But change your attitude. Change your views. And start thinking about us in a totally different way.”
How differently?
“Start thinking about us not as your Arabs, asses that anyone can ride, people without honor. Start thinking about us as your future neighbors. In the end we will be the people with whom you will have to live here and come to an agreement with and create ties with, and do business with, and everything, right? It’s not the Japanese you will have to come to an agreement of peace and trust with, right? Even if there are five more wars here, the children of my grandchildren and the children of your grandchildren will finally get wise and make some sort of agreement with each other, right? So I say: Change your attitude a little, make some effort in our direction. Even try—and I know that it is probably hard for you, right?—try, God forbid, to respect us.
* * *
Taher speaks a fluent and special Hebrew. He studied for three years at the Hebrew University. Then he went into business. He has extensive links with Israel and his economic situation is good. Because of his Israeli connections, and because of the things he says, I at first suspected that he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. I wondered whether he was not deprecating himself; but I did him an injustice. I wanted to be sure that I was not mistaken: in the two months I traveled in the land of Ishmael, I heard once or twice the sickening sound of the groveler. I was acquainted with the whisper of one who makes himself a partner in my crime and tells me: Stay here forever. Only you can save us. You brought us wealth. Liberty and freedom won’t buy us bread. And this, too: We, the Arabs, need to be treated with a strong hand. We respect only the person who hits us. I listened, and tried to find out if the speaker could say something more than that, about what awaits the two peoples if the current situation continues, and about the reality coming into being here. But I heard no more than the same whispers over and over again. There is no point in going into details: it does not matter who said these things—they are said by an enslaved man who has lost his divine image, and maybe doesn’t realize it himself. More than likely he believes what he says with all his heart, but I want nothing to do with such people. You can never trust them. Not when they are under our control and not when we are allied with them.
Taher, however, speaks his own free, original thought, without a trace of groveling or desire to be liked. “Twenty years have passed,” he tells me, “twenty years during which we have been together. You already know that Arabs know what theater is, and we know that Jews don’t have tails. True, not everyone understands it fully. Sometimes I hear a mother here in the village shout at her child: If you don’t eat, I’ll tell a Jew to come and kill you! I tell her that she should be ashamed to speak that way, because if you teach your child to fear Jews, you ensure that he will do so all his life, and, after all, he needs to live together with them here, right?”
He speaks with emotion, with urgency. Sweat gathers on his forehead, and his thick eyeglasses fog over, despite the coldness of the large, unheated house. For a moment he looks like a frightened attorney caught between two hotheaded disputants, trying to appeal to what remains of their reason, knowing that if they pounce on each other he will be the first to be crushed.
“You also have much to learn: not to get into our souls, for example. Why do your soldiers need to stop me five times when I go to buy a sack of flour in the main street of Hebron? Why do they need to humiliate me at a roadblock in front of my children, who can see how the soldiers laugh at their father and force him to get out of the car? Of course, you have to behave like conquerors. I don’t deny that. That’s the way history is: you won the war and we lost. I say, all right. Be conquerors. Push us, but with delicacy. Because sometimes you push so hard that we see how scared you are.”
Scared? Explain that.
“Yes, yes. You should know that you’re in a bad position. When I return from Amman, from visiting my brother, and one of your soldiers tells me to undress, and pokes his fingers down there, and checks my underwear, my hair, I look him in the eyes and think, My God, look how the entire Israeli government and the entire Israeli Army are scared of you, Taher. And then you seem to me like a great king who sits in his palace and places many guards around him, but doesn’t sleep at night, because he knows that at any minute someone might come and take his crown away.”
But you know that our fears are well-founded. We have enemies, we are in danger, and we have to defend ourselves.
“Yes, yes, that’s right. But even if you are certainly justified in your searches and your roadblocks and all that—you yourselves feel in your hearts that this is not the right position for you. You want to be great conquerors like the Moslems of Mohammed were, like the Turks and like Napoleon, but on the other hand you want to be merciful and democratic like the English and like America, so what do you do? You make mistakes. Look, every year you have a new political party; anyone with any sense sets up another party, and why? Because no one understands what your country was originally meant to be, and no one remembers what they wanted to do, and believe me, when I sit down with a Jew (and I work with Jews all the time) I feel as if we are both of us in a prison under Israeli occupation.”
Then the door opens, and a sleepy child in pajamas comes in, turns to Taher, and jumps into his lap. A small boy, curly-haired, who walks barefoot across the painted floor tiles. Taher speaks to him with movements of his hands, mouthing words for emphasis, and the boy answers with more movements. Taher excuses himself and goes to put the boy to bed. When he returns, he tells me that he has two deaf-and-dumb children. They even studied for a time at the school for the deaf in Jerusalem, but they don’t teach Arabic there. He speaks of his children naturally and lovingly, without a hint of reproach in his voice, and I understand without any explanation from him why he so urgently seeks to bring the extremes to reason together, to open their eyes to moderation and caution, and why he cannot surrender to any sort of dream.