The train passed Tel Aviv University and Tel Aviv HaHaganah stations without our hearing the name Merkaz Savidor, or reading it on any sign—though my eyes were polluted by all the names I hated: Haganah, Stern, Lehi, and all the others, old and new, that represented the worst falsification of history and geography in the present age. At those moments, I felt the steel wheels of the train grinding the bones of the dead in the three Palestinian villages buried under Tel Aviv, and my own feelings were equally crushed.
“We’ve been traveling more than an hour, darling,” said my wife. “Are you sure we haven’t passed our station?”
The Israeli conscript snatched away my chance to reply to my wife’s question without asking permission, like Israel confiscating a piece of land in East Jerusalem. “Where are you going?” he asked in a Palestinian accent.
“To Merkaz Savidor,” replied Julie.
“You passed it some time ago, and now you’re on your way to Lydda,” he said, in a tone of gratuitous regret and slight censure. “You need to get off at the next station and head back the other way.”
“But we didn’t hear the name of the station or see any sign for it,” I replied.
“Well, it went past a little while ago. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He got up, and I followed him in the direction of a train route map hanging in the space between our carriage and the one before it. Of course, he would know more than me: he was a local, while I was a foreigner, a tourist lost in the country. The soldier showed me the last station we had passed, then put his finger on the name of the station we were supposed to have gotten off at. We went back together to our seats, though I could still not understand how we’d missed our stop.
“You speak Arabic better than I do. Are you Palestinian?” I asked him cautiously before we arrived back at our shared seat.
“No, I’m Israeli,” he replied, with a decisiveness free of any emotion. His confidence disturbed me. I swallowed as hard as I could, and sat down in silence. The conscript took his place and continued reading his newspaper.
At this point, Julie engaged him in conversation in the worst possible way. “Why are you carrying a weapon?” she enquired of the conscript, in her usual broken Arabic. My foot moved under the table, as I tried to signal her to stop talking. The young man hesitated to answer. Julie went on: “It’s a lovely day, the weather’s really nice, the train’s quiet, and wherever we go people are living normally. So why are you carrying a weapon?”
Once again my foot issued a warning beneath the table, this time more forcefully, as if to say, Why are you making problems with an Israeli soldier and creating a headache for us?
“Of course, the weapon’s necessary, essential. Otherwise . . . ,” the soldier replied.
All my attempts to stop Julie’s questions—to which she already knew the answers—failed. Despite my kicking her harder with my foot, Julie insisted on getting a clear and direct answer from the soldier himself. “Okay, why is the weapon essential? There’s no war here, there aren’t any problems!”
“But there might be trouble at any moment. We don’t know. We need to be ready.”
This answer silenced her questions like a blow. For my part, I tried to place his accent. Suddenly, I realized what I should have realized from the beginning: this Israeli army conscript was a Palestinian from the Galilee region, most likely a Druze, whose young men had been obliged to serve in the Israeli army (along with some of the Bedouin) ever since a number of traditionalist sheikhs of the sect had agreed on their behalf to the compulsory conscription decree.
As his rifle bumped my hip again, raising in me a shudder of disgust, I thought, Why didn’t you do as the writer Salman al-Natur’s hero did, and scream, “Why have you killed us, Sheikh?” like an eternal condemnation, as he did in the face of Sheikh Fahd al-Faris? Al-Natur gathered together the voices of those who had refused or resisted conscription, demanded that the sect be relieved of subjection to his laws, and threw them in the face of al-Faris: “You’re the killer, Sheikh!” Why didn’t you refuse to serve, go to prison, and come out of it freed from the Sheikh’s signature?
Meanwhile, Julie was busily examining the map of the land that the train window was flashing past. She seemed to have dismissed the conscript. I made a mental note to share the soldier’s paradoxical nature with her later.
Would this young man recall his colleague Samir Saad? Would he have even heard of him? Ought I to remind him? Samir had been a member of his sect, killed by Palestinians like himself. They had thought he was an Israeli—and they were right, since there was nothing Palestinian about him except his name and his origin. He was no different from a real Israeli—even though there’s no such thing as a ‘real’ Israeli. A resident of the village of Beit Jinn (which since 1983 had been under the control of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the groups making up the PLO), Samir had served in the Occupation’s Army of Defense. The sheikhs of the Druze religion had canceled his Palestinian birth certificate, and he had been silent and had accepted its cancellation. And in turn, he had been ‘canceled’ by true Palestinians on the Lebanese front.
On 13 September 1991, Israel received Samir’s body in exchange for Israel permitting the return of the trade unionist Ali Abdallah Abu Hilal, originally from Abu Dis. Abu Hilal was a member of the DFLP expelled by Israel in 1986. At that time, the deal was clear: one Palestinian in exchange for one Israeli, and
