Death as a Way of Life

by David Grossman

  An entire nation is in a coma. It is as if the people have voluntarily anesthetized themselves, suspended their discernment, so as not to face up to the quiet horror of their condition.

  Just to think, for example, that the government is funneling more and more money into construction in the settlements in the territories, which will complicate and convolute the situation even further and make any political solution impossible.

  Just to think, that an entire nation has forfeited its future, its only chance of getting out of the trap it is in, simply to humor the messianic, militaristic urges of a few thousand—no more—fanatics who insist on pushing themselves into Hebron, Nablus, and the Gaza Strip.

  And, worst of all, consider that we have been ruling over another nation for thirty-one years, even though we have the alternative of not doing so.

  But that’s already become a cliché, “to rule over another nation.” The Israeli eye is already trained to skip over the small items in the newspaper: the Palestinian babies dying at roadblocks, the children fainting from thirst in the refugee camps because Israeli officials control the water supply, thousands of families whose homes are bulldozed on the grounds of being “illegal construction.” Who can face up to all this nauseating detail? Who can acknowledge that this is actually happening. That it is really happening to us?

  As in a fairy tale, as in a nightmare: Hush … the entire kingdom has fallen asleep.

  That is, people are awake. They move, produce sounds, travel, enjoy themselves, do business. Lots of activity, lots of noise.

  Yet underneath all that, the same gnawing corrosion of the heart, the feeling that something here is hollow, that its movement is but inertial, that it is disconnected, excised from its essence.

  We’ve been so wonderful at putting ourselves to sleep, at suspending our understanding and our will, that even those who oppose the government’s policy don’t have the strength to really do anything against it.

  And so it happens that, despite the conspicuous void in this country’s leadership, the opposition is unable to produce a single person who can respond to the profound need for restoration, someone who could sweep along the masses simply by, finally, offering them anything, a way, a chance, an awakening.

  Perhaps Israel is now paying the heavy price of too many years of stubbornness, of opposition to compromise and refusal to understand reality as it is. Perhaps something really horrible has happened to us. Perhaps the peace process came to us a bit too late.

  Because when you keep rejecting something for so long, when you so much don’t want something, you are liable, in the end not to want anything. In other words, you are liable to lose your will itself. So the result is a nation that has spent years investing huge amounts of energy in not wanting and has now reached a state in which it is so passive that anything can be inflicted upon it, anything at all.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everything really is operating as it should, according to a well-thought-out plan, a plan of genius that is beyond my comprehension.

  I may well be wrong, but I know that something in me is dying. I no longer have that spark inside that life here always ignited in me. With all my criticism and all my pain, I also had joy, even pride, over belonging to such a unique, unprecedented human enterprise. So full of promise for the future.

  I am trying to comfort myself with the hope that, despite it all, a change will happen soon (not a withdrawal of a few miles here or there; rather, a profound change of the way the world is seen). After all, where there are living beings, immobility cannot be sustained for long. Perhaps we will soon be released from this evil spell. But I also know that there are parts of the soul, the individual soul and the collective soul, that cannot be suspended “for the time being,” or only “until circumstances change.” Because afterward, you cannot reclaim those parts.

  When the change finally takes place—and let us hope that it will be a change for the better, not another war or popular uprising or who-knows-what—when we emerge from the cocoon that encloses us, it is liable to be too late. We may make a few political gains, we may well retain a few strategic hills and roadblocks, but the main thing—the spark that will truly ensure we maintain our identity and continuity—could already be lost.

  May we wake up at last, may we stop straying through this nightmare, which is no one’s dream.

  Shana Tova, Happy New Year.

  Beware, Opportunity Ahead

  September 1999

  In a landslide victory over Netanyahu, Labor leader Ehud Barak won the May 18, 1999, Israeli general elections. The former army general vowed to renew the peace talks and declared that he was ready to negotiate land for peace. On September 4 of that same year, Barak and Arafat met in the Egyptian Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to sign the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum on Implementation Timeline of Outstanding Commitments of Agreements Signed and the Resumption of Permanent Status Negotiations. The issues agreed upon included the gradual transfer of areas to Palestinian control, security, and safe passage between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  The Israelis and the Palestinians didn’t dance in the streets after this new agreement. The two nations are already well aware of the disparity between, on the one hand, the euphoria often characteristic of the formal language used in signing ceremonies and, on the other hand, the actual execution of the agreements. The latter is generally done without enthusiasm, in a petty and even resentful way.

  The present agreement contains no dramatic change from the Wye Plantation agreement, achieved eleven months ago and much trumpeted in Washington.

  But it would be a mistake to judge this agreement only on the basis of the apparent successes that one side or the other scored. The great achievement is that the peace process, which Benjamin Netanyahu suspended and slowed down as much as he could for nearly three years, is again back on track.

