By David Grossman
Translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman
Published in the Globe and Mail, Canada, June 14, 2003
Reviewed by Nomi Morris
When the latest Palestinian uprising erupted nearly three years ago, Americans–let alone Israelis–reacted with shock. For seven years there had been a peace process, however halting and grudging. How had we gone from the inspiring 1993 handshake on the White House lawn between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to suicide bombers on Israel’s streets and soldiers shooting children? “What went wrong?” asked observers who had been lulled into believing that the grinding diplomacy that followed the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords was in fact the hatching of the peace itself. As a former Middle East correspondent whose term in Jerusalem included the first year of the uprising known as the al-Aqsa Intifada, I have been asked this question again and again.
So I welcomed the new book by David Grossman, one of Israel’s most penetrating novelists who often crosses over into journalism. A few insiders have published their accounts of the failed Camp David summit in July, 2000 that ushered in the latest Palestinian revolt. But a broader view was needed, a literary interpretation of how hope has turned to despair over the past decade.
Death as a way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo in many ways satisfies that craving, as one of the first books to take us right up to last fall. Grossman’s latest work is a compilation of his guest editorials, written for newspapers in Israel and abroad at key moments between that 1993 Nobel Prize winning handshake and the second anniversary of the Intifada last September. It is a much needed voice of sanity and sensitivity weaving through the news events that marked the decade.
But the format will leave some Grossman fans hungry for the kind of on-the-ground reportage he provided in his 1988 book The Yellow Wind, about the first Palestinian Intifada.
Although each segment of Death as a Way of Life is pegged to an actual news event, the essays are more meditation than reporting. We hear few voices except that of Grossman himself, who invites us inside his very personal lament for his nation. Although each entry begins with an italicized synopsis of the news context, this is not a primer for those unfamiliar with the region. Rather it is a cri de coeur from a writer who believes, as many people on both sides still do, that “force will not resolve the severe crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Grossman tells us he would much prefer to write only fiction but feels pulled into journalism by his stranger-than-fiction daily reality. That impulse sent him to live among Palestinians in the West Bank for three months in 1987, which produced the The Yellow Wind, a critically acclaimed bestseller that played a role in opening dialogue between the two peoples. In addition to his six novels, Grossman in 1993 also authored Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel, about the predicament of more than a million Arabs who are citizens of the Jewish state.
That background makes Grossman one of few Israelis who are able to transcend their intense feelings of pain and grievance to empathize with the suffering and aspirations of their enemy. It also lands him squarely in the peace camp, with views likely to rankle more hawkish readers. Grossman is harshly critical of Arafat. But he is equally hard on Israeli leaders, who he believes are working against the long term interest of their people. Stressing security at the expense of true dialogue with Palestinians, says Grossman, is a blind march deeper into the quagmire.
Grossman believes the Palestinians grievously sabotaged a legitimate drive toward statehood by resorting to snipers and suicide bombers. But he is also one of few Israeli commentators who are brave enough to posit that Israel, even under moderate Prime Minister Ehud Barak, was offering Palestinians not the deal of a lifetime, but canton-like parcels of territory surrounded by an Israeli military presence that would have precluded true autonomy.
Grossman is most eloquent when he delves into the paralyzing effects of war and terrorism on the psyche of individuals and states. Life in a place where a bomb may go off any moment, he writes, has become “latent death.”
When describing the numbing tango that sees each side avenging a violent act with yet more violence, Grossman notes that Israelis and Palestinians have come to prefer “this cruel ritual rather than (to) really resolve the problem at its roots.” Especially moving is the author’s essay of September, 2001, “Terror’s Long Shadow,” in which Grossman writes as an older, wiser, terror-inured Israeli mourning in advance the effect that the World Trade Center attacks will inevitably have on the American people. Grossman’s “Letter to a Palestinian Friend” is similarly poignant, as the author warily reaches out to re-establish contact with a Palestinian after a mob lynches two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah.
Many of the pre-Intifada essays in this volume read like the better political columns that appear in Israel’s daily papers. Grossman weighs in on events such as Arafat’s return to Gaza in June, 1994, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in Nov.1995, and the May, 1999 election of Ehud Barak as a peace-seeking prime minister. Some of his writings now seem quaint in their optimism. Others appear prophetic, such as an essay as early as April, 1995 warning that Palestinians were already becoming disillusioned and distrustful of the Oslo process.
But it is in his writings since Sept. 2000 that Grossman’s prose soars. Anguish jumps off the page. “I have to admit that many times I often feel that words can no longer penetrate the screen of horror,” he writes. “It is difficult to speak to another person’s heart when, all around, human beings are being blown up and children are being torn to pieces. At such moments I very much want, instead of writing, to run through the streets screaming.” Because he does write, and maintains his humanity and compassion throughout, Grossman deserves to be read.
Nomi Morris, a former Senior Writer at Maclean’s Magazine, was Middle East Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers from late 1998 to Sept. 2001.
