“Israel is an ideological state,” Yitzhak Shamir declared when he was Israel’s right-wing prime minister. Even in the Labor Party the ideology is more and more removed from its old vision of Jews united by the dream of socialism, but of course the official consensus in Israel remains that Jews belong together in a state of their own just because they are Jews. That desire for togetherness, now based more on terrible memories and common fears than on Zionism as a political philosophy, is the residual ideology of Israel. For some it can be hard to live with. A leading Hebrew University political scientist confided to me that he had taken to keeping a personal journal just to keep from feeling sucked in by the pressures of common opinion in a state already so regulated by images from history and so organized against enemies. “Holocaust” is now such a figure of speech that it is used by settlers to protest the slightest impediment to Jewish expansion in the occupied territories.
In The Yellow Wind (1987), which first appeared in the left liberal magazine Koteret Rashit, now defunct, the young Arabic-speaking reporter David Grossman (born 1954) astonished and shocked his readers by describing his observations for seven weeks of the tribulations, brutalities, and humiliations routinely experienced by Arabs under occupation in the West Bank. Masses of these Arabs cross the “green line” every day to labor in Israel and they must have enough Hebrew to communicate with Israelis. The Israeli military and civil administrators in the West Bank are intensely involved with the Arabs there and have many stories to bring back to family and friends. Yet the Arabs of the West Bank have been so fundamentally unregarded (in both senses of the word) and mistrusted that Grossman felt like an explorer in terra incognita; he approached the Arabs in hesitation and humility, seeking only to listen.
The title of his book comes from a local Arab myth that tells of “a hot and terrible east wind from the gate of Hell which comes once in a few generations, sets the world afire, finds those it seeks, those who have performed cruel and unjust deeds, and exterminates them, one by one.” Near the end of The Yellow Wind he says
Seven years ago, I felt I had to write something about the occupation. I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched. What happened to us? How were they able to pass their values on to me during those years? For two years I sat and worked out those thoughts and dilemmas of mine. I wrote a novel, The Smile of The Lamb, and the more I wrote, the more I understood that the occupation is a continuing and stubborn test for both sides trapped in it. It is the sphinx lying at the entrance to each of us, demanding that we give a clear answer. That we take a stand and make a decision. Or at least relate. The book was a sort of answer to the riddle of my sphinx.
Years passed, and I discovered that one does not have to battle that sphinx. That you can go mad if you allow it to torture you with questions day and night. And there were other matters, and other things to write about and do. Because there are other sphinxes as well.
So I also became an artist of sublimation. I found myself developing the same voluntary suspension of questions about ethics and occupation. I did not visit the territories; I did not even go to Old Jerusalem. Because I felt the hatred of the people there, but mostly because I cannot tolerate relations that are not on an equal basis [my emphasis].
In Sleeping on a Wire, Grossman published an equally penetrating book on his conversations with Palestinians in Israel. But it is clear that he regularly returns to fiction, as in his remarkable See Under: LOVE, because “I cannot tolerate relations that are not on an equal basis.” Perhaps he can no longer travel in the foreign territory that, for all their physical closeness, Arab lives represent to Israelis even when officially they are Israeli citizens. The problem—Grossman is not very political, just independent enough to think it is a problem—is that when, in fact, “relations are on an equal basis,” so that the state is likened to a family and the family history centers on everything and anything threatening it, there is really no way of honorably being an outsider.
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This Issue
December 22, 1994
This Issue
December 22, 1994