  This agreement and the way it was achieved are in large part the agenda which Israel’s new prime minister, Ehud Barak, has presented to his people. When we examine it, we find a few very clear pieces of information. The first, and most important, is that Barak does, in fact, intend to lead Israel into a historic peace with the Palestinians. The second piece of information is that the price of this peace—handing territories over to the Palestinians—still looks nearly intolerable to Barak. He is not necessarily willing to pay it. The third piece of information arising from the way Barak conducted the negotiations is that, despite the great historic opportunity, both sides continue to treat each other with suspicion and animosity, as they became accustomed to doing during the Netanyahu period.

  Barak most certainly has a bold and revolutionary vision of a new Middle East, and unlike previous Israeli leaders, he can carry it out without encountering too much opposition from the great majority of Israelis. Yet Barak suffers from the same infirmity as his predecessors. He lacks sensitivity to the problems of his partner—Arafat—and to the Palestinian people’s terrible distress and years of frustration.

  Arafat, for his part, still seems to be having trouble believing that he is facing the best partner he can hope for under the present circumstances. He is haggling with Barak just as he did with Netanyahu, stubbornly holding his ground on small details. In doing so, he is contributing to the dissolution of the chance for a true, profound change in the relationship between the two peoples.

  We now have an entire year ahead of us before reaching a final agreement. During this year the two sides will have to resolve the approximately 450 problems and disputes that now divide them. Is this possible? At first glance, it seems impossible. But perhaps we should see it differently. The conflict between the two peoples has almost run itself out. The majority in both nations are weary of war. The Israelis and Palestinians already know in their hearts, more or less, what dreams they will have to give up and what they will gain.

  Only two things remain a riddle. We don’t know how much time will be lost until the solutions are found and how much blood will be spilt by then. Ehud Bara
k has, with the vision of a great leader—or with appalling naïveté—announced: Within a single year we will have a permanent status agreement.

  The heart hopes that there is good sense behind this move of his, in definitively cutting the tangled Gordian knot between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But that same heart is well acquainted with the two peoples who are party to this conflict. It knows their suspicious, cynical character, their self-destructive tendencies, and the fear that has become second nature to them—the fear of believing that there is hope for another kind of life in the Middle East.

  Despite this, I allow myself to celebrate today—because, despite all the doubts, and the sorrow at all the gratuitous insults they have hurled at each other, it’s clear to me today, more than it ever has been, that the hundred-year-old conflict between them has been heading in the right direction these last few years. The process of accommodation has survived repeated blows from both sides, and this may be evidence that, inside the armor that all of us in this region have become accustomed to living in, a hunger for life still has us in its grasp. We still remember what it is really worth taking a risk for.

  Expulsion of the Cave Dwellers

  December 1999

  On November 16, 1999, the Israeli Army evacuated 750 Palestinian villagers whose families had been living in mountainside caves near Hebron in the West Bank since the 1830s. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in March 2000 that the cave dwellers could return to their homes pending a final determination in the case. In July 2001, the Israeli Army raided the caves and expelled hundreds of people again. The struggle between the state of Israel and the cave dwellers currently awaits a final court decision. Israeli and international peace and human rights organizations mounted a massive campaign in support of the cave dwellers.

  “I was born here in this cave,” said Mahmoud Hamamdeh, “and here my father was born and here my seven children were born. Give me a three-story house? Don’t want it. Give me a hotel? Don’t want it. Only here. And what has happened?”

  What happened is that, three weeks ago, several dozen army armored personnel carriers and jeeps showed up. The soldiers surrounded the village of al-Mufkara on the southern flank of Mt. Hebron, cordoned off the field containing Hamamdeh’s cave and the caves of other families, as well as some tents and corrugated metal shacks, and ordered the people to leave the homes they’d been living in for decades.

  Afterward the soldiers went into the caves, piled up mattresses, woolen blankets, buckets, and sacks of barley, and scuffled with frightened children and with women screaming in panic. Our soldiers opened the plywood door of the adjacent cave, where the sheep and the chickens were kept, and shooed out the livestock. They knew that their owners would run after the sheep, to keep them from getting lost in the desert, and so they did.

  After a commotion that lasted for a while, the commander could report that the mission had been accomplished, or use some other sterile phrase of that sort. The cave dwellers’ belongings were impounded, and they were told, in accordance with regulations, and in absolutely clear language, that they could receive their personal effects only by paying a certain sum of money, a hundred or so dollars—that’s all.

  Then the soldiers returned to the caves, just to take one last look, because they’d never ever seen anything like them. They scouted out the crevices and were astounded at how human beings could, in the final month of the twentieth century, live in moldy, dark caves, between damp stone walls, on a ground covered with ash and goat turds. Afterward, all our soldiers returned safely to their base.

  There are two explanations for this action. When the residents of Ma’on Farm, a squatters’ site set up by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, were evacuated by the army, the settlers were promised “balance.” That is, action would be taken to harm the Palestinians as well. So they shouldn’t be too pleased, those Arabs. Another explanation: the army needs the field as yet another firing range for military training. (In May 1999, land belonging to sixty-nine villages in the West Bank was similarly categorized as a “closed military zone,” and no one was permitted to enter.)

