On Oct. 31, 1948, the Israeli Army marched into Ikrit, a Christian Arab village in Galilee. “We received the soldiers as guests, with food, drink and song,” says Aouni Sbeit, a poet from the village, now 63 years old. A few days later, the soldiers told the villagers to leave-just for a couple of weeks, to get out of the way of the war. They were sent to a nearby town called Rama, and they were never allowed to go back. Sbeit and his rapidly growing family (eight children and now 19 grandchildren) were stuck in Rama, where he lives today, 44 years later.
When Israel won its independence, nearly 600,000 Arabs fled the country or were driven out. But another 160,000 stayed on and ultimately settled for citizenship in the new Jewish state. They have multiplied mightily, and many of today’s 800,000 Israeli Arabs-18 percent of the population-have prospered. But they don’t really belong on either side of the Green Line that separates Israel from the territory it conquered in 1967. That makes them a natural subject for David Grossman, the Israeli writer whose best-selling 1988 book, “The Yellow Wind,” poignantly described the plight of Palestinians on the occupied West Bank. His new book depicts the Israeli Arabs as a docile, though deeply resentful, minority. “Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learned something even more difficult-to stand still on the wire,” he writes. “To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will.”
The habit of acquiescence separates the Arabs in Israel from those in the occupied territories. “They can conduct a violent struggle against you,” an Israeli Arab tells Grossman. “We can’t anymore.” The comparison induces self-loathing. Says another Israeli Arab: “We have only the body; there they have the soul.”
Dialogue is Grossman’s main method. The result is discursive but compelling-a shaft of light on a subject that neither Arabs nor Jews talk about much. Mohammed Kiwan, an Arab, and Jojo Abutbul, a Jew, start their dialogue full of good will. “An Arab is a human being. An Arab has a soul,” says Abutbul. “Jojo has the right to live here,” says Kiwan. But after hours of talk, they reach a dead end. “Jojo would never give up Israel as a Jewish state; Mohammed would never retreat from his goal of full equal rights,” Grossman says. Israeli Arabs have no answer to their own dilemma. They want full rights but cannot have them as long as Israel is a Jewish state. And even if those rights were available in a Palestinian state on the West Bank, most of them would never leave home.
Grossman hopes that eventually the Israeli Arabs will become “an autonomous national minority” with self-rule “in areas that present no challenge to the country’s sovereignty (education and culture, religion, community services, independent radio and television, etc.).” But he concedes that, in one of the world’s most silent minorities, “the voices calling for this today, are few and far between.” He warns that if Israel makes peace with the occupied Palestinians before it comes to terms with those inside its own borders, the Israeli Arabs will be left dangling, a people without a country anywhere.