  In the three intervening weeks, the inhabitants of al-Mufkara have been wandering around their village befuddled, forbidden to enter. They’ve found a partial refuge in the adjacent village of Tweineh, which is no more than a gaggle of houses and some lean-tos. But Tweineh can’t take in all the refugees from the caves—almost 250 human beings—and the parched fields can’t feed the additional flocks. And there is already tension between the guests and the hosts. Says Hamamdeh: “At night, when it’s cold, they take us into their homes, but during the day they tell us to go far away.”

  I stand there, at the entrance to a cave, I see and I hear, and I can’t really grasp it. What is happening here? How can it be that we, each and every citizen of Israel, are signed on to this? We fund it with our taxes, and carry it out through the sons and daughters we send to serve in the army. What is the connection between the army we knew and the institution that commits such an act against defenseless people?

  There is no argument that if the country is in a war of survival, it is permitted to use all means necessary to protect itself.

  But now? From our position of strength? Israel, the great military power, against those people out there in the fields, in the caves? How low can you go, and how cruel can you get?

  Last Friday, in bone-chilling cold, on the main road at the edge of Tweineh, a woman sat next to a pile of mattresses. At her side, clinging to her, were several children, toddlers among them, wearing thin clothes. When she saw our little delegation, her eyes showed no zest of life or any interest. Later, without much hope, she urged one of the children to cough loudly, to elicit our pity. The boy, about nine years old, looked at us, shrugged his shoulders, and stubbornly remained silent.

  At that moment he had more self-respect than I could find for myself as an Israeli.

  If I could directly address Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak, I would say to him, Sir, I want to believe that you didn’t know exactly what was taking place there. That you had no idea how one signature of yours on a document would be translated into reality and affect individuals. I have no doubt that, had you witnessed what I saw there, in the field, in the caves, you would have canceled the decree and ordered that these people be immediately reinstated in their homes.

  There is a struggle over territory, true, and we are in the midst of negotiations over borders, absolutely. But beyond this there is the matter of the boundary that a man makes for himself, the final boundary beyond which a person and an entire people lose their self-respect, and in the end their identity as well. There are deeds that an army—especially one that once bore the banner of “purity of arms”—does not do. Because in performing them, it ceases to defend the nation whose agent it is and begins to act counter to that nation’s most profound interests.

  Mr Prime Minister, I’ll say it in the simplest possible terms: It is not fair to bully these helpless people. These are not the values that you, sir, were raised on, and it is not the education you passed on to generations of soldiers. This is not what we reflected upon when, years ago, we studied the prophet Nathan’s parable of the poor man’s ewe lamb that the rich man stole.

  It is not too late. That is, it is definitely late. Because three weeks like these, being outside in the cold, humiliated, will not be erased from the memory of the refugees. But something can still be repaired. Today. Right now. You don’t need to ponder over it too long. There’s no need to consult various advisors. This is something that a person recognizes from within, from the deepest place inside. If you give the order to restore these people to their homes, no one will consider it as surrender to Palestinian pressure. On the contrary, they will see it as an act of loyalty to your fundamental values and those of the nation you lead. Sometimes a little repair, even Tikkun like this—in the midst of the moral chaos in which Israel finds itself today—can remind its citizens of what they once were, and what they hope someday
to become, when this passes, this storm that sends our compasses awry.

  Leave Lebanon Now

  February 2000

  Ehud Barak promised, as part of his election campaign, to withdraw the Israeli Army from southern Lebanon within a year—after eighteen years of occupation. Grassroots organizations persisted in their pressure on the government to fulfill this controversial promise.

  Six Israeli soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah attacks in Lebanon in ten days. The Israeli government has decided on a tough response. Israeli air force fighter planes have bombed power plants deep inside Lebanese territory. Hezbollah has continued to attack Israeli outposts in southern Lebanon, and a flare-up seems imminent.

  But, in fact, it doesn’t really matter what Israel’s tough response in Lebanon will be. The entire process is preordained, and it is only an illusion to believe that Israel controls or initiates any part of it.

  Time and time again, for over twenty years now, our leaders have brought us to a Lebanese blind alley in which we are forced to act precisely contrary to our interests.

  This time, too, apparently, we will react the same way. We’ll once again behave like the drowning man whose frantic flailing sucks him deeper and deeper into the water.

  Why does it have to be this way? Why does it sometimes seem as if we Israelis are doomed to make this error by our very nature? That it’s the result of our too finely honed instincts, which in the end bring more and more disasters upon us?

  We do not acknowledge the failure of our continued, pointless presence in Lebanon. We are not admitting that our deterrent force decays further with each additional day there. We do not accept that there is no military solution to the Lebanon problem. Instead of facing up boldly to these facts, it’s much easier for us to turn our frustration and humiliation into a great fist and to strike out, hard.